230 to 115100m (step-by-step guide)

In this video, I'll give you the exact issues that hold swimmers back at each pace, from beginner swimmers at 230 per hundred or slower, all the way to advanced swimmers at 115 per hundred for a kilometer. And I'll also give you actionable drills and strategies to help you progress to the next level. And as I go through this, comment below your current pace and which tip you'll try first. Over the last 18 years, I've coached thousands of swimmers from beginners all the way to pro triathletes and seen what it takes to go from 230 all the way down to 115. Let's get into it. So at 230 per hundred, this is our beginner level of swimmer. This is where people are typically having trouble swimming more than 50 meters or a hundred meters at a time. Usually their body position is quite low. So the hips and legs are sinking a lot. They're often having trouble breathing. They lift their head to breathe. They're looking up to the sky or they feel like they are taking in water. And they often find that they are fatiguing a lot quicker than what they should be. This is where we typically find that people are a bit panicked or they're not comfortable in the water. And some of the frustrations that people experience at this level is they can't swim further than 50 meters without tiring, even though they might be relatively fit outside the pool. And the other frustration is it's not fun yet because they're not able to glide through the water. They're having to work super hard to go not very fast and not very far. And that is completely normal when you are at this 230 or slower pace. Now, some of the things people at this level need to focus on, number one, it's regulating your breathing. So in terms of regulating your breathing, it's getting comfortable and relaxed with your breathing. Sometimes people will breathing too much. So they'll inhale too much where they're gasping for air and they'll try and exhale everything. But we need to breathe in a somewhat natural way where we inhale and we exhale, but we're not pushing all of the air out of our lungs. We still need to keep 20 to 30% of our air in our lungs. So it's this more normal and comfortable breathing that we're aiming for. They also need to focus on getting horizontal in the water. So that means that we are minimizing drag. So we're more streamlined because if your hips and legs are low, the amount of drag that that creates is a lot. And it takes so much energy to overcome that drag that you're never going to be able to swim with much ease and much speed at all if you don't first get your body position horizontal. So they're the main things we need to focus on. How you can go about that, number one, I love to do some drills like sink down drills. This is where you'll take your breath in and you'll then exhale through your mouth or through your nose and sink down to the bottom of the pool. And after a second or two of having no air left, come back up and go again. Now this might seem like a bit of a frivolous drill at first sight, but I've had so many people do this drill and give me feedback that they actually managed to keep calm in the water, whereas before they were quite panicked and quite tense. So these sink down drills, if you do this five to 10 times, even at the start of a session, you start to relax and you start to get rid of a lot of that unnecessary tension in the body. Another drill that we like to do here is ball floats. So this is where you hug your knees, you put your head between your knees and you're just in a ball. Now, make sure you take a big breath in before you do this. And the purpose of this drill is to show you that you can float. Quite often I'll get a lot of males who are over 40 who think I'm just a sinker. I've got dense bones, I've got a lot of muscle mass and I just sink straight to the bottom of the pool. But I've never seen anyone sink while doing this ball float drill. So your lungs are filled with air, that gives you this buoyancy in the water. And that is the thing that helps keep you up in the water. And so if you realize that you can actually float in this ball position, that firstly gives you the confidence to know that, okay, I don't actually have to kick really hard and thrash my arms and thrash my legs to stay up. My lungs, my body will actually support me if I use it the right way. So we go into this ball float into an X float, which is where you extend your arms out and your legs out behind you. And most people can get somewhat horizontal in that position, especially when they go from a ball float into an X float, because they start to figure out how to hold themselves in the water to be able to get horizontal. And learning that balance and control of the body is really the first step at then being able to relax and minimize drag. One more drill that we tend to do at this level, and I actually had a swimmer recently who for more than he said, I think 30 plus years, he could never really swim more than a hundred meters without being completely gassed. And so one of the drills we had him do was this body position kick drill, where he's face down, arms extended, kicking out behind him. And the aim is to get the shoulders and the back and the hips out of the water as much as possible. And again, this is just about figuring out how to hold and how to use your body so that you sit in that horizontal position. Once you've gotten comfortable with your breathing, once you've learned some of that balance in the water, then you're gonna be starting to get close to that two minutes per hundred. Now at two minutes per hundred, this is more of our casual swimmers and triathletes. And this is where we're starting to get a good idea of being horizontal in the water, a better idea of the rhythm and momentum we need in the stroke. But some of the issues that people run into at this level is refining their body position. So a lot of people at this level have got their head too high. We're just their faces in the water and they're not having the head deep enough. Now the problem with that is that if they've got just their face in, you're probably holding four or five kilos up above the water. So your hips and legs are sitting still a little bit low. So making sure that our head is like an ice bag, 10 to 20% above, the rest of it should be below. Another thing we find at this level is that their core control and the way that they're holding their hips and their legs isn't as streamlined as it could be. So what we wanna try and do there is make sure we draw the belly button into the spine, squeeze the butt cheeks together a little bit to make sure that's nice and straight. And then importantly with the kick, we wanna make sure that we're not kicking like we're riding a bike. We need to kick almost like you think of a ballerina, moving their legs. They need to be long, a little bit of knee bend, but we need to maintain this kick where it's almost like it's in a bucket. Not too big, not too narrow, but somewhere in between. So the kick isn't coming much outside of our body line. Another thing we find at this level too is the breath timing. Quite often the breath timing is out where people are often lifting their head, turning, and it means that their breath timing's a little bit late. And so their stroke is out of rhythm and out of sync. So it's important at this level to learn to turn your head in time with your shoulders. I also find at this level, people are often muscling themselves through the water more than they would at those faster speeds. So if you find that your legs or your arms are getting tired fairly quickly, there's a very good chance that you're muscling yourself through the water. That can often come from swimming too flat. Now, when we swim freestyle, hips, torso, shoulders, we want that rocking side to side, typically 30 to 40 degrees side to side. If you are flatter than that, then you'll find that a lot of effort goes into just kicking or just the arms because without correct rotation, you don't get to use these stronger muscles through your back and shoulder, and you don't get to set up your caption pull as effectively. So that's where the muscling of the stroke comes into it. So at this level, we need to make sure that we're rotating side to side evenly, 30 to 40 degrees. And the last thing we often see at this level too is a poor catch and a poor pull. So lacking propulsion in the stroke. And if you are not rotating correctly, it's very difficult to have an effective catch and pull. So we also start to work on some elements of the catch and the pull at this level, because that is a big contributing factor to increasing speed. Some of the frustrations that we run into at this level is that you might be fit and you might be getting overtaken by people who are less fit than you. So it's very common to see triathletes here, high VO2 max, but they're getting smoked by people who have a VO2 max, which might be half of theirs. And so that can be quite annoying. And also at this level, you might feel that your swimming is a little bit forced and it's not smooth and it's not efficient. So what we can focus on here, refine the body position, make sure that your head's at the right depth and we have head, hips and heels at the surface. We also need to focus on making sure we rotate 30 to 40 degrees side to side, because that will then help you set up a better catch and pull. And we can start to introduce some propulsive drills or catch and pull drills to help you improve that aspect of the stroke as well. Now at this level, some drills that we would often do here. Number one, front kick with a snorkel. So this is where you're kicking face down in the water, arms extended, and we are aiming to be horizontal, feeling that tautness through the core and through the hips and making sure that we hold this long streamline position like a needle, not like a noodle that's loose and floppy. Then we go to side kick, one arm extended, one arm by the side, and here we wanna make sure we're rotating to about 40 degrees as we do it, getting used to being on our side and getting comfortable in that position. Then we'd often progress to a 6-1-6 drill, where we do six kicks on the side, we take a stroke, and we swap sides, getting used to being on our side, taking a stroke and then switching. So we're starting to introduce that side-to-side rotation and making sure we get the feel for what is 30 to 40 degrees rotation. Now equipment at this level, you might start to use a pull buoy. You might start to use some fins and maybe a snorkel at this level to help you do some of the drills. And in terms of using a pull buoy, that can help you get the feel for getting that propulsion from the rotation and from the catch and pull, as opposed to kicking yourself forwards. At this two-minute level, this is a really typical level that we'll see people go through our eight-week Faster Freestyle course online or attending one of our freestyle clinics here in Australia. So once you're starting to master your body position, have good rotation, and starting to feel a little bit of that propulsion, then you're gonna be starting to get all the way down to 145 per 100. So at the 145 per 100, this is our intermediate level of swimmer. This is where people have typically swum for about 12 months or more, and they're starting to get a sense of what it's like to move effortlessly through the water. Some of the common issues that people run into at this point. The first one is that they've got habitual errors or mistakes in their stroke. So they've now swum for long enough that they do have some habits there, but those habits might not be necessarily effective or efficient. And quite often there's poor synchronization or timing within the stroke, where they're not necessarily swimming with front quadrant timing, meaning there's always, there's not something in front of the head at all times. So they might be a little bit rushed with the stroke. Quite often people here as well, they feel like they've only got one speed. So they find it hard to judge how long do I need to keep my strokes and how much do I need to increase my stroke rate? So finding that sweet spot between the two of those and being able to change that to go faster. And also at this level, we do often find a lot of swimmers are late with their breathing. So they begin to turn their head too late, so it throws off their stroke rhythm. And eventually that causes an imbalance and it means that they drop their arm in the catch as well. And so that's where they feel like their catch slips or it's not very effective on one side or maybe both sides. Some of the frustrations that people run into at this level, they feel the inconsistencies. Sometimes they feel like they are flying along and feeling really good. And then other times they feel like they are sinking in the water and they lose a lot of their speed. So there's often a big fluctuation between a good session and a bad session. Sometimes even between strokes, a good stroke and a bad stroke, and they become aware of those differences between what's good and what's not. And I also find at this level, there's frustration in putting in more effort, but not necessarily seeing the results of that effort translate to faster times. So at this level, what you can focus on to get down towards 130. The first thing, make sure your breath timing is in time with your shoulder rotation. So we think of that as pulling into the breath. Turn your head when this hand is coming past your shoulder. It's when you initiate the turn. And then the more important thing is bring your head back down with your catch. So your head and your arm goes back down together. So we need to time our breath correctly. We also need to start working on a high elbow catch position when we go through our catch. So once we've finished reaching forwards and rotating, then we need to point our fingers down and bend our elbow out to the side. So elbow goes out wide. Getting that high elbow catch. So we've got a lot of surface area pressing back. If you can start to improve on that, that means that the propulsive side of your stroke is really starting to improve. And if we think of what makes your swim speed, well, it's about minimising drag, which we do in those earlier levels. Then we need to maximise propulsion. And this is where we really have to put a lot of our focus at this point. We also need to make sure that we are timing the stroke correctly, making sure we're in that front quadrant, always having an arm in front of us. And that doesn't mean doing catch-up freestyle because you'll lose your speed and you'll decelerate if you do a full catch-up. Swimming's all about rhythm. So we need to make sure we're always keeping the hands in motion without ever stopping and pausing completely. But we need to make sure we've always got something in front of our head. So getting that type of rhythm and timing in the stroke is an important aspect here where a lot of people get stuck in rushing the catch. So they don't end up extending forwards and then during the catch, they just enter and pull straight through. So we've got to start to work on that front quadrant timing in the stroke. And here at this level, we can also start to work on balancing stroke length and stroke rate. A good way to do this is doing sets where we are changing speeds. For example, four 100s, where we descend one to four or build onto four. So first one's the slowest one, last one's the fastest one, and we're looking to get a bit quicker each one. Now, when you first do sets like this, you might find that you actually start too fast and you drop off and you finish slower than what you started in. But with more practice and getting used to finding that balance between stroke rate and stroke length, you can get really good at changing gears and changing speeds. And so this is a really good time to begin to do that and get a sense of how much extra pressure do I need to get on the catch? How much increase in stroke rate do I need to do to see that result in faster times? And quite often, it's very incremental. People think to go faster, they've got to double the amount of power, double their stroke rate, but it's very incremental. It's like turning up the dial from six to a seven, seven to an eight. It's very small. And so figuring that out at this level is what can help you get to that 130 to 100. Now, drills at this level, some very common drills that we like to do. This is a great time to do single arm freestyle. So one arm by the side, other arm in front, wearing fins and working on single arm. The benefit of this drill is when you've got one arm to think about, you can get each aspect of it to improve, to be better. And it can also help you refine some of the things like your breath timing. So single arm drill with fins on is a great one. Another drill we typically introduce here is set up drill. This is a one arm drill where you're kicking with both arms in front, going through your catch and coming back. We're just isolating the movement of the catch and getting used to that elbow bending and going out to the side as you initiate the catch. Because if you can get really good at that movement, that helps set up a high elbow catch and that helps you then have an effective catch and pull. So often starting with some specific catch drills, this is a good time to do it. And you might start to introduce some paddles at this point in order to build some strength and get a feel for a little bit more pressure or propulsion through the catch and pull. And in terms of courses or products, a lot of people go through the five day catch challenge, which is our five day course, which helps them improve their catch and pull. And this is typically where swimmers will get the most out of that course because going from a 145 to a 140 or a 135 with the better catch, that's doable at that level because more propulsion, if you've already got good body position, more propulsion is how you can really see a big increase in your speed. So if you're doing those things, you're gonna start to get down to 130 per 100. So at 130 per 100, this is our competitive triathlete, competitive swimmer sort of level. And if you're an age group triathlete, you're gonna start to be pushing towards the front of the group at this 130 type of pace for most people. Now, some of the issues that people run into here that stops them progressing to 115, it's small inefficiencies with their catch and pull. So typically they've got pretty decent propulsion, their catch and pull's okay, but there are things that they can refine and improve on. Maybe they're pulling a bit straight, maybe they're dropping the elbow a little bit on one side. This is where you can start to refine that aspect of it. Quite often we're working on finding the right amount of rotation as well. Typically people will over or under rotate on one side or both sides here. So this is where we typically video film from the front, see how much they're rotating and making sure it's in that 30 to 40 degree range. Quite often in terms of the training as well, this is where we really need to introduce specific training, making sure we're doing enough aerobic work, threshold work, introducing some speed work. So being a little bit more targeted and specific to the type of training that they're doing to maximize their fitness and their ability to race whatever races they wanna do. And usually at this level, people have difficulty maintaining their stroke length as they get tired. So here we're looking to be able to maintain stroke length for those longer distances and not have that drop off too much as you get tired. Some of the frustrations that people find at this level. The first thing is that next level of 120 or 115 seems completely unachievable because they can't physically put in any more effort. And so it seems like that's not possible. But the thing is, it's not about necessarily getting more fitness behind you. It might be these finer technique parts that we need to refine in your stroke. And the other frustration here is that those technical errors are harder to pinpoint. So you're not sure what you need to work on at this point where you feel like you're doing everything you can to swim at 130, but you don't know what can take you to 120 or 115. So at this 130 pace, what you can focus on to get down to 120 and 115. The first thing is making sure you've optimized your rotation, making sure you're rotating the right amount so that you can get your catch and pull as good as it possibly can on both sides. The second part there is making sure that you are consistent with your catch and pull. Typically when someone turns to breathe, it's that catch arm that drops away where the elbow drops. So making sure in your breathing strokes that you're still maintaining a good catch. And the third thing is making sure you're optimizing your training. You're doing the right amount of sessions, you're optimizing how much aerobic work, threshold work and speed work that you're doing so that you have the fitness and the, and the, I guess the aerobic fitness and also the speed to be able to start to edge those faster times. Drills that we would often do at this level, single arm freestyle drill where you're breathing to your opposite side, also known as unco drill. So single arm breathing to your opposite side with fins on. This is a drill that I see all Olympic level freestyle is doing. It's a challenging drill to do well, but if you can do it well, it translates really nicely into the stroke. So single arm drill, bring to the opposite side. The other drill, long dog paddle. This is a drill that I love to give to people. This is a drill I love to do. It's where you're extending out, finishing past the hip and then you're recovering underneath the body. So long dog paddle. This is great for working on the right amount of rotation, improving your catch and pull and connecting that with the rotation through your hips. So that's a, those two drills sort of cover all of your fundamentals there. Now at this level, you're probably using a range of different equipment, probably using fins for your warmup, probably doing a bit with pool buoy and paddles to build strength, maybe a bit with a snorkel as well. And you're probably incorporating a few different pieces of equipment within your sessions each week. And people at this 130 pace, they're typically coming to our long distance camps like we've got in the Whitsundays, like we've got in the Maldives and often coming to clinics as well, looking for that, what they need to work on to get down to 115, where they're looking for more assistance with helping pinpoint what they can do to get faster. So as you start to refine your rotation, improve your catch and pull and get the right amount of training behind you, that's when you're gonna start to find yourself getting close to that 115 pace per 100. So 115 per 100. This is our advanced swimmers. This is our high level triathletes and swimmers, often people who have got several years of swimming behind them. And this is really your front end or front pack type of swimmer. Now at this level, some of the issues that people run into here, it's about maintaining excellent form, excellent technique under pressure and under fatigue. Any changes that they make are for fractional gains. So we're not seeing five or 10 seconds faster per 100 at this point. It might be half a second. It might be one second per 100 at this point, rather than those bigger gains that people have earlier on in their swimming journey. At this point, we're starting to see a highly effective catch with minimal wasted effort. Even at this level, we're still fine tuning the breath timing to make sure it doesn't impact the stroke rhythm. So at this level, and myself included, we can often refine our breathing so that it goes in time with our rotation, because for a lot of people that I've filmed and coached at this level, we can still find improvements there. And really at this level, especially for even open water swimming or pool swimming, we are looking to work on race strategies, race tactics, and really refining those parts of our race as well. Some of the frustrations that you'll run into at this level is improvement is very minor, and it takes a long time to see the results of the work that you're putting in. Often three months or six months working on one aspect of the stroke in order to see a half a second or a second improvement per 100. The other frustration here is that any minor technical flaws could be the difference between making front pack and second pack. So there's a finer line that you've got to work with there in order to be hitting that front pack or second pack. And so those minor flaws really start to show at this level. So at this level, what you can focus on is refining those small or single technical aspects of your stroke and being consistent and working on that for several months at a time. And here, you can also start to focus on race strategy and tactics and making sure you're becoming familiar with what's required to compete at the very top level in terms of your pacing, in terms of how you should be drafting or strategizing where the other swimmers are. So this is where those things become a whole lot more important. Drills at this level, often doing a lot of sculling to enhance and develop that feel for pressure on your hand and forearm. They're very important drills to do as well as continuing with the single arm and the long dog paddle drills as well, like we did at the 130 level. At this level, you might start to introduce a swim parachute or working on some power aspects of your stroke and strength aspects of your stroke, as well as continuing with use of fins and pull buoy and paddles as well. And at this level, it really requires some expertise to help you get better. Having someone help spot where the flaws or faults are in your stroke and things that can help there, something like the EO SwimBetter, the devices that measure your propulsion, direction of force. That's a great way to find things that aren't necessarily very visible to the naked eye, getting some underwater filming and analysis as well to help you identify that. So here we're really looking to technology to help work on the finer aspects of your stroke at this point. So if you can master your technique at your current pace, that is what can help progress you to the next level. Comment below where you're currently at and what you wanna focus on in your technique. And if you're looking for help in your own swimming, then check out our Effortless Swimming membership below. And I work with people every single day from 2.30 down to 1.15 to help them identify what they need to do to get faster. Thanks for watching. Check out this video here for a full breakdown on freestyle technique. So you know exactly where to start and how to improve some of these things that I've covered in this video.