Dear fellow swimmers
The lure of magic bullets
If you could change one easy thing in your swimming that would make you 10% faster overnight, you would almost certainly do it, even if
you are not particularly competitive.
Sadly, that one easy thing probably doesn’t exist – at least, I haven’t discovered it yet.
But that doesn’t stop swimmers looking and hoping.
We had an email from a reader who said he was told that if he rotated his elbow outwards before initiating the catch, he could swim 20 seconds per 100m faster. He asked what me what I thought, and you can see my answer here.
You will come across other suggestions: change the position of your hand entry, drive the stroke with your body rotation, keep your head
lower while breathing, hold your core, kick from your hips (not your knees), point your toes.
The challenge and beauty of swimming is that it is a full body activity. Every part of you needs to work as a coordinated unit. There is no one thing that will make you significantly faster. Instead, (and this is the not-so-secret secret) speed comes from the
accumulation of small changes.
For many people, especially if you have recently started swimming, a 10% or even 20% increase in speed is possible – but not in a single session or with a single change.
Instead,
you need to build an understanding of what good swimming technique looks like, focus on one or two changes at a time, and layer improvement upon improvement. It takes mindfulness, dedication and patience – and it’s a never-ending process.
Enjoy the journey.
