Fundamentals of Fast Swimming

Gary Hall Sr. opened the session with a frank assessment of the swimming world: most clubs, even excellent ones, are fundamentally limited in what they can offer technically. With a coach managing 20, 30, sometimes 40 swimmers at once, the focus inevitably becomes getting athletes fit, getting laps done, keeping the group together. “They’re looking at the whole flock of sheep,” Gary said. “And when one leaves the flock to go to the bathroom, they have to herd them back in. They really don’t have a whole lot of time to look at details.”

So that’s the gap Race Club exists to fill. Indeed, the core belief underpinning every session, every drill, every piece of technology deployed at the camp: swimming is 50% training and 50% technique. Yet most programs dedicate only about 5% of their time to genuine technical correction. The other 95% goes to fitness, which matters, but only takes you so far.

As a result, the consequence shows up in a pattern Gary has seen countless times: swimmers who work hard, train consistently, and then hit a wall. They plateau. They get discouraged. Some quit, “too many,” as he put it. In other words, the problem isn’t fitness or work ethic. It’s that technical flaws have gone unaddressed for so long they’ve become invisible, baked into muscle memory, indistinguishable from the swimmer’s own sense of what “correct” feels like.

The Will to Improve

That’s the invitation Race Club extends: come willing to be corrected, willing to feel uncomfortable, willing to change things that have felt right for years. “As long as you have the will to work and you’re willing to listen, and maybe change some things you thought were right but aren’t, you’re going to do fine.” In fact, improvement at any age is possible. Still, the ceiling isn’t as low as most swimmers assume.

There’s a deeper point Gary makes that goes beyond technique: God didn’t engineer us to be fast in the water. We were built to run, throw, and move on land. If we were meant for swimming we’d have webbed fingers, scales, and streamlined bodies. We don’t, which means to swim fast, we have to become unnatural. Techniques that feel wrong at first are often the most correct. Discomfort isn’t a warning sign. Instead, it usually means you’re doing it right.

Diagnostics That Change Everything

Beyond the coaches, the camp deploys what Gary believes may be the most sophisticated swimmer diagnostics available anywhere. For example, video analysis captures above and below water from every angle, starts, turns, the full stroke cycle. But the more groundbreaking tool is Race Club’s proprietary sensor testing system: two small paddles worn on the hands, a sensor on the goggle strap, and one on a belt at the lower back. Together they measure force, velocity, rotation speed, and stroke timing in real time, synced to video on an iPhone and processed within minutes. What previously took a month — sending raw data to Sweden, waiting for manual extraction — now appears on screen almost immediately. In addition, Race Club now collaborates with software engineers in Finland to push this technology further. “Every time I look at it, I just shake my head in excitement. It’s giving us more detail than we’ve ever had.”

The Race Club’s entire teaching system is built around one man who has been dead for three centuries: Isaac Newton. His three laws of motion — one borrowed, Gary noted with a grin, from Galileo — govern exactly how fast you swim, as surely today as when Newton first wrote them down. “They’re laws of physics. And the laws of physics don’t change. A lot of other laws do, but not these.” Newton also gave us gravity: an insight that arrived, legend has it, via an apple falling on his head under a tree. Gravity matters in swimming too, though less critically than the three laws of motion. Ultimately, ignoring any of them is a guarantee of mediocrity.

Therefore, Race Club attacks these three laws in order: reduce drag first, maximize propulsion second, maintain inertia third. Every drill, every correction, every data point from the sensors maps back to one of these three priorities.

Drag is enemy number one, and Gary made sure everyone in the room understood why. For instance, at 787 times the density of air, water punishes imprecision at speeds that would be trivial on land. “In air, you have to be going 30 or 40 miles an hour before drag becomes significant. But in water, you can go one mile an hour, and if you have your thumb sticking out, it slows you down a lot.”

To prove the point, Race Club has measured drag precisely using a drag propulsion meter imported from Italy, pulling swimmers at a fixed 2.3 m/s, peak racing speed for most swimmers from age 13 up. Altogether, over ten seconds, the machine collects more than 200 individual drag force measurements. Moreover, every variable has been tested. One of Gary’s favorites is the drag appreciation drill: start in hyper streamline, kick hard with fins, then widen your hands every four to six kicks until you can barely move. You feel drag compound in real time, something impossible to notice normally, because too much else is happening at once.

The 10 Techniques Swimmers Must Master

• 01
  Hyper Streamline, elbows behind head, chin tucked, back arched, shoulders hyper-extended
  Not biceps over ears. The biceps-over-ears method creates 9–11% more drag. Nobody should be comfortable in this position, that discomfort means you’re doing it right. About 1 in 20 swimmers can actually touch their elbows together; Gary calls them unicorns.
  ▶ Watch: How to Streamline
• 02
  Thumb In on Entry, keep thumb tucked flush with the hand
  Thumb-out creates 11% more drag. Particularly common in distance swimmers. For years coaches taught fingertips-first entry, but the world’s best (Popovici, Ledecky, Bobby Finke, Ahmed Hafnaoui) all come in hand-first, keeping it “out of the soup, out of harm’s way.”
• 03
  Straight Wrist on Entry, no lateral flaring until the catch begins
  Keep it straight until you open the fingers for the catch. Any lateral wrist deviation adds frontal area to the entry and disrupts the clean line into the water.
• 04
  Correct Hand Entry Width, straight from the shoulder, arm hyperextended
  Not just fully extended, hyperextended. Notably, wider hand placement exponentially increases drag. The drag appreciation drill makes this visceral: widen your hands every 4–6 kicks and feel it grind to a halt.
• 05
  High Elbow / Early Vertical Forearm (EVF), especially for 200m and up
  The “Katie Ledecky pull.” Grant Hackett, 1500m world record holder, used the same. High elbows aren’t more powerful, they’re lower drag over many strokes. Pulling deep dramatically increases drag throughout the catch phase.
  ▶ Watch: Improve Distance Per Stroke

Techniques 6 through 10

• 06
  Controlled Knee Bend, freestyle: 38–50°; dolphin kick: 50–70°
  Over-bending knees is one of the most common drag mistakes across all three non-breaststroke strokes. As a result, it drops velocity sharply, forcing extra energy expenditure to recover speed.
  ▶ Watch: Freestyle Kicking, Over-Bend
• 07
  Head Position, no excessive head lifting; eyes mostly down
  Lifting the head creates drag and drops the hips simultaneously. In dolphin kick, some swimmers who lack the back flexibility for true hyper streamline are better off slightly lifting the chin to keep arms in the line of motion than letting them hang down.
  ▶ Watch: Sprint Freestyle Head Position
• 08
  Arms in Line of Motion, especially in dolphin kick and streamline
  Arms hanging below the line of motion create severe drag. Sensor data shows it’s worse than lifting the chin slightly to maintain arm alignment.
• 09
  Dome Cap, wear a thicker dome cap in competition
  Measured at 10% less drag than a standard silicone cap. One of the easiest free-speed gains before race day.
• 10
  Tech Suit and Shaving, reduce skin friction
  Shaving body hair from age 13 up for competitions. In addition, tech suits make a measurable difference. Both reduce the skin friction component of drag, which compounds at race speeds.

Only two things generate propulsion: the kick and the pull. Everything else — body rotation, arm recovery, head movement — produces zero propulsion on its own. Notably, approximately 90% of arm propulsion comes from the hand, not the forearm or upper arm. The reason is geometry: the hand is flat, while the forearm is round. Its flat surface resists water, whereas the round forearm lets water slide past it efficiently. The muscles of the upper arm are large and powerful, but their role is to drive the hand through the water, propulsion happens at the hand.

In addition, finger position matters. Enter with fingers together (minimizing entry drag), then slightly spread fingers during the pull. At pulling speed, slightly spaced fingers create turbulence between them, the water can’t flow through, and the hand effectively becomes larger, increasing propulsive surface area. In contrast, curl the fingers like a fist and you’ve made the hand both smaller and round. Two bad things at once.

The Multiplier Effect

Coupling is one of the most misunderstood, and most important, concepts in competitive swimming. These motions generate zero propulsion on their own, but amplify propulsion when timed correctly with the pull. Gary’s analogy: walking uses arm swing as a coupling motion. The arm swing doesn’t propel you, but it adds energy to each step’s push-off. Running demands a harder, higher arm swing, and it makes you faster. In freestyle, the two most important coupling motions are recovering arm entry (come down hard, Caeleb Dressel makes a 3-foot splash) and body rotation speed (not how far, but how fast). Effective coupling requires four things:

The third law, inertia, is the one Newton borrowed from Galileo, and its implications for swimming are often the most overlooked. A body in motion tends to stay in motion. What this means practically: it’s far more efficient to maintain constant velocity than to repeatedly gain and lose speed. As a result, every deceleration costs energy you have to spend getting back to race pace. Consequently, the more velocity fluctuates within a stroke cycle, the more energy you waste, and the slower you go over a race distance.

How the Four Strokes Rank

Seen through this lens, the four strokes rank very differently than raw speed might suggest. Gary drew the breaststroke comparison with feeling, he had just driven through Los Angeles traffic on the way to camp.

Likewise, stroke rate matters significantly for inertia management. Higher tempo means less dead time, the interval when neither hand is pulling and drag works against the swimmer’s momentum. For example, in sprint events, RPMs must be high. In longer events, the balance between rate and efficiency is more nuanced, but the principle holds: velocity-killing technical errors compound over many stroke cycles.

The main offenders: lifting the head (creates drag and drops hips simultaneously), over-bending the knees (massive drag across all strokes), pulling too deep (higher drag throughout the catch), and sweeping the hand outside the elbow line (increases drag and reduces propulsion efficiency at once).

Gary closed the session with a note of realism that every athlete in the room needed to hear. Learning something at a camp — understanding it, feeling it, executing it in a drill — is only the beginning. There are four distinct transitions that have to happen before that technique is genuinely race-ready, and most swimmers skip several of them.

Why Each Step Is a Bottleneck

Still, each is a genuine bottleneck, not a formality. For example, the jump from drill to slow swim introduces coordination complexity the drill doesn’t have. The jump to race pace adds fatigue, speed, and pattern override, pushing the body back toward ingrained habits. Finally, competition adds pressure, adrenaline, and months of preparation, all of which can override even well-practiced technique in seconds.

“A lot of what you learned may go out the window,” Gary said. “That’s why there are really four important transitions. The first is: can you do the drills we teach you correctly? Because if you can’t do the drills right, we have a problem.”

The camp covers all five disciplines of elite swimming performance, not just technique. Swim training itself is covered least, because campers already get that at home. The five disciplines across the four days: swim training with technique, dry land/strength, nutrition, recovery, and mental training.

Four-Day Camp Program

Sensor testing and video analysis are woven between sessions throughout all four days, giving coaches and swimmers data that previously took a month to obtain, now appearing on screen within minutes of each test.