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Freestyle Training
FREESTYLE CORE FUNDAMENTALS
Freestyle Training
These are the bedrock principles of freestyle that remain the most effective way to move forward through the water. Small tweaks in different aspects of the freestyle technique has, and will change over time as new discoveries are made but the bedrock core fundamentals remain the same. These are the very core basics that need to be mastered in order to swim efficient freestyle.
Freestyle Training
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There are many different ways you can train to improve your freestyle and these will all differ depending on your goals. There are a few aspects of freestyle training that remain constant across all varied forms of training for improvement.
1. Technique comes first.
2. You need to create a stress within your body in order to adapt.
3. You need to allow time for your body to recover so it can adapt to the stress.
4. You need to apply consistent training over a long period.
1. Technique comes first.
You can do all the training in the world, but you will always be limited to how efficient your freestyle technique is.
This is why technique comes first. Spend time learning proper technique, and always continue to work on improving your technique even during heavy training loads.
2. You need to create a stress within your body in order to adapt.
The human body needs to be exposed to stress in order to grow and adapt. Stress means pushing yourself with training and pushing yourself with technical work.
There is no substitute for hard work. If you want to see change, you need to embrace some physical and mental stress.
3. You need to allow time for your body to recover so it can adapt to the stress.
Along with exposing your body to stress, this needs to be in balance with recovering.
To achieve maximum adaptation, you need to let your body heal and grow after you have stressed it. Once you have allowed your body to heal and grow you will be ready to expose it to a higher level of stress, which will result in even more adaptation.
Failing to do this will cause a plateau in the improvement cycle. If you are not letting yourself heal and grow after stress exposure, you will not be able to expose yourself to higher levels of stress. Therefore causing a plateau.
4. You need to apply consistent training over a long period.
The improvement cycle of technique, stress, recovery needs to be repeated many times in order to accumulate small improvements at a time.
These small improvements that accumulate will result in noticeable larger improvements over a long time.
This is why a more consistent athlete will often beat a more talented athlete over time.
