This board overflows with advice from swimmers, mostly very good ones, or so it seems. The problem is that there is a presumption of a certain level of competency or basic capability in most of that advice that some of us just doesn’t have.
Here is the perspective of a still pretty bad swimmer, who was downright awful 6 months ago but continues to improve weekly.
Get a coach, a good one. Mine was an olympic finalist, costs more, worth every penny.
Do the damn drills. They are boring as all hell but they work.
Do the dryland work. 25K/week since kindergarten swimmers have the right muscles developed. For the rest of us, 1o minutes a day of strengthening lower abs and lower back pays of tremendously.
I am convinced that for those of us on the bad end of the swim continuum, working on technique and strengthening the right muscles, is a far better use of time than trying to go faster or longer.
I’ve been frustrated with my swim these past weeks. I feel like i just don’t have enough base power in my arms and shoulders. My triceps are the first thing to get tired. thinking of starting a 2-3 times weekly resistance program with light weights.
While dry land work can help some it cannot replace yardage. The only way to get more swimming strength is to simply swim until your arms feel like they are going to go numb and fall off then repete…for several years. Thats how I did it, and that how everyother accomplished swimmer in the world did it. Lots and lots and lots of time spent in the water.
FWIW I always viewed, as did my coaches, dry land work as more injury prevention than strength building.
Not a big fan of the More is More thing going on on this board, but in this case until you get a base- More is More
The dryland work the original poster mentioned seemed to be about core work, not the usual arm improvements.
Which is probably a good thing since knowing how to keep core muscles tight and the torso stabilized is a horribly underrated stroke component in swimming, especially in rough water conditions.
That’s great advice. As a bad (and improving) swimmer myself (9 months in now), I can see how all of those points will help other struggling rocks.
The point about how the real swimmers have been working on this since they were 8 is well made. I’ve been lapped every other lap by folks that swam competatively 20 years ago and just got back into it 75lbs overweight.
And since no one has put numbers on what their “bad” swim is, I’ll put mine. My 200yd pace all day pace is around 4:50 (yes, I suck). I can now go faster for short distances (like one lap) at under 1:30/100 pace but I can’t keep it up.
I’ve done the coach thing, spent many mind-numbing hours on drills, and been doing dryland work (though I think I’ve recently gotten the most from the dryland work). For dryland work I’ve been doing weights, core, lat pulldowns, seated rows, and dips (all of these tri specific weight work I got from a book). With the dips I’ve seen the most improvement going from using the dip machine with half my body weight as a counterweight to no dip machine required (this probably doesn’t compare to a real swimmer but its a start). I’ve been doing stretch cords as well and that has helped my power, though my swim endurance (muscular and cardio) has a long way to go.
If you are doing weights, 2 more exercizes that I highly recommend are the fly press and the reverse triceps extension(names may differ, but this is what I was taught were their names).
Fly press: use the lat pull down bar, begin on your knees with your arms extended above your head holding the bar. Do not grip the bar, use the palm of your hands to press it with your hand flat and fingers extended, press the bar downwards at first only bending your arm at the elbow, keep your elbows high until your hands are about chin/neck level and continue pressing down until your arms are fully extended downwards. Go back up reversing the previous steps, and again making sure to keep your elbows as high as possible. This exercize is meant to build strength for the catch and pull phases.
Reverse triceps extension: use the row bar, stand facing the rack, flex your knees and bend forward at the waist, pass the row bar between your legs so that it is behind your knees, press the bar backwards so that your arms extend behind you, if possible don’t grip the bar, but keep your hands flat with fingers extended, this simulates the last part of the pull phase.
If your coach was an Olympic Finalist then I would just listen to him. I’m sure he know his stuff. Unless he was an Olympic finalist in the 60’s, in that case his knowledge on the sport might be a little out-dated.
The dryland work the original poster mentioned seemed to be about core work, not the usual arm improvements.
Which is probably a good thing since knowing how to keep core muscles tight and the torso stabilized is a horribly underrated stroke component in swimming, especially in rough water conditions.
Agreed- About the core being important.
However it was this sentance that caught my eye.
"I am convinced that for those of us on the bad end of the swim continuum, working on technique and strengthening the right muscles, is a far better use of time than trying to go faster or longer. "
I still contend that the “faster” and “longer” can not be replaced by dryland or any other exercise.
I find that when I’m at my best (for swimming), I don’t feel like I’m using much in the arms/shoulders. I feel that these muscles should provide tension/stability, and the muscles through the back should be doing the ‘pulling’ (traps, lats).
that said, you have to keep the arms/shoulders engaged to transfer the power down through the stroke, and at high intensities, the arms and shoulders provide more power to what the back is doing. I just think that the basis of a good swim is to learn to engage the back to do much of the work.
I am getting a kick out of this thread. Once before Jill you said you remember who are masters swim coach is. Mike Burton golds in 68 and 72. So often his advice to me is the backwards to the Tri recommendations. I asked him about practicing technique first. His reply “No swim longer and your stroke will start to come together” or “More you swim the more comfortable you will be, the better your stroke and farther you can go”. Or on asking him easy way to pick up speed? “Increase your stroke turnover” And tons of other comments I see here. I think He would say that your reply of "… "The way to figure out how to swim better is to go out there and swim. " would be his number one advice.
good advice (i am also a terrible swimmer but slowly and finally improving).
i will this: learn flip turns and get used to always doing them…to me they not only help with strenghtening the core but the improved “flow” seems to encourage me to swim faster too…
A while back, someone here asked what he needed to do to to increase his arm turnover. Which kind of made my brain blip a little bit because I don’t know if there is supposed to be an answer to that one other than ‘move your arms faster’
I admit the core muscles in swimming is a bit of a pet subject of mine because so many people just don’t get it. The fish have good enough core muscles that they never really have to think about it. Reason- they swam eleventy zillion yards with kickboards growing up, and that forces you to learn how to keep your torso tight and your butt on top of the water when your head is way up in the water. If you don’t figure it out, you don’t get to enjoy that nice 500-1000 yard break in the middle of practice when you get to kick and talk/catch up on gossip with your teammates.
And the newcomers seem to be constantly told that kickboards are The Giant Evil, because they force you to contract your abs and such and there’s some sort of Total Immersion voodoo about something else that will annoy me all over again if I try to remember the details.
Kickboards are good for you if you understand the why of it all. They really are.
And I’ll get off my tangenty soapbox now.
As for drills, I’ll admit I never bother with them unless I’m playing in the water during warm down. I’m the least kinestically aware person I know. If I’m doing drills, what happens is that I’m learning how to do the drill perfectly. I just don’t have the ability to translate good drill form into swim form. The only exception is that a bit of full stroke backstroke helps me sort out freestyle body rotation issues sometimes.
IMO, the best place for drills is in warmup and warmdown, as they give you a way to swim slowly without wrecking your regular stroke.
I’m not a huge fan of drills. A bit of catchup freestyle here and there is good, but most of the time it is an experienced eye on deck who can help you fix stroke flaws and give you something to focus on.
edit: the other drill that is really good, as an ex-butterflyer, is one armed fly. doing full stroke fly in a crowded pool can be rather painful at times, particularly when you share a lane with another flyer.
The point of this thread to help those, like myself, who are not strong swimmers improve and to compare what has worked for each of us. This thread is similar to someone asking “how do I go and get strong enough to run a mile”. This is certainly funny to some, but really quite serious to the person asking. Some of us are in this same situation with swimming and are quite serious about improving.
When I was recovering from my broken femur and starting to attempt to walk again (and doing very poorly at it), I went into physical therapy to be able to improve faster. They did some simple physical tests and said that the reason I couldn’t walk without a major, major wobble was because I had weak (atrophied) glute and glute mead. They had me doing targeted weight work to improve the strength and after a couple of months I was able to walk normally again. I could have recovered the same way by just walking but I had tried that for the prior 3 months and I still walked badly (Yes it probably would have worked eventually but taken much longer).
The point of this is that, targeting weak muscles with weight work or getting technique coaching from someone who actually knows how to swim are valuable for someone who has really never done this before.
I’m certainly interested in anything else the other bad swimmers (and good ones) have to say about getting faster, stronger, etc.
Part of the problem here is that so often the questions on the board are framed in such a manner that the answer to them must be precise. Something like “How do I improve my catch?” is a common one. The broad base answer is swim more and you’ll get it. But 99% of the time the questioner and the 19 other people watching the thread hoping for a nugget of gold don’t want to hear that, they want their nugget. So now we (the swimmer on the site) are left parsing details better left to people who have already done the yardage and have the toolset in place. If the tools are there we can sharpen them, but most people here don’t even have the proper toolset.
I feel pretty safe with this advice for a lower level adult swimmer wanting to improve. I bet you’ll see 99% sucess (being a signifigant improvement in technique and speed) out of this
Get a coach or join a masters program
Swim, swim, swim, swim, swim, then do it again for several years.
I’m convinced that I will never be a good swimmer, no matter what I do. Of course, I’m not willing to swim more than 1,000 yards in my workouts 2-3 times a week nor, giving the little swimming I do, does it seem worthwhile for me to do drills rather than swim my 1,000 yards (with a few 50-yard intervals thrown in). BTW, the only reason I swim this much is that I want to place in my AG in sprint tris and this requires this level of swim training.
What I don’t get is that I have always been a fast runner, I have good endurance, I am coordinated and I push myself hard in training and races, and yet I can’t swim faster than a 42-second 50-yard or 19:30 1,000 yard.
As for technique, I think I’m doing all the things I’m supposed to do. I had a national age group winner as a coach and she did not have a problem with my form after a few tweaks. That is why I am convinced that swimming mediocrity is my fate in life.