Skills are underrated in swimming development, but we can also obsess over them – how can you find the balance?

We often think of swimming as either an endurance sport – especially if you’re a triathlete or marathon swimmer – or a power sport, if you’re a sprinter.

Most swimmers also recognise that technique is essential for anyone who wants to swim faster and more efficiently.

Good swimming technique is a skill developed through mindful practice – and it’s largely independent of your strength and fitness. These primarily ensure you can apply force to the water and keep doing it for the required length of time.

But beyond basic swimming technique, there is a host of other skills we can develop that could help your swimming. Here are some examples:

Skills for open water

• Navigation and sighting
• Drafting and pack swimming
• Coping with changing conditions and reading the water
• Feeding and nutrition
• Open water starts and turns
• Pacing

Skills for the pool

• Racing dives
• Slick turns
• Underwater dolphin kick
• Breakouts
• Relay takeovers
• Pacing

What about bilateral breathing?

Let’s explore this further, starting with a skill I didn’t include in the list above – bilateral breathing.

Many coaches will encourage you to breathe on both sides, either every three strokes or some other pattern.

There’s good logic behind it. Bilateral breathing can improve symmetry in your stroke, it allows you to keep an eye on competitors on either side, in open water you can choose to breathe away from the sun or incoming waves.

Nevertheless, many top-level swimmers breathe primarily to one side during racing. It doesn’t mean they can’t breathe to the other side, but they choose not to. This must mean that one-sided breathing is faster for them, otherwise they would breathe bilaterally.

So does that mean bilateral breathing is not worth bothering with? Or should we persist with it?

I argue that we should keep practising, but maybe not for the reason you might expect. Practising bilateral breathing is a drill that can highlight technique weaknesses and help you improve your overall swimming. And that’s it. The aim is not to become someone who does bilateral breathing in a race. It’s just part of your swimming practice.

No pressure

One thing I like about this approach is that it removes pressure. You’re not a failing swimmer because you can’t breathe on both sides. You’re an improving swimmer as you use bilateral breathing to develop your overall swimming technique. You’re not striving to become a bilateral breather; you’re just improving your swimming using bilateral breathing as a tool.

While bilateral breathing may be optional, what about a skill that is almost essential if you do open water events or challenges: sighting? If you can’t sight forward to see where you’re going, the alternative is to stop or switch to breaststroke – both are possible but will cost you lots of time.

Sliding scale

Being able to sight in open water is not something you can either do or not do. If you watch people swimming outdoors, you’ll see a range of abilities. Some people sight so efficiently it doesn’t appear to impact their swimming speed. Others slow dramatically or lose their rhythm.

Despite this, it’s rare to see swimmers systematically and mindfully practising sighting – and I think that’s a mistake. Most of us have room for improvement and skills degrade if you neglect them.

Obviously, sighting is only relevant if you swim outdoors. If you always swim in a pool, you could argue that you don’t need it. But there is still a case to be made for occasionally practising it. Deliberately disrupting your stroke with sighting may help improve your overall sense of control and location in the water. It could also highlight weaknesses. For example, if your legs have a tendency to sink, sighting will push them even lower.

Hold the line

Some skills are so important to efficient swimming that I wonder why people don’t practice them more. For example, streamlining. We all appreciate that the less resistance we offer the water, the faster we will swim. We therefore try to be streamlined in our swimming technique, but how often do you isolate streamlining as a standalone skill to be practised?

It’s easy to practise too: push off from the wall and see how far you glide. It’s not tiring, painful or hard. Yet people rarely do it. Perhaps they think they are already as streamlined as they ever will be – but if you watch elite swimmers, you’ll see they travel much further underwater than the rest of us.

Improving your streamline is something that will benefit all your swimming. I can’t see any reason to stop practising it.

Specialist skills

Some skills may seem completely irrelevant to your swimming. In modern elite swimming, most swimmers use a “crossover turn” to switch from backstroke to breaststroke in the individual medley (IM). If you don’t race IM, you don’t need to be able to do this. And if you race it at masters level, you can use an alternative and still be competitive.

I’ve tried and failed to learn the crossover turn. It’s tricky to learn from YouTube videos and I don’t know anyone who can teach me. I’d love to use it in a race because doing it well would save time. But doing it wrong would result in disqualification or a big loss of time.

But even if I never use it in a race, I’m still curious to learn how to do it. Practising improves your spatial awareness, and it’s fun too. The endpoint doesn’t need to be mastery.

Never stop learning

In brief, what I’m saying is that we should never stop practising skills in swimming, but some selection and prioritisation will be helpful. Focus on the skills that will have the biggest impact on your swimming, and keep going with that practice for as long as developing that skill serves you.

Skills make a huge difference to your swimming efficiency and performance, and because water is so dense, even small improvements can have a big impact. Besides, skills weaken if we don’t pay attention and use them, even ones you think you’ve mastered. Think of skill work as an ongoing process, not something you ‘finish’. Finally, even skills that are not essential to the swimming you do may still play a role in your swimming development, so don’t dismiss them.