If you want to become a swimmer who breaks through yourself, you must work hard to improve your swimming skills and psychological quality. Practice and determination are key, but most importantly, some swimming skills are required. Swimming practice without technique is meaningless. If you want to break your personal best and improve your performance by a few seconds or even tens of seconds, you may wish to refer to the steps in the article below.

Improve Swimming Skills

Reduce resistance. Swimmers often focus only on how to swim faster and ignore how to minimize drag. The resistance when swimming comes from the water. Reducing resistance cannot rely on strength alone, but also requires some skills. There are many ways to reduce resistance, such as improving balance or keeping your body stretched.

Improve body balance. This method can effectively reduce water resistance. Because when swimming in a horizontal position, the resistance to advancement is minimal. To maintain balance, you should try to keep your posture as level as possible in the water. This is especially important for freestyle swimming because freestyle swimming requires raising the head frequently, which affects the body’s balance, so the kicking force must be increased.

• In breaststroke and butterfly stroke, the body will rise and fall greatly and cannot maintain perfect balance, so these two swimming styles are slightly different from freestyle.

Keep your body stretched. Try to keep your body stretched in the water so that you can swim faster and better. For example, if you want to stretch your body as much as possible during freestyle swimming, you need to retract your arms into the water as soon as possible after crossing your head, and then extend your arms as far forward as possible before the next stroke.

• Think about it: It would be more difficult to move through the water if you curled up into a ball instead of fully extending.

Kick the water effectively. When kicking, you should neither kick out of the water nor below your body line. Both situations are not conducive to maintaining body balance. Otherwise, the body will lose balance and create greater resistance.

Increase forward thrust. This does not require athletes to focus on strength and neglect technique. About 10% of your speed comes from your legs, and the rest comes from your arms, so pay attention to your arm stroke strength when swimming, and make sure your leg movements help move forward faster, rather than slowing down your overall speed.

Use the sides of your body. Don’t worry about your body leaning to the other side when paddling with your arms. This condition requires better use of back muscles and shoulder strength. It does take some time for the body to overcome, but once you get the hang of it, you can better control your strength and speed.

Don’t forget your core muscles. The core is made up of muscles in the back, hips, abdomen, and trunk; it’s especially important to utilize your core when swimming as your body leans from side to side. Although swimming training that utilizes your core muscles rather than your arms and legs may seem a little awkward at first, strengthening these muscles will help you swim smoother and faster. You can consciously tighten them to keep your body as straight as possible.

Keep your arms in a fixed stroke position. To maximize speed, you should keep your hands and arms in a straight line with your palms facing back. This will make it easier to move your arms backward while swimming. Since you have to keep your elbows above your head to truly master this move, this technique is similar to the high elbow catch in freestyle.

Keep your head in the midline of your body. To increase speed, you should keep your head in the midline of your body while swimming. If the head is not centered, it may swim astray. If the head position is incorrect, the buttocks and legs will be lowered relative to each other, resulting in “sinking”. You should look down, not forward or up, and keep your body as horizontal as possible when swimming freestyle. Relaxing your neck can help keep your head and eyes down, allowing your lower body to be in a higher position in the water.

• If you’re a visual thinker, consider this advice from swimmer Garrett McCaffrey: “Imagine you’re a whale with a blowhole in your neck. That hole needs to be able to open at any time to keep breathing. Otherwise, you’ll suffocate. If you bend your neck, the hole will become blocked and you won’t be able to breathe. So you need to adjust the position of your head so that your neck is at the right angle.”

Keep your fingers apart when swimming. Opening your fingers slightly can create an “invisible net” that can help increase the force by 53%! The optimal distance between fingers is 20%-40% of the diameter of the fingers. While this may not be as effective as the other steps, working together will help you swim faster.

Swim Faster in a Race

Avoid turning fouls. Even if you’re not playing, you should avoid turning and fouling so you don’t develop bad habits. Just like keeping your head in the midline, treat every daily training session like a game to improve.

Hit the wall quickly. Although many swimmers only touch the wall for a few tenths of a second, they regard this as a slight rest adjustment during the competition. However, if you want to swim fast, you should never treat hitting a wall as a break. When hitting the wall quickly, except for breaststroke, you should lower your head for at least two strokes in other swimming styles. This will help you achieve a leading position, even break your personal best, and surpass your opponents in other lanes.

Remember to kick your legs to complete the breakthrough. When kicking off the wall, remember to use a powerful kick to maintain your existing speed. If swimming breaststroke, you should keep popping up and rowing a distance to get an extra advantage. Continue to maintain a tight streamline of your body when rowing. If you practice this for a while, you will find that you can swim faster than before.

Do dolphin kicks underwater? After turning and kicking off the wall, you can swim faster with a dolphin kick. Dolphin kicks after popping up can make you faster, and powerful underwater kicks can strengthen your lungs. Because some athletes can accelerate with long kicks, but others can’t, you might want to ask your coach about this. However, it is generally recommended not to use the dolphin kick. If you feel that the speed has dropped, or when you reach the 15-meter line or the yard line, you should surface immediately.

Keep Practicing

Make a structured training plan. If on a swim team, the coach will provide a structured swimming training plan. If you are practicing on your own, it is best to make a plan yourself. The program should include aerobic exercise, that is, long-distance swimming, as well as appropriate endurance training to increase speed, mainly middle-distance and moderately difficult swimming exercises. Exercises should include a wide variety of exercises, including training on endurance, speed, and muscular endurance. Here are examples of structured training:

• Spend 10-15% of your time simply warming up, doing 4 easy 100-meter swims, resting for 20 seconds each time;
• Spend 10-20% of your time practicing and kicking, eight 50-second alternating exercises plus one kick, resting for 15 seconds each time;
• Use 40-70% of the time for your main workout, 6 reps of 200 meters with 30 seconds of rest, or 12 reps of 100 meters with 15 seconds of rest;
• Use 5-10% of the time to end the exercise and relax for 100 seconds.

Join a swim team. Search for swim teams near you and find information like registration fees, training times, and required equipment. If you’re not ready yet, start by finding someone to train with who can help improve your swimming speed. The reason for this is that not only will it motivate you to practice every day and get more practice in the competition, but the coach can also help you understand the correct way to swim. swimming skills.

• If you join a swim team, practice every day.
• Push yourself to practice. At the end of each exercise, you can reward 5-7 seconds of rest. After overcoming laziness, you can increase the reward to 10 seconds, 15 seconds, etc.

Participate in swimming competitions. If you are a member of a swimming team, you can participate in swimming competitions regularly. Don’t be nervous, the purpose of participating is not to get first place, but to surpass yourself. Because swimming competitions can increase adrenaline, most swimmers will swim better than usual when they are nervous and excited. You can “trick” your body in this way to get yourself excited and break your personal best.

Take a swimming class. Swimming training classes will teach some techniques to help form correct swimming postures and achieve better results. They will also teach diving and turning, and may also provide some more unforgettable experiences. Meeting people who love swimming as much as you can motivate you to work harder. Some training classes even hire Olympic champions as coaches. Although the cost may be expensive, many people say it is worth it.

• Some training classes or coaches can even film the swimming process to provide valuable feedback to help improve swimming skills. Without this kind of feedback, it’s hard to know where you need to improve.

Pay more attention to swimming-related information. Watch videos and books about swimming to gain a deeper understanding of how to swim faster. There are many videos on how to improve swimming posture on video websites, and there are also many books on swimming skills. You can find a few of these books to read, or you can look at the success stories of swimmers to inspire yourself, such as Michael Fei Erps, Ryan Lochte, and Missy Franklin. While it’s important to physically swim up faster, mental encouragement is also essential.

Go to the gym. Although practicing swimming is important, to increase your swimming speed, you should also make yourself stronger. Do some aerobic running, weight-bearing exercises, and sit-ups to strengthen your core. Strengthening your abdominal muscles and arms can help you swim faster in the water. Moreover, this kind of exercise can also change the training method, otherwise just a swimming competition will seem a bit boring.

Let others push you. If your friend swims faster and your goal is to be faster than him, you can think about this while swimming to encourage yourself to work harder. Swimming next to faster athletes can push yourself. But make sure the people around you don’t go too fast, as this won’t be motivating.

Be prepared physically and mentally. All physical movement is meaningless if you are too nervous or unmotivated. You should stay focused during training and be excited on game day. Don’t be afraid of swim meets, use it as an opportunity to do your best. Remember, the purpose of a swimming competition is not to be the best or take first place, but to break your personal best. This alone can encourage you to swim faster.

Tips

• Wear a swimming cap and cover your hair to swim faster. This reduces drag when swimming.
• Do not give up! Since swimming is particularly demanding on physical strength, if you cannot adapt to high-intensity training at once, you will feel very tired during the first training. But it will get better after a while. It may take up to 6 months before you start to feel comfortable practicing swimming.
• If participating in a swimming competition, be sure to cover your hair. Wear a swimming cap, get regular haircuts, and shave other body hair. Hair increases resistance in the water and reduces swimming speed.
• Do not slap or push the water away with your hands. Put your hand in the water.
• If you join a competitive team, it’s okay to not train occasionally, but if you don’t train often, or your coach isn’t happy, or you’ve lost motivation, you should ask yourself, “Why do I want to swim?” Is it to win? Competition? Participate in the Olympics? Or is it to stay in shape? No matter what the answer is, you should continue practicing according to the plan established by the coach.
• When swimming, you should pay attention to which swimming styles you are good at, and then work hard to practice the swimming styles you are not good at. This will help you develop perseverance, get better times in the medley, and become a stronger swimmer. Also, decide whether you want to swim a long distance or a short distance. This is important because not everyone is cut out for short distances. Decide what works best for you and what you enjoy most, otherwise you may not perform at your best in the sport.