# Two Simple Tricks to Swim 10 Seconds per 100m Faster Almost Instantly \[VIDEO\] | Ep 518

An episode of [Oxygenaddict Triathlon Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/951501034), 4 Dec 2024, 17 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/ea99f7d8/podcast/play/95300888/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-11-3%2F390901493-44100-2-33dcc4cc7afc4.mp3

In this episode, learn two simple tricks to add extra power to your swim stroke. Move further, faster through the water with each stroke by generating more propulsion with greater efficiency. The drills that will do this are 1) the "water bottle" drill (which works really effectively in combination with the fist drill I discussed in the last episode: https://youtu.be/zLJekigBg6A)... And 2) the triceps push drill to enhance your stroke completion, enabling you to travel a greater distance per stroke thanks to the additional propulsion. It's not uncommon for athletes to see an improvement of upto 10 seconds per 100m almost instantly after incorporating these 2 aspects into their swimming. Of course it takes time and practice to embed stroke improvements into your swim technique over the long term, but seeing quick results like this really help keep you motivated to practice! If your CSS pace is in the region of 1:30/100m or slower, you really don't want to miss this as there's a very good chance there's a significant yet simple time saving to be had for you. * * * * * * * * SPONSORS * * * * * * * * Like what you heard in this show? Join hundreds of other age group triathletes making the most of their limited training time, training with Team OxygenAddict! http://team.oxygenaddict.com - The most comprehensive triathlon coaching program for busy age groupers. Book an application call to see if you'd be a good fit for Team Oxygenaddict for the coming 12 months here: https://team.oxygenaddict.com/consultation-call/ * * * * * * * * * * * * precisionfuelandhydration.com Precision Fuel & Hydration help athletes personalise their hydration and fuelling strategies for training and racing. Use the free Fuel & Hydration Planner to get a personalised race nutrition plan for your next event. And then book a free 20-minute video consultation with a member of the PF&H Athlete Support Team to refine your strategy. Listeners get 15% off their first order of fuel and electrolytes with Precision Fuel & Hydration. Simply use this link and the discount will be auto-applied at the checkout. * * * * * * * * * * * * Watch on youtube Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts

## Transcript

[0:04] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Oxygen Addict
[0:07] Triathlon Podcast. We're brought to you every week
[0:09] by our sponsors, Precision Fuel and hydration.com.
[0:12] You can personalise your fueling and hydration strategy so you
[0:15] perform your best with 15% off your first order of electrolytes
[0:19] and carbohydrate fuel with the code OXYGEN 24 at
[0:22] precisionfuelandhydration.com. Welcome to the show, everybody.
[0:26] I'm your host, coach Rob Wilby, and every week we bring you an
[0:28] episode of this podcast to help motivate and inspire you.
[0:31] Listen, before we kick this off, there's a couple of things you
[0:33] could do for us. Please, if you like and enjoy
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[0:55] for help and advice with your Iron Man or 70.3 training,
[0:58] please get in touch. We run our own coaching
[1:01] programme, Team Oxygen Addict. I think it is the most
[1:03] comprehensive programme for busy age groupers.
[1:07] We've helped thousands of athletes over the last 10 years
[1:10] achieve the 70.3 in Iron Man dreams and we'd love to help you
[1:12] too. So please get in touch.
[1:14] Send an e-mail to help@oxygenaddict.com or there's
[1:17] a link in the show notes to book a call with me or the team and
[1:21] we can see how we can best help you out to make next season be
[1:23] the best one ever. OK, in this episode I'm going to
[1:27] be talking about two things that you can do that's going to put
[1:31] extra power into your stroke. If you're the kind of swimmer
[1:35] that is bitter on the bike and on the run, then it feels like
[1:40] your times are showing in the pool.
[1:42] There's usually one of two things wrong with your strim
[1:44] stroke and I think this that I'm going to show you today is the
[1:48] number one way that you can change a swim stroke so that you
[1:52] can add extra power into that stroke and move more effectively
[1:55] through the water. So first, what do I mean by that
[1:58] if I say you don't have any power in your stroke?
[2:00] Well, for most triathletes, especially those who've come
[2:04] from a cycling background or a running background, they come to
[2:07] swimming. And it's different to running or
[2:09] biking in that in those two sports, the more you train and
[2:13] the harder you try, generally the faster the results you see.
[2:17] And swimming doesn't seem to be like that.
[2:19] Working on pool deck, I would see dozens if not hundreds of
[2:23] swimmers come down to sessions. They were either runners or
[2:27] cyclists, and they want to move into triathlon.
[2:29] And what they find is when they apply the same mindset to swim
[2:32] training that they've had for bike or run just doesn't
[2:35] translate. And so we've got, you know, guys
[2:38] who are 55 minute runners for 10 miles and they're struggling to
[2:42] complete 100 metres in the pool in under 2 minutes.
[2:45] Thirty. It's clearly not aerobic fitness
[2:49] that's the problem. I've coached a guy who was a
[2:52] national standard cyclist. He was riding under 50 minutes
[2:56] for 25 mile time trial. He was struggling to swim under
[2:59] 2 minutes for 100 metres. It's clearly not the aerobic
[3:03] fitness that's the problem in, in this athlete.
[3:06] There must be something else going on.
[3:07] And I go all the way back to when I was at university and we
[3:10] had a, we had some swim lessons there from one of the older, the
[3:14] older lecturers. And he said something that stuck
[3:16] with me. He said some people just seem to
[3:19] be able to grip the water better than other people.
[3:22] And he said we don't know why some people are just better at
[3:25] it than others. That's just how it is.
[3:28] And it never really sat well with me.
[3:29] It was clearly true. There was a guy next to me who
[3:32] wasn't in as good shape as me, but he was a fantastic swimmer.
[3:35] I couldn't get anywhere near keeping up with with him for
[3:38] even the length, even though I was, you know, at the time, a
[3:41] ripped 18 year old runner and he was honestly slightly overweight
[3:45] and looked quite out of shape. I could get nowhere near him in
[3:48] the pool and it really frustrated me.
[3:50] So I knew one of the things that the lecturer there was saying
[3:53] was correct, which is some people can grip the water better
[3:57] than others. This guy could clearly grip the
[3:59] water better than me. But what I didn't agree with
[4:02] was, and we don't know why, and the inference being there's
[4:06] nothing we can do about it. So that's kind of what I focused
[4:09] my coaching career on. Why is it that some people can
[4:12] grip the water better than others and what is it we can do
[4:15] about it? And I think one of the facts of
[4:17] the matter is the guy in the lane next to me had swum as a
[4:20] kid. He had done 10/12 hours of
[4:23] swimming a week all the way through his childhood.
[4:26] I'd been in the pool once or twice a year when I was on
[4:29] holiday. It's obvious he's going to be
[4:31] better at gripping the water than me.
[4:33] But the thing that really happens with kids who swim, when
[4:36] they're children, it isn't just the yards that they put in, it's
[4:40] that often they get very good coaching.
[4:42] The coaching involves the correct drills.
[4:44] The correct drills are put there to correct stroke
[4:47] inefficiencies, and they learn very young to correct the
[4:51] inefficiencies because children's brains are, you know,
[4:53] they learn very, very quickly. They learn to correct those
[4:56] stroke flaws before they're even really fully formed.
[5:00] As athletes who are adults, it's much, much harder for us to do
[5:03] that if we don't have someone saying to us, right, you think
[5:07] you're doing this, but actually you're doing that.
[5:10] You think you need to do this to change it, but actually you need
[5:13] to do something different to change it.
[5:16] So one of the two things that I see the problem being for
[5:20] athletes who are very fit but can't swim fast yet.
[5:24] One of them is in the timing and rotation of the stroke.
[5:28] And one of them is their ability to apply focus and force to the
[5:33] water. Now we'll talk about the timing
[5:34] in another episode. We're going to focus for this
[5:37] episode on applying the force to the water.
[5:40] So what does that mean? Surely every human body has got
[5:43] roughly the same build. We've got the same number of
[5:46] arms, hands. They're moving in the similar
[5:48] sort of place. Surely we should be applying
[5:51] force to the water in the same way.
[5:53] That's often not what we see, though.
[5:54] If you watch a video underwater of someone like, you know, an
[5:58] excellent swimmer, Lucy Charles Barkley, for example, what
[6:01] you'll see is the position that her body gets into means that
[6:06] she's not just using her hand as a paddle.
[6:08] She's using the entire forearm all the way from her fingertips
[6:12] to her elbow as a paddle. And if you look at her from
[6:14] underwater, what you'll see is her arm is going to be in this
[6:20] position under the water as she catches and pulls through all of
[6:25] this section from the elbow to the fingertip is getting used as
[6:29] a paddle to pull her through the water.
[6:32] Now the difference between that how it looks to a fantastic
[6:36] swimmer and how most of us actually look when we're when
[6:39] we're adult onset swimmers, it's completely different.
[6:42] And one of the examples I've used to show athletes this on
[6:46] pool deck is really simple drill.
[6:48] And you can do this yourself. It just involves picking up a
[6:50] water bottle. So I'm going to put this water
[6:54] bottle here. I'm going to imagine that I'm in
[6:56] the pool, this is the pool deck edge here and ask the athlete to
[7:01] reach out and grab the water bottle.
[7:03] And what they'll usually do is reach out and bring the bottle
[7:07] back towards them like this. I'll show you that again,
[7:11] because it's really obvious, isn't it?
[7:12] We reach out, we pull the clock back towards us.
[7:16] So that motion of pulling our arm like this, this is a natural
[7:20] way a body moves when someone's reaching.
[7:23] Pick something and bring it back.
[7:24] What we don't do is keep the elbow really high and pull it
[7:27] back. If Lucy Charles Barkley was
[7:30] swimming, her arm wouldn't go like this and pull back because
[7:34] her elbow would slide through the water and there'd only be
[7:36] this part of her hand holding onto the water.
[7:40] That's exactly what we see with most age group swimmers when
[7:43] they swim. Their arm comes into the water
[7:46] and it pulled back like this and the elbow slides back through
[7:50] the water. Even sometimes we'll use our
[7:52] hand, but the elbow stays low and all of this just slides back
[7:56] through the water. There's no actual force
[7:58] application put on there at all. So the drills that are used with
[8:02] athletes to try and help them get the body into this position
[8:06] to swim more powerfully is to pick this water bottle up but
[8:10] have to reach over something. Now when I'm coaching on pool
[8:13] deck, I use a kickboard and put a kickboard in front of the
[8:16] athlete. This example, just going to use
[8:21] this laundry basket. OK, Now if I want to pick up
[8:25] that water bottle, I have to reach over, I have to reach down
[8:29] to grab the bottle and I even have to turn my body over
[8:32] towards to face you in order to do that.
[8:34] So again, this is exactly the rotation we'd see in the pool.
[8:38] You can see now as I pick this bottle up, all of my forearm,
[8:44] all of my hands, all of this is now what I would use to pick up
[8:49] this bottle and pull it towards me.
[8:52] So again, if we're in a position of swimming in the pool, it's
[8:58] likely that what's happening is your arm is going into the
[9:02] water. You think you're in this
[9:04] position under the water, but actually the elbow is sliding
[9:09] back through the water and we're losing all of that efficiency.
[9:12] So the drill that I get athletes to do is just simply using a
[9:15] water bottle, as I showed you there, and a kick board.
[9:17] Put the kick board in front of you and you have to reach over
[9:22] and that keeps your elbow really, really high as you reach
[9:25] over to do that. So do that a couple of times
[9:28] with each arm at the end of a length, and then go back to
[9:31] swimming normally. And often what we see is just
[9:34] embedding that motion just before you swim is enough to
[9:38] start to reprogram your body's natural movement patterns.
[9:42] Now, a word of warning, It's going to feel different around
[9:45] your shoulders. It's going to feel like there's
[9:47] extra strain on there and you are going to have to get your
[9:50] body into a sideways position in order to be able to get the
[9:54] elbow high. That's all part of this.
[9:57] If you watch my demonstration again behind me, if I try and
[10:04] reach over here and I don't turn my body sideways, there's no way
[10:08] I'm going to be able to reach that bottle.
[10:10] If I face this, it's a really, really awkward position.
[10:14] The moment I turn my body sideways can then make use of
[10:19] that leverage and pull against it.
[10:21] That's exactly what we see in the pool as well.
[10:23] We want you turning sideways before you start to put that
[10:26] catch in. OK, Now the second thing to
[10:30] think about here is that's that's kind of set the catch at
[10:35] the front end of your stroke, if you like.
[10:38] What we really have to work on as well is finishing the stroke
[10:41] off at the back end of the stroke and making sure that goes
[10:44] through all the way through the stroke and you push at the end
[10:49] of your stroke. So you can Google a swim drill
[10:53] for this, the triceps push drill.
[10:55] Essentially you're just kicking your way down the pool.
[10:58] You can wipe out fins if you need to and all you're doing is
[11:02] practising the end part of your swim stroke.
[11:06] So what this is going to look like is as you're swimming
[11:10] you're going to be pushing back with your hand and you'll
[11:14] alternate on both sides. So you'll end up pushing back
[11:18] like this. But the key part here is all the
[11:21] way through extending out towards the back of your stroke.
[11:26] That's what you need to do in order to programme into your
[11:31] stroke that push at the end of the stroke.
[11:34] Now that's going to make a big difference because again, one of
[11:36] the things we see in swimmers who don't have very powerful
[11:39] strokes is as well as not having very much catch at the front of
[11:42] the stroke, they also don't have very much push and completion at
[11:46] the end of their stroke. And that's a really good thing
[11:49] to practise as well. So I'd programme that typically
[11:51] just half a length of that kind of swimming and then swim out to
[11:55] the end of the length. But just the act of adding in
[11:58] that little bit of triceps push practise is enough to change the
[12:03] way that you're going to feel when you swim the rest of the
[12:06] length. So again, the key thing to
[12:08] remember when you've done these drills and done these practises
[12:11] is it's going to feel different as you do the action itself.
[12:15] It's going to feel strange reaching over something to pick
[12:18] up a bottle. Try and hold onto that sensation
[12:21] of how it feels. I'll tell you now, for me, it
[12:24] feels different in my shoulder when I'm in this position to
[12:27] when I'm in this position. So that's the sensation that I'd
[12:31] try and hold onto if I'm not feeling like that in my
[12:34] shoulder. If it isn't, I'm not going to
[12:35] say uncomfortable, but slightly unusual and slightly different,
[12:40] then I'm probably not doing it right.
[12:42] And the reason that I wanted to follow up on this is last week's
[12:45] video. I had a comment come through.
[12:48] The comment was from an athlete over here called Swim Bike Run
[12:52] 256 and he said thank you tried this drill at pool today I'm
[12:57] immediately 10 seconds per 100 quicker instantly and the drills
[13:02] feel very awkward. I'll keep doing these regularly
[13:05] great tips thank you so that's that's a genuine piece of
[13:09] feedback from last week from a YouTube viewer.
[13:11] They were 10 seconds per 100 metres faster immediately.
[13:15] Now this is available to all you guys.
[13:19] If you're listening to this and thinking, well, it's it's
[13:21] ridiculous to expect an immediate speed change in the
[13:23] pool. It isn't ridiculous to expect
[13:26] that immediate speed change. It's very different to running
[13:29] and it's very different to cycling where the changes are
[13:31] going to be small and gradual. In swimming, when something
[13:34] clicks, you can immediately be 10 or maybe even 15 seconds per
[13:39] 100 metres faster immediately when that stroke change has
[13:43] clicked into place for you. And often we see this with
[13:46] athletes when we're practising this drill that makes you keep
[13:49] your elbow high under the water and allows you to access all of
[13:53] this forearm as a paddle instead of just your hand.
[13:57] When you look at the length here, there's three times as
[14:00] much length to pull against as just a hand previously.
[14:05] So of course you're going to get more propulsion, it's going to
[14:07] feel different and you're not going to be able to swim 1000
[14:10] metres at that pace. But if you can turn out 100
[14:13] metres and immediately be 10 seconds faster per hundred, that
[14:17] shows you that you can change your technique and it will have
[14:19] a big, big effect on your overall swimming.
[14:21] So that's why I'm really confident in saying knock 10
[14:24] seconds per hundred off your swimming immediately.
[14:27] It's not clickbait. It's actually something that
[14:29] happens really regularly in swim sessions.
[14:32] Now it's going to take time to embed that.
[14:34] It's going to take time to embed it to the point you can do a
[14:36] full 70.3 or Iron Man swim. But if you can embed that
[14:41] immediate 10 second O 100 change, you're going to find
[14:44] that that translates to a 6 1/2 minute improvement of your Iron
[14:48] Man distance immediately for no extra fitness training, just by
[14:53] changing the technique that you're swimming with.
[14:55] I think it's well, well worth practising.
[14:58] So try that at the pool next time you go.
[15:00] Just reach over the kick board to pick your pick your water
[15:03] bottle up just a couple of times before each Rep.
[15:06] And that will help you start to embed that feeling of keeping
[15:09] the elbow high and getting the early vertical forearm in the
[15:13] water as you swim. All right, I hope you enjoyed
[15:16] that episode of the show. To wrap this up, here are some
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[15:20] precisionfuelandhydration.com. Remember, you can use the code
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[15:59] And also if you're looking for help and advice with your
[16:01] triathlon training, please head over to teamoxygenaddict.com.
[16:05] I think we've got the most comprehensive triathlon coaching
[16:07] programme for busy age groupers. Please check us out.
[16:11] There's a link in the show notes to book a call with us.
[16:14] We can have a chat about you, find out all about your
[16:17] background and what you want to achieve and I'm really confident
[16:19] we can help you get where you want to be.
[16:22] Dead easy. Link in the show notes or under
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[16:26] calendar and we can have a chat here.
[16:28] We can best help you out, so remember links in the show notes
[16:32] so you don't have to remember them.
[16:33] Until next week, have a great safe training and racing week.
[16:37] I'm coach Rob Wilby, and you've been listening to the Oxygen
[16:40] Addict podcast.

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