How to Swim Faster – Top Tips
Swimming has so many benefits that make it one of the most worthwhile sports in the world. Even unprofessional swimmers get a lot out of swimming that improves their healthy lifestyle and tones their bodies. However, in order to become a professional swimmer and beat the competition, you have to be more willing to train harder and follow a few guidelines.
As a result, we’ve collected some of the most important and actionable tips to swim faster. Just keep in mind, before swimming, never forget to warm up. It’s important for preventing injuries and getting ready for maximum performance in swimming. These are some of the best warm-up tips for swimmers that will make sure you get the most out of your warm-up and help you swim faster in the long run.
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Decrease Drag & Increase Propulsion
One of the most useful tips to swimming faster than your opponents that you will ever get is to learn how to decrease drag in the water and significantly increase your propulsion. What does this mean? Well, too much drag and too little propulsion in the water is what creates slow swimmers and makes you exhausted faster. The reason for this is poor body position, out-of-sync pull phase, and improper execution of strokes.
How to Decrease Drag in Swimming?
One of the biggest reasons for creating more drag in the water is a bad body position. This usually has to do with your head and legs.
To begin with, you need to make sure that your head is not raised up. Instead, align it with the rest of your body and ensure that you’re looking at the bottom of the pool with ease.
In addition, make sure that you don’t spread your legs too much when kicking. This just creates more drag and makes you more exhausted. Instead, keep the movements short and powerful.
Then, rotation is another important thing to consider. If you’re trying to learn how to swim backstroke faster, you need to ensure that you don’t rotate all the way on each stroke. Keep the rotations short by engaging your core muscles and getting back to the starting position as fast as you can after each stroke.
Lastly, keeping a firm and straight body is key to decreasing drag in swimming. It’s important to visualize. Imagine how a slick and elegant position just glides through the water. Then imagine a poorly positioned body with no symmetry or firmness. Which form do you think will move much faster in the water?
How to Increase Propulsion in Swimming?
If you want to learn how to swim faster, you must understand that propulsion plays a huge role in this. In fact, it’s one of the most important factors. Having great propulsion means a greater and faster thrust through the water each time you pull. However, increasing your propulsion can be divided into several parts.
First, you have to ensure that you have proper form and timing when your fingertips enter the water. As soon as that happens, you should bend your elbows slightly and keep your forearms and wrists straight and firm.
The other important part is the pull phase. Ideally, you want to pull as much water as you possibly can. To do this, you have to strengthen your muscles by training and improving your early vertical forearm. By doing so, you will slowly get stronger and more in sync as you swim. Getting faster in swimming is a slow process that involves a lot of training and improvement. So, trust in the process and give it your all, which leads us to our next tip.
Become Stronger
I know that just saying “become stronger” is not enough to set clear goals and guidelines. However, it’s as simple as it sounds. Without putting in enough effort and constantly training harder you simply won’t improve. Most of the time, it’s not up to talent or luck, as the one who trains the most and hardest usually wins.
The goal here is to constantly push yourself in order to become better. Sticking with the same training routine is fine as long as you want to maintain your current tempo. However, if you want to learn how to swim faster, you must train harder and become uncomfortable. Keeping your comfortable training routine won’t get you any further or make you faster.
As a result, changing up your routine is crucial for improvement. In most cases, it’s best to ask for expert help to analyze your training schedule and show you some of the best strength exercises for swimmers to help you improve even further. So, if you’re asking yourself how to swim the breaststroke faster, freestyle, or any other technique, getting stronger is a crucial step in doing all of that.
Improve Your Strokes
Finally, after learning how to decrease drag and increase propulsion, and changing your training routine to become stronger, it’s time to perfect your swimming strokes. You can have the most endurance, be the strongest, and never get tired but you still won’t get faster in swimming without the proper technique. You will just keep paddling aimlessly while the competition leaves you in the waves they create in front of you.
As a result, it’s important that you learn how to improve your breaststroke, how to improve your butterfly stroke and other important ones. By learning how to do them properly and perfecting them, and when you add up all the training and exercise, only then will you learn how to swim faster and beat your opponents.
Conclusion
As we mentioned, it’s not as much talent or luck as it is about hard work, training, and constant improvement. This is the way it is for most things, not just for learning how to swim faster. You should strive to be better each and every day. Compare you with yourself from yesterday. In addition, make sure you follow these tips to ensure that you reach your swimming goals much sooner.