This is an article by Salim Ahmed that first appeared in THE ART OF WILD SWIMMING: ENGLAND & WALES.

I worked in the whisky trade and used to live in Scotland, before I became a full-time swimmer. I moved down to England about twenty years ago and, because I had been a competitive swimmer, startedcoaching at my son’s school. I found this was something I loved, so I gave upmy corporate life and went full-time as a coach, which soon became open water focused.

I set up Swim Lab in 2012. My focus was on developing the methodology that would harness the best of all the best methodologies out there, like total immersion and swim smooth. What I created was a six-point methodology for swimming, which was based on two key factors. One was body alignment and the other was how your body keeps evolving and changing with age and how you can adapt to it.

Swimming is a life journey and, in fact, it is one of the few things that you can – to some extent – actually get faster and swim further with as you age. That’s because what you learn over time is how your body works, so your connection between your mind and your body becomes so much more fine-tuned. As you get older you learn how to deploy your strengths and weaknesses better. Whatever you lose in terms of muscle strength and VO2 max, is more than made up for by improvements in your technique and how to deploy them when you swim. I treat swimming as a performance art rather than a sport. We should all have several programmes for swimming, such as one for open water without a wetsuit, in the sea with or without a wetsuit, in a pool without a wetsuit, in a lake with or without a wetsuit, and so on. These are all different settings you might need to have depending on what buoyancy you are likely to have in that type of water.

SIX WAYS TO RAISE YOUR SWIMMING GAME

1. Your hands should enter shoulder width apart as far away from your body as possible: so they stay shoulder width apart as you rotate. If you look at top swimmers, as opposed to those who have perhaps been taught at school, they’ll have their hands shoulder width apart, as far away from the body as possible.
2. Head position should be looking down, to align the spine. Again the waterline should be cutting the middle of your head rather than your forehead, which goes against the grain of what we’re often taught (which is to always look slightly forwards).
3. Feet and legs should be on the surface of the water behind us, just breaking the surface – and for endurance swimming not much more than that (because as little as 5 to 10 per cent of your forward propulsion comes from your legs). When you do use your legs, they use up a disproportionate amount of energy, so the maths doesn’t support the overuse of your legs for endurance-level swimming. The idea is that you have your legs and feet in the right place, out of trouble, creating as little resistance as possible – which means they are on the surface, toes pointed and together.
4. I tell people to rotate from the hips rather than the shoulders. Imagine your spine is a broom handle rather than a flexible coil and your objective is to rotate on that broom handle. The gyroscopic effect of a body moving through the water spinning on its axis is what we’re trying to create. Treat your entire body – from the tips of your fingers to the tips of your toes – as that which should be a straight line that rotates, and that you rotate on as you move through the water.
5. Swim with an 80% catch-up. Swimming with a 100% catch-up is when one arm completely comes round to catch up with the other before the other one goes. It’s a brilliant training tip.
6. Keep your hand below the elbow on the recovery part of the stroke. This reduces lateral movement or minor snaking.

FIVE SEA SWIMMING POINTERS

1. Be buoyant, be brilliant
   With sea swimming the first thing you need to think about is how buoyant you are because of the salt. You will automatically be on the surface more so than you would be in a lake or a pool. It’s almost like wearing a wetsuit. That buoyancy is a key element in being able to swim with a minimal amount of effort – because a lot of the effort we make, especially to bring our legs up to the surface, involves kicking.
2. Keep in sight
   The second thing to be aware of is the current as you go through the water. That’s either something you have to fight against or something that will affect your direction. So sighting and learning how to adjust your direction as you swim becomes more important when you’re in the sea, because otherwise you have no idea where you are. The beauty of open water swimming, and the scariness of it, is that you might not know where you are. Unless you’re swimming over a shallow reef and can see things below, you often have no measures to tell you that you are making any progress whatsoever. When you’re in the deep sea away from the beach you can lose yourself in the water. Being out in the vast ocean can bring on all those primal fears that can get into your head. Some people find it easier to swim in the sea than a lake; other people are absolutely terrified because you have nothing with which to orientate yourself. I run trips to the Amalfi coast and Cornwall, and wherever I choose to do our open water swimming, I’m very conscious of what you see when you turn to breathe. What you see when you swim is one of swimming’s joys and is also what orientates you, be it the verdant hillsides of Positano or the grottos of Capri, these images make swimming truly mindful.
3. Tide times and rip currents
   It’s really important to understand tides and rips. Always assess where you are going to swim in the sea and work out where potential rip currents are. Also, decide what time of the day to swim, so you can find out whether the tide is coming in or out. This is vital: it’s far more than just good housekeeping. The reason rips need particular attention is because they are a body of water you can find yourself in which will simply sweep you out to sea. And the reaction we normally have as human beings, when we discover we’re not making any progress against this rip current, is to panic and try to go faster against it. But this is exhausting, and that’s when serious accidents happen. If you find yourself in a rip, I always advise people to do the counterintuitive thing of swimming obliquely with it, so you let the rip take you further out to sea, but at an angle. You want to swim out at 45 degrees to the direction of the rip. This feels counterintuitive, but will often help you swim back with more effectiveness. Please always inform local lifeguards of your plans and never swim alone.
4. Become acclimatised
   The key thing here is to do your homework. Generally the UK’s west coast is going to be warmest around October and into November, so this can be a better time to swim than spring. Investigate, too, how currents may affect temperatures in the areas where you plan to swim. Armed with that knowledge, what matters next is what you wear and how you prepare. It’s about knowing your body and knowing how quickly you dissipate heat, which depends on training and exposure to cold water swimming. With open water swimming you need to learn to reach your optimum mobile temperature really quickly. When you start swimming, you lose heat straight away, but as you get to a certain pace and time in the water you generate heat, which eventually equals that. A wetsuit speeds up all of that. You get warmer faster and you equalise much faster. If you swim in a wetsuit you get to that temperature much quicker and can swim much further using less energy. Wetsuits are great! Naturally, as you swim more, you will become acclimatised and able to wear fewer and fewer items.
5. Stung!
   In warmer waters you will come across jellyfish more, but we get them in the UK too. They’re why I tell people that learning a good breaststroke in open water makes excellent sense. Lord Byron did breaststroke for all his epic swims around the world. It’s a fabulous stroke. But the reason we do it when we’re in the Med is that it enables you to actually see the jellyfish. Often when you’re doing front crawl you don’t see them until they’re right up next to you. If you find yourself surrounded by these aquatic menaces, do a controlled breaststroke and dodge.

WHY NOT CHECK OUT . . .

Man o’ War Bay

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A shingle beach on the east side of Durdle Door in Dorset, this is a beautiful spot and fairly safe to swim in because it shields a lot of the currents. You can swim there without seeing another soul.