How To Swim LONGER And More EFFICIENTLY

So, Coach Fires, the question is, how can I swim longer, more efficiently? Swim high in the water. It's that simple. Because if your legs are dragging, if your head position's off, you're going to be inefficient. And the more you're inefficient, the more tired you're going to get the longer that you swim. I know it sounds simple and I say this all the time, but it all starts with your head position and really making sure, this is the second part, you not only have a good body position, but you're training your body position at the highest level for the longest period of time. Let me be specific. So, instead of just swimming 1,000 meters straight, you're going to need to break it up and you're going to train your body to swim shorter durations at a faster rate of speed. So, to put some numbers behind that, let's say you can swim 1,000 meters in 20 minutes. That means you're swimming two minutes per 100 meters. That same swimmer could probably swim 1 minute and 40 seconds for an individual 100, and they're probably not even going as fast as they can. So that's a significant change from two minutes to a minute 40. That's a 20 second difference. So now let's break it up further. Let's say 50 meters. That same swimmer, instead of going a 140 pace, could probably go a 130 pace. They can go 45 seconds in that 50. So what if instead of doing 1,000 meters straight, we just do 50 meters and we swim it in 40 to 45 seconds. And so instead of training our body how to swim an average speed of 1 minute per 50, we're now going to do it in 45 seconds. So if you want to swim more efficiently over a longer period of time, you need to train your body to have good body position, but then also just train at a higher rate of speed, a higher average rate of speed. This applies for literally every distance of swimming, every single stroke. Let's say you want to be good at a 200 breaststroke. You could just swim a kilometer of breaststroke, or you can swim short segments of 25 or 50 meters, not even 100 meters, and train your body how to swim at a higher body position, shorter durations, more intensity, and more focus. It doesn't mean you're going fast. It just means you're swimming with more intentionality around the distance per stroke that you're taking, the body level that you have in the water, and just being more efficient overall. I love it. So if you're out there and you're hoping to break that magic two-minute barrier for a 2K swim, and you're training, going 205 average, I mean, you can't expect to get to razor and magically go sub-2. It's not going to work. So as Farid just said, you have to make sure you are reprogramming your body and training your body to swim at those faster speeds. And what I wanted to add is that I think a lot of people just make swimming too complicated. I think I like to keep it simple. The only three ways in which you can swim faster is pull, pull more, pull more powerful, pull more water. You can kick more, and you can decrease drag. So if you are practicing at least one of those things when you're training or when you're doing your sets or whatever, you are ultimately getting better. So a lot of people go to the pool, they start thinking about their head position, their body position, their pull, their kick, their rotation. It's impossible to try and focus on 10 different things at once. So I think a huge aspect to getting better at swimming is also just making sure you are taking small steps at a time and keeping things simple. So if you know that you lack rotation, focus on rotation for the next three months. And then when you can rotate consistently without always having to remind yourself to rotate, that's when you truly know you have learned something. Then you can start moving on to your pull and your head position and all these things. So just make sure you're keeping things simple. Take it one step at a time, and I think that's when you'll start seeing a lot of progress as well. What's the best equipment to use for swimming? Favorite equipment. You know, equipment can do wonders for you. It can also be a huge curse if you use your equipment too often, because then you can become dependent. But if I had to do my own tier list ranking of equipment, I think at the very top, fins. It's the most accessible. You can use them the most frequently. It's going to help you swim faster, improve your technique. Then from there, I think I'm going to go with paddles. Paddles give you more resistance. You can swim faster. It can help your technique. It can also hurt your technique. And it puts more stress on certain joints. If your technique's not good, you can actually hurt yourself with the paddles, so you've got to be careful there. And then I'll go with snorkel, because you can still focus on technique, get the aerobic benefit, your lungs. So I'm going to go fins, paddles, snorkel. And then there are a lot of other pieces of equipment that I want to go into, but I'm curious your takes. Right. Well, I definitely agree on those. But what I like to do with equipment, I like to think of as, I mean, I like to think of swimming in general as a big swimming equation, for example. And when you use swimming equipment, I like to think you kind of take things out of that equation when you're using, for example, fins. So if you want to focus a little bit more on your rotation and your body position, how you are pulling and stuff like this, you kind of put fins on and that takes that little bit out of the equation, if that makes sense. Right. So that's how I like to think about it. So fins, I definitely agree, are very, very good. I love the fact that you said snorkel. I think snorkel is probably one of the most important ones that I love to use, because again, not only does it kind of take the breathing out of the equation, you can also focus on your head position and that kind of flattens everything out, again, tying in with what you said earlier about your body position as well. The piece of equipment that I've recently learned about and I have been using a lot in my training personally is the resistance equipment, which is your parachute and your drag socks. Thanks to you, Faris. This wasn't something I was using before, but since getting back into swimming a little bit more and training for my 50 backstroke, the resistance equipment for me has been a game changer. I think it is really, really good, especially if you're training for sprint events like myself. If you want to get stronger in the water, if you want to start building your tempo and really start to build some power, I highly, highly recommend you guys out there invest in a good pair of drag socks and a parachute, because like I said, I feel phenomenal, especially after I do, for example, I like to do a little pyramid. I like to kind of build my resistance up, then take it all off and I just feel like I'm flying. So this is my absolute favorite thing to do at the moment. So resistance equipment, I think is a game changer. Yep. And actually just to explain why the resistance equipment can be so valuable, because you've been using it and you feel so much more power, but why does resistance training make you so much faster? And it's because, think about it, when you're swimming and you're moving through the water, this medium that is 800 times more dense than air, your muscles on their own can only be activated so much by your stroke technique. No matter how good your stroke technique is, you can only pull so much water and engage so many muscle fibers. But if we put additional stress on your body, additional resistance through parachute or drag socks or power tower or any other way to basically keep your stroke the same, but slow you down. So now you're going to recruit more muscle fibers and you only do that for a really short period of time. And if you can do that over a short period of time with a high level of effort, you're going to recruit more muscles, meaning you're going to activate and engage all these extra muscles that it's literally not possible unless you had that extra level of resistance. And so when you take all that off, you recover. Just like lifting weights, you need a recovery period and that's where the growth actually happens. Then the next day, the next week, the next months, that's when you're actually going to feel faster because it's so much easier to engage those muscles because you engage them at full stress with the resistance. Right. All right. Thank you.