5 Commandments for a Successful Swimming Season

With Summer just around the corner, triathletes and open water swimmers are breaking out of their hibernation and heading to the pools. We are looking ahead to events and planning our season and the training that will achieve our goals. The technical nature of swimming makes it a little more complex than just simply working out, getting fit, building endurance and then speed. While planning our new season’s training, we need to keep in mind these five commandments of successful swimming.

Swim with the whole body, not just the arms.

We now know that swimming is not simply about sticking your hand in the water and pulling it back using the puny muscles in our arms and shoulders. Instead, efficient freestyle is much more about anchoring the hand and the forearm at the catch while engaging the core and the body’s rotation to draw the body forward to where the hand and forearm are holding onto their piece of water. So, we are not pulling water back but rather pulling ourselves forwards using our hips and core to drive our bodies through the water as we rotate left and right with shoulder and hip rolling in unison around a fixed, central axis. By utilising our strong core and back muscles, which can produce far more force than our biceps, triceps and deltoids, we’ll move forward faster.

Swim fast, not hard.

Swimming freestyle combines a complex set of movements. We need to be flexible in all areas of our upper bodies, hips and ankles in order to smoothly apply power, in the correct direction and at the correct time in relation to what the rest of the body is doing simultaneously. Flexibility in swimming has two components though. The first we have just mentioned and that is the common use of the term but swimmers also need to not try too hard. We need to be relaxed and supple in our movements, even when we are trying to swim fast. Many swimmers try too hard to go fast by tensing up and trying to overpower the water instead of flowing through it in a rhythmic and relaxed fashion.

Sets and reps

Probably the worst thing we can do for our swimming is steady, continuous laps. Many people who are new to swimming will be motivated by how far they can swim in a session and their average pace per 100m. A lot will simply jump in the pool and swim up and down without breaks in order to cover as much distance as they can in the time that they have for their session. While this will certainly build our endurance, it is terrible for our stroke mechanics and we could actually become slower, as we get fitter. As we fatigue through a session like this, our speed will drop and our technique will falter. The more sessions we do like this, the more we swim slowly, with incorrect technique, and our nervous systems create the pathways so that we learn this poor technique, rather than good technique. It is far better to divide up our sessions into sets and reps. Varying drills, aerobic and strength focused swimming. The short breaks between reps and the longer ones between sets, allow the body to recover slightly and we are able to swim our whole session at a higher speed than we would in a continuous session, and faster swimming means a higher position in the water and better stroke mechanics, which is what we want our bodies and brains to learn.

Stop clock-watching

The sets and reps approach described above has a drawback in that swimmers then tend to focus more on the clock. This is necessary in order to control when we start each new repetition but it can have a negative side-effect when we start worrying about the times that we are coming in on. Yes, we want our reps to be well-paced and even but we can definitely not and, should not, expect to get faster and faster with each session we do. Overall there must be progression but day-to-day and week-to-week we are building fatigue at a similar rate to the fitness and conditioning that we are developing. It is only when we allow a bit more recovery and freshen up between macro-cycles that we will actually be able to see concrete evidence of these improvements. Trying to race every set in every session will only lead to mental burnout and physical fatigue.

There is no such thing as a perfect stroke

There are definitely fundamentals when it comes to how we should generate force from our freestyle strokes and how our bodies should be positioned so as to reduce drag but, we are all a multitude of different shapes and sizes. Even those of us who are the same height may have different length legs, arms and torsos. Even if we all spend the requisite time on stretching and mobility, some just have a naturally higher range of motion in the shoulders or their ankles. For this reason, while learning from the best swimmers and coaches in the World and mimicking what they do, we need to always keep in mind that our bodies might do something just as good, in a slightly different way. We should never try to force change purely because it doesn’t fit a template or, quite often the case, doesn’t look perfect. That will only lead to frustration and potential injury.