Two swimming drills for a faster freestyle.

By gab

Short distance freestyle racing is all about fast and effective arm strokes and leg kicks. Once you have got the start from the block and flip turns right you need to work on a quick arm stroke and a 6 leg kicks rhythm.

I found two drills particularly useful to improve the speed of your freestyle: Water Polo freestyle drill and leg kick frontal breathing drill. Let’s go through them.

Water Polo freestyle drill

Water polo players always need to pay attention to their surroundings while swimming across the pool. To do that and to swim as quick as possible they have developed a unique kind of freestyle technique. They keep the head constantly out of the water and have a very powerful and quick arm stroke focused on minimizing the gliding phase to maximize the push forward. The same approach can be taken by short distance freestyle swimmers. Rotate your arm fast and “attack” the water as soon as your hand touches the water. You can practice this technique by doing the Water Polo freestyle drill. It consists on repetition of 50m laps, 25m of which swum as a water polo player would do and the next 25m of normal freestyle swimming focusing on minimizing the delay between the moment the hand enters the water and the beginning of the pulling phase of the arm stroke.

I selected this youtube video for you to understand the correct technique to perform the Water Polo freestyle drill.

Freestyle Leg Kick drill with frontal breathing

This is a freestyle leg kick drill which does not use the kickboard. Because of that it requires an higher leg kick speed and it is particularly effective when training for freestyle speed. To perform this drill you need to put your arms straight in front of you with your hands on top of each other. Start the freestyle leg kick in a very streamlined position with your head looking down in between your arms. When needed, raise your head from the water to breath trying to have the minimal possible impact on your whole body position. Do not break the hands while performing the breathing act. Inhale outside the water, exhale under the water always keeping your arms straight and your hands together.

The best way to do these two drills is to make them as if they were part of an interval training set, timing yourself and giving all you have.
Combining these two drills you will get an effective and faster freestyle technique.

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

Keep healthy, keep swimming.

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