How to Swim Your First 1000m with Ease or Much, Much Faster

You want to swim for fitness and perhaps eventually give triathlon a go, but before you do that, you'd like to knock off at least 1000m to prove to yourself that you belong in the pool or swim it faster.

But you're having trouble swimming more than a few laps without stopping or find you just can't get any faster.

Are you falling into these common dead ends?

You have to stop frequently at the walls to catch your breath.
You tend to rush your swim in the first 50-200m and then have nothing left to continue
You feel your technique deteriorate rapidly throughout the swim
Your breathing becomes ragged and awkward and you feel like you claw your way through the water
You feel like you need to be in better shape to be able to swim
Your focus moves from streamline and balance to pulling and kicking throughout the swim but you slow down

If you are looking to swim 500m or 1000m as a milestone in your swimming path, fitness has very little to do with it. Stopping at the walls, gasping and feeling ragged in the water are mostly about technique and a lack of body awareness in the water which is fixed with skill improvement.

If you're trying to swim 1000m faster, fitness does play a role, but your best approach is to stick with a focus on maintaining consistent technique throughout the swim.

We all know that the best way to see huge improvements in swimming is to focus on technique.

But I will take this further and say something that might surprise you:

To swim 1000m with ease or much faster you only need to swim 3-5 strokes with excellent technique.

Okay, obviously you can't cover 1000m in only 3-5 stokes. What I mean is that if you can swim 3-5 very efficient strokes with breathing that feels easy, you can then ramp that up to swim 1000m. Why? Because now you know what you should feel like throughout the whole swim and you know what to do to achieve that.

So swimming longer distances is really all about concentrating on holding on to your best technique.

To illustrate why skill, not fitness, is the most important factor in swimming longer distances efficiently, let me tell you the story of my experience with long distance butterfly swimming.

The Butterfly Effect

A few summers ago I decided to try swimming butterfly in open water. I was very excited by the idea.

It went something like this:

At Kits pool, I tried swimming a whole length (137.50m). I floundered and stopped after 75m on each try. I tried a few more lengths, same result. Something wasn't right with my stroke and timing and I would tire easily and swallow water. Yuck.

Two days later, at the YWCA, I spent 15 minutes on drills and playing with my butterfly skills. Then I tried swimming 100m. It felt great! So then I swam 400m non-stop. Definitely more challenging but it worked.

Two days later I went to Kits Beach and went swimming in the ocean and did a fun 500m swim.

Seven days after my first Kits Pool Butterfly Experiment, I swam 1100m butterfly non-stop. I was gobsmacked.

The 50m a Week Freestyle Program

Before that, I had a crazy experience with freestyle, that I'd like to share, because it is important. Some of you may have already heard this.

It was the fall season and I had a very demanding teaching schedule, waking up very early and teaching late at night. I got sick and stopped working out. I would only jump into the water for lessons and classes to demonstrate the drills we commonly use in Sea Hiker classes: the streamline drill, single switch and breath integration mini-swims of 10-15m. Because I was doing demos for my swimmers to learn from, I was doing them as best as I could and always thinking about how to improve them. So you could say, I was still doing my drill practice even though I wasn't working out.

I think I may have swum 50m max per day, at the most.

Gradually, things got better, and I decided to go to the pool for my first practice after 6 weeks. Being so out of shape I knew that a fast swim over 100m would be a struggle, but I wanted to test my speed over 50m. So after a warm up, I tried 3 x 50m swims with 1:30 rests.

On the third 50m swim, I broke my all time personal best for a 50m sprint by 3 seconds from a push-off. I could not believe it. It represented a 10% increase in speed and I hadn't done anything in terms of fitness training in or out of the pool.

So what does this tell us?

1. I was able to go from 75m butterfly to 1000m butterfly in one week. There's no way I suddenly increased my fitness level by a factor of 13. So it was all about the right technique.

2. In the 50m sprint, I was able to swim faster over a very short distance by focusing on drills and technique alone. To hold that kind of improvement over longer distances would indeed require more conditioning, practice and above all, concentration, but it was a great start.

So in terms of building distance and speed effectively, here's the most important concept to help get you to an efficient and faster 1000m:

Swim a short distance really, really well.

I would start with half a pool length, 10-15m. Use all the tools you have at your disposal to make it the best swims you can muster. The drill that makes everything feel easy. Swimming with fins. Focusing on streamline to improve your breathing.

Very often, alternating breathing and non-breathing mini-swims are very helpful. Breathing tends to mess up stroke mechanics. So it is good to have the experience of swimming without the interruption of breathing. So you can do a 10m swim without breathing, catch you breath, and swim back the way you came breathing normally, but trying to get the same feel of smooth swimming you probably will feel when you don't have to breathe.

The 5 Stroke Progression to 1000m

Once you feel like you are swimming very well over a short distance, starting building your distance, always with a focus on swimming 3-5 strokes very well.

If the pace of the plan below is too much for you, be patient, and simply focus on transferring your great mini-swim of 10-15m to 25m until it feels more or less the same. When you can swim 25m with the same level of comfort at 10-15m, then start moving on to the next level. You may be surprised that each step is much easier (remember my butterfly story). But that shouldn't be a surprise, because you already know how to swim better. It's just over a shorter distance for now.

You'll notice that as the distance increase, I ask you to focus on swimming the first 5 strokes off each wall very, very well. This helps you stay focused on maintaining your best technique and prevents your swim from getting sloppy and slow as the distance increases.

Remember that swimming is mainly about awareness of your body and concentration.

Week 1: