Myth #8: All swimming drills are good for you.
I am a great believer in doing drills. In fact, if most swimmers would spend a little more time doing drills and not worry so much about getting their hour or so of aerobic fitness in, they might come out ahead. The biggest problem with drills is that too often, they are being done without any real understanding of what they are supposedly teaching you. Unless you are planning to enter a drill race, there is not much point in doing a drill unless you understand what it is for. Coaches often go to great lengths to explain how to do a drill properly, but then forget to mention what the drill is for.
And sometimes the drills that are being recommended actually teach you the wrong thing. For example, if you have no kick and you are trying to get faster by learning how to increase your stroke rate, then a catch-up drill may be doing you a big disservice. Or if I ever see anyone who has been told to flick water with their hand/wrist out the back end of their stroke, I kindly ask them to hit the delete button. Or what does sliding your finger tips across the surface of the water (finger tip drill) teach you that helps you swim faster?
So all I ask is that you do drills nearly every time you jump in the water, even if for warmup. But that you understand what the drill is trying to teach you AND that the drill is designed for the technique you are trying to learn.
Gary Sr.
The Race Club
Former Member
I guess it's a question of how much trade off there is between any inefficency caused by breathing and the benefits of getting oxygen in.
If your stroke efficiency is not adversely affected by breathing more often it makes perfect sense to do it. If Sun Yang can break the world record breathing off his turns, and doing the odd bit of one stroke per breath, it can't be all bad!
Additionally, if you are desperate to breathe when you do so, you may be more likely to create an inefficiency as you gulp in as much as possible.
However, not many of us are that effecient when we breath, so it's a case of working it out on an individual basis. I'm happy with 2-3 in training but will take the odd extra breath.
On fly, though, I know that I'm inefficient when I breath, so am trying to do at least 2 strokes per breath as often as possible so that I can do at least that in a race. I'm not going to improve my flexibility enough at this stage to improve any other way!
Can anyone name the last Olympic gold medalist in the men's 100 fly who did not breath every stroke? (I can't, but I'm guessing it was more than four Olympics ago).
If your stoke isn't efficient enough to breath a lot, then it might make sense to work a bit on stroke technique and core strength (and that might help address other underlying problems at the same time).
My vote: air is good ... In total agreement here, especially for fly (which ain't the main topic of this thread though)
In support of off-topicness regarding breathing/fly/efficiency. As beginner testimony I'm an extreme example: able to push 25M of fly below 16 sec yet cannot complete an entire 50M (I can do just 2 meters shy of a 50). I blame this on not knowing how to breath with fly yet. I do 25 without a breath, but if I do breath it's like slamming on the brakes.
To bring this on topic, is there any drill I can do to assist efficient fly breathing? I would like to swim the fly someday in a race.
No-arm-fly is like aspirin. It's a cure for several issues, breathing is definitely on the list. Here's my fast execution of this drill:
Butterfly Kick - NAD (No Arm Drill) Fast - YouTube
It's fly, without the arm action. All other elements remain the same. It teaches you when to breathe (in relation to your kick timing), how to breathe (ref: up-and-down head movement) and for how long you should breathe when you do (ie, the blink of the eye, breathing at fly must be done very rapidly, if you don't want to loose speed in doing so).
More importantly, it teaches you to use 0% of your arm pull to breathe. At the moment, if a portion of your arm pull is used to lift yourself to breathe, that may explain why you endup being slower during this phase. Breathing can be done without the arms, as clearly demonstrated by this drill.
Finally, this drill can be done with speed in mind. It's a fast drill. On the clip above, I think I'm swimming 41sec for a 50m, but I wasn't in a great shape then. I can certainly go down under 40 with more training. Benefits on full stroke swimming are immediate!
Can anyone name the last Olympic gold medalist in the men's 100 fly who did not breath every stroke? (I can't, but I'm guessing it was more than four Olympics ago).
..
Denis Pankratove-1996 Atlanta Olympics.
