SWIM FASTER TODAY

BY CHELSEY WALDEN SCHREINER

For this week's Speedo Tip of the Week, we bring you five little things you can do right now to help yourself swim faster right away.

Streamline. Streamline. Streamline.
Streamlining upon entering the water and off your walls may be obvious, but it is often overlooked or the first thing to go when your arms tire and muscles scream. However, it is one of the most important habits you can practice over 100 times during a workout. Streamlining reduces drag and therefore keeps your body moving faster in the water. Those hundredths of a second can mean the difference between places. Remember, Jason Lezak out-touched Alain Bernard by just eight one-hundredths of a second in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay at the 2008 Olympic Games.

Practice head position
“If you’re head is moving, your body is moving,” says Kate Lundsten, coach of the Minnesota Team Aquajets and internationally-ranked National Teamer Rachel Bootsma. Like streamlining, your head position can affect the amount of drag on your body and the efficiency of your stroke. Strive for a neutral head position throughout your stroke.

No illegal turns
“Swim in practice how you want to swim in meets,” says the Golden Goggles Breakout Swimmer of the Year Missy Franklin. “That way you don’t have to worry about it when you’re racing, and it will just come naturally.” This includes illegal turns in practice. The last thing you want to do in your next 200 IM is miss the two-hand touch because you forgot to practice it in training.

Go into walls fast
Working to swim fast in the middle of the pool is only part of the race. The wall may seem like a good place to rest, if only for a tenth of a second, but your competition may be thinking the same thing. According to T2 Aquatics coach Tom Yetter, who has coached multiple swimmers to top age group rankings, going in to the wall fast with your head down may give you an advantage over your competitors. He encourages his swimmers to practice swimming into the walls with their heads down for at least two strokes in all strokes except breaststroke. It may just give you the edge you need to move past the heat in your next race.

Kick through your break outs
Another spot in which you can pick up speed is your breakouts. Yetter promotes a strong kick off the wall to maintain the speed you just gained from pushing off the wall. Do a full pull-out for breaststroke. Keep in mind, a strong kick and a good breaststroke pull-out also need a tight streamline!

Dolphin kick underwater
If you’re streamlining with a powerful kick already, one way to take it up a notch is to dolphin kick off the wall. Lundsten incorporates dolphin kicking into practice as a drill. Swimmers will dolphin kick underwater to various marks throughout the set, especially working on awareness of the 15-meter-mark. Franklin also integrates underwater kicking in her practice by completing underwater 25s. By practicing a strong underwater kick, you’ll be sure to have the lung capacity and kicking power to leverage this asset in a meet.

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect
All of the techniques mentioned above can help you shave time in your races, but just thinking about them at meets isn’t enough. “You have to use it in practice to use it in a meet,” says Lundsten. Practice makes perfect in that your muscle memory will be developed and ready so you can focus on racing.