The ONLY Way to get Better at Swimming (Unfortunately…)

There’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: why is it so difficult for a reasonably competent triathlon swimmer to actually get better at swimming?

I’m not talking about someone learning to swim from scratch. I’m talking about the athlete who can comfortably get through a 1,500- or 2,000-metre swim, has decent fitness, trains consistently, and maybe sits somewhere around an average or slightly above-average pace.

They swim regularly. They do workouts. They might even participate in a coached group program.

And yet, six months later, they’re still swimming at roughly the same pace.

I think there’s a reason for that.

First, take a break

Before getting into swimming, there’s something else on my mind: rest.

My racing season is over, and I’m a big believer in having a clean ending to the season. When the last race is finished, I like taking a week or two where structured training largely disappears.

Not necessarily because you’re completely exhausted or because you need to recover from some catastrophic training load. Sometimes it’s just good to be done.

For me, that means having a spare moment and picking up the guitar. Maybe having an alcohol-free beer. Going to watch my wife play volleyball instead of figuring out how to fit another training session into the day.

There’s value in having a period where your identity isn’t wrapped up in whether you got your workout done.

This year, that break also happens to coincide with a trip to Pennsylvania, where I’m crewing for a friend running a 50-mile trail ultramarathon.

I’ve never actually been to an ultramarathon before, so I’m excited to experience the culture from the other side of the aid station. There’s something pretty cool about the overlap between endurance racing and the outdoors: trails, hills, camping, ridiculous distances and people voluntarily spending an entire day doing something that most people would consider completely insane.

And, of course, running 50 miles is a hell of a thing to do.

I finally won a race

Another reason this post-race period has been interesting is that I finally won a race.

I’ve raced for years. I’ve done everything from shorter triathlons to Ironman events and even the Ironman World Championship.

But I had never actually won a race.

A couple of weeks ago, I won the Camp Tri, a relatively small grassroots triathlon here in Ottawa.

I want to put that into perspective because it wasn’t exactly an elite field at a major international event. But it was still a race, there were more than 100 people in it, and I finished first.

That matters to me.

I actually finished second at the same race the previous year. So this year I went into it thinking, essentially, okay, what happens if I actually train for this thing?

Apparently, you win it.

It was a great day: clients racing, friends racing, hanging around the campground afterward and talking about the race. Exactly the kind of grassroots endurance event that makes the sport fun.

But the bigger reason I mention it is that it got me thinking about improvement.

Sometimes improvement is very obvious. You finish second one year and first the next.

Swimming is much less straightforward.

Why swimming is different

Cycling and running are relatively simple from a fitness perspective.

That doesn’t mean they’re easy.

But if you want to improve your ability to ride or run for a long time, there’s a fairly obvious relationship between training and adaptation.

You can improve your aerobic engine. You can increase your threshold. You can build volume. You can develop muscular endurance.

Swimming certainly involves fitness, but technique plays an enormous role in determining how effectively you interact with the water.

And that changes the improvement process.

If you’re swimming 2:30 per 100 metres, for example, the path toward becoming a 1:45-per-100-metre swimmer is not necessarily the same as the path from 2:15 to 2:00.

At some point, simply building a bigger engine isn’t enough.

You need to change the way you move.

Learning a correction isn't the same as making the correction

This is where I think a lot of swimmers get stuck.

You might go to a coach and discover that you’re dropping your elbow.

Or that you aren’t getting enough extension.

Or that your timing is off.

Or that you’re not maintaining an effective front-quadrant position.

Now you know what the problem is.

But knowing what the problem is doesn't mean you've solved it.

You might consciously fix it for five strokes.

Maybe you can hold the new position for a length.

Then you start thinking about something else, and suddenly you're back to doing exactly what you were doing before.

That's because the movement hasn't become automatic yet.

Whatever terminology you want to use—muscle memory, motor learning, neural pathways, habit formation—the basic idea is the same:

You need to perform the new movement enough times that your body starts doing it without requiring constant conscious attention.

That takes repetition.

A lot of repetition.

And repetition is boring

I know this because I’ve done it myself.

There have been technical changes in my own swimming that took months of drilling before they actually started to feel natural.

At one point, I spent an enormous amount of time working on the catch-up drill and related movements to improve the relationship between my arm, shoulder, torso rotation and lead arm.

It was boring.

It was repetitive.

There were plenty of sessions where I was thinking, I am so sick of doing this.

But eventually, the movement started to become more natural.

That’s the part of swimming improvement that I think gets overlooked.

We often assume that if a coach tells us what to change, and then we practice it occasionally, the problem will eventually disappear.

It doesn't necessarily work that way.

The limitation of group swim programs

This is where I want to be careful.

I am not arguing that group swim coaching is bad.

Quite the opposite.

Group programs have enormous value.

They provide accountability. They get you to the pool at 6 or 7 a.m. when you otherwise might not feel like going. They provide camaraderie and friendships. They create a little competitive environment. You can learn from other swimmers. You can learn from the coach.

I've benefited from group coaching myself.

As a coach, I also think it can be an excellent way to help a large number of athletes.

The question I'm asking is slightly different:

Is a group program necessarily the most efficient way to make a specific technical change to your stroke?

I don't think it always is.

Imagine you join a six-, eight- or ten-week swim program.

You show up. There's a workout on the board. You warm up. You do some drills. You swim some intervals. Maybe the coach watches you and tells you that you're dropping your elbow or that you need more glide.

You think about that correction for a few laps.

Then the workout moves on.

The next week, there's another workout.

There might be some drills, but those drills aren't necessarily the drills that address your specific problem.

And that's the key distinction.

Your improvement path is individual

There's probably no universal drill that represents the next logical step for every swimmer.

I like the catch-up drill a lot. I think a huge number of triathletes could benefit from working on aspects of their stroke that catch-up swimming addresses.

But that doesn't mean catch-up is automatically the right next step for every athlete.

Your stroke has its own problems.

Your body has its own movement patterns.

Your technical limitations are different from the person swimming next to you.

So your improvement path should be individual, too.

And even identifying the correct drill isn't enough.

You can't simply do a million metres of catch-up and assume you've fixed your stroke.

You have to understand what you're trying to change.

You have to know what the new movement should feel like.

You have to recognize whether you're actually performing the movement correctly.

And eventually, you have to integrate that movement back into normal swimming.

That's where the mental component becomes really important.

Don't just do the drill. Know what you're looking for.

Suppose you're using a drill to improve your timing.

The objective isn't simply:

Do this drill 100 times.

The objective is to understand what you're trying to create.

What should you feel?

What should your timing look like?

What should happen when you transition back into normal freestyle?

How do you know whether the change is actually carrying over?

That's a much more complicated process than simply checking a drill off a workout.

And it's why I think individual coaching can be particularly useful.

There's a difference between thinking you're making a change, actually making the change, and eventually making that change automatically.

Those are three different stages.

Return on training investment

I've been thinking about this in terms of what TrainingPeaks calls "return on training investment," or ROTI.

If you have an hour to swim, what is going to produce the biggest improvement?

Maybe it's swimming 3,000 metres of a conventional workout.

Maybe it's doing a group session.

But if you've identified one major technical limitation in your stroke, it might be spending a significant portion of that hour deliberately working on that one movement.

Not because it's the most entertaining workout.

Not because it gives you the biggest TrainingPeaks number.

Not because you're going to feel destroyed afterward.

But because you're trying to change the way you swim.

That can be a very high-return use of training time.

This is a long process

The other important point is that this doesn't happen overnight.

Technical changes can take months.

Sometimes longer.

The off-season is particularly valuable because you have more freedom to focus on this stuff.

During the racing season, you're trying to balance technique with volume, threshold, race-specific work and everything else required to prepare for an event.

But when you're further away from your next race, you have an opportunity to say:

This is the thing I'm going to work on.

And then work on it.

Over and over.

Until it becomes normal.

Then you move on to the next thing.

That's not a six-week transformation.

It can be a multi-month or multi-year process of gradually becoming a better swimmer.

So should you join a group swim program?

Yes.

Maybe.

If that's the best coaching option available to you, absolutely.

If you need accountability, camaraderie and motivation, absolutely.

If you need someone to watch you swim and identify things you could improve, absolutely.

There are plenty of reasons to participate in a group program that have nothing to do with technical correction.

What I would caution against is assuming that simply attending a coached swim program will automatically cause major technical changes to become permanent.

Learning what you need to change is one thing.

Changing it is another.

And making that change automatic is another step again.

If you can identify the one or two things in your stroke that are holding you back—and then deliberately, repeatedly and patiently work on those things until they become part of how you naturally swim—you may get a much bigger return from your training time.

It won't always be exciting.

It probably won't always be fun.

And, honestly, it may be boring as hell.

But if you want to make a meaningful technical improvement in your swimming, that's often where the real work happens.