Stretch cords, buckets
Here it does get a little bit more tricky. Both methods require you to have at least a half a lane to yourself since you will be swimming attached to a cord, which is then attached to the pool deck.
Training with buckets is something that you will see in a lot of college teams throughout America. It is a very complicated set up that enables you to pull a cord (attached around you waist) that will lift a bucket (weights or water can be added in vary resistance) away from the ground. That allows you to work against gravity and with a constant resistance that pulls you back towards the wall.
A very similar way of training would be to use a stretch cord and attach it to the pool deck. The difference here is that you cannot vary the resistance of the cord since it will stay the same from cord to cord. Another difference is that the resistance is not constant as it will increase the further you get away from the pool deck (rubber cord).
Both ways are in my opinion an amazing way to work on your strength, but unfortunately very few of us get to toy around with bucket training and very few of us have a half a swim lane to ourselves.
Band
Let me tell you -- this little thing is the devil. It ties your feet together so that are unable to kick at all and you then start to swim without a pull buoy. Yes, your legs will sink and that will make it very hard to swim. This will get better the more you practice, but this is certainly something for the more advanced swimmers among you. Make sure to start with very small sets. Something like 8-12 x 50 will do the trick in the beginning.
Fins and paddles
This is in my opinion the most fun of all of the methods that I know about to develop strength in the pool. The reason for that is that we get to go so much faster than we normally would. The increased surface area on your hands and on your feet combined to with the additional drag that comes with the higher speed still makes this an amazing way to train your strength. Since you will go much faster that you normally would it will also enable to you to get a better feeling for drag and streamlining. You will find that the faster you go the more you will feel like a real swimmer and you will start to develop a feeling for where your body creates drag.
Butterfly
This last way of working on strength is very simple. Swim butterfly and you find out that it hurts in very similar spots like your freestyle does -- just a lot earlier! The butterfly and the freestyle pull are very similar which allows us to use butterfly sets for our freestyle strength work. As for the set with band, start our with small sets and maybe even with fins, and work your way up.
As you can see, you have plenty of new weapons in your arsenal that you can put to good use when you want to work on your strength. Please make sure that focus on your technique and that you start out small with the very challenging stuff.
Sample session:
- 100 warm up
- 6 x 100 (1*25streamline kick +75 distance per stroke 1*75pull +25kick) rest 15
- 8 x 50 (1 x 25 under water +25 easy 1 x 25 water polo freestyle + 25 easy), rest 30
- 4 x (200 pull w paddles negative split 70% + 2 x 100 fins + paddles 80%) pick an interval that gives you about 45 seconds rest for the 200s and about 25 seconds rest for the 100s
- 2 x 300 fins (100 free, 50 breast with fly kick, 100 free, 50 fly catch up), rest 20
- 8 x 50 fly with fins 80% pick an interval that gives you 30 seconds rest
- 200 loosen
Total: 3,900
Jan Wolfgarten is the swim coach for IRONMAN and 70.3 World Champion Sebastian Kienle, and founder of Swimazing, a web-based swim coaching platform. Beyond his weekly column here, you can look into his detailed program offerings at swimazing.com