My Favorite Freestyle Swimming Drill

A swimming drill is a specific movement that helps you focus on part of your swim stroke to improve your swimming technique. The idea is that doing a drill can help you do that swimming element better. If you can bring what you developed while doing the swim drill to whole stroke swimming, then you should be able to swim the whole stroke better. At least that is the idea, and it has been around for a long time. I think it works well for most swimmers.

You can do swimming drills during any part of a swim workout or a swim lesson. Drills might be part of a warm-up, done during recovery swims, done as part of work sets, or during a cool-down at the end of a swim workout. Drills are generally done at slower speeds, but (follow me here) as long as you keep the parts of the drill that drill is focused on intact, going faster should not hurt anything, and might even help.

What drills should you do? There are many of them to choose from, and trying all of them you can find can lead you to ones you like or need to do to be a better swimmer. I like four basic drills for freestyle: Catch-up, Fingertip Drag, Fist, and One-arm.

Actually, I hate swimming One-arm drill. Hate it. A lot. That tells me I need to do it more often in swim workouts as it probably exposes a flaw in my swimming stroke (among the many I have). By doing a swim drill I don't like to do, I am probably working on something I need to do better. In my case, I know I need to have better body balance left to right side, kick more, and I need to have a better pull pattern and catch. That makes One-arm drill my favorite drill. I hate it, but I need it, so I favor it when I am doing swimming drills.

How to swim One-arm drill? You can see a video of One-arm drill as part of the Swim Faster and More Efficiently video on About.com. The basics are:

• You only move one arm at a time.
• You move that one arm over and over and over. You don't move the other arm.
• The non-moving arm is either locked against your side or pointing toward your destination. I favor the locked against my side position.
• You can breath toward either the swimming/moving arm side or the non-moving arm side, but I think you will get better body rotation and leverage by breathing away from the arm doing the swimming. It can also be harder to breath to that side, which may make it better for you as once again it pushes a weakness up where you can see it and work on eliminating it.
• It helps - a lot - if you kick - a lot - when doing One-arm drill. Good strong, steady kicking.
• Do one length of the pool with one arm, rest if needed, then swim another length of the pool with the other, rest if needed, and repeat.
• You can mix it up by doing 1/2 length with one arm and the other 1/2 length with the other arm.
• Another of the many variations is swim 1/2 length with one arm, then swim the rest of the length with bot arms (whole stroke), rest if needed, then so the same thing but use the opposite arm for the first 1/2 length of the pool.

Next time you are at the swimming pool, give One-arm drill try and see what happens. You might learn to hate it, just like me.

Swim On!