How to use Pacing, rotation and hypoxic breathing sets to improve your front crawl!

By focusing on improving your core driven body rotation which will help to make you more streamlined in the water, engage your more powerful core and hip muscles, and make your body cut through the water more like a speedboat with its V-shaped hull!

The result equals less drag and resistance and more distance per stroke which is great = more efficiency and lower stroke counts. We'll be checking stroke counts per length a lot over the next few weeks, and at the start and end of the rotational drills series this evening.

We also have a hypoxic swim set over 200 metres. I'll clarify what this is now to avoid lots of questions later.

It's basically a 200 metre set, split into continuous sets of 25 metres.

So you swim the whole 200m in one go, adjusting your breathing pattern every 25m.

It goes like this:

25m breathe every 3, 25 every 2

25m every 5, 25m every 2

25m every 7, 25m every 2

25m every 9, 25m every 2

I appreciate some of you may not get to 7 or 9 strokes holding your breath. I don't want you feeling like your head is going to explode, or pass out definitely! So if you can't go beyond 3 or 5 stick to that number. It will help you with improving your lung capacity, which then helps with your pacing, and also open water swimming, as it helps you to have some air in reserve if the water is cooler.

T pace is equivalent to your 80% of your max effort pace, which should feel hard yet sustainable. If you do a 1500 metre time trial or swim in a triathlon then it is this pace you're aiming for.