14 Swimming Drills That Actually Improve Your Stroke

The most useful swimming drills for almost every level are catch-up freestyle, closed-fist freestyle, fingertip drag, single-arm freestyle, and the six-kick switch. They cover the four pieces that limit most swimmers. Body position, the catch, stroke timing, and kick. Drills are how good swimmers get faster without simply swimming more laps. This guide covers the drills that actually move the needle, the ones for beginners and for speed, and how to fit them into a real workout.

What Are Swimming Drills and Why Do They Work?

A swimming drill is a modified version of a stroke that exaggerates one element so you can train it in isolation. Take away the kick, lock one arm at your side, swim with closed fists. Each variation makes one piece of the stroke harder or more obvious so the rest of the body learns what it should do.

Drills work because the brain can only fix one thing at a time. Trying to think about head position, arm pull, kick timing, breathing, and rotation at once produces nothing. Isolating a single element and doing it slowly enough to feel it is how motor patterns change. The cue carries back into your normal stroke without you thinking about it.

Best Swimming Drills for Beginners

Beginners get the biggest gains from drills that fix body position and breathing, not advanced technique work. Most adult beginners struggle with sinking hips, panic on the breath, and a kick from the knees instead of the hips. The three drills below address all three.

Kick on Your Back in Streamline

Push off on your back, arms extended overhead in a streamline, and kick. The goal is for your knees to stay below the surface and your hips to stay near it. The drill builds an even up-and-down kick from the hips, which is the foundation for good body position.

Vertical Kicking

In water deep enough that your feet do not touch the bottom, hold your arms above the surface and kick from your hips to stay afloat. The drill exposes anyone kicking from the knees, because that pattern cannot produce enough propulsion to keep your head up. Two minutes teaches more about your real kick than fifty kickboard lengths.

Bobbing and Rhythmic Breathing

Stand in chest-deep water. Submerge with a slow exhale through the nose and mouth, then come up and inhale through the mouth in one beat. Repeat for 30 seconds. The drill removes the panic response that makes most adult beginners hold their breath underwater, which causes the chest tension that wrecks freestyle breathing. It is the single most effective fix for swimmers who feel out of breath after one length.

A reasonable beginner ratio is 75 percent drills, 25 percent full-stroke swimming, until your stroke holds together for one length without strain. Then flip the ratio and keep drills at 10 to 20 percent of total volume.

The Most Useful Freestyle Drills

Freestyle is where most pool time is spent and where most technique problems are easiest to fix. The drills below address body position, the catch, and stroke timing.

Closed-Fist Freestyle

Swim freestyle with your hands balled into fists. The smaller surface area forces your forearm to grab water on the pull, which trains the early vertical forearm position that good swimmers use to anchor the catch. When you open your hands again after 25 to 50 meters, you will feel a noticeable jump in pull power. A useful variation is to hold a tennis ball in each hand, which prevents the unconscious finger relaxation most swimmers do during fist drill.

Catch-Up

Swim freestyle, but only move one arm at a time. The non-working arm stays extended in front of you until the other arm finishes its full stroke and meets it. The drill exaggerates extension and fixes a common problem where swimmers pull too early, before their lead arm has finished reaching forward.

Fingertip Drag

During the recovery phase, drag your fingertips across the water surface instead of swinging your arm wide. This forces a high elbow during recovery, which sets up a clean hand entry and reduces shoulder strain. Some elite sprinters use a straight-arm recovery, so this drill suits distance and technique-focused swimmers more than sprinters.

Single-Arm Freestyle

Swim with one arm and keep the other arm at your side. Alternate arms every 25 meters. The asymmetry forces you to kick harder and rotate more aggressively, which exposes any imbalance between your left and right sides. Most swimmers discover their non-dominant side is significantly weaker.

Six-Kick Switch

Push off in a side-lying streamline position, lower arm extended forward, upper arm at your side. Take six fast kicks while staying on your side, then take one freestyle stroke, rotate to the other side, and take six more kicks. The drill builds body rotation and teaches you to swim from your hips rather than your shoulders.

Swimming Drills for Speed

Speed comes from two things, more force per stroke and a faster stroke rate. The drills below target both. They suit swimmers who already have a clean basic stroke, since speed work on bad mechanics locks in the bad mechanics.

Overkick with Stroke Count

Swim normal freestyle but cut your usual stroke count by 20 to 30 percent without losing pace. If you usually take 20 strokes per 25 meters, drop to 14 or 16 while holding the same time. The kick has to do more work to keep you moving forward, which trains both leg power and distance per stroke. This is one of the few drills that builds speed and efficiency at the same time.

Golf 50s

Swim 25 meters slow and long, counting your strokes. Swim the next 25 fast and try to match or beat your stroke count from the slow length. Add your stroke count and your time to get a golf score. Lower scores mean better efficiency at speed. Repeat 4 to 6 times. The drill makes the trade-off between pace and stroke length tangible, and stops swimmers from churning faster strokes that do not actually move them faster.

Sprint with Closed Fists

Swim 25-meter sprints with closed fists. Hard intervals with no hand surface area force your forearm and lat to do all the work, which builds the muscular pattern needed for a powerful sprint pull. Open your hands for the next 25 and feel what a full pull does at race pace.

Drills for the Other Three Strokes

Each of the other three competitive strokes has its own technical bottleneck. Backstroke needs body position. Breaststroke needs timing between pull, glide, and kick. Butterfly needs undulation and a strong dolphin kick.

Backstroke

Six-kick switch on your back is the cleanest backstroke drill for body position. Lie on your back with one arm extended overhead and the other at your side, kick six times, then take one stroke and switch. The drill keeps your hips from sinking, the most common backstroke problem.

A second useful drill is double-arm backstroke, where both arms recover together. It is awkward, but it removes the rotation crutch and forces you to balance on your back while both arms are out of the water.

Breaststroke

Two-kick, one-pull breaststroke is the standard timing drill. Take two full kicks for every one arm pull, with a long glide between cycles. The drill exposes whether you are rushing the timing, which is what most breaststrokers do under fatigue.

Pull-buoy breaststroke pull, with no kick at all, isolates the upper body and forces a clean sweep-and-recover motion. It also helps swimmers with an asymmetric kick by removing the kick entirely.

Butterfly

Single-arm butterfly is the most useful butterfly drill for almost every level. Keep one arm extended forward, pull and recover with the other, and take a full butterfly kick on each cycle. Breathe to the side of the working arm. The drill cuts the workload in half so you can focus on timing the second kick with the hand exit, where most butterflies fall apart.

Three-three-three is a popular sequence. Three strokes of right-arm-only butterfly, three strokes of left-arm-only, three strokes of full butterfly, repeat. It builds rhythm without the exhaustion of full-stroke butterfly for an entire length.

How to Structure Drills in a Workout

Drills work best when mixed with normal swimming, not done in isolation. The standard format is short drill segments alternated with full-stroke swimming, so you can immediately apply the cue you just trained.

A simple drill structure looks like this:

Repeat the 100 m block three or four times for a focused 300 to 400 m drill set. Drills do not need to make up your whole workout. Ten to twenty percent of total volume is enough for technique gains in most experienced swimmers.

A few guidelines that matter more than the specific drill choice:

1. Pick one drill per workout, not five. Spreading attention across many drills produces nothing.

2. Slow down. If you cannot feel what the drill is supposed to teach, you are swimming it too fast.

3. Get feedback. Doing a drill wrong reinforces the wrong pattern. Video yourself with a phone in a waterproof case, or have a coach watch.

What Pool Setup Do You Need to Practice Drills?

A 25-meter lap pool is the standard environment for drill work. The wall every 25 meters lets you reset your push-off, restart your streamline, and run drills in clean segments.

The harder situation is a small backyard pool. Most home pools are 8 to 12 meters, which is not enough distance to feel a drill before you hit the wall. The usual workaround is to swim against a swim jet that pushes a steady current at you. The current replaces the lap, and you stay in place while the water does the work of moving past your body.

For drill work specifically, a swim jet with adjustable flow speed is more useful than a fixed-power unit. Drills are slow by nature. You need to be able to drop the current low for catch work, then crank it up for stroke-rate or sprint drills. The iGarden Swim Jet P fits this case because the flow speed adjusts across 5 current modes, and it runs on continuous power so a 45 minute drill session does not run into a battery limit.

FAQs

How often should you do swimming drills?

Most coaches recommend including drills in every workout, but only as a small portion of total volume. Ten to twenty percent of your total swim, or roughly 200 to 400 meters in a typical 2,000 meter session, is enough to drive technique gains without sacrificing fitness work. Beginners can start higher, around 75 percent drills, and lower the ratio as their full-stroke swimming holds together.

Do you need fins or paddles for swimming drills?

Most foundational drills work without equipment. Fins are useful for kick-heavy drills like the six-kick switch or butterfly undulation work, because they provide enough propulsion to maintain body position. Paddles are more advanced and best added once your stroke is solid, since bad form with paddles can stress the shoulders.

What swimming drills are good for kids?

Kids learning to swim benefit most from drills that build comfort and body position, not technique refinement. Bobbing for breath control, streamline glides off the wall, and kicking on a kickboard are the three that almost every learn-to-swim program uses. Once kids can swim a full freestyle length, catch-up freestyle is the easiest drill to introduce because it slows the stroke down.

Why does my stroke feel worse after drilling?

Stroke awareness usually goes up faster than stroke quality. After a focused drill set, you start noticing flaws you previously swam past, which can feel like getting worse even when you are getting better. The fix is to keep drilling and trust that the awareness will resolve into better mechanics over the next few sessions.