The drill I have been working on to develop the idea of anchoring in the water is what I call fist paddles. The drill is very simple: Swim normally, but keep your hand in a relaxed fist. That’s actually all there is to it.

You should learn a great deal about your feel for the water when doing this drill. If you find yourself feeling like you are completely standing still in the water (or going backwards for that matter) you’ll have discovered that your stroke has serious issues. Swimming the crawl stroke really well is largely about how you position your arms and the fist paddle drill proves this. Your hands act as paddles when you swim and most swimmers rely on this exclusively to propel them through the water. The giveaway is a high stroke rate, lots of motion in the water, and low elbows.

The real trick to improving how you anchor is a combination of arm angle and shoulder movement. Here are some stills that illustrate this well:

Most swimmers I see have never learned how to access the most efficient muscles when swimming. They tend to rely on their triceps and shoulders to move through the water. This is often sufficient if you want to swim only for your fitness, but if you have read this far in the hopes of finding drills to improve your stroke technique then the fist paddle drill can do wonders for you.

As you think about the arm position of the images above and keep your hands relaxed, but in a fist you will start to feel which position moves you through the water the best. Here is a set of Ian Thorpe from the front to give you an idea of how high is elbows actually are.

The danger I personally run into when swimming the fist paddle drill is that of pushing up with my arms instead of back. You can see above with all of the strokes that they have a way to bring the lever of their arms to apply force back. I often find that as start to move my arm into the high elbow position that I am pushing down with my catch, rather than back.

Overall, it is a good drill and should allow you to easily spot issues with your anchors,er, your arms.

First a few stats about Stefan Nystrand

• Birth Date: October 20, 1981
• Birth Place: Haninge, Sweden
• Height: 193 cm (6′ 3")
• weight: 85 kg (187 lbs)

Stefan Nystrand is the current world record holder in the short course 50 meter freestyle and the short course 100 meter freestyle. There are some fantastic videos of his swimming style. The first video is of him swimming while focusing on his technique rather than speed. The second video is him swimming at top speed. After some comments and videos I have taken both sets and done a frame by frame comparison.

One note about Nystrand’s stroke is that many people don’t like his arm recovery in races, as it looks really brutish, because he has very little elbow flex as he brings his arm over, but there is no mistake that he is extremely fast.

The first video allows you to see him swimming at a slow pace (the video is 30 seconds and he swims 50 meters). For me it is striking to see how he moves his body. Some of the things that really stand out to me are how much body rotation he gets on each stroke, how much he looks forward, how he turns his head to breath, how long he keeps his head back to breath, and how well his kick is timed with his stroke. 

The images on the right are from the clip where Nystrand is swimming at top speed and the images on the right are from the technique oriented clip.

The only two points to highlight are: 1) Notice how high their elbows are. Amazing! 2) Notice the lack of bubbles on the insweep, which means they really do anchor in the water and not slide through.

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I am really happy with the progress I am making. The week before last (week 39) was frustrating for me, but I learned an important lesson that made a big difference for me. I figured out that if you want to swim fast, you need to practice swimming fast EVERY DAY. Most of my practice sessions were spent trying to work out different problems with my stroke, but at the end of the day I was swimming slower (see week 39). In week 40 I pushed myself every single day and I saw new personal bests across the board.

This morning I had another person best that I am especially happy with. Not only did I beat my previous 35 meter time, but I beat my best 25 meter meters per second while swimming 35 meters. I often worry that my 25 meter times won’t translate into 35-50 meter times and I promised myself that after I break 15 seconds on 25 m. that I would permanently switch 50 meter sprints. I’ll still stick to that promise, but with the break through of this morning it is encouraging to think that my 50 meter times might not be so bad (on 25 it would have been faster than 16.586). I could really feel a huge slow down around 25 meters and wouldn’t doubt that I would have swam somewhere around 16.

I will try and get some video up next week to show a few things I am working on, but one thing I have noticed is that a very fast swimming time is largely in the way you hold your shoulders. I am no coach, but I feel that shoulder position is the key to freestyle swimming. After doing some filming I was happy to see that my stroke looked okay with very high elbows. Underwater, I feel like my elbows are staying high as well and I am getting a lot of reach. However, what I noticed is that I stay submerged except my arms as they come around. When comparing that to other swimmers it is a very big difference. Coaches often call this ‘staying high in the water’, but I think that it is more easily explained as using counter-balance to keep your shoulders inline with the surface of the water.

Take a look at my shoulders.

These two images aren’t easy to see, but if you look close to the image on the left I am almost completely submerged and on the right you can see my arm out of the water, but everything else is underwater.

Now, compare that to Olympic Gold Medalist Bill Kirby. Our arms have a similar angle, but he is a few centimeters higher in the water than I am. You can see that clearly as his head is out of the water and mine is not. Also Alexander Popov (on the left), current 50 meter world record holder shows the same thing. If you watch videos of Popov you can see that when he moves faster he really comes out of the water.

Having the right shoulder position is the base to swimming fast. It is important in so many ways: It keeps your legs in line, it keeps your head from dragging, it facilitates the movement of your arms, it helps connect the movement with your hips, the list goes on. I don’t have years of experience or million dollar computer analysis software, but I think if you want to learn to swim fast, figure out where your torso should be and everything else will follow.

The chart below is for sprints on 25 meters

The chart below is for sprints on 50 meters

Here is a graph of my fastest times in the last four trips to the pool. 

I recently purchased the SportCount timer and so I can record the time on each lap that I make. I have been recording the times in an Excel worksheet and then looking at the progress. Unfortunately, I have two different sheets of times on two different computers. Oops. I’ll upload the workbook when I have some time.

Here is an overview by workout type.

Looking at the Regular – Crawl it strikes me that my average time is not really improving. That is a bit striking as I have made a nice improvement in my 25 meter sprints, but apparently my technique isn’t improving.

However, if you look at the fastest times I can see improvement in my regular crawl. My Dolphin kicks are coming right along and it really shocks me. I can swim as fast that way as I can doing a regular crawl.

In the end I have to think I am quite a geek. Oh well, it’s fun.