The other day, a friend lent me a DVD on how to swim faster freestyle, and it included some drills to help improve technique when swimming. Since I've determined my technique pretty much sucks, I've been trying to get as much information on how to improve it as possible.
After watching the video, I determined that just about everything with my swimming technique sucks, and needs to be revamped. Drills more basic than the catch up drill need to be worked on. So today I started with the very basic stuff in the DVD.
The first portion to cover is the core - forget the arms, hands and extremities for now. So at first, I just set the pool speed to about as low as it can go (because my kicking sucks), and just floated along on my belly, experimenting with hip position and so forth to see what would result in the least about of drag. Example.
Next, it was a drill to help get accustomed to being on your side in the water. This was simply staying on one side with one arm extended, and using only a kick for propulsion. Example.
Finally, I looked at doing a drill where you spend some time on one side, followed by switching to the other side. This more closely starts to resemble the rolling motion that you are looking for when swimming freestyle. Example.
Similarly to when I started working on bilateral breathing a couple weeks ago, I found that at first when doing these drills, they were tough - especially when it came time to get a breath. More than once I had to interrupt the drill(s) because I got water in my mouth and not air. However I did manage some improvement - at least enough to be noticable, but far from being proficient.
I suppose that is why drills are to be repeated a lot.
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