Drills are the most misused thing on a pool deck. Not because they are wrong, but because swimmers treat them as a separate sport. Fifteen minutes of catch-up, then an hour of swimming the way they always swam, and nothing changes.
A drill is a way of taking one piece of the stroke, making it impossible to ignore, and then putting it back. The putting it back is the part almost everybody skips.
What are freestyle drills actually for?
A drill exists to give you feedback your normal stroke cannot, by removing something or exaggerating something until the fault has nowhere to hide.
Take an arm away and you find out how much the other side was covering for it. Slow the recovery down and you find out whether your body was rolling or your shoulder was reaching. The drill shows the fault, then you decide to swim differently.
Two rules follow. Know which fault you are hunting before you pick the drill, and end every drill set with normal freestyle at a real speed, so the correction has somewhere to go.
What does the catch-up drill fix?
Catch-up fixes a rushed front end: it buys you time to set the catch instead of pulling the moment your hand touches the water.
You swim normal freestyle, but one hand waits out in front until the other arrives and touches it. The exaggeration is time. With the lead arm parked there you cannot pull early, and you feel how long the hand can sit in a quiet position, wrist slightly bent and elbow a little higher than the hand.
It is also the drill most likely to break your stroke. Catch-up works because it is not a race stroke, and a swimmer who starts racing in it ends up with a stall in front of the head instead of a catch, which I wrote out in the post on the freestyle dead spot.
So touch the hands for a few lengths, then walk the touch point back to the forehead, then the goggles, then nothing. You are returning the drill to your stroke rather than hoping it carries over.
What does fingertip drag fix?
Fingertip drag fixes a lazy recovery and a body that has stopped rolling, because it makes both faults immediately obvious to you.
You let the fingertips of the recovering hand trail along the surface from the hip to the entry. For them to stay in contact without the arm feeling like a mess, the elbow has to ride above the hand and the body has to roll out of the way. If you are flat, your hand catches the surface and your shoulder complains within a length. That is the information.
This is the drill I would give first to most adult swimmers, because it treats recovery and rotation as one problem, which is what they are. More on each half in the posts on high elbow recovery and body rotation. One caution: do not let it become a shoulder shrug. The elbow rises because the torso turns.
What does single arm freestyle fix?
Single arm exposes one side of the stroke with nowhere to hide, which makes it the best diagnostic drill in freestyle and the one that most alters your body position while you do it.
One arm does the full stroke while the other stays extended in front or rests at the hip. Everything that side was getting away with shows up: a catch that slips, a pull that crosses the midline, a finish that quits before the hip. Alternate 25s by arm and one side is often a different swimmer.
It also changes the stroke more than swimmers realize. A study on changes in front crawl technique caused by different technical exercises opens with the plain version: "Some swimming exercises alter the rotation around the longitudinal axis of the body." For the variation with the non-executing arm held out in front, the authors explain the effect directly: "This was explained mainly by the fact that the extended arm restricted the rotation of the body, which caused the swimmer's body to lie flat in the water."
So the extended arm version flattens you out. Not a reason to drop the drill, a reason to keep the dose short, alternate with the arm at the hip, and finish on whole stroke.
Do swim drills really transfer to your stroke?
Not automatically, and the research is more skeptical about it than most pool decks are.
The same study concludes that "swimming exercises altered shoulder and hip rotation, especially when breathing", then adds the line every swimmer should sit with: "Therefore, its transference could be questionable." The authors go further: "Therefore, coaches should reconsider including these exercises in swimming programs."
I do not read that as a reason to stop drilling. I read it as a reason to stop treating the drill as the training. A drill gives you a sensation and a diagnosis. Whether your stroke keeps either at race speed is answered only by whole stroke swimming, which is why the set below alternates drill and swim at real speed.
How does SwimRead read the stroke you drill?
It reads your normal freestyle from the side, which is where you check whether the drill went anywhere.
SwimRead's home page describes the app as a way to "Record a short freestyle video, keep each swimmer's history together, and choose a focus to take into your next practice", and lists "General drills and a saved focus" among its features. The capture guide asks for "10 seconds continuous freestyle, landscape, side view", with the "Whole body in frame", a "Steady camera" and "Normal speed". Film the swimming, not the drill: it states that "The current beta analyzes freestyle filmed from the side of the pool."
It is honest about what it does not do, and so am I. Asked whether it scores your technique, the page answers "No. The current beta shows measurement availability, swimmer history, and a chosen training focus", and explains that "On-device pose detection estimates up to 33 body landmarks in sampled video frames." On privacy it says "Video stays on your phone. Technical measurements are sent to improve the analysis." Its own guidance names the habit worth copying: "Keep the filming comparable" and "Revisit the focus", so this week's clip and last week's argue about the same thing.
What does a freestyle drill set look like in practice?
Short doses, always paired with whole stroke, one fault at a time.
- 8 x 50: 25 fingertip drag, 25 freestyle at a real effort.
- 8 x 25 single arm, alternating arms, resting arm at the hip for four and extended in front for four. Count strokes on each side and note the gap.
- 6 x 50 catch-up, touch point moving back: hands, then forehead, then goggles.
- 4 x 100 as 25 drill of your choice, 75 freestyle holding what the drill just taught you.
- Finish with 4 x 50 freestyle on a fixed rest and run the times through the pace calculator. If the drilling is working, the same time arrives on fewer strokes before it arrives faster.
Pick one drill per block of weeks, not three, and film the 50s rather than the drills. If your catch looks the same after a month of drilling it, the drill was the workout rather than a tool.
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Drills are honest teachers and poor substitutes. I built SwimRead because the gap between what a drill feels like and what your stroke does is where most swimming years get spent. Its home page states that "SwimRead is free while in beta." If you want to see the stroke rather than the sensation, join the beta.