[How to Fix] Trying Harder But Not Swimming Faster

Hi Brentford here. Welcome to another Effortless Swing.com update where swimming fast is easy. This week I’ve got a change for you. I want to challenge you to try what I’m about to talk about in training, to see if you get an increase in your speed by trying this one thing. Because in the next few weeks I’ve got the Effortless Freestyle DVD coming out, which I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. And I talk a lot about increasing your speed without using too much extra energy. And what I find in training sometimes is that swimmers will try harder, but not go faster. And why is that and how can you overcome it? So the first reason is usually because you’re fatigued. So you might have trained hard the last few days and it’s caught up with you, or you might not have got much sleep the night before, or you haven’t eaten very well the last couple of days. That can make you feel heavy, like you’re swimming through mud sometimes.

And you know that feeling of when you just can’t really get your speed up because you’re just feeling so sluggish in the water. The other reason might be because you’re trying to lengthen out too much in order to get your speed up. So you’re trying to stretch out reach as long as you can and pull as hard as you can to go faster rather than increasing your stroke rate and maintaining your normal distance per stroke. So how do you overcome it? How can you overcome fatigue from training a lot? Or how do you overcome trying to stretch out too far and pull too hard to go faster? My challenge to you is to try this. When you’ve got a fast set in training, so let’s say you might be doing six two hundreds where you’re descending one to three. So the third one and the sixth one are the fastest two hundreds. In those two hundreds, I want you to try swimming with a slightly higher stroke rate but the same distance per stroke.

So you’re not trying to lengthen out anymore or shorten your stroke at all. You want to keep the same distance per stroke as best as you can and increase your stroke rate. So get your arms over just a little bit faster and keep your kick narrow. So like you can see Lissandra doing here, she’s got quite a narrow kick. Her legs aren’t coming apart too much and she’s got her feet relatively high in the water. So heels are breaking the surface every couple of kicks. So she’s got a really good body position here. So when you’ve got a fast swim in training, whether it’s a hundred or a two hundred or more, I want you to try swimming with a slightly higher stroke rate and a narrow kick. And that should help you get your stroke rate up enough in order to be able to put in extra energy but get the increase in speed with it. So that’s my one challenge for you this week is to try that and let me know how you go in the comments below here

or send me a message through Facebook because that’s one of the main things that I see holding a lot of students back and I know the feeling of when you’re not feeling great in training it can be hard to get that increase in speed but try this and it’s a good way to overcome any of those feelings of not being able to go faster.