This is a post by Jorg Jansen.
Yesterday Sanne and I did a good freediving pool workout crawl style. While my inflamed tooth didn’t really cooperate during the first part of training where I tried to do 8×25 with 1:20 min countdown for each lap (and failed), the next part went much better.
I tried to do 50 meter laps with one minute rest in between doing crawls with 6 strokes, 1breath for 200 meters. Then upped it to 8 strokes, which still felt pretty good in a training sense of way (Ouch!). And then it was time to explore the limits somewhat and tried to do 10 strokes and 12 strokes with 1 breath each time.
It seems there is a certain technique in it. Because when I do my long distance swims (1k-2k) I use a very shallow breath, so when I’m preparing to breath I only need one stroke to exhale. This doesn’t work when you’re high on CO2 when you’re holding your breath, so in this second session I started to exhale fast in around 1,5 stroke, so that I get completely empty in between. All in all great CO2 work!
Today it was monofin testing time. Sanne brought his prototype weight that he will use on this Saturdays competition in Eindhoven. And I must say it already works great. I think he’s at 80% of solving all the problems now.
While Sanne was so nice to create a prototype that is adjustable so that it also could work with me, it still didn’t fit me ;) So I had to do some other way of testing my streamlining. In the end it appears that 3 kilo’s is just a little bit to heavy for me, so next time I’m going to try for 2,5-2,8 kilos.
It’s really clear that the time of just playing around with a monofin without weights is over. The difference between my technique without weights and with weights is so major, that if I wish to improve I have to use weights from now on. So time to create a streamlined weight for myself as well.
