Many of the issues around drifting off line in open water swimming are caused by how you swim, what is important is that you always enter the water in line with your shoulder. As soon as you start to enter with a wide stroke or crossover the centre line of the body, you will have a tendency to drift offline. Practice and make sure your coach is helping you with the correct hand entry position.
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One of the most difficult and important things to do in open water swimming, so what are the tricks to keep on track.

• Sighting and breathing in the same action means you rush the sighting element, so separate the actions and focus on the sighting alone.
• Sighting is a three stroke action, firstly take a look at where you need to go, looking for a landmark or buoy you are heading for, the second is about adjusting your angle toward the direction you want to go. Then lastly check, have you made the right adjustment and are now going in the right direction.
• Lifting your head to sight means your legs are likely to drop, slowing you down, make sure you add some extra kick to maintain forward motion and to keep those legs high in the water.
• If the water is choppy, try and ensure you sight at the top of a wave, you should be able to feel yourself rising on the wave, use this to then sight when at the top of the wave,
• Lifting yourself out of the water to sigh, can be helped by entering your hand flat, rather than entering fingers first. This flat hand entry and subsequent push down will help left you out of the water.
• If the water is calm, minimise your head lift so you keep yourself as streamlined as is possible, lifting so just your eyes are out of the water only.
• Make sure you practice head up swimming, even in the pool you can site during a training session, just to get used to the action in a controlled environment.
• Remember the more you sight and / or the higher you have to lift yourself to site, the more of a chance there is that you will slow down as your feet drop. Only site as often as you need to, as you get better at keeping straight you can reduce the number of times you site.
• As you get better at sighting you can include a breath in the sighting cycle, I wouldn’t advise this until you are relaxed with your sighting. When you do this ensure you sight first then turn your head to the side to breath. Never breath then site.
•  When choosing something to sight on and a direction to swim, always choose the largest target as it will be easier to see, especially when choppy.

Conditioning an athlete requires focus on :-

• Individual differences
• Adaptation
• Overload
• Reversibility
• Specificity
• Progression
• Variation
• Recovery
• Long-term planning

So what do we mean by each of these :-

Individual differences – training has to be as specific as it can as all individuals react differently to training

Adaptation – with a change of demand with training, the body will over time adapt to cope with these stresses

Overload – If we are going to improve, we have to do something different, so training must include changes that exceed that normally experienced.

Reversibility – here we must understand that adaptations made from overload will be lost if the training isn’t maintained

Specificity – the changes the body makes to overcome the stresses, will be specific to the type of training the athlete is exposed to. So it is important that training has a specific focus to improve the elements needed in the relevant competition.

Progression – Training has to develop and increase as the individuals capacity for work is increased - do the same, get the same.

Variation – the training should vary over time, training the same all the time will return a diminishing improvement and so training has to include variety, covering relevant components of fitness

Recovery – One of the most important element, this allows the body to replenish energy stores and repair / replace damaged tissue. In preparation for the next phase of training.

Long-term planning – Used to develop a structured and controlled development plan for individuals, allowing them to deliver on their long term goals.
The above makes up the principles of conditioning and are aimed at delivering increased performance. A managed development program will deliver improvements demonstrated in the diagram below. This is called the over-compensation model.

Developing all aspects required to improve fitness at the same time would be crazy. Time and energy would not allow it and the training required for some components, would interfere with the training required for others.
To overcome this we break the training period into separate training periods each of which will have separate goals and training methods. These different periods are designed to maximise the gains in the different components of performance.
This process is called Periodisation and can be characterised by changes in goals, training focus, volume and intensity over time. The time period can vary and is normally talked of as the Macro cycle. This macro cycle is then broken down into several training phases :–

• Recovery
• Preparation
• Pre-competition
• Competition

Each training phase having a specific goal / aim, with the overall aim to deliver the best performance at the end of the cycle.

Recovery phase – usually at the end of a cycle, but can also be seen as the start of the next macro cycle. This involves a break from any serious training, usually lasts about 3 – 6 weeks, consists of fun exercise and is focused on both physical and mental recovery

Preparation phase – Low intensity training with high volume, so slow aerobic work, long swims, runs or bike rides at a slow pace. The focus is on physical conditioning, technique and practicing scenarios. Involves aerobic endurance, strength, technical and mental skills training. This forms the basis of all other training.

Pre-competition phase – Here there is an increase in intensity, with a decrease in volume. Normally a 4 – 8 week period with some possible pre-season competition. Can include some tactical and more specific technical and mental training. The rate of change in this period is dependent very much on how individuals respond to changes in intensity and therefore can tend to be more specific.

​Competition phase – This phase sees a further increase in intensity, with a subsequent reduction in volume. The training intensity is more specific to the selected events. Some increased focus is also given to nutrition, recovery, warm-up and cool down routines for competitions.