Swimming: Finding the Balance Between Technique and Fitness
One of the more challenging components for many multi-sport athletes is improvement in swimming. Adult onset swimmers typically face a long learning curve to meaningful improvements in the most technical discipline of the sport. It’s an age old question: What is more important, swimming technique or swimming fitness?
The Key Topics To Focus On:
Improving The Swim As An Adult
Swimming is a funny beast of a challenge for adult onset swimmers. It is performed in an alien environment in which 90% of your weight is displaced by the water that you are floating in. This makes it closer to trying to learn to improve a sport while in space than nicely grounded on earth. You are immersed in this strange and foreign environment and then asked to think about so many moving pieces of your body. How well you retain posture, grab the water and pull it back, and recover the opposing arm for the next pull are all critical elements to dial in for improvement. This is without forgetting your kicking legs that trail behind your body. It is more akin to playing three instruments at the same time than single sport improvement. Compare it to running, which is performed in a familiar grounded setting. Here you transition from what you do in daily life to a similar action but with both feet now off the ground. There are plenty of technical elements in running, but nowhere near the overall complexity.
It is no wonder that the natural tendency for many coaches and athletes is to utilize the majority of training time to adopting and retaining proper technique improvements, often through the utilization of swimming drills. We can label drills as exercises in which we break down full swimming into a smaller focus point, which can then (hopefully) be integrated into full swimming strokes. But this isn’t where the challenge stops. Another barrier for swimming improvement arises out of time availability and the actual opportunity to improve. The vast majority of multi-sport athletes face some water access challenges. Swimming training normally includes greater logistical planning and time consumption than throwing on a pair of running shoes and heading out for a run. Many athletes only have one to three chances a week to swim, ranging from 90 minutes to 4 hours of typical training time. That isn’t much when you are seeking gains. We have a training optimization challenge.
Technique Versus Fitness
The truth is that much of the multi-sport training community has got the path to swim improvements incorrect. Let’s start with a couple of important points:
Technical improvements are important.
Technical improvements are irrelevant without the muscle resilience to maintain them.
This is defining. You must improve your technique, but without great fitness and muscular endurance, any technical improvements will not be able to be maintained. Yes, as Matt Dixon likes to say, “You must be FAF.” What is FAF? It is Fit and F*&K. You will remember that, won’t you.
But here lies the challenge. If you are time-starved, and only have a limited time to train, how can you improve your fitness to a level that you can maintain best form, while also improving that form along the way? Well, we will tell you what it isn’t, which is to aim to drill your way to glory. We see so many coaches prescribing massive bouts of swim drills and easier micro-focus blocks of work that take up large amounts of the total swim training session or program. We see whole sessions anchored around single arm swimming, sculling, fingertip drag, and other drills. Many of these drills are used by world-class swimmers, hence, emulation is the word. Unfortunately, these world-class swimmers often have 15 to 25 hours of swimming opportunity each week, and are also performing in events lasting less than a few minutes. Every hundredth of a second is critical, so minor improvements become massive. They are also really fit, as the majority of their training time is still anchored around highly specific intervals and resilience development. They have more time to play with.
So what to do? If you only have one, two, or three weekly sessions available to swim, then your best course of action is to minimize (not eliminate) drills, and aim to combine fitness development with technique improvements. Your approach becomes adopting smart and purposeful uses of swim toys. You train hard with plenty of intervals to achieve the best fitness return from the training you are doing. Then, adding toys to this can force improvements in different elements of technique.
This can be powerful, but there is a big ‘but’ to this:
Swim toys are only beneficial if the athlete understands their role, and then aims to apply the ‘lessons’ of the toy usage into their normal swimming.
It is with this in mind that we map the different toys we utilize at Purple Patch.
A Guide To Swim Toys
Buoy:
We use one primary buoy: the Eney Buoy. This buoy has three uses and includes two chambers that can be filled with water to provide a different stimulus:
Empty: A buoyant buoy similar to open water wetsuit or salt water swimming. It's your friend.
One Chamber-Filled: Put the full chamber on the bottom and open up the hips to introduce light resistance.
Double Chamber-Filled: Fully introduces the resistance challenge for use in power and strength-based swimming.
Snorkel:
There are plenty of good options for a snorkel, but the key is that it is designed for a swimmer and doesn't wrap around the back of the head. We use this for taking the head rotation associated out of the breathing equation, leaving an opportunity to focus on good:
Alignment or symmetry of swimming without arms and legs crossing from one side to the other and maintaining a good connection between the pulling arm and the power center (hips)
Developing a proper feel for the water and grip (catch)
Improving the timing and rhythm of the stroke and allowing best execution of certain drills we utilize (example: the purple patch drill)
The first 5-10 times using a snorkel may carry a claustrophobic feeling, but the learning ramp is fast and almost everyone falls in love with the tool after a few attempts. If needed a nose plug can be used, but it is less preferable as you really want to learn how to exhale from the nose as much as the mouth in swimming.
Tech Paddles (or swimming with closed fists):
This is important as we have 1-2 sets of paddles we often utilize.
Size: Small or Medium (we recommend against athletes oversized large paddles - too much shoulder strain)
Work on the 'catch' and purchase on the water to push back through forcing a high elbow and good connection with the water
Develop a sense of swimming with the body and great connectivity between pulling arm and opposite hip
As Tech Paddles are sometimes tough to find, we replicate the focus via an athlete swimming full stroke, but with closed fists. This removes the ‘paddle effect’ of the hand, and forces a focus on the position of the pulling arm, timing and connectivity, and beginning to swim with the whole body (instead of just the hand).
Ankle-Strap/Band:
We love for athletes to execute ‘pull focused workouts,’ while binding the ankles together. This removes the kick portion of the swim stroke and places great emphasis on your body position and pull. It is challenging, and we often swim with both buoy and band/ankle strap at the same time, but also ask for ‘band only’ swimming, which is akin to medieval torture for many. This highly valuable toy:
Helps develop good posture (a taut vessel), which is the platform to build powerful swimming from
Enhances the need for improved stroke rate without losing purchase/grip on the water
Increases strength and power development in your swimming
Fins:
We don't use fins as a joyous motor boat for the struggling athlete. Fins are designed to make you kick harder, and to assist with body position and allow a little patience to help you find proper mechanics. Your best choice for length of fins is 3-5 inches over the end of the toes and comfortable. Two options:
Option 1: ROKA Sports Classic Silicone Short Fins
Option 2: TYR Crossblade Training Fin
Stretch Cordz:
The final toy comes in the form of ‘dryland swimming.’ These are a small, yet critical, tool for endurance and power development. Stretch Cordz only require 5-7 minutes of work, and can be completed pre or post-workout.
Note: I would purchase the yellow option unless you can swim on a send off of 1:30 per 100y or better or 1:40 per 100m.
The Final Word
We realize there is quite a laundry list here, but each tool has a specific and repeatable use within your swimming program.
If you are an adult onset open water swimmer or triathlete, this is your path to optimize training return and actually see improvements in your swim.
Free Download: Purple Patch Strength Workouts
Purple Patch anchors training around four Pillars of Performance - Endurance, Functional Strength, Nutrition, and Recovery. Strength sessions, such as this one, are integrated into our training methodology, and specifically on how strength training will improve your bike performance.
Get your strength training started with behind-the-curtain strength training sessions from the Purple Patch Squad and Strength programs.