When to breathe on both sides (and when not to).

A coaching client recently asked me if it was better to breathe on both sides while swimming.  The answer is, of course, "It depends."

This is a good one. PRACTICE breathing on both sides. RACE breathing one-sided if you feel it's faster.

Why?

If you can't breathe both sides, you are setting yourself up for several problems:

1. Unbalanced workout. 
2. Needing to follow the shoreline on the opposite side that you breathe on and you're too much of a landlubber to know how to breath on that side. Now you can't look left without stopping and lifting your melon out of the water. Lame!
3. Waves and wind coming from one side and smashing you in the face. It'd be nice to be able to breathe without that guy kicking in your airhole.

Tips - practice bilateral breathing for parts of your workout. Warmup, cooldown, whatever. Just do it and do it enough so that you can do it on race day without it being a problem.  You are probably faster breathing on one side (depends on the individual) so pull it out on race day just like you pull out your race wheels.

Get your Stretch on!

When you're old and frail, you're one fall away from breaking a hip and well, that ain't fun.  Stretch and do push ups on occasion and you can live strong until the the Grim Reaper dies waiting.

Here's a fun vid on how to stretch.  It's apparently some kind of robot that will turn your grandad into an adonis so you don't have to waste time with your family yourself.  After all, if Poppy can't ride aero, what use is he at all?

Shattered Bikes!

The biggest problem with carbon fiber as a frame material is that it shatters.  Steel can be bent back, aluminum can, well, be melted down into a new coke can, but carbon fiber is pretty much trash.  Check out this video of a pro crashing his bike and it blowing apart into several pieces!

Cool picture of all the pieces together found here.

Minimalist Mind, Powerful Triathlete

It's hard to gain a clear mind, even just a clear goal, when your thoughts are everywhere.  Most triathletes work out in a zombie-like state.  Go to gym, get on bike, pedal for two hours at 80% of threshold, eat brains...

You think like a zombie because your thoughts are scattered all over the place.  You're thinking about dinner later, what your boss said to you last week, that car wreck three years ago.  You have thousands of thoughts a day, 90% of them repeats of previous ones.  Not very useful, huh?  Notice all those are thoughts about the past or future.  Things that you can't change or may never happen.

All this extra mental baggage doesn't help you work out.  The ZenTri approach is to cut all the excess crap out.  If you don't need it, ditch it.  And if you do need it, use it until you don't need it anymore.

I recently posted on Twitter that workout software is overrated.  Notice that I didn't say, "It doesn't work."  It does work.  It works great.  But it takes extra time, time you could be working out, and those workouts could make you better than the software did.  Once the software gets you training better, get back on the real stuff.  Move on.  Let go.

I am here to tell you that there is a fun, self-empowering side to triathlon.  It's the part where you learn to be a better you.  One of the first steps is discarding what you don't need.  You don't need six bikes.  You don't need tubular tires.  You don't need the latest wetsuit.  You do need a supporting environment and some clarity.

This will be a multi-part post.  Next week I will describe how to start going minimalist to clear up the mind and make some real progress in your training. 

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