Technique is crucial for swimmers. It’s something good swimmers think about constantly at the pool.
Every moment in that big, chlorinated bathtub, we are negotiating and battling with the water. Manipulating body position to slice through it a little more cleanly, a little more efficiently, a little more fasty.
Typically, when swimmers are looking to improve technique, they turn to their mesh bag of drills. Catch-up. Closed fist. Doggie paddle. There’s no shortage of them for isolating aspects of our stroke.
And while they certainly have their place, there’s a more effective way to improve technique that doesn’t rely on breaking the stroke apart.
Why Swimmers Use Drills in the First Place
Drills are used for two main reasons in the pool:
1. To fix something.
Drills are used as a corrective mechanism, prescribed to correct a specific flaw in swimming technique. A dropped elbow during the catch, uneven pull path, not positioning the forearm for proper leverage.
The goal is to isolate the problem, clean it up, then bring this heightened awareness and sharper technique back into the full stroke.
2. To reinforce something.
Drills are also used to reinforce or wake-up good swimming technique. By exaggerating a key aspect of the stroke during warm-up or a pre-set or even during a main set to shore up proper technique.
There’s no shortage of drills that you can throw at your freestyle, and experienced swimmers have their own favorites and advanced ways of implementing them (i.e. adding light resistance to amplify the effect of the drill).
But a better way to improve technique is to swim in a way that forces these technique outcomes.
The Problem with Isolating Parts of Swim Technique with Drills
Drills remove key elements of the stroke in order to focus on one part of it. This means that things like:
- Body roll
- Timing
- Force application
- Stroke rhythm
- Stroke coordination
…all change in order to produce a version of swimming to isolate on one thing in the stroke. Essentially, you are swimming a version of your stroke that doesn’t fully resemble how you actually race or train at speed.
And there’s no guarantee that a specific drill will work for you, either. Research by Brackley et al. (2020) showed that even with highly trained swimmers, drills like head-up freestyle and long dog didn’t transfer to all the swimmers.
Sometimes drills work, sometimes they don’t. But they always don’t resemble full-stroke swimming in all the ways that matter.
Improving Technique in Whole-Stroke Swimming
Instead of breaking the stroke apart and trying to improve it from the outside, an alternative is manipulating the environment and variables so that better technique naturally happens.
You don’t tell the body what to do but rather put it in a situation where doing the right thing just kind of… happens.
For example:
Let’s say you want a more balanced body roll and symmetrical stroke. Well, bilateral breathing or breathing every three strokes naturally promotes that. And swimming with a snorkel especially promotes that. No single arm freestyle drill required.
What about increasing stroke rate? You could do lots of head-up freestyle. Play around with various “spin” drills. Or you can put on a Tempo Trainer and explore swimming fast at and slightly above your target stroke rate.
Improving distance per stroke? Closed fist freestyle and long dog are common drills to help you increase feel for the water and extend the stroke. But challenging yourself to swim fast with a reduced stroke count (or stroke tempo) pushes your body to swim strong and long within whole-stroke swimming.
Or how about getting the forearm more vertical in the catch? Long dog is a popular drill for this. Or you could do 25s swim at around 80% effort with medium resistance (drag chute), which naturally encourages a more powerful catch.
In all four cases, the stroke stays intact and swimmers chase the technique they want to see in their swimming.
Why This Approach Can Work Better Than Drills
One of the best things about swimming in a way that pushes better technique is that you don’t have to worry about creating competing adaptations.
- With head-up freestyle, swimmers hips bounce up and down a lot more, the stroke gets short and choppy, and trunk inclination shoots up (Brackley et al., 2020a).
- Single arm freestyle significantly changes how much your body rolls (Arellano et al., 2010)
- Long dog freestyle doesn’t replicate the recovery phase of the stroke and changes where your hand starts the pull (Brackley et al., 2020b).
These drills can definitely give you a sense of what good technique feels like, but they don’t always help you swim faster as a whole.
Instead of isolating something to improve your technique outside whole-stroke swimming…
You find the ways to improve technique inside whole-stroke swimming.
The Bottom Line
This isn’t all to say that drills are useless or should be avoided. This is not an anti-drill manifesto.
I still like to do them, either in my warm-up to help grease the movement, or as part of a technique “reset” between rounds of a hard set. Drills can also be used to highlight feel for the water, such as with closed fist swimming.
And for a lot of swimmers, piece-mealing a technical improvement with a specific drill really helps them to conceptualize it before they can progress. They can definitely play a role.
But it’s important to understand their limitations. When it comes to challenging your technique and making the improvements stick, try to find ways to force better technique in whole-stroke swimming.
Your technique will improve by leaps and bounds, your stroke will become more adaptable, and most importantly, you’ll swim faster (very ideal).
