Swimming Training Tips Free Podcast
Swimming Training Tips
Recently, I did a long interview for a group called Effortless Swimming. Click here for the FREE podcast where I share some of my favorite swimming training tips – including some of the “secret” swimming training tips I use at my Swimming Camps and Clinics.
In the posdcast I talk about:
- Swimming technique development
- Swimming skills
- Swimming speed
- Important concepts for every swimmer like “the faster you want to go, the more relaxed you have to be”, how keeping your hands “soft” helps with feel and distance per stroke and how relaxing more in the water is the key to swimming faster.
Here’s an extract from the podcast:
Well a lot of people talk about feel one of the common things that triathletes will say they struggle with; is feel, so feeling the water to learn where to apply pressure. That again comes down to relaxation.
I often say to tri-athletes or swimmers that are struggling with those two very simple words that mean a hell of a lot, soft hands. Keep your hands are very soft and loose and relaxed so they can actually feel the water.
It comes back again to this relaxation thing that a lot of swimmers again the tri-athletes are the biggest culprits I think who have come from non-swimming back grounds is that when you ask them to move faster you can see the tension start to form in their finger tips, their hands, they cup their hands really tightly.
They get tension in their forearms right up even past their elbows sometimes as they go well I have to go faster let’s really grind out and apply more force to it and they can’t figure out why they are not going faster.
Whereas if we talk to them about moving their arms faster and increasing speed, keeping their hands soft so they are thinking about relaxation with speed or relaxation with power they get those two things together they get great benefit from it.
Very tough thing to teach because again they are used to getting performance improvement through tensions or applying tension.
We want them to do exactly the opposite of what they have done, maybe since they were little kids playing football and trying to improve their performance in other areas.
It can be learnt it is a very simple skill and doesn’t take very long but just those little queue words like soft hands; the faster you want to go the more relaxed you want to be.
All the power on power off all those little queues to keep reminding them about the marriage between relaxation and speed.
