Flip turns?
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emzman posted 9 weeks ago.
Depends on how many people you have to share the lane with. From personal experience, I've had swimmers in front of me perform flip turns and slam right into me.
I started competing in triathlons 2 years ago and fell in love with the sport. Because heart disease runs in both sides of my family, I figured that training and competing in tris will help delay the inevitable.
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KHAD posted 9 weeks ago.
Just like emzman said, it depends on how many people there are in the lane... you would rather stop and turn than get injured and stop racing. But the fact is that if you can perform a good flip turn, it is definitely a lot faster, if you master it well. It helps to maintain your inertia, and you gain speed from a good wall kick turn. I have seen a link recently on insidetri about this :
http://insidetri.com/article/70973/perfecting-your-flip-turn-how-to-be-s...
but if you don't have any coach to help you, there might be some good video on youtube. Good luck practicing!
-KHAD
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TriSooner posted 9 weeks ago.
KHAD wrote:
but if you don't have any coach to help you, there might be some good video on youtube. Good luck practicing!-KHAD
I "learned" how to do kickturns from youtube. They probably still suck, and I really don't know why I bothered because I don't do pool swims, but if I did, I'd use it. But emzman has a good point: If you don't angle your kick turn under the ropes and head into the next lane (serpentine-style swim?) all in one motion, you are likely to take someone out.
Ironman Germany (July 6, 2008)
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callco posted 9 weeks ago.
Just did one of these races Saturday (300 yd serpentine style pool swim). They lined us up by estimated speed. Surprisingly, my estimate put me about #25 (out of nearly 400) in line. A new swimmer entered the water about every 10 seconds.
As I watched the first ~20 swimmers, they all did flip turns. I can't pull one off to save my life, so I was starting to fret about it.
My turn finally rolls around, so I dive in and start strokin'. At about 200 yds I'm tappin' on the feet of the guy in front of me. Way cool. (I don't know if he was doing flip turns or not.) By the time I'm climbing out of the pool, I'm only about 5 seconds behind the next guy.
Moral of the story: Do what you know. You'll be in the water for a total of about five minutes, so the couple seconds you might save with a flip turn isn't really worth much unless you're proficient at it.
My $0.02.
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joetex23 posted 9 weeks ago.
Thanks for all the great input. I'll take all of it into consideration. There is no info on the race website about the format of the swim, so I'm not sure if it will be serpentine or not. By the way, I just want to say that this is a great site - a lot of info here - and I'm learning new stuff everyday.
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chekmarks posted 9 weeks ago.
i agree with callco. unless doing a flipturn is second nature it will hurt your time, partially due to technique and partially due to panic.
if you do use a flipturn, you are breathing less, for it to be really effective you need to be underwater for a few good kicks. if you arent familiar with it, you can end up being way farther underwater than you want to be which will really slow you down. good luck!
I'm doing a sprint tri at the end of May that involves a pool swim. So, I was thinking that I should start practicing flip turns. How important is it to do flip turns? Is it really that much faster than just stopping and turning at the wall(we're only talking about a 300y swim)?