I Bet You Will Swim FASTER After This Video

Most swimmers train their endurance, but they completely forget to train their speed. Your speed is mainly depends on how efficient your breathing is, the quality of your stroke, and actually exposing your body to faster speeds in your training. I'm Joshua, a former swimmer and coach with nearly twenty years of professional swimming experience. And in this video, I'll show you how to train to swim fast, how to hold that fast pace in long distance swim. I'll give you the training strategy and drills to make your four hundred one point five kilometer or even five kilometer swim improve. Let's go. By the way, before jumping the video, I made ten endurance practices for you to not only build your endurance, but to hold a great every pace in your long distance swims. It's absolutely free, and the link is down in the description below. Let's get right in. Make your breathing comfortable and not affecting your stroke. And I know we've talked about it so many times, but breathing is the first thing you need to master in order to swim fast and swim for long. But now you probably know how to breathe. But what I want you to do, I want you to focus on breathing that doesn't break your stroke or doesn't affect your speed. That might be breathing every second stroke, breathing every third, every fourth stroke. What I tend to see that if you're swimming something like twenty five or fifty meters, if you're racing these distances, most likely you won't need to breathe every second stroke. Most likely, you even in twenty five, you can eliminate breathing all, and in the fifty, you can breathe every sixth or every eighth stroke, even yet, because the oxygen is not that necessary in short distance swims because you're going to get that oxygen anyway when you finish that distance. Yeah. When we're talking about four hundred meters, one point five kilometer swim, when we're talking about three point eight kilometer arm and swim, that is exactly when you want your breathing to work together with your stroke, because you want to get oxygen constantly, and that you are breathing does not drop your speed. Yeah. And so what I tend to see with my open water swimmers is that they're going to breathe every second stroke in the open water. That's gonna allow you to get all the oxygen that you need, and it's not gonna affect your speed, your every pace. Yeah. Now, if you're gonna breathe every fourth or every fifth stroke, it's going to be fine for maybe a hundred to two hundred meters, but because you're going to need to hold your breath, yeah, because you're not gonna take a breath to decide and immediately start exhaling when you're breathing every fourth or sixth stroke. Yeah. You're going to hold your breath, and that factor of holding your breath is going to get you exhausted. And so that is exactly why I recommend long distance swimmers to breathe every third or every second stroke. Yeah. If you don't have a dominant side, fine, breathe to your right and to your left. If you have a dominant side, breathe only to that dominant side. Of course, you you must learn how to breathe both sides to be able to navigate. Yeah. For example, if you can breathe in your right, you have to be able to breathe to your left. But yeah, what I tend to see with long distance swims is that you need to be breathing constantly in order to just maintain that good pace and that speed in the water. Work on increasing your distance per stroke. Now, when it comes to holding a great every pace in your swims, what you really want to do, you want to work on your catch on your pull, and not just that, but also holding on to that water. Yeah. What I tend to see that swimmers do they just really get into that early vertical forearm, they get into their pull. Yeah. But if you're not holding on to that water, if you're not engaging your muscles, not engaging your lats, you are just moving your arm like a windmill. Yeah. You don't want to have that one more time engaging your lats. Yeah. It's not a shoulder driven stroke; it's a lat driven stroke. Okay. Also, I want you to remember when you swim, you want to have a motion from slow to fast. Yeah. So even when you're swimming in the open water in the pool, slow to fast, slow to fast, with the fast being the back of your pull, the push, and so when you're pushing the water with that, that motion is gonna get your arm out of the water easier into the next stroke. Yeah. So really focus on that powerful underwater stroke in order to get the speed, because your goal is not just the cadence. Yeah. You're not moving your arms as fast as possible. Yeah. Your goal, if you want to drop three four five seconds off your every pace in long distance swims, your goal is to work on the quality of your stroke, on the quality of your catch. Yeah. And so not just the high elbow catch, but you can hold beautifully under the water, but actually holding that water, that your catching from the beginning all the way to the end. Now another thing when we're talking about distance per stroke is you don't want to confuse distance per stroke with the glide. Yeah. So the glide is when you extend and glide and then catch. Yeah. And distance per stroke is that amount of distance to travel with each stroke. And so I want you to think about the distance per stroke from the perspective of engaging your muscles and catching the water, holding on to that water, the power in your stroke. The glide is great, and I always encourage my swimmers to glide to get a great extension. But you know sometimes I tend to see when we do the drill like four fifties and every fifty, you have to decrease the number of strokes you take. What I want you to do, I want you to do thirty strokes and twenty eight and twenty six and twenty. Yeah. And I want you to do that because you glide more, and because you stop your arm and kind of stop your stroke in the middle. Yeah, because we can do that all. I can just stop the arm kick and then just finish with like three four five strokes. But the goal here is not just increase to increase your glide. The goal here is to work on that power, work on that catch, work on that stroke, and be able to hold on to that water, and that is what really distance per stroke is. Expose yourself to fast speeds. Now, what essentially that means is you want to break your desired distance into pieces, into intervals, and swim those intervals with fast in your training, then your desired pace in the open water or in your event. And so what I tend to see that many swimmers will train their pace, their exact pace that they want to hold in the race in the pool. Yeah. And so let's say your desired pace in the open water is one forty five. And so now you're not just holding one forty five per hundred in the pool in the training. What you really want to do, you want to expose your body to faster speeds, and by doing that. You're going to hold the one forty five easy because that pace is going to feel easy in comparison with the faster paces and speeds that you're going to be training in in the pool. If that makes sense, yeah. So for example, you're going to do fifteen one hundred at one thirty or one twenty five pace per hundred, and that would mean that you're expanding your fast zone, yeah, expanding your fast comfortable zone. That's your expanding your easy zone. And so when you get into the open water, when you get your race, one forty five feels pretty reasonable, and you can hold that pace actually as opposed to if you would just hold one forty five and train at one forty one forty five in the pool. That's really important. I want you to not get scared of those fast and hard core intervals and intensity blocks in your training because that essentially means you expanding your limits and expanding your aerobic zone as well. There are different ways you can play with your speed, play with your pace, and train your pace in the pool. And so you can either decrease the rest and keep the same intensity, the same pace in your intervals, or you could also just increase the number of repetitions or the distance. Yep. Let's say you're doing at one thirty per hundred ten one hundred. Yep. And you're resting for thirty seconds. Maybe next week you're going to be able to do six to hundred or eight to hundred at the same one thirty per hundred with again the same thirty seconds rest. Yeah. Again, you can play on. You can either increase the distance, decrease the rest. Yeah. Work on that in intensity. Don't get scared of it. Now, if you don't know what to do in your training, you don't have a structure yet. Everything that I'm saying to you right now is new. I have the Ultimate Swimmer Academy. Literally everything that you can ever need to become a better swimmer. I wish I had something like this when I used to swim competitively. Luckily, I have it right now. And so when I compete, I always, always, always look at those drills, look at those practices and the plans. And so I recommend you check as well. You're going to find practices for endurance. You're going to find practices for speed. You're gonna even find practices to work on all four competitive strokes as well as shoulder mobility drills and iron swim plans. Everything is in there. Go check it out, please, swimmers. I need you all to strength train. Strength training is extremely important swimming for multiple reasons. In particular, number one, you're going to be injury free. Yeah, it's extremely important. Yeah, you don't want to overload your shoulder. You want to be strong yet not get injured because the volume, the speed, everything really affects your body. You know, number two, you're going to have so much more power in the water. It's not about just motion itself. It's not about moving your arms or kicking with your legs. Essentially, what that means is how hard, how powerful your movements are in the water. And so strength training, in particular, yeah, working on your lats, your shoulders, your triceps is going to allow you to produce that power that will get you fast speed in the water. And also, why strength training is extremely important is because when you get tired, yeah, imagine you're doing a thousand strokes, yeah, two thousand strokes, your muscles are going to get tired. And so strength training means that you are going to get tired way later than sooner. Yeah, you're going to get your muscles ready for the volume, for the distance, and yeah, just in general, strength training at least two three times a week. The longevity of swimming is going to improve with strength training. I highly recommend you do that. Now, also you can find strength training mobility work in the Ultimate Swimmer Academy. Again, go check it out. If you like this video, you Tube is going to recommend another video right here. Go watch this. Go get freaking fast, and I'll see you in the next video.