All drills have advantages, and all drills have disadvantages. Rather than accepting this reality, we can overcome it by using multiple drills at the same time to retain the advantages, while eliminating the disadvantages.
In this article, I’ll show you three ways to make it happen.
Sensory and movement drills
Sensory drills can be really useful for helping you feel the key skills. But they often don’t involve much movement, which can limit how well they result in improved skills.
We can overcome that limitation by pairing a sensory drill with a movement drill that addresses the same skill.
To make this practical, consider the Wall Pull exercise. It can be extremely useful for helping you feel how to use the forearm to create pressure and execute a great pull.
It’s going to be even more effective when paired with an exercise like Underwater Recovery, where you’re actually focused on pulling really well.
In combination, the drills enhance each other, allowing swimmers to feel the key skill, then perform it.
Simple and integrated drills
Some drills are quite simple to help you isolate and learn specific parts of the stroke. While this isolation can be useful for understanding these specific parts, these drills usually don’t fully resemble the rhythm and timing of freestyle.
That can make it hard to execute the specific skills while actually swimming. And some drills resemble freestyle really well, yet they don’t allow swimmers to focus on specific skills.
The best solution is to combine these types of drills. For instance, Power Pulls allow you to work on pulling straight back and getting a strong pull, but there’s no timing to it.
Underwater Recovery is great for understanding the timing of the pull in freestyle, but it’s difficult to address the pull itself.
When you combine these drills, you get best of both worlds, working on the pull itself as well as the timing of the pull within the rhythm of the stroke.
Complementary drills
It also makes sense to use two different drills that are working on the same problem. That way, you can attack the problem in multiple ways, increasing the probability that you’re going to learn what you want to learn in the way you want to learn it.
Different drills can often be designed to help swimmers improve the same skill in a different way, and by combining them, you get more out of each activity.
For instance, let’s say you’re working on improving the use of your forearm while pulling. You could choose to do some swimming with Closed Fists, and you could choose to do some swimming with Upside Down Paddles.
Both encourage the use of the forearm, but it in different ways. The closed fist encourages use of the forearm by removing the hand, and the upside down paddles lock the wrist so that the hand and forearm need to move as unit.
Top image credit: Getty Images
