Want to improve your feel for the water? Even help bullet-proof your shoulders from injury? Here’s why you should be doing more sculling during your swim practices.
It looks easy, and it kind of is.
Commonly swimmers cheat their way through it just to go faster and beat their teammates to the wall. Or not really give it the attention it deserves.
But when done slowly, and with focus, sculling is a Swiss Army knife for your swimming.
What is Sculling?
Sculling is a hand and forearm movement technique where swimmers make small, controlled figure-eight or sweeping motions through the water. This movement generates lift and increases pressure on both sides of the hands. This teaches swimmers better how to “hold” and manipulate the water, which they can then apply to their swimming stroke.
Swimmers use sculling to develop proprioception, improve stroke efficiency, increase “feel” for the water, and improve the overall pulling movement when swimming.
The Benefits of Sculling for Swimmers
Sure, it might not look like it does much, but under the surface, as your hands jet back and forth quickly, there is a lot happening.
Here are just some of the things that sculling can help do to help make you a better swimmer:
- Teaches you to understand pressure differences. The biggest benefit of sculling is that it teaches you how pressure differences on the top and bottom of the hand create vortices. These vortices are what then create propulsion in the pulling motion. Swimmers who hold lots of water aren’t grabbing “more” water, but they create large pressure differences that are stable, leading to stronger pulling. Sculling isolates this movement, teaching swimmers how to move their hands (speed, angles, positioning) to control the pressure differences that lead to thrust and propulsion.
- Improves feel for the water. It’s not easy to describe, but you know it when you feel it–that mythical feel for the water. During moments where we have more of it than usual, we feel great in the pool. We skim across the surface of the water, our pull feels extra pully, and for those few and fleeting moments, we’ve conquered the water. Sculling teaches you how to hold and grip the water efficiently.
- Technique correction. Scull your way through the full pulling motion. From the catch, to having your hands perpendicular to your hips, all the way to the last part of the pulling motion. You’ll get a sense of where your “grip” of the water is strongest and where it is weakest. Anthony Ervin, sprint legend, spent a heap of time front sculling in order to improve his catch when he first arrived at Cal in order to help him grab more water.
- Early vertical forearm. For you freestyle and butterfly stroke specialists strap on a swim snorkel, put your face down, extend your arms above your head and scull with your elbow higher than your wrist, emulating the early vertical forearm you want during the first phase of the pulling motion. This is one of my favorite ways to hit reset on my freestyle when it’s feeling a little sloppier than usual.
- Mega versatile. Want to spend more time working on your catch? Do some sculling where your hands would be initiating the catch. Not happy with the end of your pull? Spend some time back there doing some sculling. Left arm, right arm, palms, forearms–the sky is the limit. Use sculling strategically to precision strike the parts of your stroke that need some TLC.
- Shoulder injury prevention. This one might sound a little strange, but sculling is one of my favorite ways to help injury-proof my shoulders. The way that I do this is pretty basic–with a snorkel on my fizz-ace, head down, I make sure that my shoulders are set back in their sockets, and that I have perfect posture in the water (this is absolutely key). Once my shoulders are “locked” back in their sockets, I like to do a quick sculling motion. At what angle my hands are sculling doesn’t really matter. But it’s gotta be quick–the quick hand movements will challenge your scapular stability, something that is essential to strong, swimmer’s shoulder-free, uh, shoulders.
Tips for Making the Most of Sculling
Sculling is a drill that can help you swim more efficiently–but many swimmers slosh their hands around like a blender and don’t get the full benefits. Here are some ways that swimmers can level up their sculling:
Use the forearms.
The hands are responsible for ~95% of the thrust in freestyle propulsion. Which means they get most of the attention–fair enough. But don’t forget those forearms. Angle and position them so that they are also creating subtle pressure differences when sculling.
Mix with regular swimming.
Sculling works best when it is used to improve full-stroke swimming. To better transfer that enhanced feel, alternate sculling with swimming.
One of my favorite ways to incorporate any kind of drill work (and sculling, essentially, is a drill) is to sprinkle and splatter it within regular swimming. Doing 50’s as 25 scull, 25 swim build, for instance. Or doing 15m swim, 20m scull, 15m swim. You get the idea.
Use a stroke reset.
Sculling is an excellent tool for hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL on sloppy swimming. When your hands and arms feel like they are slipping through the water, sprinkle in some 25s of slow, purposeful sculling.
We all have those swim workouts where we can’t seem to find our stroke. The water slips right through our fingers, and our usually gorgeous technique feels sloppy, hopeless or lost.
Sculling takes things back to basics, reinvigorating your feel for the water and helping you rediscover your technique.
Pair with a swimmer’s snorkel.
Sculling is best practiced fast down so that you can isolate the movement and really feel how the water interacts with your hands. The swimmer’s snorkel is the perfect tool for this as it removes the need to turn the head and breathe, breaking concentration on those briskly moving hands.
There are about a kajillion benefits to using a swimmer’s snorkel, from balancing out your stroke to evening out hip roll, but eliminating the head turn when breathing means you can focus completely on sculling.
The Bottom Line
Sculling is one of the best ways to help swimmers develop “feel” and hold on the water. This is an absolute fundamental of efficient and fast swimming, and yet few swimmers ignore it completely.
Instead they focus on energy systems, distance, stroke rates. Sculling slows things down, breaks down your stroke to the simplest building blocks.
But once you have that locked in, and your hand is moving through the water in a manner that displaces more and more water, all those other things you are doing in the water will become massive leverage points.
