How to shift your swim drill work over the course of the season 

Improving your swimming skills is a key aspect of improving your swimming speed, and drill work is often a key component of the skill improvement process. 

While identifying key skills to improve and key drills to improve those skills is critical, how you actually implement those drills is important as well. 
 
Remember that the purpose of using a drill is to improve your swimming skill, and you’re improving your swimming skill to race more effectively. 

Ultimately, the goal is not to practise the drill, but to learn how to swim effectively in a race.  As a result, you want to shift the between drilling and swimming over the course of a season. 

Initially, it’s about using the drill to create change, and then over time, more and more focus should be dedicated to swimming full stroke. Let’s check out the details.

Early season

Initially, the goal is to practise the drills so that you can understand what new skills you’re trying to learn and how to do them. The drills are your teacher and they’re showing you a new way to swim. Because everything is new, that should be the focus of your swimming work. 

The goal is to learn the drill and what it’s trying to show you as quickly as possible. You’ll also want to continue to do some full-stroke swimming to stay in touch with the overall skill, and to see if you can start to apply what you’re learning with the drill. 

As soon as you get the hang of the drill, you can move on to the next step.

Middle season

As you gain experience and expertise with your drill work, you’ll want to begin performing more and more regular swimming. The focus is on taking what you’ve learned in the drill and apply it to the swimming. 

You’ll want to keep using the drill to ensure that your skills stay on track and begin to increase the amount of swimming you do, while staying focused on how well you’re able to apply what you’ve learned during the drill. With practice, you should get better and better at applying those skills.

Late season

By this point, you should be quite skilled at the drills and competent at executing those skills while you swim. Now, it’s all about making things happening with your full-stroke swimming in more difficult situations. 

You should still keep the drills in as a reminder of what you’re trying to accomplish. However, the big emphasis is on swimming with great skills and doing so in more race like conditions, which is the ultimate goal you’ve been training for.

Repeat the process

After the big competition and the conclusion of the racing season, you’ll want to go back identify which skills you need to improve for the next go around and start the process over. 

You’ll start off focusing on the drill work and then gradually transition to more and more swimming. Each time you do so, you’ll find that your swimming skills during races get better and better.