Maintaining Your Stroke Technique At Faster Speeds
A skill that all great swimmers have is the ability to maintain their stroke technique at racing speeds, which requires strong concentration and great coordination. Here's a simple set that you can use to start to develop this yourself. We just ran it with the Swim Smooth squads in Perth and the guys loved the challenge!
Perform a short warm-up of around 4-600m and then kick off the following descending set of 21x 100m :
At first the 100s will feel very do-able so get into your stroke with a nice rhythm and concentrate on hitting the times as accurately as you can. Obviously as things get progressively faster they become more challenging so maintain your focus on holding your stroke together, not fighting the water. This combination of good pacing with good stroke technique under duress is very powerful for developing you as a distance swimmer.
Whilst swimming the set, it can be a good idea to pick a single area of weakness in your stroke and focus on it as things become harder. This could be maintaining a constant smooth exhalation into the water, avoiding crossing over the centre line in front of your head or stretching through your core to keep yourself straight.
Don't worry if you are quite new to freestyle swimming, its amazing what you can achieve when you challenge yourself and give this session a good crack. If you find you fatigue quickly, you can shorten the set by swimming 2x 100m at each speed.
* CSS is your Critical Swim Speed which is approximately the speed you can sustain for 1500m flat out. You might also know it as your threshold pace. Find out more about how to calculate it here: www.swimsmooth.com/css
Using Your Tempo Trainer Pro
A Tempo Trainer Pro is a great tool for this sort of set because it helps you pace things out very accurately by beeping to you when you should be starting, turning or finishing a lap. You've just got to stay with the beep to complete the set! Our tips:
- Use mode 1 set to beep the pace to you every 25m or 25yd so you get pacing feedback during each 100m.
- Take one beep rest between each 100m. So finish a swim on a beep and then start the next 100m on the next beep.
- If you have the beeper set to beep every 25m then take off 0.25 seconds to speed up by 1 second per 100m.
- You might notice straight away that you have a tendency to start too fast over the first 25-50m of each swim and get ahead of the beep before dropping back again. This highlights that developing a better sense of pacing will be critical to moving your swimming forwards.
For more information about the Tempo Trainer Pro or to purchase yours see: www.swimsmooth.com/finis-tempo-trainer-pro.html
Swim Smooth!
Perform a short warm-up of around 4-600m and then kick off the following descending set of 21x 100m :
| If Swum With A Tempo Trainer | If Swum Without A Tempo Trainer | |||
| 3x 100m @CSS* + 2 sec | 3x 100m at 60% effort level | |||
| 3x 100m @CSS + 1 sec | 3x 100m at 1 sec /100m faster | |||
| 3x 100m @CSS | 3x 100m at 1 sec /100m faster | |||
| 3x 100m @CSS - 1 sec | 3x 100m at 1 sec /100m faster | |||
| 3x 100m @CSS - 2 sec | 3x 100m at 1 sec /100m faster | |||
| 3x 100m @CSS - 3 sec | 3x 100m at 1 sec /100m faster | |||
| 3x 100m @CSS - 4 sec | 3x 100m at 1 sec /100m faster | |||
| (take one beep rest between 100s) | (take 20 seconds rest between 100s) |
At first the 100s will feel very do-able so get into your stroke with a nice rhythm and concentrate on hitting the times as accurately as you can. Obviously as things get progressively faster they become more challenging so maintain your focus on holding your stroke together, not fighting the water. This combination of good pacing with good stroke technique under duress is very powerful for developing you as a distance swimmer.
Whilst swimming the set, it can be a good idea to pick a single area of weakness in your stroke and focus on it as things become harder. This could be maintaining a constant smooth exhalation into the water, avoiding crossing over the centre line in front of your head or stretching through your core to keep yourself straight.
Don't worry if you are quite new to freestyle swimming, its amazing what you can achieve when you challenge yourself and give this session a good crack. If you find you fatigue quickly, you can shorten the set by swimming 2x 100m at each speed.
* CSS is your Critical Swim Speed which is approximately the speed you can sustain for 1500m flat out. You might also know it as your threshold pace. Find out more about how to calculate it here: www.swimsmooth.com/css
Using Your Tempo Trainer Pro
 |
| Elite swimmers have an amazing ability to hold their stroke technique when swimming quickly. |
A Tempo Trainer Pro is a great tool for this sort of set because it helps you pace things out very accurately by beeping to you when you should be starting, turning or finishing a lap. You've just got to stay with the beep to complete the set! Our tips:
- Use mode 1 set to beep the pace to you every 25m or 25yd so you get pacing feedback during each 100m.
- Take one beep rest between each 100m. So finish a swim on a beep and then start the next 100m on the next beep.
- If you have the beeper set to beep every 25m then take off 0.25 seconds to speed up by 1 second per 100m.
- You might notice straight away that you have a tendency to start too fast over the first 25-50m of each swim and get ahead of the beep before dropping back again. This highlights that developing a better sense of pacing will be critical to moving your swimming forwards.
For more information about the Tempo Trainer Pro or to purchase yours see: www.swimsmooth.com/finis-tempo-trainer-pro.html
Swim Smooth!