So I have a patella injury. It was not previously hurting when swimming, but now it is becoming a problem (particularly when swimming harder and the kick is more intense). I need to back off whilst having it treated/rehabbed.
I was focusing on trying to improve my speed with sprint sets, tempo sets etc - but now I either need to swim with a pull buoy or kick very gently,
Can anyone give me ideas of sets and drills I can do, to still work on speed and also power with a pull buoy?
For further info, I recently had a video analysis, because I did not think my form matched my pace (I saw videos of other swimmers who had worse form than me who claimed to be faster). The coach who did the video analysis said I needed to work on actually swimming faster rather than technique and also strength training.
What are your typical kick patterns? Are you someone who when you are swimming steady only use a light 2 beat kick or do you need to keep up a six beat kick even when you’re swimming lightly?
Depending how bad your injury is, will limit how much hard swimming you can do hope it comes good soon don’t push too hard off the wall with a sore knee
Something you can do to change up the stimulus is to do a bit of breath control swimming where you are holding your breath every 3 5 or 7 strokes? If you use this to replace a little bit of your steady swimming, you might hopefully find some new things to play with. Remember to gradually exhale when you’re doing these.
Or I would just do 30 seconds of the hardest sculling you can do on the spot or sculling with a buoy, think of it like doing hard pullups or chin ups and then going straight into some swimming. Combine that with some steady swimming and breath hold work and that will be something different for you to work on. So a few rounds of 30 seconds sculling, 3x 100 breath every 3, 5, 7 then 250 steady, 2x25 fast Repeat
I’m defo a 6 beat kicker, unless I’m really concentrating or in a wetsuit.
MRI shows bruising of patella bone and cartilage damage, most likely due to biomechanics. Also degeneration of the tendons. No idea how long it will take to sort.
Unless you have some kind of extremely unusual kick, your knee injury was likely not caused by your swimming (but it might be furhter irritated by your swimming, or by your flip turns, or by your wall push-offs). So, of course, you need to rest your knee.
One way to do that is swim your normal sets, but use a pull buoy and don’t kick. That might reduce the pain in your knee, but check carefully that pushing off swimming pool walls is not irritating your knee.
About your video analysis, I would be highly wary of coaches who tell you that you “need to focus on actually swimming faster rather than technique and also strength training.” There is so much wrong in this advice.
Unless you are already truly an elite swimmer, the way to faster swim speed is to fix swim technique problems PLUS swim many yards and do many interval sets. It is never only one or the other. Strength training is also excellent, but it will not make you swim faster alone, you MUST fix your technique problems too.
It is similar to cycling in this way: Bad swim technique is like a parachute that hangs behind your bike. No matter how powerful of a cyclist you are or how much you ride or how much strength training you do, you will NEVER be able to overcome the drag of a huge parachute that hangs off the back of your bike (compared to other cyclists without parachutes). You must do both: you must swim fast and swim a lot to get swim fitness, but you MUST also fix your technique problems. And not with random “technique drills”, you must have feedback on how to identify and then how to fix the exact swim technique problems that you yourself have.
How do you know others have “worse” technique than you? How do you evaluate who is “worse” and who is “better”? The others, how do they compare to you on the bike and/or on the run? How many meters a week do they swim? How many fast swim sets do they do? (compared to you)
The coach should have told you, “yes, you need to swim more and to do faster sets but you should also fix these 5 things about your technique because they are also holding you back.” Not, just “you need to swim more”.
Specific to this question, propulsion and body position are the two biggest factors into speed. Since you are going to be using a pull buoy, unfortunately you aren’t being forced to find your best body position because the buoy is doing it for you. But you for sure can work on propulsion. Underwater recovery, hinge drill, catch-up, anything that isolates the front end of the pull and forces you to engage the entire arm to find propulsion. Use various fist drills or anti/pinch paddle drills to take your hands out of the equation and use the entire arm. Then put real paddles on and develop more strength.
