Performing drills slowly can reduce your rate of improve improvement. While swimming slow can help you 'feel' your skills better, it can wreck your body position making it almost impossible to focus on the skill you’re trying to improve.
So I’m going to show you how to get the best of both worlds using this simple trick.
Many swimming drills are performed at slower speeds and with greater patience – it makes sense to go slow if you’re trying to feel and learn new ways of moving through the water; if you do it at full speed, it’s going to be tough to change!
While going slow can be advantageous for that reason, it also can cause problems for a separate reason – the slower you go, the more difficult it is to maintain great body position.
Try this exercise to get a sense of how tough it can be when you’re not moving at all.
Even if you can establish a good position in the water, it’s going to take all of your energy and focus to make it happen. That’s exactly what you don’t want if you’re trying to improve some other aspect of your stroke.
Establishing great body position is one of the fundamental skills, and you should be devoting a lot of time to it. Precisely because it is so important, it’s hard to learn other skills when your body position is poor.
If your body position is poor because you’re swimming slowly, it’s going to be a lot harder to get the most out of your drills than if you can effortlessly maintain great position.
How can I improve my body position?
The way to improve your body position while doing drills, without speeding them up, is to pop in a pull buoy. That way, because you don’t have to worry about maintaining your body position throughout the drill, you can just focus on the drill at hand.
Then, when you get better at the drill, you can take the buoy out and proceed normally. Below are some examples where a pull buoy makes great sense.
Timing drills
It’s a lot harder to improve your timing if all of your energy is devoted to keeping your hips and feet up. In fact, it’s impossible!
Try both the Underwater Recovery and Over-Under Freestyle with a pull buoy exercises below. You’ll be able to work on the timing of the rotation and the pull without worrying about keeping your legs up.
Pull drills
If you’re focused on building a great pull, your arms need to be free to pull, not stabilise your body. By using the pull buoy, you’re free to focus on creating power without the need to use your arms for anything else.
Top image credit: Getty Images
