Questions and Answers - July 2004 edition
by Dan Thompson

THE STROKE DRILL ~ Swimming's Sine Qua Non

Preface

This is a stroke-drill article I wrote while age-group coach at Texas Aquatics. Age-groupers are great fun. They are loyal and formative, their fast-growing minds and bodies almost plastic. They learn a perfect streamline in a matter of weeks—whereas their older teammates, with ingrained habits, lesser suppleness, and pubescent pride—can take a full season. Masters swimmers too are hampered by stiffness and habitual movement patterns. But like the kids, they are rarely stubborn. They enjoy theory and respond best when they understand the conceptual underpinnings of their own training programs. Presented here, then—in vocabulary intended for that nemesis of the age-group coach, the age-group parent—is a conceptual account of the stroke drill: what it really is, why it works, and why it is the sine qua non of competent training.

The only good drill, though, is a tough drill. Quoting from the last Coaches’ Corner, "The drill you come up with should be difficult, damned difficult—because it exposes and amplifies your hidden technical weaknesses. If you like stroke drills, the way some folks like kick sets (because it feels good hanging onto a kick-board and discussing Kant with your lane mates), then I assure you that while you may be doing a recovery set of some kind, you are not doing a stroke drill. It may be a stroke drill for the other guy, but it is not one for you."

Observe any big meet, even including the Olympic Games, and you will see stroke flaws in almost every champion. In less gifted athletes, these flaws can be caused by inborn impediments, like tight shoulder ligaments, and would be correctable only by a retooling in the womb! But at the elite level, where natural talent flows like the water that exhibits it, these flaws are not anatomic. They are bad habits of movement that can be corrected by the kind of coach who is not afraid to enforce a serious regimen of drills. The swimmer deprived of this essential work suffers a sort of vitamin deficiency of the training diet that can cripple good technique.

From Texas Times, April, 1996:

It happens toward the end of every season—always amazing to me but no longer surprising. A swimmer comes up before practice and says, "Coach Dan, when are we finally going to do some stroke work? My mom says my butterfly doesn’t look right, and STAGS is only three weeks away." My reply—by now fairly standard—is, "But we’ve been working on technique all season. Almost everything we do is stroke oriented!" The swimmer then gives a puzzled look, an expression I feel sure will be echoed on the face of the parent.

What leads to this scenario is my own difficulty in dealing with preconceptions that swimmers and parents bring into the program from their experiences in swimming lessons—where a teacher shows children "how to swim." There is the idea that the more time the coach spends in this manner, the more perfect the swimmer’s strokes will become. There is also the idea that a difference exists between the act of teaching good stroke technique and the process of training to swim fast, as if one should come before the other. Some swimmers even get put in secret "private lessons." It is fitting as we begin the summer season that I take another shot at dispelling these common myths.

By no means will you ever catch me saying that swimmers don’t need frequent reminders about certain items—such as streamlining and the technique of starts, turns and finishes. They do! And whips and chains can’t make me say that strokes don’t need detailing once the core fundamentals are established. They do! What I am saying is that basic stroke mechanics—what translates into 98% of the potential for speed, and the teaching and training of which ought to constitute 90% of an age-group coach’s effort—are best achieved by a different process.

THAT PROCESS IS THE STROKE DRILL!

Now there are about a billion and a half stroke drills out there. Most are of dubious worth because they treat effects as though the effects were causes. There are only a very few "real" stroke drills—difficult to master because they cut through to the core mechanics of swimming: body alignment, stroke rhythm, and timing between rhythm and the pulling pattern. One of these is the one-arm-only backstroke, emphasizing body rotation, with the non-stroking arm held to the side. If the coach is a perfectionist and the swimmer gives honest effort, these real drills actually liberate the swimmer’s innate talent for beautiful, swift swimming—obviating the need for the old swimming-lesson approach.

A strange sounding concept isn’t it? So let’s rephrase it. Good stroke drills—those that target fundamental movements, not peripheral ones—will free the swimmer’s own talent, like the genie of the lamp, to learn smooth, efficient stroke technique.

So the rumor that I don’t coach technique is actually true. I definitely do not coach technique! I coach drills—which by the way, I find more challenging—and I let the drills do the hard work of teaching technique. This is one reason I do not need an army of assistants to produce a team whose strokes I can be proud of. These real stroke drills create 80% of proper stroke technique. Only after they have worked their magic is it necessary to polish up individually, to take care of the remaining 20%.

It is essential, though, that drills constitute rigorous training. They must be made a main set—social set," as kick sets often become—and the coach must be ever vigilant to enforce proper technique. The reason is that competitive swimming is a skill sport more like ice skating and gymnastics than golf, billiards, or baseball. That is, proper technique cannot be learned unless at the same time the athlete develops a great deal of strength-endurance.

We must keep in mind, though, that there are varying degrees of talent on every team. I cannot bestow talent. I cannot put in what God left out. But I am convinced, after three years of empirical testing, that Gold Team drills do maximize the swimmer’s talent to learn the fundamentals of each stroke. If after a few seasons of consistent attendance and effort, the swimmer’s butterfly, for instance, is not of Olympic caliber, it is no fault of the swimmer, the coach, or anyone else. And it is not because the swimmer could not afford the $80 per hour stroke lessons. It is simply that Mother Nature did not bless the swimmer with an inbred ability to swim the stroke. She did not bless me with an "ear" for music (especially rap), and she did not bless every dedicated swimmer with the "feel" for fly.

Let’s take the case of Brett McMillian—our first Gold Team national champion (11-12 boys 100M backstroke). Did drills give Brett the desire to succeed? No. Did they give him strands of DNA laced with backstroking talent? No, again. His parents did a splendid job taking care of that! But tough Gold Team drills did build his backstroke from lackluster beginnings. They did so by freeing Brett’s talent to develop itself fully in the tangible world of backstroking mechanics and speed.

Brett exemplifies the most exciting part of age-group coaching. The coach rarely knows how much undeveloped talent exists within the swimmer until the drills begin to do their job. Not one of our top Gold Team swimmers has been overly impressive coming into the program. It’s like that box of chocolates—you know, the one Forrest keeps talking about: "You never know what you are going to get." And yes, miracles do happen every day. But its those tough Gold Team drills that get the magic going.

Now is the time, early in the season, when the foundation is laid for the great swims of the summer. Now is the time that Gold Team drills do their best work, brick by stroke-drilling brick. For the first six weeks in fact we simply refuse to swim at all! Yes, you heard it right . . . drill sets only, two hours each day, every day. Why? Because the old, entrenched habits still linger in our strokes. And we refuse to let those old habits extinguish the fresh, delicate patterns of muscle memory that our stroke drills are teaching us. (Imagine trying to stop biting your nails by not to biting them on the right hand while you keep chewing away on the left!) Then--when old habits are finally effaced by new ones—mentally, begin to swim again—allowing new technique to rise from sturdy foundations. By this method, we undo bad habits that crept back into our strokes during the short-course competition phase, and we strengthen our overall base of fundamental stroke mechanics.

This process is called "building muscle memory." It’s how new habits displace bad ones and become automatic. Kinesiologists have figured out that this process takes at least 20,000 repetitions of a single athletic movement. In swimming, we have four strokes, each of which contains three or four fundamental movements. You do the arithmetic! That’s why we ban full-stroke swimming from the early season program. That’s why we drill . . . and drill . . . and drill some more . . . and even more . . . and do it now!

SO TEAM, THE BIG MESSAGE IS:

DRILL WORK IS STROKE WORK.

AND STROKE WORK IS NOW!

Send your swimming technique questions to Dan Thompson at thommed@bellsouth.net.