Why Swimmers Have A Bad Training Session

There’s usually three reasons why your training times are off if you’re not swimming well in training. And that is either you are sick, fatigued or inflexible. And I just want to focus on the third one for the moment: the inflexibility. Now it’s usually one of the main reasons why swimmers’ times are off in training. Because it means you can’t put yourself in the right position and perform the right technique because your muscles aren’t able to access that position. So a little bit of stretching will go a long way to improve your training times and get your swimming better in training

00:07: Why Athletes Fail To Perform In Training
00:40: Fix Your Freestyle Entry With This Drill
01:21: Why Do We Do Drills
01:32: Elite Swimmers Do Drills Regularly
02:44: Get My Three-Month Training Plan
02:53: My Biggest Pet Peeve As A Coach
03:20: Make The Most Out of Your Sessions
03:36: Get My Learnings From A Recent Coaching Conference

Now if you find that your freestyle entry is a little bit off and it just doesn’t feel right, then there’s one drill which I love to do in the Mastering Freestyle Program that helps you get your entry correct and gets it feeling good. And that is fingertip drag freestyle. Now it’s a popular drill, it’s where you drag your fingertips on the surface of the water as you do your recovery. And the reason it fixes your entry in your freestyle is because if you enter too soon, your arm will catch in the water, it will push under and you feel that drag being created. And if you enter too far out, then your elbow will enter first and your fingers won’t enter first. So you know that is not the way you should be entering. So it’s a really good drill, fingertip drag, to fix up your freestyle entry.

Why do we do drills?
You hear a lot of coaches and a lot of swimmers talking about them but it doesn’t matter how good you are as a swimmer, you’ll still be doing drills in your swimming program. Usually the better you are as a swimmer, the more drills and more technique focused your training program is. And the reason we do drills is two reasons. First one is efficiency. So they’ll help you move through the water with less effort, creating less drag and less resistance. And the second one, is it will help with your timing and propulsion. So the timing of your stroke plays a big part in how fast you move through the water . So if you can activate your pull, at the same time you activate your hip rotation in freestyle, then you’re going to be swimming better and have a better technique. And with your propulsion, if you can hold more water in freestyle, and you can kick and generate more propulsion from your kick, then you’ll also swim faster in freestyle. So those two things are why we do drills.To improve efficiency and your timing and propulsion. So that’s why a lot of our programs that we offer are so drill focused.

I have nearly finished the three-month plan for my training squad as we lead up to our main open water event.
And if you want to get your hands on the three-month training plan, look at the distance, the types of workouts and the milestones along the way, then enter your email below. When that 3 month plan is ready, in the next few days I’ll send it out to you. So you can take a look at what a high level Masters squad goes through in the lead up to one of their main open water events.

What is it with swimmers who go to training and don’t try?
That’s got to be one of my biggest pet peeves as a coach. That swimmers will come to training but then they’ll just flop around in the back and cut corners, pull on the line rope and not putting in any effort once they’ve come to the session. What is the point if you’re going to come to the session, why don’t you make the most of it put in some effort and really work hard and get a benefit out of the training session rather than just spending an hour and a half there flopping around at the back and not really trying, not really focusing on technique and turns and all the skills that make a difference in your swimming. If you’re at the session, why not make the most out of it?

We were in a coaching conference on the weekend with some of Australia’s best swimming coaches where they were talking and they shared a lot of their ideas, and strategies and workouts and drills and techniques to help the other coaches improve their swimmers. So I’ve just added a video to the Effortless Swimming Membership Program membership where members can log in and see some of the key things that I personally got out of it so that you can go back and implement them into your training and your squad.