It can be tempting to try to use our arms ever more forcefully, and simply try harder, to get faster in the water. And don’t get me wrong. There’s absolutely a place for speed work, threshold work, and fundamentally developing your fitness and VO2 max in the water. I’ve never been one to believe it’s all about fitness or all about technique – I believe it’s a mix of both (and metabolic testing can demonstrate this by showing exactly how much potential speed is lost due to fitness compared to the world’s top swimmers, versus technique, measured as economy).

But back to the subject at hand. Technique can absolutely be about developing a better and stronger arm pull that catches, holds, and pushes more water…but before we even get there, we need to optimize body position.

Why? Because a balanced body position is essential to proper stroke mechanics. And a long, narrow, streamlined body position can dramatically reduce drag, lengthen the natural glide in your stroke, and get you from point A to point B faster and smoother with no additional energy cost. In fact, that’s the very point: reducing the energy cost of moving through the water.

Let’s dive in.

A Balanced Body Position

Total Immersion describes it as “pressing down on your buoy,” while other swim methodologies describe the sensation as almost “swimming downhill.”

The crux of the matter is that your lungs, when filled with air, essentially act as a buoy or flotation device…and given they’re closer to your head than your feet, your front end naturally wants to float while your back end…well, can easily sink.

The solution isn’t just about kicking harder. (In fact, the kick really should NOT be part of the solution.) Instead, it’s about balancing over the lungs by keeping your head looking straight down and pressing your front end downward so that your back end pops up and you end up flat in the water.

Looking forward is also an innate tendency for many of us, in part because we want to see where we’re going. But to have a shot at good body position, you need to be looking at the black line below you.

As you focus on swimming a few lengths with this in mind, you can even slow your stroke rate. With better flotation and body position, there’s often less of that hurried need to get to the next stroke.

A Longer Glide (& Swimming On Your Side!)

With the body balanced, the next step (given we’re all about reducing drag right now) is to ensure a nice, long, streamlined glide phase in your stroke.

The fastest shape to swim in is elongated on your side. You don’t want to swim flat on your stomach, which some swim instructors have likened to being “like a barge.” Rather, you want to slice through the water on one side, then the other, thinking of yourself instead as a long, skinny racing boat. (The arm extended in front of you as you reach forward adds to your length…so make sure you extend it fully and have it slice through the water as the front end of your metaphorical ship.)

This side-to-side rotation will also come to play a valuable role in producing force from your hips and core, but we’ll get to that in a future article. For now, know that good swimming happens on your side, includes that rotational element, and has you extending your arm fully in front of you to glide through the water.

Again, slowing down your stroke rate can help exaggerate and ingrain this glide phase. You want “tautness,” as Gerry Rodrigues of Tower 26 describes it, combined with a long, thin profile through the water. In turn, you’ll carry a lot less pool water with you – and be faster for it.

Pulling Straight Backwards With Intention

Okay, I actually do want to end this article with one stroke propulsion tip because it builds specifically on the two skills above, and as such, this feels like an intentional step-wise progression you can take with you to your next pool session.

A balanced body position and longer, more effective glide phase on your side should set you up to be less reliant on fast strokes. Your back end is no longer sinking, forcing you to compensate with hurried strokes simply to keep yourself up and moving forward. In this longer, more relaxed position, see if you can truly pause before starting your stroke and then initiate it with intention – by which I mean pulling straight backwards. (Think of the often-discussed “high elbow catch” or “early vertical forearm,” but I might just rename it “pulling with intention.”)

If your stroke is pushing downward (often the result of sinking or struggling to breathe ), you’re only exacerbating poor body position and not truly propelling yourself in the direction you want to go, which is forward. You want to push that water straight backwards – think toward your toes, or toward the wall behind you – to optimize your own forward momentum. As we learned in high school science, exerting force on the water backward produces an equal and opposite reaction that propels you forward.

You can probably see now why correct body position is key to an effective backward-pushing stroke. And just as we wanted a long glide, we also want to extend through the full length of our stroke, finishing all the way to the hip.

If we want to get really fancy, we can start thinking about feeling that hip and core connection add rotational force as we move from side to side with each stroke…but, as mentioned, that’s the subject for another article!

Happy swimming.