I’ve done this in two ways. The first drill is what I call fist paddles. I don’t know the official name, but probably something like closed fist crawl. Generally you just keep your hand closed in a fist. I covered this in February in an article about catching the water in your crawl stroke. I’ve forced myself to only swim like this, where before I was only doing a few drills with it. The results have been great.

First off, once you stop relying on your hand position and learn how to use your arms to anchor your stroke your average time on 50 meters should be the same with or without your hand. Mine was only about two seconds better, but it depended on the lap.

So where did I get my huge gain? By re-trying something I’d pretty much given up on almost a year ago: staying high in the water. Back in October I had a post about my work on trying to get my shoulders higher in the water. It’s interesting to look back at the technique review I’d done using images of Olympic swimmers, but after working on this for a couple weeks I didn’t have any improvement.

So what changed in my swim technique? I figured this out back in July, but didn’t keep it clearly enough in mind (meaning I didn’t use it enough before taking a two week break). When I got back in the pool I couldn’t remember what had made such an increase. I was really upset, but I just kept on doing my fist paddles. The interesting this is when your hands are in a fist you realize how much you focus on them. My theory is that because hands have so many nerves in them your brain focus on the response without realizing. Once I made a fist I suddenly became very aware of my arms, especially my forearms.

I started to feel that I wasn’t getting a great catch in the water and my push was slipping through the water, rather than pushing. As I tried different crawl techniques I tried arching my back more which brought my torso high in the water. This felt a lot better on my arms and I was thrilled to see that taking the same number of strokes and using about the same effort I did my 50 meters freestyle average decreased to 49 seconds. I tested it some more and found it to be consistent.

The impact trickled down to my other drills, which all increased. The most interesting part was when I opened my hand I didn’t swim significantly better. I am going to see how my 50 meter sprints go using this technique, the 25 meter sprints were the best I’d had all year.

When I saw that time I knew with a block start I could knock a couple seconds off my time. In addition to beating my previous fastest time I broke 16 seconds, which was a mental hurdle for me. To make the sprint more difficult because when I hit the water my goggles folded back and I couldn’t see a thing. It felt really good, but a bit like I was really lacking any kind of technique, but I guess all the meters of focusing on technique must have some effect, right?

Someone told me yesterday that the Lacombe swimming pool was a slower pool. Meaning swimmer times can be off a little. What is a Fast pool or a Slow pool? I have no idea so I looked it up. When in doubt “Google it” . Water temperature makes a difference. A cold pool is slower and a hot pool is slower. 26 degree temperature is the standard. So water TEMPERATURE makes a difference. Further reading says POOL SANITATION makes a difference. A murky pool affects the swimmer as they have difficulty judging the distance of the wall when making turns or touching the wall. Pool LIGHTING can also make a difference allowing swimmer to judge distances and see other competitors. Water TURBULANCE, waves caused by swimmer, can make a difference. Lane Ropes are designed to kill waves caused by swimmers. And there are others so as you can see there are a number of technical items that make a fast pool and a pool slow. Interesting.

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June 27th also corresponds to when I started keeping detailed records of my swimming. I have been swimming pretty seriously now (at least twice a week and often five days a week) since October of 2006. I have no idea what my sprint time was back then, but I guess more than 25 seconds on 25 meters.

When I started keeping track of my times I was swimming 20.90 on 25 meters, but I had made a lot of progress over the previous six months.

By August I had whittled four seconds off my time and reached my personal best of 16.37 on 25 meters and 37.79 on 50 meters. For the last two months I have been working to improve my technique and although my personal best doesn’t show it I feel like I am preparing for being able to swim much faster.

Another big factor of my personal best probably has to do with the amount of swimming I was doing. During September and October I was swimming over 7,000 meters per month, while in November I swam around 4,500. I don’t know exactly how much I swam in December because I lost my SportCount timer and so I wasn’t keeping track of my swimming, but I guess it was around 4,500.

It works out that when I am swimming over 7,000 I am swimming about nine days per month. Another interesting fact is that during October my regular crawl time was about two seconds faster than my other months. My average crawl time on 25 meters is 29.62 per lap, but in October it was 27.95. While two seconds isn’t much because I was swimming quite a bit during that month then it means that I was pushing myself on almost every lap. When I had set my personal best on the 16th of October the two sessions before my average was just above 24 seconds.

That analysis tells me pretty clearly what I need to do if I want to reach a new personal best in 2008: Swim FAST all the time.

Here are my goals for 2008:

1. Swim 10,000 meters per month
2. Keep an average regular crawl of 25 seconds or less
3. Break 30 seconds on 50 meters

To accomplish this I will need to make sure I swim 10 times per month, which is at least three times per week. When I am at the pool I need to make sure that my workout includes 1,000 meters, which is about 40 laps of swimming. I’ll post my workout in a while that will hopefully get me to my goals.

In the end, I feel that I have made a lot of progress, but over the last two months I have stopped doing the things that helped me reach my personal best. So it’s time to get back into gear and push myself harder and harder during every workout.

Ian Thorpe

• Birth Date: October 13, 1982
• Birth Place: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
• Birth Name: Ian James Thorpe
• Height: 6′5" (195.58 cm)
• Foot Size: 17
• Arm Span: 192 cm
• coach: Doug Frost, Tracey Menzies

Alexander Popov

• Birth Date: November 16, 1971
• Birth Place: Sverdlovsk, Russia
• Birth Name: Aleksandr Popov
• Height: 6′7" (200.66)

Pieter VD Hoogenband

• Birth Date: March 14 1978
• Birth Place: Maastricht (Netherlands)
• Height: 193cm
• Weight: 71kg

Grant Hackett

• Birth Date: 9 May 1980
• Birth Place: Gold Coast (Queensland)
• Height: 198cm
• Weight: 90kg

Michael Phelps

• Birth Date: June 30, 1985
• Birth Place: Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Height: 6 ft. 3in. (193 cm)
• Weight: 165 (88 kg)
• Shoe size: 14
• Arm Span: 200 cm
• parents: Fred and Debbie Phelps

Cullen Jones (21.84 on 50 meters)

• Birth Date: 29 February 1984
• Birth Place: The Bronx, New York, United States
• Height: 195.6 cm
• Weight: 88.5 kg
• Coach: Brooks Teal

At some point while I was swimming my feel for the water came back. It is strange, because I have been working to get rotate my body strongly in the water as I stroke, but when I swim at my fastest my torso actually rotates very little. It’s the same when I am swimming a shark stroke. As my head is out of the water it is very difficult to rotate the torso, but it is still a very fast stroke.

Well no interesting break through’s to report until I can get up to speed again.

After jumping back in this week I have made a massive un-improvement. In fact, my 25 m swim time is so bad that I have apparently lost 11 weeks of training. I really hope that I will get back to setting records much faster.

We’ll see I guess.

I am going to take this as an opportunity to re-learn a couple of things. The first being my breathing technique. I am going to need to study this one a bit, because I don’t even know where to start. What I do know is that it isn’t my strength keeping me from going, rather I get so out of breath.

The other issue I want to re-learn is my kicking. When I started I told myself that I would learn how to kick after I learned how to use my arms. I think this was a mistake. I should have done both even if it would have taken longer. Kicking correctly is challenging, but it is important and shouldn’t be neglected.

Well, back to it.

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