How to use variation to improve your swim skills

If you want to improve your swimming skills, you have to practise your swimming skills. And improving your skills often involves working on effective drills. 

Consistently working on those drills is critical for long-term progress. But to continue to learn, you need to new learning experiences. Even the best drills can get stale, and you need to switch it up.

However, you don’t necessarily want to change what you’re doing, but how you do it. The key here is not just to take one of the ideas below and add it to your training. The goal is to use multiple options and consistently rotate between them. 

The more you use and the more you master, the more opportunity you’ll have to improve your skills in a powerful way, without having to change the drills you’re doing.

Training aids

A simple way to change any drill is to start using different training aids. You can use a buoy, fins, paddles, a snorkel, or any other toy you have access to. 

Regardless of the training aid you use, you’ll instantly be performing the drill differently in a subtle yet meaningful way. Those subtle changes can help provide key insights into how you can move through the water with greater speed and less effort. 

If it feels like you’ve mastered a drill, changing the training aids can get you learning again.

Hand postures

Many of the key swimming skills involve learning how to move more water with your arms. As a result, many of the popular drills are designed to improve these skills. 

You can increase the effectiveness of these drills by…

Closing your fists

Holding paddles upside down

And by pinching paddles…

The goal is to vary how your hands are interacting with the water, and by doing so, you’ll learn more about how to move water, and you’ll learn faster.

Speed

Perhaps the simplest way to mix things up is to change the speed of the drills that you’re doing. You can do them slower than normal, you can do them faster than normal, and you can alternate between the two. 

It’s also possible practise increasing your speed within each repetition, or even make each repetition faster. By doing so, you’re going to expand your mastery and be better able swim well regardless of the circumstance, a valuable asset in the unpredictable triathlon swimming world!

Combine the strategies

While these three strategies are effective in their own right, it’s also possible to combine them, doing so in any way you can think of. For instance, you can perform a drill of choice with fins, closed fists, and while building speed. 

That’s going to provide the variation you need to continue to improve. Combining strategies opens up a lot of new options, all of which can help you swim better and faster.

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