Guidance on Working With Drills

What are Drills?

In the most common understanding, drills are activities we use to isolate a part of your body position or movement pattern and make it easier to focus on that part to train it or correct it.

A drill can be fast or slow, active or passive, moving or stationary, whole stroke or just a part of it.

A drill requires attention and understanding of exactly what you are trying to learn or correct.  The whole point is that a drill enables the mind to focus and improve control. Only when you are focusing attention on the skill purpose of the drill is effective drilling is occurring. If not, it does not matter how many repetitions you do.

The main purposes of a drill…

• To slow things down in order to expose improvement opportunities (weak spots)
• To isolate a certain area of the stroke so that specific corrections can be made one at a time
• To give the brain the ideal conditions it needs to make motor corrections and imprint them deeply
• To refocus the swimmer’s attention
• To heighten the swimmer’s sensitivity to external and internal feedback
• To rest one area of the body/brain so that another can be challenged without distraction or competition for resources

There is also a ‘drill mode’ mindset – this is where you maybe be doing what appears to be normal speed, whole stroke swimming to someone looking from the outside, but inside you are still focusing intently on  improving some feature of your technique – we call this ‘whole stroke swimming with cues’. You could even be in the mode while doing a racing event! It’s a matter of paying attention and having an intention to protect or correct some feature of your performance.

Types of Drills

There are different types of drills we may use:

• Visualization
• Rehearsals (on land, or standing up)
• Stationary drills
• Limited movement drills (isolating just a part of the movement)
• Slower-motion whole stroke
• Whole stroke with modifications

Drill work is often assumed to require moving slowly, though that doesn’t always need to be the case. And Slower does not necessarily mean Easy. One way you can adjust the challenge level of the drill is to change the speed of your movements. If you are having a hard time successfully controlling the movement then slow it down. If it is getting too easy then speed it up.

One of the mantras in martial arts is, “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” Another we use is, “Slow it down to speed it up”. The idea behind this is that we need to establish precise neural control over the movement skill – to hook up the wire in the brain through slow, careful movement – and once that wire is hooked up we make it stronger by gradually turning up the challenge level of the work we are doing around that skill. As it get stronger the command signal will become more precise and travel faster – the movement skill will become easier to execute, faster and more powerful.

There are different purposes to doing drills at different movement speeds and intensity (amount of force or power applied). We can do them in these different ways:

1. Slow speed, low intensity when first getting a grasp of a new skill
2. Slow speed, higher intensity when building more strength around the skill
3. Moderate or higher speeds, low intensity when building higher precision and fine timing
4. Moderate or higher speeds, higher intensity when building resilience to performance stress

Each combination has a particular purpose and are very effective when applied to different parts of your skill development.

Moving from Drills to Whole Stroke

You use drills in order to no longer need them any more. You are practicing in order to master swimming, not to master drilling. The idea is to start with simple drills to get a grasp of the new skill. As your skills get stronger the drills gradually increase in the level of challenge taking you into whole stroke swimming and then to whole stroke swimming in challenging conditions.

Some people can get stuck in drills as an end in themselves, avoiding whole stroke altogether, but this is not what they are intended for. The point is not to become good at doing drills, but to become good at whole stroke swimming, and then to take that whole stroke where ever you want to go. Drills are a tool, not a rule. Use drills when they help, and don’t use them when they don’t help. When the drill is not help that is a sign you need to redesign the drill until it does. You must know the skill you are working on and how the drill is meant to strengthen it, and it has to hold your attention with the right amount of challenge – too easy and you will tune out, and if too hard you will get frustrated. 

Here is a progression of mixing drills and whole stroke…

• Set that involve only drills, no whole stroke
• Alternating between drills and whole stroke
• Whole stroke with drills used for active rest between repeats
• Whole stroke with drills used for a tune up just before each set
• Whole stroke swimming with cues (in the ‘drill mode’ mindset)

In early stages of your development you may spend a lot of time doing drills. In later stages of your development you may spend nearly all your time doing whole stroke with cues. Even when advanced, when you take up a new skill or make a significant change to one of your patterns, then you may temporarily revert to spending time doing more drills around that new skill to help it get wired into your body and then more quickly return to whole stroke swimming most of the time.

When to Change Drills or Adjust them

Two important concepts to think about:

1. Failure Rate
2. Autonomous Control

Failure Rate

It is good to start with a drill that allows you to most easily execute the skill – you need to see and feel that you can successfully do it under easiest conditions.

But to get stronger you need to challenge your control over it right up to the failure point. You will do best and the work will be most interesting to you when the drill is challenging enough that you have to really give your best attention to it to avoid failure.

If the drill has you failing more than half of the time, and you are not making useful observations (learning from) the failures, then the drill is too hard. In this case, you may need to reduce the challenge level slightly.

If he drill is so easy that you can easily execute the skill without failure nearly all the time, then it might be a good reminder, but you risk losing attention. In this case, you may need to increase the challenge level slightly.

The sweet spot for drill challenge is where you are working right up to your failure point, and experiencing failure maybe 10% to 30% of the time and it requires your full attention to keep it there. It is also important that you are understanding what is causing the failure, that you are learning from it.  

Autonomous Control

What you are ultimately aiming for is to autonomous control over the skill, or in other words, you are able to execute the skill, under challenging conditions, without having to pay attention to it. It is wired into your brain and body and even under stress your body moves the way you trained it to move.

At some point drill are just not going to be challenging enough. You will want to subject your skill to whole stroke swimming. And then easy whole stroke swimming will not be challenging enough, and you will want to subject it to more difficult conditions, like focusing on other things, going higher speeds, longer distances, in rougher water, or in other race-like conditions. You will have practiced executing this skill under challenging conditions so often that it your brain becomes able to control that skill without your conscious attention on it.

There is no way around the gradual increasing challenge of the work that must be done. To provoke this development in the most enjoyable way you get to learn the art of setting your drill complexity right in your optimal level of challenge, and keep it there – not too much and not too little. From the effect of hundreds of successful repetitions sprinkled with enough failure, of work done in a variety of forms, your abilities will increase (which means your failure point will move back) and you will keep incrementally increasing the drill complexity (i.e. the challenge level) to stay near the edge of your abilities and keep provoking them to grow.

If you find the work boring, then there is a problem in the drills design, or in the attention or in the intention of your work.