There are many swim drills out there but I’d like to share a few of my personal favourites.
Subjective opinion is best served with a dash of anecdote or pseudo science to make it appear a little more credible, so here goes:
Drill 1 – Skating
This is for me the king of drills. It forms the basis of a balanced, symmetrical stroke, encourages an engaged core and glutes, facilitates a compact rhythmic kick, sets up the correct amount of body rotation, sets the hand potation through the entry-reach-catch phase of the freestyle stroke and makes the swimmer a hot drink of their choice at the end of each technical set.
Some parts of the above may not be entirely true but there are lots of takeaways for the swimmer and coach from this drill. It is founded in the principles of the Total Immersion swim coaching methodology and I’ve found it to be highly effective in resolving all sorts of problems in novice swimmers (as well as using it as a learn-to-swim step for non-swimmers).
I still use this drill regularly to promote good swimming posture and alignment in my own stroke. The downside is that as a drill, this is perhaps as technically difficult to execute correctly as a drill can be. Even the example videos available online are less than perfect.
My top tips for this drill are to watch the hand placement out from (don’t let the hand drift in front of the head, keep it out in front of the shoulder. Keep the trailing hand on the inside of your thigh, with the arm straight. Bending the trailing arm, or allowing the hand to slip around to the side or back of the swimmer, causes imbalance.
Though difficult to execute well, where this drill succeeds over any other similar (swim-on-side) drills, is that its executed in your normal swimming position. I feel really strongly about swimmers establishing their point of balance and sticking with it (30° – 45° rotation). Anything that has the swimmer at 90° ‘on their side’ just isn’t right!
See the youtube link for a reasonable example of this drill:
Drill 2 – Finger-trail drill
Finger trail is an old skool drill used by coaches world-over to promote a high-elbow recovery. Drawing the fingers across the surface of the water, encourages the swimmer to lift their elbow high and push it forward (rather than dropping the elbow behind the recovering hand). Finger trail is also a useful way of correcting hand entry placement in swimmers who place their hand entry on, or across the centreline.
So far, so good but the really great aspect of this drill that I have recently begun to utilise with many of my athletes, is correcting over rotation, most commonly a problem on the breathing stroke. Over rotators fall off balance and expend a lot of energy twisting through the water, without adding any propulsion. Commonly, on the breathing stroke they are searching skyward for air. While that’s not the right thing to do, its easy to imagine their motive for doing it. During the over rotation, the elbow of the recovering arm tends to track over the swimmer’s back, crossing the centreline (pulling the swimmer off balance), and the hand and forearm tend to track upward, parallel to the water surface.
The great thing about finger trail, is that in order to keep the finger tips in the water, the swimmer is prevented from rotating more than (about) 45°, or the fingers will be caused to leave the water. This is a prompt to the swimmer (or coach) that over rotation is either happening or preferably, being corrected. Give this old skool drill a try in this new light and you may find it creeping into your technical sets more often than you’d anticipated.
Drill 3 One finger Drill
This drill is I think borrowed from Paul Newsome at SwimSmooth. Its a variant on the ‘clenched fist’ drill. Anyone who has swum with clenched fists, knows you have to work really hard to form a catch and early vertical forearm to set up the pull phase of the stroke. The extension of the index finger allows the swimmer more control on recovery and hand entry than using a clenched fist, while still maintaining the necessity for good set up for the pull phase.
For swimmers with extreme crossing of the centreline on hand entry, this is a great prompt for them to point at the pool end wall (rather than pointing across into the next lane). This correction is quite crude but can get crossing arms up to 80% corrected once the swimmer becomes aware of their hand entry direction.
The coolest thing about this drill is the ‘paddle’ effect that the swimmer feels when they return to full-hand catch and pull. Seeing your swimmer enjoying the feel-good factor when they experience a more effective catch, is as rewarding for the coach as it is for the swimmer. This is a drill that’s effective for all levels of swimmer. Try building it into your next technique session.
Closed fist drill (extend the index finger in your session)
That’s all for this entry. These are just some of the drills I use regularly. I’ll bring more technique drills to you as the season progresses.
Paul
GI Tri Coach
GI tri coach 