Swim drills to increase speed

aidanki

Over the last few weeks I have upped my distance to nearly 2000m freestyle per session. Im v pleased with myself. the 2000m takes me about an hour.

Id like to now shorten my distance and increase my speed.

In freestyle swimming Im doing about 1m a second, I lose a bit of time turning at the ends of the pool, not too concerned with that at the min, anyone got any drills or recommend youtube tutorials to increase speed ?

Seaswimmer

In freestyle swimming Im doing about 1m a second, I lose a bit of time turning at the ends of the pool, not too concerned with that at the min, anyone got any drills or recommend youtube tutorials to increase speed ?


1 metre a second is pretty good. By your calculations you must be resting a lot as you do 2000m which is about 32 minutes swimming at 1m per second but it takes you an hour. Can you cut down the rest periods and try and build up your cardio fitness (lungs, heart) by not resting too much.

I am no coach but I found "swim golf" great when improving my freestyle.

It works like this.

count your strokes over 2 X 25m lengths and also your time taken (assuming the pool has a clock)

Add the 2 figures and this is your swim golf score.

for example it takes you 25 strokes per length and 45 seconds per length.

so your score is 2 X 25 (strokes) + 2 X 45 (seconds) = 140

Now you want to get your score down so you can decrease your strokes or your time or a combination of both.

I would suggest to work on your stroke rate so stretch your arm fully after it enters the water before pulling back. Try and glide a little bit as well before you take another stroke.

The less strokes you take, the less tired you will get and the faster you should go.

davmurpla

There is a coach who says that if you are aiming to do drills...you will become a driller...

If you want to swim fast, you need to include some fast intervals into your sessions, such as 25's all out, to teach the body to go fast and build the muscles.

If you have more questions or want deeper details, give me a shout.

Coach Gordo

Unpossible

I second the advice above, drills are useful to improve parts of your technique. However you need to do different types of interval training to increase speed. You will need to work in different energy systems, this can be tricky to plan depending on how often you swim. Of course you're end goal will also affect how you train e.g. training for an 800m race will be very different to that for a 50m race. Depending on what you are working on for a given day you might be doing less or more than 2k.

If it helps my wife has taken up masters swimming and has a competition under her belt already and I'm tracking her training and progress here (I'm also the one providing the sessions). She was only regularly starting to hit 2k per session when round two went up, so the next few will see most sessions go over that. There are other training sets in the Traning Sessions page if my wife's ones are too basic.