Swimming Technique: Feel For The Water
As well as providing guidance to help improve your swim technique, these sessions are designed to get you thinking about your swimming. As such, these technique sessions are for all types of swimmers – from developing swimmers to the front of the pack swimmers. This post ‘Swimming Technique: Feel For The Water’ is relevant to all of us.
Feel For The Water
Frequent one to one sessions with swimmers and our weekly swim technique sessions give me a great view of issues faced by many adult swimmers and triathletes. I’ve met with a lot of triathletes and swimmers for these sessions recently, and in many of them we’ve focused on ‘feel for the water‘.
Focusing on their feel for the water, all of these swimmers felt better and moved faster afterwards.
Feel For The Water: What Is It?
Many of these swimmers – and many swimmers that I see – don’t pull or push water. Instead, they move their hands and arms through the water. They slip through the water. They don’t feel resistance in the water. There is no pressure on their pull.
Does this sound like you?
Using Me As An Example
When I’m swimming, I can feel resistance on each stroke. I can feel myself pulling and pushing something heavy. I feel like I’m holding water and moving it backwards. That is feel for the water. It is a little more muscular. I generally take 15 or maybe 16 strokes per 25m on any given length. Moving forwards with every stroke.
To help with this feel for the water, I regularly swim short sets where I swim 12 strokes per 25m and move at 18 or 19s per 25m (1.12 – 1.16/100m pace). Taking account of the push off the wall, each stroke is taking me at least 1.5 metres through the water. I mention this to emphasise that using long, ‘slower’ and more powerful strokes doesn’t mean slow swimming. It’s about feel, about holding water and moving that water backwards.
Think About Your Bike
Think about your bike. When you want to go faster, you don’t simply spin your legs faster. You don’t stay in the ‘little ring’ and go from 80 rpm to 110 rpm. If you do, you feel out of control, cycling feels sloppy, the effort unsustainable – meanwhile your heart rate rockets and speed barely increases.
Instead, you would put the chain in the big ring and move through your gears, apply more tension to each pedal stroke and make it slightly harder to pedal. If you did this, you would find yourself still pedalling at that smooth and efficient 80 rpm, but you are now moving forward faster, moving a greater distance with each pedal stroke. Heart rate may increase a little, but it will feel strong and sustainable. You feel fast and efficient and in full control of your bike.
Is this how your fast swimming feels like? Fast, efficient and in full control.
It should be.
Feel For The Water: How Do You Know?
How can you tell if you have this feel for the water?
- Do you feel resistance and pressure on your hands and forearm when you pull underwater?
- Do you take ‘lots of strokes’ for each 25m?
- Can you keep the same stroke rate (don’t slow down your arms) and reduce the number of strokes per 25m?
- Do your muscles feel achy and tired at the end of a session?
Feel For The Water: How Do We Improve It?
When I see a swimmer who I believe could improve their feel for the water, often the first thing I ask that swimmer to do is stand in the water, put their hands in front of them and then move the water from side to side. We do this using different hand pressures, different tension through the hands.
- Soft hands and little tension, hands simply move through the water and it feels very gentle.
- A stronger wrist and hand* and we can feel a little resistance and we are able to move water. (* Pick up a cup of coffee or your phone – notice you now have some tension in your wrist and hands)
- A firm hand* where you are really pushing and pressing the water. We can see great turbulence in the water, creating some waves. The water is really moving. (* Put your right hand in the high-5 position. Using your left hand, try and push your right palm backwards. You want to keep that wrist and right palm strong and not give in to the resistance).
Just by altering that hand tension and hand pressure, we can see the difference in how much water we are able to move.
(Note: To create these strong hands that move water, we don’t want to squeeze our fingers. It is all hand and wrist tension, not tight fingers).
Changing Tension 25s
With the swimmers that I have met for these one to one sessions, we often progress this into some sculling drills and then do some full stroke 25s. These 25’s are broken into 6 strokes soft hands (little tension), 6 strokes putting a bit of tension into their hands and then 6 strokes with high tension and strong hands. Swimmers start off slowly (with their super soft hands) and get quicker towards the end of each 25m (when they have tension through their wrists and hands).
Always.
They hold and move more water with each stroke towards the end of each length.
Try it.
Slow It Down
When trying to think about hand pressure, tension, holding more water, I would suggest deliberately swimming with a slow stroke rate and feel yourself moving with every single pull. Doing this will enhance the feelings and the feedback.
Remember, don’t take a stroke, just to take a stroke and get to the next one. Each stroke should be purposeful and move you forwards.
Increasing Pace Through Feel
We’ve talked about using a Finis Tempo Trainer a lot in the past. If you have one, use it for this type of set.
Set your tempo trainer to your usual stroke rate e.g. 60 strokes per minute.
Simply, do a few sets of 4 x 50m (or 4 x 100m), trying to go faster on each 50m (or 100m) within each set.
- Number 1 – 2/10 effort
- Number 2 – 4/10 effort
- Number 3 – 6/10 effort
- Number 4 – 8/10 effort.
You are not increasing stroke rate, instead you are looking to move slightly faster / further with each stroke. Move more water. Increase pace.
Coincidence
Coincidentally, I was writing this post and a TrainingPeaks comment on a swim session popped up from one of my coached athletes. I set him a simple session. It was a variation on the Grant Hackett session.
If you don’t know it, it is …
16 x 50m – every 4th strong
12 x 50m – every 3rd strong
8 x 50m – every 2nd strong
4 x 50m – all strong
For this session, I didn’t want him to go strong on those particular efforts. Instead, I wanted him to focus on distance per stroke on these reps instead
“I aimed for 5/10 on the ‘easier’ 50s, then 8/10 on the distance per stroke (DPS) 50s. Focussing on technique throughout. Felt fast, powerful and more efficient!”
Quicker, more efficient, less effort.
Can You Apply This?
Does this all make sense to you? Do you recognise your own swimming in this post? Does it give you a good idea how to change and improve your swim?
Swim Session
Here is a swim session you can try. Think about the points above and give it a go.
Swimming Technique: Feel For The Water.
Feedback
When you have read the post and tried the session, let me know what you think? Did it make a difference to your swim? Are you thinking about your swim differently now? I’d love to hear how you got on.