Swimming - catch up drill

The past couple weeks, I've been doing a lot more to re-examine my swimming. Originally, my thought was that if I am slow at swimming, I can try to improve in the same way I do for running - some speed/interval work and some longer and slower swims. My thought was that it would increase muscle strength and endurance, which would make me a better swimmer.

However, upon further investigation into how certain people are fast swimmers, it started to become obvious there was another major factor to consider - resistance. With running (and biking), you only overcome air resistance, which is pretty minimal compared to water. When swimming, there needs to be a lot more focus on technique and cutting through the water than simply being able to power through it. By improving stroke technique, the number of strokes to swim a certain distance is lowered, making for a more efficient swimmer.

So, now I had an idea on why I suck at swimming so much - but I still needed to find out how I could get better. It is great to know I have to lower my stroke count, but unless I would be able to learn how to do that effectively, all it would likely do is slow me down.

Enter facebook. I had noticed a few weeks ago that a girl I went to high school with posted an update saying she was participating in a Masters Swimming program. So I figured 'what the hell' and emailed her out of the blue to see if she knew of any drills to help improve stroke technique. She responded back saying the catch up drill is a good one.

So I visited the endless pool to try this drill out, just to get a feel for what it would do. The results were very interesting. First of all, by really only having one arm able to pull at a time, your arms find ways to maximize stroke length - like by reaching farther ahead at the beginning of the stroke, and by continuing the pull after the hand passes the hips. In my typical freestyle stroke, my pull would go from about 6-8" ahead of my head to about my hips - maybe a 2.5-3 foot stroke length. When doing this drill, I'd guess that about another foot of length is added.

And the extra 30-40% stroke length is just one factor. By reaching far ahead at the beginning of the stroke, I found my body would roll much more onto its side than before. By rolling onto the side, the body slices through water much more easily, as opposed to swimming on the belly. Essentially, when I was swimming before, I was doing the equivalent of trying to push a sail through the water. By the time I'd lift my head up out of the water to breath, the fact that I was a 'belly swimmer' ended up resulting in a huge degree of drag being created by my upper torso when moving through the water.

I didn't do any time or HR monitoring for this swim session, since the point was just to get familiar with the drill and to experiment around with what it's results were.