Need to Improve freestyle technique? Do these swimming drills.

We have identified the key factors you need to work on to improve your freestyle technique and speed, but how do you train them? When it comes to improving your technique I am a strong believer in performing drills. Drills are swimming exercises that isolate a part of a stroke, or identify a new kind of movement which can be used to improve the overall technique of a swimming stroke. In this article you will find some basic drills to do every time you go to the pool for training. Make them part of your routine. you can perform these drills during warm up, during the hard phase of the training or during a cool down. Competitive swimmers do drills all the time and even have full swimming training sessions dedicated just to doing drills to improve swimming technique and sensitivity in the water.

Every swimming stroke has its own drills. In this article we will have a look at some of the most useful drills for freestyle swimming.

Freestyle Breathing

Breathing is a key factor in swimming freestyle. To improve the breathing technique and make it as efficient and natural as possible you can train in varying the rhythm of your breathing patter during freestyle. During your regular training and your special drills session try to swim breathing, every 3, 5 and 7 arm strokes.

For example do a 500 freestyle; do the first 50 breathing every 3 stroke, the second 50 every 5, and the third one every 7, and than go back to 5 and 3. Repeat until you finish. This kind of drill will teach your body to swim with less oxygen improving you aerobic conditioning, but also to keep your breathing technique clean even when you really need to breath, like in a competition.

Freestyle Leg kick

Many swimmers, especially the less experienced ones, have the problem of bending the knee too much while swimming freestyle. They often end up having an extended leg kick outside the water which brings no forward push to your freestyle. A way to correct this mistake is work on the deep leg kick drill. Simply try to perform your freestyle leg kick having your feet barely surfacing. You can use a kickboard and train only the leg, or train only legs without the kickboard keeping your arms stretched in your of you and breathing frontally when needed. The other option is that you swim freestyle normally making sure your feet never make it out of the water.

By far the most important freestyle drills you can do are those to improve your arm stroke. I am proposing here three freestyle arm stroke drills which will help you to get a better crawling and improve you water feel and sensitivity.

Freestyle Swimming Drill: ARM CATCH UP

This drills is by far the most effective drill you can do to improve your freestyle swimming. While performing one arm stroke keep the other arm outstretched in front of your head and do not move it
until the other arm has finished the stroke. Let’s say you start moving your left arm, keep your right arm stretched in front of you and do not start the right arm stroke until your left hand has touched your right hand. The benefits of this swimming technique is that you are forced to keep the arm stretched in front of you while the other arm is performing the stroke, that way enhancing the the streamline position of the body and the the push back of the active arm. Try to make a pause with both hands in front of you before starting the next arm stroke, this will make sure the body position is kept properly.
As you push back with the arm stroke make sure to outstretch the other arm to go to catch the water in the far front. Well…, pictures are worth a million words, have a look at this video to get an example of the arm catch up freestyle drill.

Freestyle Swimming Drill: ONE ARM FRONT

As for the arm catch up drill, the one arm front drill is meant to improve the efficiency of the “gliding” phase of freestyle. The one arm front drill consists of repeating the arm stroke of only one arm with the other arm stretched in front of you. Do one lap stroking with the left arm and the next stroking with the right arm, breath normally in the direction of the arm stroke. As the arm stroke is completed take a rest with the hands on top of each other and both arms stretched, then start the arm stroke again.
Make sure to focus on the push back phase of the arm stroke as well as on the outstretched of the resting arm. Have a look at this video to get an example of the one arm front freestyle swimming drill.

Freestyle Swimming Drill: Roll Over Drill

One of the factors we identified in the freestyle technique was the body rotation. This movement is functional to the putting together all the other key factors in swimming freestyle. To train the body rotation in freestyle you can perform the roll over drill. Make an arm stroke, go for breathing and keep rotating your shoulder until you reach 90 degrees. You will find yourself laying with one side of your body toward the bottom of the pool, with one arm along the body, the other stretched in front of your head and in breathing position.

Pause for a little while and start the recovery of the arm. As the hand of the recovering arm reaches the shoulder level break the movement and then go for rotating back the shoulder, your head and start the next arm stroke. This drill makes you focus on all the fundamental parts of the arm stroke and on the importance of the rotation of the shoulder to perform them correctly. Have a look at how Alexander Popov does the roll over drill.

These are some of the basic drills you can do for improving your freestyle swimming. By no means this is a complete list, but it is my experience that performing these drills regularly during your swimming workout you will greatly improve both your freestyle technique and water feel and sensitivity which will in return give you more speed.
Have you got more drills to share with us. Please add it to the comments of this post

Put all these drills and exercises together with the “4 weeks swimming training plan” free for you to download here

Until next time
Keeps healthy keep swimming

Share it!!! Bookmark it!!!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Ask backflip blinklist BlogBookmark Bloglines BlogMarks Blogsvine BuddyMarks BUMPzee! CiteULike co.mments Connotea del.icio.us

Digg diigo DotNetKicks DropJack dzone Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Friendsite folkd.com Furl Google

Hugg Jamespot Jeqq Kaboodle kirtsy linkaGoGo LinkedIn LinksMarker Ma.gnolia Mister Wong Mixx MySpace MyWeb

Netvouz Newsvine oneview OnlyWire PlugIM Propeller Reddit Rojo Segnalo Shoutwire Simpy Slashdot Sphere

Sphinn Spurl Squidoo StumbleUpon Technorati ThisNext Twitter Webride Windows Live Worlds Movies Yahoo!

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML: 

 If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

More »

Tags: freestyle, swimming drills, swimming techni