In The Swim II: What a Drag

Style is eyerything in swimming. Good style means ease, speed and the confidence to keep on going for hour after hour.

That doesn't mean you're going to get banned from the pool because you swim like a shopping trolley, it just explains why trying to go faster by throwing more effort at it will simply get you nowhere. It's all down to drag. The faster you move through water the greater the drag created by your body displacing the water as you go (water is twelve times more resistant than air). Which means that there's a limit to how much faster you can go by swimming harder. Unless you do something about that drag factor the muscle you throw at the stroke will be cancelled out by the extra drag you create. Remerriber that and scoff the next time you see some Neanderthal thinking he's impressing everyone by thrashing his way up the pool. The answer is to learn to streamline your body and reduce the drag so as to swim smarter, not harder.

Think about your body posture in the water and try to swim more like a fish and less like a labrador. That means no more looking forwards (which presents your face to the water) but instead looking down and trying to make your whole body like a spear, with your head and spine in line.

The other area where our posture often works against us is that we allow our hips to sink into the water. Thanks to our lungs our chest cavities are a buoyant flotation aid stuck between our shoulders. In order to position our whole bodies higher in the water (so reducing drag) the best approach is to try and push the chest, rather than the hips, into the water so that the buoyancy forces us up.

Although most of us see swimming as something you do on your front or your back, we are actually most streamlined when tilted onto our sides and that's how we should swim front crawl. Instead of keeping your body flat in the water and turning your head right round to breathe at every stroke, try rolling your entire torso with the stroke. You should turn sideways with your pulling arm going deep and your head barely needing to turn at all to clear the water and suck in the air. It's a great technique for those who get neck ache from turning their heads so high to get their mouths out of the water.

Try a stroke drill called catch-up to concentrate on your front crawl arm stroke. The idea is to perfect the long, streamlined swimming position that helps fishboys and fishgirls glide their way from one end of the pool to the other. In the normal stroke the forward arm is pulling back as the recovering arm prepares to enter the water. In this drill one arm stays stretched out in front of you as the other arm completes the pull back part of the stroke. As that arm enters the water you slide it forward so both of your arms are now momentarily outstretched in front of you and only then start to pull back with the other arm. Focus on trying to make yourself longer in the water.