Articles and Videos
Why Butterflyers Should Do the One-Two-One Drill
Butterfly can be the most exhausting stroke to swim, and it takes many swimmers of lot of practice to learn the proper timing. Practicing it, however, can be exhausting. Once you’re worn out, your stroke will start to fall apart, at which point you’re practicing bad technique—that’s never a good thing.
Learn to Swim Freestyle With This Drill Progression
Freestyle swimming technique can be difficult to master, and it takes a lot of practice to find the right body alignment, catch, and arm movements to swim fast. This drill progression can help. Work on these drills in progression regularly to solidify your muscle memory for faster freestyle.
Dryland Exercises that Power Up Your Swimming Turns
When you push off the wall, that’s the fastest you’ll ever move in swimming. Learning to capitalize on this for a strong push-off is a key way to post faster times in any event you’re racing.
4 Must-Do In-Water Stretching Drills for Swimmers
Staying flexibile is a critical skill for swimmers because it improves streamlining, stroke mechanics, and resistance to injury. But staying flexible as we age isn’t always easy.
Make Your Freestyle More Efficient by Doing This Drill
If you watch an aerial view of elite swimmers, you’ll notice that they always have a hand or arm out in front of their heads. This is called front-quadrant swimming, and the best of the best use it because it lengthens your body and helps with stroke timing.
Try This Drill to Improve Your Freestyle Technique
Do you feel as though your freestyle has stagnated, even though you’ve been getting stronger with dryland training? Are you putting forth a lot of effort but not getting very far?
How to Swim Freestyle Without Getting Tired
Have you ever wondered how some triathletes and open water swimmers seem to be able to just keep swimming forever? If you’ve wanted to learn how to duplicate their skills without getting tired, then this drill is for you.
Swim Breaststroke Better With This Fun, Simple Drill Progression
Drill progressions can help you master aspects of technique step by step. Each stage of a progression helps break down the stroke and gives you a cumulative understanding of how your body should be moving at a given point in the stroke cycle. Once you put it all together, your stroke will improve.
Try This Freestyle Drill to Swim Like an Olympian
We can learn a lot from the drills that the pros use. The Popov drill is named after legendary Russian sprinter Alexander Popov and is perfect for developing your length, balance, control, and rotation.
Perfect Your Breaststroke Timing With This Drill
Breaststroke is sometimes referred to as more art than science. As with dancers, breaststrokers are said to be “born not made.” Indeed, both breaststroke and dancing require a sense of timing that can be elusive for some.
Fix Your Backstroke By Doing This Drill
There are aspects of backstroke technique that, if performed poorly, affect your ability to swim the stroke efficiently. Poor alignment means you’ll wiggle down the lane, and a poor catch means that you won’t have good power for your propulsion.
The Best Open Water Swimming Buoy Turn
Tight buoy turns in open water races are critical to maintaining momentum around the course. But they can be challenging to master, as many of us slow down to find the buoy, get around it, and then get back up to racing speed.
Try This Drill to Fix Your Butterfly and Breaststroke
The butterfly–breaststroke combo drill might seem odd, but these two short-axis strokes have a history together; butterfly began evolving from breaststroke in the 1930s. Combining them in drill form leverages that shared origin story and can help you correct timing problems.
Try This Drill to Fix Your Backstroke Technique
If you’re struggling with how to swim backstroke, this technique drill will help you. It focuses on stroke timing and will help fix common backstroke mistakes of shoulder and body rotation. Mix this into your swimming workout in the pool and see how your backstroke improves and becomes faster, as a quicker rotation leads to a more powerful stroke.
2 Must-Do Dryland Exercises for Your Swimming Starts and Turns
These two exercises can help you get more power off your starts and walls.
Do This Swimming Dryland Exercise for Optimal Shoulder Mobility
Do you struggle to hit a strong overhead position in swimming and sometimes need to arch your lower back to get into that position? This could be because of some tension in your shoulders. This band exercise can help.
Get Your Lats Ready for Swimming With This Dryland Exercise
If your coach has ever told you to speed up your turnover but when you try it just feels like you’re slipping through the water without getting any propulsion, you might be losing lat engagement. The lat muscles run along the outside of the upper back and are important for generating forward propulsion in swimming. Losing lat engagement can make you feel like you're spinning your wheels in mud instead of achieving meaningful forward progress in the water.
How to Strengthen Your Core to Fix This Common Swimming Mistake
Too much wiggle in the water is inefficient and can lead many swimmers to meander down the lane like a snake slithers. This common problem usually means the swimmer has good range of motion and good rotation but doesn’t have quite enough core strength to control that rotational movement. This core stability exercise can help you learn to better control that side-to-side wiggle.
Try This Swimming Dryland Exercise to Build Shoulder Strength and Prevent Injury
Resistance bands can be helpful for developing pull strength. This lateral raise exercise can help strengthen some of the smaller muscles needed for an effective swimming stroke.
Stop Struggling With Swimming Butterfly by Doing This Exercise
A lot of the whip action in butterfly happens in your T-spine or mid-back. If you're feeling a bit tight, you could be missing out on valuable propulsion during your dolphin kick that could push you forward faster in the water.
