Come, you know, come sort of six years ago when we started running clinics, I had to get very good at understanding the purpose behind the drills because we started with about 24 different drills and we gave people 24 different drills when we started doing our clinics and it was confusing. It was too much and people just sort of left going. So that’s a lot of information and they didn’t really retain much of it. And then I, after that, I thought, okay, I’ve got to make it as simple as possible. I think that is the best way to do anything. Take away anything that doesn’t, that’s not going to contribute to the end goal and just strip it away to the bare essentials. And now we only have really five, five or six drills that we do at clinics and they just build on one another. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life.

Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome back to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. In today’s episode, I want to go over an article that I was sent recently from Bevan McKinnon who hosts the podcast, Fida Radio. And he sent this article through as a bit of a discussion starter for an episode that I was a guest on, on his show at Fida Radio. So you can go and check that out. And I thought it’d be worthwhile going over this article that he sent because when I first read the title and I read the first couple of paragraphs, I kind of got my hackles up a little bit, like, this, nah, this isn’t, this isn’t right. But I continued to read through it and I thought, okay, I actually agree with most of this. So the article that I’m, that he sent through was called Swim Drills, Do They Work? I look at the controversy over the benefits of drills. And this was published in Trathon Magazine, Canada only a couple of weeks ago from Clint Leanne, I think it’s called.

Now there are a few, I’ll read you the first paragraph because I think it’s, as I was going through it, I was like, nah, this isn’t right. But then I kept reading and tended to agree. So it starts off, there are a few conversations in the swimming world that generate as much controversy and heat as the debate over swimming drills. Most coaches and athletes argue fervently for one side or the other. It’s a black and white issue for them. The evidence they use to fortify their stand is almost exclusively anecdotal because to my knowledge, there hasn’t been much in the way of peer reviewed study on the issue. Joe Rodriguez of Tower 26 has been known to give single arm sessions that has many shattering at the shoulder while Joe Filio went viral with his 20 rules for swimming fast in 2012. Rule number two, read, read, traditional drills don’t work. There’s actually no daylight between Filial’s position and my own on this matter.

But it’s important to note that Filial goes on to say the type of drills and the way that most triathletes do them don’t actually have any material effect on swimming technique. It’s the type and the way they’re done that matters. So it wasn’t until I got to that end part where I was like, okay, I actually agree with that because with the clinics that we run, the people that I coached online for our stroke analysis, I know that drills help change certain aspects of the stroke. And I’ve seen it, and yes, it’s anecdotal, but I’ve seen it with so many swimmers over the last, well, 13, 14 years that I’ve coached, particularly in the last six or so that we’ve run these clinics. So I just want to talk about this because I would agree that the majority of people when they’re doing drills, they’re either done incorrectly, they don’t know the purpose of the drill and they’re just not done in the way that’s actually going to change their stroke

because they’re not done with the right intent, the right purpose and the right focus behind them. And I say that from personal experience as well, like when I was sort of growing up, for a lot of the drills that we did, I didn’t know the real purpose behind them. And even when I started coaching 13, 14 years ago, I would just give drills because that’s what I was given. And I wouldn’t really explain the purpose behind them and I didn’t really understand it, to be honest. So come sort of six years ago when we started running clinics, I had to get very good at understanding the purpose behind the drills because we started with about 24 different drills and we gave people 24 different drills when we started doing our clinics and it was confusing, it was too much and people just sort of left going, that’s a lot of information and they didn’t really retain much of it. And then after that, I thought, okay, I’ve got to make it as simple as possible.

I think that is the best way to do anything. Take away anything that doesn’t, that’s not going to contribute to the end goal and just strip it away to the bare essentials. And now we only have really five or six drills that we do at clinics and they just build on one another. So it’s a very simple step-by-step way at changing the stroke. And it just kind of builds up in a way where if you’re going through it, you can see the relationship between the first drill and the second drill and then the reason why behind doing them. And often when we’re doing clinics, I’ll be correcting people’s doing the drills. So if you’re not doing a drill correctly, you’re not really going to change that motor pattern or that movement with whatever that drill’s focused on, particularly some of the catch drills. So two years ago, we were two or three years ago now, I was looking at the drills that we were doing and it’s like, oh man,

we’re taking a lot of time just to get people to do this drill correctly and to teach them this part of the drill. What would be the simplest way to get them to learn the movement of the catch and the pull? And so I came up with this YMCA drill progression. It’s basically three drills that takes you through the four key positions that we want to get in freestyle. So YMCA drill. And you can see this on our YouTube channel which I’ll link to in the show notes. And with these drills, we often find that what people are doing when we film them and we analyze their stroke, those flaws in their catch and pull would show up in the drill. For example, if someone was pulling really wide where the hand is the widest part of their arms, they’re out super wide, often that would show in the drill. So as they’re going through these four positions in YMCA drill, they’re going through it too wide. And so if we can start to change that in the drill

and we correct them and say, all right, you’re out here, you’re a bit too wide. If you want to go faster, you’re going to have to get your hand to come in a bit closer to the center here and they change it. That’s the first step at changing their technique. But if no one corrected them on that or if they didn’t know that they were doing that, then they’d just continue doing that drill incorrectly until infinity. So that is why I tend to agree with this. And often when I’m working with people online with our stroke analysis coaching, I’ll get in the same videos of them doing some of these drills. And I’ve been back two, three, four times getting people to refine how they do the drill. And it takes them two, three or four times to actually get it right. But when they do get it right, we start to see their stroke changing. And when we go into the nitty gritty of these drills and why we need to make sure that they’re done right,

they have a better understanding of the purpose behind them. So within their warm-up, they’ll be doing 200, 300 meters of some drill and some swim with very intentional focus and purpose behind each one

and they know exactly why they’re doing it. And that not only is very motivating because you know that if you can do this right, then a couple of weeks, a couple of months down the track, it’s gonna come into your full swim stroke. But it’s also motivating because you know that, okay, look, I know I’m doing this the right way. And that way I know that I’m gonna get the results there. So yeah, that’s why I thought it’d be worthwhile talking about this article because I just, yeah, I was a little bit like what this like drills don’t work, I know that they do work, but yeah, they’ve got to be done right. So I’ll just wanna keep reading this. So the short answer to do they work question is no, but sometimes yes. I rarely if ever give traditional drills in any of my swim sessions. Like for the old, I’ve just not seen your return on the training investment, but don’t stop reading here. It’s important to understand what a drill is

and what separates it from just swimming. We might think about a drill as being a method of inspiring stroke correction by isolating the variable of the stroke. Take something as simple as fist swimming by removing your paddle. You might be motivated to get your elbow up and find more surface area with your forearm. While that could work in theory, work it rarely does. And I’d agree with that as well. Some of those traditional drills, while the intention behind them is good, I don’t find, if you’re just, let’s say you’ve got a very poor catch, you drop your elbow and you start doing some fist swing. You’ll probably just continue with a dropped elbow, but with a fist now. I find stuff like that doesn’t often work. And that’s why in our five day catch challenge that where we go through one aspect of the stroke at a time, that people have got such good results, I think, because it’s kept really simple. You’ll get one or two drills a day

on that aspect of the stroke. And those drills I made sure were very specific to the thing that we focus on. And it’s not something just like fist swimming, which might just continue you, make you continue swimming the way that you were without actually changing any aspect of it. So it continues the challenges that too many coaches will prescribe four or five fifties of it. The athlete thrashes through the set and then move on. Creating a new neural pattern requires repetition, a lot of it, and the movement needs to be correct. Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. And even if you master swimming with fists, then you have to be able to open up that fist and apply what you’ve learned to the full stroke. Here again, we see the gap between time invested and skills gained. Anytime we learn to do something new in the water, I think we, in a small way, become better swimmers. But we’ve got three sports to work on.

We need to do our core and strength work. And somewhere in there, some of you need to make a living and check in on the family once in a while. But I wrote that sometimes drills work. When? Well, if you wanna work on your dropped elbow or your weak initial catch, and you wanna do it by putting on a snorkel and doing some single arm work, then it’s possible you might succeed, but you’ll need to do it many hundreds of meters of this every time you swim. And you want to break it up so that you are constantly following the single arm with straight arm. So the set might look like this and it goes through the set there. So I thought that was a very interesting and it was a good article. So if you are currently doing some drills, make sure you know the purpose of them and how to do them correctly, 100% correct. And I think I’ve mentioned this before in the podcast, but we’ve got a course, we’ve got a program called the Virtual Freestyle Clinic.

And this was recorded about two and a half, three years ago, I think it was. And this is where I got someone to come in and film me going through a clinic. And we only go through those couple of drills. It’s like five or six drills. And some of the feedback I’ve got from people when they first watch it, particularly the first one to, yeah, the one and two drills, the first two, they go, this is too simple. But the thing is that I’d guarantee that the people who’ve watched through those first two drills, they’re not actually doing those drills correctly because there’s a lot of nuance to how they should be done. So for example, like the first drill that we do there is front kick. And there’s sort of three focuses that we want to get right in that front kick drill. The first thing is train tracks. So make sure that your hand enters and reaches forwards in line with your shoulder. So get your alignment right, swim on the train tracks.

The other thing we focus on is the right position to start your catch, which is fingertips at about underarm depth. And we want the fingers blow wrist, wrist blow elbow. So we want to make sure we get that right. And the other thing is we want to make sure we’ve got our head position right when we’re doing that front kick drill as well. And I would say, the probably less than one out of 10 people when they initially go through that front kick drill at a clinic, less than one in 10 will be doing all those things together. So often we’ve got to just go through it step by step, get those things right. And then by the end of that drill, everything’s in place and they’re doing it really nicely. And you see them moving through the water so much more efficiently and so much better. And so while it’s very simple and if you don’t go into the detail with it, you go, all right, that’s easy front kick, yep, I’m just gonna do it.

But those things probably aren’t in place. So I’ve said to those people who have written back in the beginning, I said, just go through those drills, make sure you get that stuff right because after going through drills one and drills two, we find people are already swimming better because the first couple drills that we do are working on minimizing and reducing drag, which is the first way that you swim faster. And so when all those things are in place that I just mentioned, people tend to not only sit better with their body position but they tend to be better aligned, their head position’s better, they move better because they’ve got this better posture. And so if you were just to leave it those two drills and you got those couple things right in the stroke, we would probably find that that alone will help you swim faster because you’re reducing drag. So don’t let simple things, don’t brush over them as this stuff is too simple.

It’s often those simple things that can make the biggest difference going forwards. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode. If you don’t want to get a copy of the virtual freestyle clinic, you can get it inside our effortless swimming video membership, which you’ll find on our website under membership. So that’s included for all members. So you get a copy of that. And obviously there’s a lot of other stuff in there, including our workouts, our five core principles training videos and also the five day catch challenge as well. It’s all in there in the video membership. So you can check that out on our website at effortlesswimming.com and it’s under the membership headline there. So thanks very much for listening. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.