Freestyle Swim Catchup Drill Technique

Описание: Today’s focus is catch up drill in freestyle. It’s simple in concept: one hand catches up to the other before you initiate your next catch. Despite its simplicity there’s a lot of benefit to it. It can help bring focus and development to parts of your stroke whether athletes are conscious of it or not. The catch in the front, the finish of the pull in the back, your body roll, and body posture in the water. Which I’ll elaborate on later.

I think Catch up drill is one of the first places younger kids learn that not everything in competitive swimming is a race. Slow it down, Break it down into parts, reduce stroke count, feel yourself gliding through the water.

You’ll notice strong kick in these swimmers demonstrating, even the little ones. These kicks DO NOT always look like this. The slower stroke rate and therefore slower speed, the body rotation, required balance drive a more natural kick. These kids knew they were being recorded, but received no guidance on the kick.

So remember before I mentioned body posture in the water. Note this swimmers body position in the freeze frames. Catch up is great for warmup and warm down for exactly this purpose. Take a look at these two people, or even imagine 2 people standing. One nice and tall and the slouching and droopy. Have your parents ever told you to stand up straight? Which person do you think is going to have a better catch up drill.

The second drill covered here is an extension of basic catch up swimming. It’s the same thing as catch-up except you’re using a physical object to make sure you don’t cheat. It’s a great addition into warm-ups. It forces kids to kick which raises the heart rate making it great for warm up. Kids usually complain when they see stick in the workout. so generally speaking its got to be good for them.

There are a couple drawbacks with stick. Eyes drift forward to see the stick, which drops the hips and compromises perfect body position. However, given the positives, I’ll take the negative.

Watch how this swimmer does a great job pushing the stick forward after the exchange to promote extension and good body rotation.
Special thank you to Bryan Zapata and Sofia Rojas for being the primary examples in the drill.