Why and How to Practice Swimming Drills

Let's discuss why swimming drills are among the best exercises to quickly improve your technique and learn new swimming strokes.

Why practice swim drills?

First of all, the movements you do in the drills will be completely different than the ones you do during normal swimming, especially in the beginning. This ensures that potential bad habits don't have a chance to interfere during your learning.

The drills also teach you how to swim by feel instead of intellectually. This is not unlike martial arts are taught to students. Movements are broken down in their different components, and the swimmer must practice those components repeatedly until the body "understands" the correct motion to execute.

Once this understanding has occurred, the body will automatically reproduce the same sensation and the mind is free to tackle the next skill.

Image courtesy of Tracy Barbutes

This also means there is a progression in the skills learned. During each swimming exercise, you are presented to more and more difficult challenges. But as the body adapts and the previous skills are integrated, you become ready to take on new drills.

Each drill is designed to teach one specific skill to be mastered. Tackling one skill at a time ensures that the mind is not overwhelmed and fully concentrated on that task. The progress is faster and can be measured more easily.

It's rather easy: if you have mastered a swim drill, you will be able to assimilate the next one without too much difficulty. But if the drill hasn't been mastered, the next one will be much more difficult and sometimes even impossible to master.

Finally, drills have a zen-like feel to them. While you are focusing on the movements and sensations in the body, you will start to be both concentrated and relaxed. Swimming becomes a moving meditation in the water that is very enjoyable.

How to practice the swimming drills

The key to learn the different drills is to practice them patiently in the suggested order. It will often take a couple of swim sessions to correctly execute a new drill.

This means it should take a couple of weeks to master the drills for each swim stroke. Nevertheless, you should quickly feel that your swimming technique improves once you begin to integrate those swim drills into your training.

Don't try to do all drills at once in the first few sessions. The best is to first rehearse a little bit the drills you already know and then to practice one or two new drills. After this you can do something else. Ideally you would only start a new drill when the previous one has been mastered.

This gives the body time to adapt between each swim session. You should notice that rehearsing a drill becomes easier at each new swim session, as the body has adapted. You are then ready to move to the next one.

Conclusion

Now that you know why swimming drills are the best exercises to learn a stroke or improve your technique, visit the following pages that contain drills for the various swimming strokes:


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