PDLC Swimming Skills
This set of swimming skills was developed by Joe Friel, the author of The Triathlete’s Training Bible.
The great advantage of this swimming system is that it only includes four skills to learn, it’s limitation is that it’s focused on open water swimming for Triathletes. This system is really for people who are struggling with their swimming and generally have started their competitive swimming efforts as an adult.
I go into Tris about a decade ago, my first Tri was the Canberra 70.3 Ironman in 2011 for, which my son and I trained close to a year. But even after this time my 1.9km swim was more a matter of survival than racing.
Since that race I have been swimming but my swim time has somehow got stuck 4min / 100m. A few years ago I took some on-on-one swimming lessons and my time improved to 3/100m, still a long way from being competitive in my age group, which needs to be 2/100m or better. I’m a pretty fast rider so can make up some good time but no more than about 4-5 minutes in a sprint and maybe double that in a standard triathlon. The other thing that I have found is that I have always been anxious before every swimming session and if it came to the crunch to decide if today is a swim, run or ride, guess what swimming wouldn’t win.
When I started reading The Triathlete’s Training Bible I learnt about PDLC:
- P – Posture, the core being to look straight down to ensure your hips come up
- D – Direction, this about your hands entering the water in-front of your shoulders and not your head
- L – Length, stretching as far as possible whilst rotating your body
- C – Catch, high hand rather than high elbow and start catch as soon as your hand enters the water, ensure your hand is facing rear pool wall
To focus on these skills swim 25m length only and focus on one skill only, recover 1-3 minutes and repeat. Take 2-4 sessions per skills and then start combining them, it might take 12 – 16 session before you start to feel comfortable with this.
See this post here what a typical training session looks like for me as well for a link where Joe Friel discusses the PDLC system in a podcast.
