Get Faster With… Snorkels

Hey there, and welcome to the first edition of my new "Get Faster With…" series.

In these articles, we'll take a piece of gear or a training idea and figure out what it can actually do for your swimming. (Spoiler: the impact is usually big, because these are all my favorite tools for getting faster.)

And this first edition is about a humble little piece of plastic that most triathletes ignore, and the ones who don't swear by: the swimmer's snorkel.

Not the scuba kind that hangs off the side of your face. I mean the front-mounted swimmer's snorkel that runs straight up the middle of your forehead. It looks a little goofy. It is also one of the most useful things you can put in your swim bag, and here's why.

It Deletes Breathing, Which Is The Whole Point

Here's a truth most triathletes never sit with: breathing is the enemy of a good stroke. Every single time you turn your head to breathe, you pull your body out of alignment. Your rotation gets thrown off, your timing hitches, you lose your platform for a perfect catch. If we didn't need oxygen, nobody would ever turn their head at all. That's not an exaggeration, it's literally why Olympic 50 freestylers rip the entire race without a single breath. Even one breath costs them speed, so they skip it.

You're not racing a 50. You have to breathe. But in training, the snorkel lets you take breathing off the table completely, and that changes everything. Suddenly you can put 100% of your attention on the actual mechanics of swimming fast: your head position, your hand entry, your catch, your body rotation. Nothing is getting interrupted every 2-3 strokes by the disruption of turning to breathe.

This is why I tell every athlete to do their drills with a snorkel. When you're trying to groove a new movement, the last thing you want is your breathing pattern fighting you for control of your timing. Take breathing out, and the drill actually works. Your body gets uninterrupted reps at the correct pattern, which is exactly how a better catch gets built, more time in the right position, less time recovering from the breath.

It Trains The Muscles You Breathe With

Here's the second benefit, and I want to be straight with you about the science, because there's a lot of back and forth about what snorkels are actually doing for your fitness.

You can buy a small cap that fits over the top of the snorkel and shrinks the opening, so less air gets through and you have to work harder to pull each breath in and push it back out. You'll see people claim this supercharges your cardio like altitude training. The honest truth is that the aerobic-capacity claims aren't well proven, and I'm not going to sell you a fairy tale.

What it does do, and what the research actually supports, is train your respiratory muscles. Your diaphragm and the muscles around your breathing are muscles like any other, and making them work harder makes them stronger. Breathe through a restricted opening for a while and those muscles adapt, so that normal breathing later feels easier and you feel less winded at the same effort. There's a second payoff too: swimming calm and relaxed while getting less air teaches you to be efficient under stress. Then you pop the cap off, breathe normally, and it feels like bliss. That composure, staying smooth when your air is limited, is worth a lot on a choppy open-water swim where you can't always grab the breath you want.

So no, the cap isn't a cardio cheat code. But stronger breathing muscles and a calmer relationship with air? That's real, and it's worth having.

A Few More Things It Quietly Does

Once you start using one, the benefits pile up. It builds open-water composure, because getting comfortable swimming with less air means a few extra strokes before a breath in rough water won't rattle you. It's a great warm-up tool, a few 50s with a snorkel set your stroke up perfectly before a race, so you go in sharp and confident. And above all, it's the fastest way to build a stroke that doesn't fall apart the moment you breathe, because you've spent so much time swimming in perfect alignment that it becomes your default. What's that saying? It takes 10,000 hours to master a craft. Well let's make a lot of those hours perfect with a snorkel.

The Hurdles, Because I Won't Pretend It's All Upside

Like most good things, the snorkel is a little miserable at first.

You won't like it in the beginning. There's a learning curve, and it's real. You have to get used to holding your breath through the flip turn and waiting for the snorkel to break the surface before you clear it with a big forceful exhale. And little bits of water sneak in constantly, so you're periodically blasting the tube clear mid-swim (not much different than swallowing water during an open water race). For the first few sessions it feels like a lot. Then it becomes automatic and you stop thinking about it.

It can be uncomfortable. The thing likes to wander. It'll creep up and down on your forehead, or slide side to side when you push off the wall, and you'll find yourself resetting it between reps. A good one with a solid forehead bracket cuts this way down, but no snorkel is invisible.

It's one more thing to buy and haul. Your swim bag is already a black hole of paddles, buoys, bands, and fins, and now there's a snorkel to jam in there and toss in your car. Some days you look at runners, who need shoes and nothing else, and feel a pang of envy. Swimming asks more of you. This is part of the tax.

Which One To Buy (I Have No Affiliation With This Brand)

You need a proper front-mounted swimmer's snorkel, not a scuba snorkel, the side-mount kind simply doesn't work for lap swimming. You want the tube running in a straight line from your mouth up the front of your face, with a stabilizer that holds it against your forehead.

I've tried a lot of them over my career, and the one I always come back to is the FINIS Original Swimmer's Snorkel. The plastic quality is the best out there, the head stabilization is the most secure, and the thing lasts basically forever, mine is 20 years old and still going. You can also buy the added cap for the top when you're ready to work the breathing muscles more. It's a cheap piece of gear that will outlast most of the rest of your bag.

So there it is. A goofy-looking tube of plastic that lets you train perfect technique without breathing getting in the way, strengthens the muscles you breathe with, and builds the calm that holds up in open water. For around forty bucks and a few uncomfortable sessions up front, that's about the best return in your whole swim bag.

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