An athlete told me proudly that he did twenty minutes of drills at the start of every swim. I asked what each one was for. He could not answer for a single one of them.
He had inherited a list, and he was doing the list, and the list was eating a third of his pool time every week. His stroke had not changed in two years, which is exactly what you would predict.
A drill is not a virtuous activity. It is a tool with a specific job, and if you cannot name the job, do not do the drill.
The Test for Whether a Drill Is Working
Swim fifty metres normally. Do the drill for fifty. Then swim fifty normally again.
If that last fifty feels different, the drill is doing something. If it feels identical, you have just done a length of something that is not swimming, and you have got better at that instead.
That is the whole test, and almost nobody applies it. Drills are supposed to exaggerate one element so that when you return to full stroke, that element has moved. Any drill that does not produce a change in the fifty afterwards is decoration.
The Six I Actually Use
Six kick on the side. On your side, one arm extended, one on your hip, kicking gently, breathing by rotating the face up. Six kicks, then switch. This teaches rotation from the hips and body position at the same time, and it is where I start with almost everybody because it exposes both problems at once.
Scull, in three positions. Hands out front, then mid-catch, then near the hips. Small figure-of-eight movements, feeling pressure on the palm and forearm. This is the only drill I know that directly teaches the feel of holding water, which is the thing the catch depends on and the thing that cannot be explained in words.
Doggy paddle, head down. Ugly, unpopular, and the single best drill for the high elbow catch. Because the arms stay in front and underwater, you cannot cheat by dropping the elbow and pulling straight through.
Fists. Swim normally with your hands closed. It removes your paddle and forces the forearm to do the work, which is exactly where the propulsion should be coming from. Open your hands afterwards and the water feels thick.
Single arm, with the other arm at your side rather than out front. Trailing arm at the side forces you to rotate to breathe and stops you resting on an extended arm. It also exposes an asymmetry immediately.
And catch-up, done properly, which almost nobody does.
The One Everyone Ruins
Catch-up is the most commonly performed and most commonly damaged drill in the sport.
The intent is to teach front quadrant timing: keep one arm extended until the other has entered, so the stroke stays long. The way most people do it is to wait, motionless, hand touching hand, for a full beat before the next arm goes.
That teaches a dead spot. You are rehearsing a pause, and a pause in the water means deceleration, which means the next stroke starts from a slower speed. Athletes who do a lot of badly performed catch-up develop a stroke with a stall in it, and then wonder why their stroke count is good and their times are not.
The fix is to never let the hands actually meet. Start the catch with the front arm as the other arm is entering, so there is overlap but no stop. If you are touching your hands together, you are doing a different drill to the one you think.
How Much Drill Work
Less than you are doing. Ten minutes, integrated into a session rather than piled at the start.
And always paired. Drill fifty, swim fifty, drill fifty, swim fifty. The swimming afterwards is not a rest, it is the point. It is where the change either transfers into your actual stroke or does not, and if it never transfers you have learned something useful about that drill.
The mistake is doing twenty minutes of drills and then a main set at a pace where technique falls apart entirely. You spent twenty minutes practising a shape and then forty minutes practising the opposite.
The Uncomfortable Part
Drills will not fix a stroke on their own, and I want to be honest about that because the industry sells them as though they will.
What changes a stroke is somebody watching it, telling you what is wrong, giving you one thing to work on, and watching again. Drills are how you work on that one thing between sessions. Without the diagnosis, they are a lottery, and you may well be drilling something that is already fine.
If you have never had anyone watch you swim, that is the highest-value thing you can do for your swimming, and no amount of independent drill work substitutes for it.
The Bottom Line
Six drills, ten minutes, always paired with swimming immediately after so you can feel whether anything transferred.
Do not let your hands touch in catch-up. And if you cannot say what a drill is for, take it out of your session, because it is currently costing you pool time and giving you nothing back.
