Get Faster With… Resistance Training

We're heading into a different field here. Most of what I write about is subtraction. Cut the junk yardage. Stop swimming one speed. Use the time you have instead of chasing time you don't. For most triathletes, that's where the easy speed is hiding, because they're busy people swimming a lot of meters that don't do anything.

But once you've cleaned all that up, a new question shows up. You're training smart, you're using the clock, your technique holds together. Now what? How do you actually add speed, instead of just getting more out of the speed you already have?

One of my favorite answers is resistance training in the water. Shirts, drag socks, parachutes, power racks. Things that make swimming harder on purpose, to build power in your stroke so that swimming without them is easier and faster.

But before we get to the fun stuff, a warning label.

This Is Not For Beginners

I don't use resistance with an athlete until their foundations are second nature. Body position, kick, breathing, catch. Not "pretty good when they're fresh." Second nature, and still holding together when they're tired.

Here's why. Resistance makes everything harder, and it makes everything harder all at once. To hold a good body position and a good catch against extra drag, you need more strength and better mechanics than you do without it. If your stroke already falls apart at the end of a hard set, a parachute won't fix that. It'll just make it fall apart faster, and now you're practicing the broken version under load.

It's the same reason nobody in the weight room puts plates on the bar before they can squat the empty bar with good form. Load amplifies whatever movement you bring to it. Bring a good one.

If you're not there yet, start with the fundamentals swimmers learn first. This post will still be here.

Why Resistance Makes You Faster

Think about how strength training works in the gym.

You want to get stronger, so you lift something heavier than your body is used to. Your body responds by recruiting more muscle fibers, including the bigger, more powerful ones it normally saves for emergencies. Do that consistently and you adapt. You can produce more force. And because the weight on the bar is a number, you can measure your progress and add a little more over time. That's progressive overload, and it's the reason weight rooms work.

Resisted swimming is the same idea, with one huge advantage: it happens in the water, in the exact movement you race with. Squats and pull-ups build general strength. Swimming against a parachute builds strength in your actual stroke. Same catch, same pull, same body position, just with more load on it.

When you add drag, your body has to produce more force on every stroke just to keep moving. That means more power through the catch and pull, more muscle fibers recruited, and more strength built in the positions that matter. Then you take the resistance off, and the same effort moves you faster.

The research backs this up. In a 2006 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Girold and colleagues split competitive swimmers into three groups for three weeks. One group did resisted sprints with elastic tubing, one did assisted sprints, and one trained normally. The resisted group got significantly faster over 100 meters, got stronger in their elbow extensors, and increased their stroke rate without losing stroke length. In other words, they took more strokes per minute and still covered the same distance per stroke. That's how you swim faster.

There's one more piece of research worth knowing, because it explains my most important rule. When Gourgoulis and colleagues studied swimmers under added resistance in 2010, both stroke rate and stroke length dropped as resistance went up. Too much drag changes how you swim. Which brings us to the ladder.

The Resistance Ladder, From Easiest To Hardest

1. T-shirts

This is where I start every triathlete. It's the easiest, the cheapest, and the least resistance of anything on this list. You already own one.

My preference is an oversized shirt with the sleeves cut off. In my opinion, sleeves get in the way. They restrict your shoulder rotation and mostly just tire out your arms instead of creating drag on your body, which is where you want it. Cut them off, and the shirt does its real job: it catches water and makes your body work harder to move through it.

A shirt is also the gentlest test of whether you're ready for this at all. If your stroke changes a lot with a T-shirt on, you have your answer.

2. Drag socks

This is a step up, and it's something you usually see pool swimmers using. Drag socks are mesh pockets that catch water around your lower legs or hands.

Because they sit on your extremities, they also ask more of your body position. If your kick and core aren't doing their job, drag socks will tell you about it right away.

3. Parachutes

Parachutes attach to a belt around your waist and open up behind you as you swim. They come in a lot of sizes, which makes them a great option for advanced triathletes. You can match the chute to the job.

Here's the key rule, and it's backed by that research above: don't go too big. If you can't hold your normal stroke rate, you're using too much resistance. A chute that's too big slows your turnover, and now you're training a slow, grinding stroke you'll never race with. The point is to keep your stroke and add load to it, not to swim a different stroke.

There are a few ways I like to use them.

Short sprints with a bigger chute. For short, all-out efforts, you can go bigger, especially with fins or paddles to help you keep your speed and stroke rate up.

Long aerobic swims with a small chute. This is one of my favorite things to do, usually with paddles too. What I've found is that longer swims with a small chute get you the muscle fiber activation of sprinting without taxing your nervous system nearly as hard as true sprints do. That makes it a great way to hold onto speed during an aerobic phase of training, when you'd otherwise lose some of it. I use this a lot with my pro Ironman athletes.

4. Power racks and power towers

This is by far the most advanced and most expensive option, and you'll mostly find it at serious swim clubs and college pools.

Power racks sit on the pool deck with weight plates you can add or remove. The line usually only lets you swim about 12 yards. They're built for heavy, short, all-out sprints. Think of them as the heavy squat of swimming.

Power towers, or buckets, usually let you swim 25 or 50 meters, and you add weight or water to the bucket to increase resistance. They're more versatile. You can do heavy, short sprints, or sets like 8 x 100 where you're resisted on the way down the pool and swim free on the way back. That's a more intense version of parachute work, and the contrast between the resisted length and the free length is a great feeling.

Racks and towers also give you the cleanest measurable progression on the list. The weight is a number. Next month, you add a little more. Exactly like the weight room.

5. The new tech

There are newer options now too. Olympic champion Cam McEvoy trains with a 1080 Sprint, a motorized machine that applies resistance through a cable and measures your force and speed on every rep. Instead of guessing how much a chute is holding you back, you get exact numbers. It's also priced at around $17,500, so unless you're chasing Olympic gold, you can probably hold off. Expect to see more of this over the next few years. For most triathletes, though, a shirt and a parachute will get you most of the way there.

What About Tubing?

You'll see plenty of swimmers using stretch cords, or tubing, tied to the wall or the starting block. Thicker tubes give you more resistance, and you can also flip them around for assisted sprints, where the cord pulls you down the pool faster than you can swim on your own.

Personally, I've never been a big fan of tubing for resisted swimming. The resistance changes with every single stroke. It barely does anything at the start, and it doesn't really kick in until the cord is almost fully stretched, which is right about when you're almost done with your 25. So you get a few easy strokes, a few hard ones, and not much consistent load in between. That's why the Girold study above can show results with tubing and I still reach for a parachute instead. A chute gives you the same resistance on the first stroke as the last.

Where I do love tubing is for push-offs and streamlines. Shorten the cord, tie it to the block or have a partner hold it, and push off the wall against it. You'll feel right away how tight your streamline really is and how much power you're getting off the wall. A loose streamline gets yanked back. A tight one cuts through. It's one of the best ways I know to make a somewhat invisible skill something you can actually feel.

How Much Is Too Much?

One rule covers almost everything: watch your stroke rate.

If your stroke rate stays close to normal and your body position holds, the resistance is doing its job. If your turnover drops, your hips sink, or your catch turns into a slow shove, back off a level. More resistance isn't better. The right resistance is better.

And just like in the weight room, progress slowly. Shirt before socks. Socks before chutes. Small chute before big chute. Move up when the current level feels easy to hold, not when you get bored.

Your Homework

If your foundations are solid, grab an old oversized T-shirt and cut the sleeves off. Wear it for the main set of your next speed session, then take it off for your last two fast repeats.

Pay attention to two things. First, does your stroke stay the same with the shirt on? If it doesn't, you've learned something important. Second, notice how it feels when the shirt comes off.

That feeling is the whole point. Swimming without resistance should feel like someone cut the anchor loose.

Sources

• Girold S, Calmels P, Maurin D, Milhau N, Chatard JC. Assisted and resisted sprint training in swimming. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2006; 20(3): 547-554.
• Gourgoulis V, et al. Acute effect of resisted swimming in the kinematic characteristics of the stroke during front crawl swimming. Inquiries in Physical Education and Sport, 2010; 8(1).

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