How to Swim Faster With Less Effort

Have you been wondering how to swim faster for months or even years without ever having found a satisfactory answer? If the answer is yes, you are in good company.

The answer most swim coaches have to fast swimming is to gradually increase the number of swimming laps and to increase the intensity of the swim workouts so that the swimming fitness improves.

However this doesn't work for everybody. There are a few gifted swimmers that instinctively feel how to move efficiently in the water. Given enough time and mileage, they will always improve.

But most of us only have a vague sense about our efficiency in the water. In that case, the mileage will often only make our bad habits more permanent, without our swimming technique improving much at all.

Fast And Easy Swimming

So what do we need to do? To learn how to swim faster and better with less effort, we need to swim smarter and not harder. Specifically, we need to work on the following points:

1. We need to decrease our drag in the water.
2. We need to improve our propulsion in the water.

Decreasing Drag

The importance of swimming with as few drag as possible is often overlooked, however this area can improve your efficiency in the water by 70%.

The water is a dense medium, much denser than air. The resistance in the water increases by the square of the speed the swimmer moves. So there is quickly an upper limit on how much force a swimmer can apply to improve his speed.

However, reducing drag takes less physical effort. Therefore it should be the first priority of the swimmer that wants to swim faster.

Principle #1: Improving Balance

The first and most efficient way to decrease the drag in the water is to improve balance. A balanced swimmer stays as horizontal as possible in the water while going through the swim stroke's motions.

Note that this is especially true in the freestyle stroke and backstroke. In the breaststroke and butterfly stroke, the body undulation makes things a little bit more complicated.

While swimming freestyle, swimmers often lift the head to breathe or look to the front. When they do this their hips and legs automatically drop, and their body offers a much greater resistance to water. Additionally, they need to kick harder to keep those legs up. Needless to say, much energy is wasted.

Principle #2: Swimming Taller

An additional way to decrease drag is to extend the body in the water.

Since hundreds of years, naval engineers have discovered that for the same mass, longer boats go faster. However this is a relatively recent understanding in swimming.

To swim taller, you need to keep your arms extended in front of you for a longer time. In freestyle, this forms the base of front quadrant swimming.

Principle #3: Swimming on the Sides

The last way to decrease drag in the water is to spend more time on your sides. This creates less drag because more of your body (shoulder, side, hip) clears the water. That's why slim yachts go faster than the large barges. Swimming on the sides is however very counter-intuitive.

Improving Propulsive Efficiency

Once you have reduced drag to a minimum, you can start to work on improving your propulsion. This will allow to improve your efficiency by 30%.

Principle #4: Power from the Core

This is one of the secrets on how to swim faster with less effort. The power for the propulsion will originate in the hips and be channeled to the arms and legs using body rotation.

It is like a baseball pitcher when he throws the ball: first the body twist to the back, then the hips initiate a rotation to the front which is channeled through the upper body into the shoulder, arm, hand and finally into the ball, with an acceleration at each step.

You will be able to swim longer and faster and tire less once you have learned this, as the muscles in the hips, back and torso are much larger and have more endurance than the ones in the shoulders and arms.

Principle #5: Anchoring the Hands

This is the last piece of the puzzle to learn how to swim faster with less effort.

Instead of trying to push the water down with the arms and hands, which makes them slip and wastes energy, you need to keep them in place so that they serve as an anchor for the propulsive force generated by the whole body. The body's task is then to pass above those anchored hands to move forward.

Conclusion

That's it, you now know the principles on how to swim faster with less effort. You now may want to start working on the swimming drills that teach you those principles and will help you integrate them in your swimming strokes.