If you are starting your journey into open water swimming, there are several challenges to overcome that you do not experience when swimming in a heated indoor pool. Once you learn how to deal with this outdoor environment, most people prefer it to lap swimming in a chlorinated pool. Some of these challenges include acclimatising to colder water, perhaps swimming in a wetsuit, swimming in choppy water when it is windy, swimming directly into the sun in certain directions, not

Open water swimming is amazing and gives you a real sense of freedom, being in nature and not having to stop and turn every 25m. There is a lot of research telling us how exercising outdoors is good for our mental and physical wellbeing, and you get a different view of your surroundings from the water. Adapting to Open Water Swimming However, swimming outside is quite a different experience to swimming in a pool as there are many additional factors to get used to. For instanc

In December 2022, I wrote an article for the Outdoor Swimmer magazine on the benefits of nose breathing for winter swimmers doing heads-up breaststroke: The mental and physical health benefits of cold water swimming are well known, but did you know we can also boost our health simply through the way we breathe? Many of us switch to heads-up breaststroke in the winter. This enables us to breathe in and out through our nose which is the optimal way for our health and during phy

In August 2021, I wrote an article for the Outdoor Swimmer magazine, explaining why swimmers should check how well they are breathing on land: Breathing efficiently is a key skill and common focus in swimming training, but is generally overlooked in our land-based lives. As swimmers, you may question why we need to look at our functional (daily) breathing on land, as it is an automatic, involuntary process like the heart beating, blood pressure regulation, and digestion. Howe