How to get more out of your swim drills

There are some great drills than can make a huge impact on your swimming. And it’s my recommendation that you focus on using the best drills rather than using lots of different drills. 

The problem with that approach is that doing the same drills can become boring, and worse still, they may no longer be able to continue to improve your swimming because they’re no longer challenging. 

The solution isn’t to find more drills, it’s to make the same drills more difficult. Here are three ways to do it:

Add speed

If you always perform your drills slowly, you’ll only be able to perform your drills slowly. Drills can and should be performed fast. If you want to swim fast, you want to drill fast. 

Practise picking up your speed within a repetition and practice picking up your speed each repetition.  By performing drills at higher speeds, you’re going to challenge your skills in completely novel ways.

Even if you compete over really long distances and you don’t require much speed, the faster you practise your drills the better your skills will get. 

Performing a drill fast is harder than performing it slow. It’s going to challenge your ability to swim well because everything is happening a lot faster. 

Once you can master faster speeds, going back to ‘normal’ speed is going to be easy and relaxed.

Add resistance

You can also add resistance to your drills. A parachute, a stretch cord, or a drag suit are great ways to increase the challenge. 

By swimming against resistance, you’re making it a lot harder to move forward and execute the drill. That extra challenge is going to require you to focus more, be more disciplined, and swim better. 

It’s a challenge that will make the same old drill a completely new learning experience. And when you take the resistance off, it’s going to be much easier to swim really well.

Use training aids

Add a snorkel. Add a pull buoy. Add paddles and hold them in different ways. Use fins. These are all different ways to change what you’re experiencing as you perform a drill. 

A snorkel will change your breathing pattern, which will have a major impact for most triathletes. 

Adding a buoy is going to take away the legs, and require you do all of the work with the upper body. 

Wearing paddles is going to change how your hands interact with the water, allowing you to further improve the pulling component. 

And wearing fins is going to increase the contribution of the legs.

These different training aids all create novel experiences, and they change how you perform a given drill.  Suddenly, the same old drill becomes something very different. 

That new puzzle to solve provides a new challenge that can result in better skills.

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