I have been working on technique for ages, because everyone always says you have to improve your technique to get faster - but I don’t get faster. I have seen many videos of myself, and my technique is obviously not perfect, but then I see videos of others, whose technique is far worse than mine, yet they say they are faster - I’m like “HOW!!! if it is all about technique?” My pace is not equal to my technique if that makes sense.
I was advised recently that I need to work on strength and actually swimming fast in order to get faster. So has anyone got any recommendations of sprint sets and paddle sets that I can add to my swims in order to build strength and speed? Simple sets to follow, as I’m no pro-swimmer. I also need to keep working on distance and not just forget about that for speed work.
when i think of technique i think of two things - 1 is that you can swim further on each stroke (or your distance per stroke, or strokes per length) and getting that down to a good level (what is good for an individual swimmer will vary a lot, depending on whether they are more of a length swimmer, or a rating swimmer) and 2 is that you can swim at a given speed without expending too much effort. 2 is both a fitness and technique issue.
you dont necessarily need paddles to build stamina in the stroke but paddles can help. i prefer to just do swimming, and not use paddles or pull buoy, as sometimes they are very addictive.
good sets to build speed and strength in the shoulders is something like this (3 minutes worth of 25s or 50s, with about 15 seconds rest) into 4 to 6 minutes or so worth of steady swimming, 1 minute easy repeat that a few times. you should find it pretty hard to repeat the 4 to 6 minutes worth of steady swimming at the same speed, the longer this set goes on. teaches good pacing.
at the end of the day you only need a handful of swim sets. a big set of 50s. a big set of 300s or 400s. and a set where you start slower and get faster. the first is for speed, the second is for endurance, and the final is for pacing and endurance to threshold at the end of the set.
some people need more speed. some people have the speed, but just need the endurance. dont know which one you are
I stopped using paddles and just upped my yardage to 12-16k a week as 4-5 swims. Thats when my times really shifted favorably. Didn’t grow up swimming so the technique and experience wasn’t engraved in me.
Paddles did nothing for me except fatigue me and make me sloppy. Only time I’use them now is for a few 100s with a wetsuit prior to a wetsuit workout to pre-fatigue.
Not a coach, not a swimmer, but that’s my take on swim paddles.
How much are you swimming now? How many days per week? How many meters per workwout? What kind of sets exactly? At what speeds and effort levels? Post that, and it would be easy to suggest some improvements.
About paddles, as we discussed earlier, use them ONLY without wrist straps and use them with a pull buoy. However, do not use them for speed sets, just use them for steady swimming to work on your technique. And no more than about 25% of your total swim distances.
Same problem here, and totally new territory for me. Used to be good at vo2 swim sets because of rowing. Did the recommended high volume training with smooth “swimmer technique” but it just made me slow at everything. If I pull as hard as I can, I barely accelerate. The key is probably just lots of 25s at max effort, even if the speed is barely faster. Hopefully that works without having to go back to press-ups and pull-ups first, like before.
