Why Pro Swimmers SLAP Themselves Before They Race

Have you ever wondered why pro swimmers slap themselves before the races? Or why they wear two swim caps? How about why they swim with their fists? These crazy rituals and others explain. From shaving legs to swimming with weird equipment, let's dive in. Oftentimes you'll see the best swimmers in the world wearing more than one swim cap. You might ask, why is this? There are a couple reasons for that. If you're training with a specific swim cap, you might actually need to wear a different cap in representation For example, this is a cap that I got for swimming from Asia to Europe in the Bosphorus cross-continental swim. Every swimmer was required to wear it. What a lot of swimmers did is they'll put their regular training cap on first, then their goggles, followed by the competition cap. You'll often cycle with a latex cap and a silicone cap on top of it. If you're swimming in open water, this can also keep your head warmer. There's also a personal preference that goes with it. Some people are latex, some people are silicone, some people like the goggles underneath the cap, some people like the goggles over the cap. Let me know in the comments what version you like as well. Also, you might be wearing a dome racing cap. This isn't a dome, this is a silicone, but these caps actually have no seams and they're super, super fast. And what you'll want to do is wear a latex cap first, then your goggles, and then the dome or hydrofoil cap on top of it, and that'll make you swim the fastest. If you've ever watched the you notice that the best swimmers spend most of the length under the surface of the water. This is even more true if you watch in the college swimming and short course yard pool, where literally the best swimmers spend more time underwater than actually swimming over the surface. And this is because you can swim faster underneath the surface of the water than on top of the water. This is because water is 800 times more dense than air. So if you can swim in a more streamlined position, that is dolphin kick, you'll swim that much faster. Swimming underwater is often referred to as the fifth stroke. It's something I talk about a lot in my book, Swim Like a Pro. And if you want a full breakdown of the analysis and how you can swim faster in every stroke, including the underwater dolphin kick, you got to check out the book link down below. Pro swimmers do a ton of training before and after their workouts. If you see top swimmers doing pushups or other dry land activity before they swim, it's because they're getting their central nervous system activated. They're getting warmed up, doing things like dynamic stretches to really get the blood flowing. You don't want to dive into the water cold. Instead, you want to make sure you're warming up your shoulders, your joints, getting that flexibility and blood flow moving. So that way, when you swim, you're that much more prepared for performance. These dynamic stretches really get the blood flowing. And it's also a great way to stay activated if you're at a competition and you don't have a lot of room to warm up. You might not have the luxury of swimming in your own lane before a race. So what you can do is you can get the blood flowing by doing some simple arm swims like this or some jumping jacks to get the heart rate going, and that'll shorten the amount of warmup you actually need to do in the water. You may see people kicking vertically. Now, vertical kicking is a great way to develop not only leg strength, but good balance in the water. And you'll see a lot of top swimmers doing this, not just in a workout. Whether they're doing it flutter kick, breaststroke kick, eggbeater kick, whatever it may be, it's not only strengthening the kick, but when you go to a competition, it might be the only way that you can actually warm up. Now, vertical kicking is just one skill of many in my new book, 101 Ways to Swim Faster. So if you're looking for some tips and tricks to level up your swimming, make sure you check out the book link down below. If you've gone to an international competition, you may have seen some of the best swimmers warming up with fins. That's right. They just walk up to the edge of the pool and they dive in and they start doing their warmup with fins. Now, if you're only swimming a few times a week, this isn't going to work for you because your body hasn't really developed the strength and the feel of the water to add that much resistance, even in your warmup. But if you're a top level swimmer and you're training with fins regularly, it's a natural extension of your body. And so that way, when you get into a warmup, it doesn't really feel like that much added resistance, but you get the benefit of added speed. So what you're essentially doing is you're training your body how to move quickly through the water. And when you go to a competition by warming up with fins, these pro swimmers are able to just skip to the fun part and teach your body what they wanted to do in 30 minutes or one hour when they actually step onto the blocks and they have to race. So then why do pro swimmers warm up more than once before a swimming race? And what is a double warmup? A double warmup simply means you're going to warm up multiple times. Maybe it's a triple warmup before your actual swimming competition race. And what that means in simple terms is if your race is at 10 o'clock in the morning, you'll do your first warmup, maybe at 730 or 8am. Then you'll do another warmup 30 minutes or 45 minutes before the start of your actual race. And maybe if you're racing at 10, some swimmers like to warm up just 10 to 15 minutes before the race. And the reason why you break apart your warmup into multiple pieces is because you really want to get your body and your mind activated in a specific pattern. But why do pro swimmers slap themselves? We see it time and time again, whether it's a behind the scenes at the ready room at the Olympics, the World Championships, or your local parks and recreation swim meet. We see swimmers slapping themselves on their head, their face, their chest. It is absolutely insane. And if you don't know what you're looking at, it can seem a little scary as to why these swimmers are literally beating themselves up before the competition. Now, some of this is actually just habit. You see other people doing it, you start doing it, and next thing you know, it's just a part of your normal ritual and routine before you step up onto the diving blocks. But there is some method to the madness, literally. Because when you slap yourself, you're waking yourself up. And this is really a variance from swimmer to swimmer. Some swimmers are cool, calm, and collected. They don't hit themselves at all. They just sit there. They look like they're about to sleep, but everything's happening between their ears. Their mind is firing, and they're pumping themselves up. Other swimmers need a little bit of a boost. And whether it's taking a little bit of caffeine, slapping yourself is one way to do it. I remember one of the best swimmers in the world, Cesar Cielo from Brazil, he would beat himself up like crazy, smacking his chest. And he did that before breaking the world record in the 50 freestyle. So if the fastest man in the world is doing it, maybe there's something there. Let me know what you guys think down below in the comments. Why do pro swimmers swim with socks? No, not these socks, but these socks, or other pieces of resistance. And that's because when you get to a certain level of swimming, and you've already built your feel of the water, now it's time to take it to the next level. And you can't really do that with just your natural body. It's sort of like doing pushups. After a certain period of time, pushups aren't that difficult, and you need to increase the amount of resistance on your body. So you'll move to the bench press, or more complicated versions of a pushup, where you increase the amount of load on the muscle. And swimming, the way we do that is resistance. So if you see someone wearing drag socks in training, or maybe swimming with a parachute, or a power tower, or maybe even a stretch cord, there are a lot of different ways that you can add resistance. You can also add resistance with fins, and paddles, and other things like that. Those will normally make you faster. They increase your propulsion by making your foot longer, or your hand bigger in the case of a paddle. But when you have these resistance drag socks, it's actually going to slow you down. It's going to increase the resistance when you put these things on your feet. When you're kicking, and a pro swimmer is kicking, or swimming, you're going to increase that resistance, which means you're going to put more stress on the muscle. And then when you take those off, you're going to have a lot more tempo, speed, agility. And when it comes to competition, and you look at a pro swimmer, they're the best in the world at being able to increase their propulsion compared to everyone else. And that's why they're swimming so much faster. Do all pro swimmers shave? Yes. The answer is yes. Men and women shave at the highest level. This is common in triathlon and cycling as well. And the reason might actually surprise you. Swimmers shave not just because they want to feel slim and slender in the water. It actually reactivates your nervous system because you have a new feel of the water. So yes, you feel faster. Yes, you're reducing drag by just a little bit. But I would argue this is actually only part of the equation. Because if you want to swim really fast, you need to have this mind-body connection in the water. And when you shave, it's like you have a new skin. You feel alive. You actually feel cold, especially as a guy with a little bit more hair. When you dive in the water for the first time after having a clean shave on your chest and your legs, you just feel amazing. You feel like a different person. And that alone can make you swim faster because you feel faster. Yes, you're going to get the hydrodynamic effect. Now, what you don't want to do, and what a lot of pro swimmers do not do, they don't shave down every single day. They're not shaving their entire body every week or even every month. Normally, you're going to shave this special experience because there's a lot of work, actually. But you're going to shave that special feeling before a big competition. So a lot of the top swimmers are only going to shave their entire body a couple of times per year, maybe three times per year max, maybe four times per year if you have a few different cycles. And the really, really good pros, like the Michael Phelps of the world, they're only shaving once or twice per cycle. And that cycle could be a full year. And you know what's crazy is sometimes the best swimmers in the world swim with fists. That's right. They're actually decreasing the size of their hand. It's a drill, and it's one of the best drills for swimming. In fact, if you haven't seen a video, a tier list of the best swimming drills, I put fist drill as an S tier because it really is one of the best ways to improve your feel of the water. So here's how it works. When you decrease the size of your hand, it actually forces you to really work on this early vertical forearm because you lose the surface area of your hand, and it makes you really focus on pulling water with your forearm. And pulling water with your forearm is how you move the most water because you're trying to increase that surface area. The next progression of going from a fist is simply adding a finger. This is another drill. You can add multiple fingers in progression, and you work your way up to having a full hand. Then after you have a full hand and you're really getting strong and a good feel of the water, pro swimmers will start to add a little bit more size. So when you add a paddle, it's actually going to increase the size of your pull. So now we're doing quite the opposite. So we've shrunk the hand with the fist, and now the pro swimmers are going to add a paddle. And if you notice, some of the best swimmers in the world are able to swim with these absolutely massive paddles. So as you get stronger in the water, you increase the size of your paddle, you increase the resistance, you build the muscles even faster. And really a big misconception is that if you're a really strong person, you can wear a really big paddle. That's not actually true. You have to be strong in the water. These are very swimming specific muscles. If you take a bodybuilder in the weight room, they're not going to be able to wear the biggest size paddle because they haven't developed that strength inside of the water. That's why it's really important that you develop your technique first, you build a fist, and then you work from the fist drill all the way up to a bigger hand. Now if you're looking for other drills like this, you got to check out the MySwimPro app because we've developed hundreds and hundreds of drills organized by different stroke. So download the app, get your drills going, and start swimming smarter. The best pro swimmers listen to their coaches. They surround themselves with people who can help them excel not only in the pool, but also in life. Having a positive environment is what's going to separate the best from the very best. And so whether it's a coach, sports medicine, nutrition, dry land and strength, having a supportive family, friends, and being in a high performance environment where everyone is trying to level up, this is what's required to be a pro swimmer. And this is one of the biggest differentiators that I see not only in swimming, but in life in general. And so if you're not really satisfied with your current results, if you're not in a position where you feel like you're progressing, you need to take a look around you. Who are you surrounding yourself with? Because that is really one of the biggest indicators of where you'll go. Because if you're not happy with the group that you're around, then it's probably not going to be the best for what the goals that you have for yourself in the future. And if you're swimming by yourself, and you're alone, and you don't have a coach, that's why we developed the MySwimPro app. It's basically a coach in your pocket, on your wrist, guiding you through every step of the way. And if you want to level up, you can join our Swimming Academy where you can work with myself and my team where we can analyze your technique, give you corrective feedback, and help you all the things that you need to do so you can reach your goals in less time. The best swimmers, the pro swimmers are all very methodical and literally obsessed with their stroke technique, their data, how many strokes they take per length, how many breaths they take in a race, where they take the breath, how many dolphin kicks they take off the wall. And so if you haven't seen yourself swim, you're really at a disadvantage. It's not just seeing yourself swim, because it's really easy actually these days to grab your phone, put it on the side of the pool and film yourself. But actually working with a coach who knows what they're talking about, who can point out specifically what you need to focus on, when you should focus on it, and specific drills that you can improve. And then seeing that over time, and this is exactly what we do in our academy. So if you're interested in learning more, if you want to work with myself and my team, check out the link in the description. Why do pro swimmers train at altitude? If you actually go to a higher elevation, whether it's at the top of a mountain, the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs is over 6,000 feet. There are other training centers around the world, and they've designed these places specifically in these locations. So that way athletes can train with less oxygen. Yup, that's right. Because when you train at a higher altitude, there's literally less oxygen in the air. Your body becomes more efficient. You improve your VO2 max. And almost all of the pro swimmers that have broken world records have had some experience at a training camp. Michael Phelps has spent weeks, if not months at a time at the U.S. Olympic Training Center. And it turned out pretty well for him and other top athletes. Now, if you're thinking, well, I'm never going to be able to train at the U.S. Olympic Training Center or other altitude training camps, that's okay. You can still get most of the benefits of this training camp experience when you come to one of our retreats. These are incredible one week experiences at all inclusive resorts. We're swimming in paradise multiple times per week. We do video analysis, a yacht trip. It's an absolutely incredible experience. And I'm so excited to announce some of our upcoming locations because we have some absolutely amazing locations and programming planned. So if you want to learn more and you want to join us in paradise, make sure you check out the link in the description. And if you really found value in this video and you really want to level up your swimming, I know you're serious. So I want to see you at this video right over here. I'll see you over there and happy swimming.