How to develop faster swim skills with contrast training

Learning swimming skills is often thought of as a mechanical process.  Your body needs to move in a certain way, and your goal is to reproduce those movements.

In reality, learning is a sensory process. As such, you need learn how to feel new ways of moving through the water if you want to improve your skills.

Training aids are powerful because they instantly change what you feel when you swim.  We can use these novel sensations to help take your skills to the next level.  It’s the contrast between what you’re normally doing, and what you’re feeling with the training aids that is really powerful for creating change. 

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By using the training aids, you can feel new possibilities for swimming fast, and then it’s matter of recreating those sensations when you swim.  Just continue to go back and forth between the training aid and regular swimming to continue to improve your skills.

How contrast training can improve your swimming skills

Below are some great training aids that can make a powerful difference in what you feel, and how you swim.

Paddles

Hand paddles can be very effective for helping you feel new ways of using your arms. 

Upside down paddles will help you feel how to use your forearm more effectively, whereas pinch paddles will help you feel how to use your wrist more effectively. 

For more advice on swimming with paddles, take a look at this paddle-based training session to develop power.

Once you have that sensory awareness, it’s all about reproducing those skills when you swim without the paddles.

Snorkel

If you want to improve your breathing, one of the simplest strategies is stop breathing.  By using a snorkel, you can feel what it’s like to swim without your breath disrupting the stroke. 

Once you take the snorkel off, the goal is to recreate those same sensations.  It’s the sensory contrast between the two activities that helps you improve your breathing.

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Resistance

If you have trouble feeling what your arms are doing under the water, swimming against resistance is really going to help become aware of what your arms are doing. 

You’re going to feel a lot more pressure on your arms, and that feedback is going to help you understand what you’re doing and what could be better. 

Simply go back and forth between the resisted swimming and normal swimming until you’re pulling like you want.

Buoy
 

Pull buoys are often criticised because they artificially help swimmers maintain their body position.  While this is a valid concern when buoys are used as a crutch, we can use buoys precisely because they make it easier maintain position. 

Use a buoy to feel an elevated position in the water, and then take the buoy out and aim to figure out how to achieve a similar position.  Repeat this process. 

While you may not be able to recreate the same position, the closer you can get, the better your position will be.

• How to use a pull buoy for maximum improvement

Learn how to build your swim skills faster with contrast training