The Active Swim newsletter in my email inbox listed an article heading that caught my eye 5 Tools to Spice Up Your Swims. The promo copy said Ever wonder what swimmers are doing with fins and snorkels? Here’s a breakdown of helpful gadgets and how to incorporate them into your workouts.

Actually I have a pretty good idea what swimmers are doing with them. In many cases they think the ‘recipe for a workout’ is much like that for a cake.  To make a cake, mix together cake flour, eggs, baking powder, vegetable oil, and sugar. To make a workout, mix together pull buoy, paddles,kickboard, fins, and ‘bake’ for an hour or two.

Back in 1988, when I first met Bill Boomer, he referred to them as “contaminants.” By that he meant that they impede the swimmers’ ability to develop the all-important sense of how your body and water interact. At the time I regularly used most of them in my own training and had also used them in coaching my teams.  Bill got me to re-examine my own beliefs and over time I came to view them as he did. In the last 20 years the only swim tools I’ve used have been Fistgloves (in the late 90s) and a Tempo Trainer (since 2003).

To most swimmers, and coaches, most tools are simply ways to do more work and virtually all of that work is predicated on overloading the muscles and aerobic system. But as contaminants – and there’s no disputing that they are — they rarely do anything positive for neural adaptation.  And as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a strong believer that a well-tuned brain and nervous system are the most critical aspects of swimming well.  (The Tempo Trainer is 100% about neural adaptation.)

The article’s author Steve Munatones  is recognized as one of the leading voices covering and coaching coach open water swimming, and was an elite open water marathoner himself. At 49 he can still swim a mean set of 200 – a set I never attempted in college. While Steven and I are friends, we also have some spirited-and-principled differences of opinion on training approaches. The usefulness of swim tools is one of them.

I’ll give my view of the 5 tools Steve reviewed in his article, devoting one blog post to each. I’ll also give a highly subjective rating to each tool. My rating system will be

Would I use or recommend this tool?

1. Not a Chance

2.

3. Highly selectively — with the right focus.

4.

5. In a Heartbeat.

I’ll quote a bit of Steve’s review first:

Swimmer’s Snorkel

The snorkel is a relatively new tool in the competitive swimmer’s arsenal. It helps both beginner and veteran swimmers focus on stroke improvement while effectively eliminating the interruption of turning your head to breathe. You can relax, breathe easily and maintain proper body alignment as well as focus on the proper hand pathway under the water.

My Rating: 3

I actually find an area of agreement with Steve on the snorkel, but would advocate using it in significantly different ways. First, I don’t think it’s helpful to think of turning your head to breathe as an ‘interruption.’ In fact, rhythmic breathing – preferably to both sides — is an essential part of the freestyle stroke. It is however, IMHO, the most exacting skill in all of swimming. When a skill is that important, that challenging, and you need to do it literally every stroke cycle avoiding it as an inconvenience is not a promising improvement strategy.

Rather, you need to figure out the weak points in your skill, develop strategies for correcting them and work at them tirelessly until they become strengths.

The skill challenges in freestyle breathing are mainly in two areas (1) keeping the head aligned as you rotate to breathe; and (2) keeping the leading arm and hand engaged in a firm catch position until you begin rotating back from the breath. I.E. When breathing to the left, the right elbow should remain up, the right palm facing back and stroke pressure should be minimal until the left hip begins to descend in the weight shift.

You can improve #1 only by practicing breathing, not avoiding it.

You can improve #2 by practicing with a snorkel, but the opportunity for neural adaptation (i.e. rewiring your nervous system to replace a struggle with a skill) will be minimal if you follow Steve’s set suggestions of  5 x 100 for newbies or 5 x 200 for veterans. Our brains learn fastest when required to process new inputs at high frequency.

Rather I’d suggest a series of 1 x 25 with snorkel, alternating with 1 x 50 without. Breathe to right on one length and left on next, or bilaterally the whole way.

For a series of perhaps 4 x [25 + 50] focus on imprinting one narrowly-targeted skill or awareness on the 25 w/snorkel, then test your ability to maintain that sensation on the 50 without. Continue repeating with one Focal Point until you feel you are no longer improving the targeted sensation.Then introduce a new one.

Here’s a menu of possible Focal Points you could employ with this set. If you use these, do them in the listed order:

1. Keep lead arm on a Wide Track. Align with shoulder; don’t let it cross toward the middle.
2. Feel as if lead arm and hand are ‘cushioned’ or ‘weightless.’ No downward pressure.
3. Keep axilla (armpit) open with elbow above wrist and fingers hanging. (As illustrated below.)
4. Keep hand  still for a moment — after extension and before stroking.

Keep lead arm extended-and-engaged while breathing.

These skills are also illustrated in Lesson Three and Seven of the TI Self-Coached Workshop DVD.