By Chris Webb on SwimSwam
By Chris Webb · Director, GAINswim
If you are not fast, you cannot compete.
That sentence is more true at the elite level today than it has ever been. Which raises a question most clubs do not answer well:
Where does speed actually come from?
The honest answer is that speed is a skill.
Not a gift. Not a genetic ceiling you either have or do not have. It is a teachable, trainable, and developable quality that begins in the nervous system of a young child and continues to be refined into a swimmer’s twenties and beyond.
IT STARTS YOUNG, AND IT STARTS ON LAND
There are sensitive periods in a child’s development, beginning roughly between the ages of six and ten, when the nervous system is more responsive to coordination, locomotion, and rapid motor learning than it will be again at any other point in life. This is when athletes are best equipped to learn complex movement patterns.
General athletic skills precede sport-specific skills.
A child who can skip, hop, gallop, bound, change direction, climb, hang, throw, catch, and roll, a child whose body has a robust movement library, is going to learn to swim faster than a child who has been doing nothing but laps since age seven.
Land coordination is not a substitute for water work. It is the foundation underneath the water work.
Children who move well on land tend to learn movement in the water more quickly. They acquire technical skills faster, adapt to coaching more effectively, and build more athletic solutions when challenges arise.
Speed at ten is largely a function of coordination, motor learning, technique, and the nervous system’s window for rapid skill acquisition.
Speed at twenty is a function of coordination, technique, force production, neuromuscular efficiency, race tactics, and the accumulated work of a decade of correct progressions.
Speed at thirty, for those who get there, is often a function of having protected the technique and the body well enough to continue expressing what was built.
TECHNIQUE SETS THE CEILING
Speed in the water is a function of two things: producing force and reducing drag.
This is why technical improvements often lead to speed improvements more reliably than physical training improvements do, particularly before strength becomes a major contributor.
When we teach technique, we start with the end in mind.
We look at the fastest swimmers in the world and ask what they have in common.
The honest answer is that they do not all look the same.
The freestyle pull of a 1500-meter Olympic finalist looks different from the freestyle pull of a 100-meter Olympic finalist. Bodies vary. Styles vary. Event demands vary.
But underneath the visible variation are positions that almost all elite swimmers share.
In skill acquisition theory, these are often referred to as attractor wells: stable movement solutions that the system repeatedly gravitates toward because they are efficient and effective.
The high-elbow catch. The timing of the breath. The body line. The kick rhythm.
These are not matters of preference. They are the biomechanical positions that physics rewards. They maximize force production into the water and minimize drag against it.
Style, in this framework, is any variation that does not violate those underlying attractors.
Some swimmers carry a higher hand recovery. Some breathe predominantly to one side. Some sweep slightly wider during the catch than others.
Those differences matter far less than whether the foundational positions are intact.
The developmental challenge for coaches is helping young swimmers find these attractors early, before inefficient patterns become deeply ingrained and difficult to change.
TRAINING RAISES THE FLOOR
Young athletes should be exposed to the full scope of the sport.
Sprint events. Middle-distance events. Distance events.
They should train for all of them and race all of them for as long as possible.
The athletes who specialize too early, who become “50 and 100 swimmers” at age twelve simply because that is where they are currently successful, often limit their long-term development.
A broad base creates more options later.
Eventually, event selection naturally narrows. It usually narrows in one of three directions, and the direction depends largely on how the athlete’s body develops through maturation.
For some athletes, the longer events gradually disappear.
For others, the shorter events disappear.
For the rare middle-distance specialist, both ends fade away, and the 200 and 400 become home.
The point is not to force specialization.
The point is to delay it until the athlete has developed sufficient capacity, skill, and self-awareness for the sport to reveal where they belong.
SPEED IS BUILT, NOT FOUND
We cannot all be 50 freestyle world record holders.
But every swimmer can become faster than they are today because speed is a learnable skill.
It begins in the nervous system of a young child.
It is developed through movement quality on land before it is refined in the water.
It is shaped by the biomechanical positions shared by the world’s fastest swimmers, and it is protected through thoughtful training, broad race exposure, and long-term athlete development.
The challenge for coaches is not simply to train speed.
The challenge is to build it, layer by layer, over the course of an athlete’s career.
That is why the theme of this year’s GAINswim Annual Clinic is SPEED.
For three days, we will explore how speed is developed, taught, measured, and sustained across every stage of a swimmer’s development.
GAINSWIM ANNUAL CLINIC
August 28-30 | Carmel, Indiana
Featuring:
Chris Plumb, Head Coach, Carmel Swim Club David Marsh, Head Women’s Olympic Coach (2016) Russell Mark, World-Leading Biomechanist Andy Stone, University of Virginia Dryland Architect Chris Webb, Director, GAINswimAnd more.
CONNECT WITH GAINSWIM
Clinic Information: gainswim.com
Master Path Coaching Community: gainswim.mn.co
Newsletter: Sign up
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