Why tumble turn if you’re a triathlete?

Many of our squad members groan when I ask them to tumble turn in the pool. Most “give it a go”, some don’t even try, and those who have persevered do it with varying degrees of proficiency.  

The strongest reason for doing it is, professionalism.

When you swim like a swimmer, ride like a cyclist and run like a runner, you simply pick which race you’re going to qualify at and you go do it. These days, you can’t afford to have a weak leg.

I want any stranger walking past our swim squad to think our group is an advanced masters swim squad. Not a bunch of gumbys who turn like crocodiles.  If you want to race the swim in your next triathlon, you have to approach it like a swimmer. It’s a mental shift. Another thing, I am not the most co-ordinated man on the planet, and a few years ago I put in the effort to master tumble turning, it took two weeks. If I can do it so can every person in the squad.

Another huge benefit once you have “banked the professionalism”. Streamlining, once you learn to tumble turn, you have a wall to push off. When you push off that wall from the full squat position, you reach out to the longest position you can hold, cross your hands with your head gripped between your biceps. Every time you push off that wall you’re practicing streamlining.

Streamlining (that’s overcoming the drag of the water) is the single most important thing to master in swimming faster. Seventy percent of your energy goes into overcoming drag. That’s the reason skinny little fourteen year old girls can swim faster than most of you. They’re streamlined. They don’t have their toes pointing at the bottom of the pool, they don’t have their heads up looking where they’re going.

So if every tumble turn puts you into a position to practice streamlining, and if you push off that wall with a full squat drive, your 400m time is going to improve significantly. When this important time drops, it turns a switch in your head, you start to think of yourself as a swimmer. When you think of yourself as a swimmer, you start at the front row, then all of a sudden, you start to get great swim times in races.

How to do it —-

* you must swim into the wall fast, don’t slow down

* After the cross at the end of the black line, take one strong pull, driving yourself into the wall. Allow your eyes to follow your hand through the pull so they are lead towards the other end of the pool. As you execute that last pull, your head will have turned down into a forward roll while pulling your legs in close to you so your heels are right up near your butt. At this point there is no muscular tension, it’s a relaxed, smooth action, like a spin on a dance floor. 

* As you feel yourself 180 degrees through your turn (when your head is pointing back to where you came from) gradually straighten your legs until your feet contact the wall. At this point your butt should be within 18inches of the wall.

* When you feel the wall with both feet, drive yourself off the wall and reach out with your hands in a streamlined glide.

* At this point start kicking and don’t look up

* Take one full stroke before you breathe, don’t look up, you know where you’re going by the black line on the bottom.  

Swimmers are no smarter than triathletes, great tumble turning is not an intellectual exercise, it’s just a “practice thing”