Can’t I Just Lift Weights or Use Paddles More?
It’s a common misconception that getting stronger in the gym or using paddles more often will automatically improve your swimming. Strength alone doesn’t guarantee better performance, because swimming isn’t just about how much force you can produce. It’s about how well your stroke mechanics meet and move a volume of water.
When you lift weights or use paddles without addressing your orientation in the water, you might feel stronger, but you’re not necessarily conditioning your stroke to handle more load. In fact, if your biomechanics are off, that extra strength often reinforces poor movement patterns—and increases the risk of injury.
Paddles can be useful tools when mechanics are already in place. However, when swimmers use paddles, the extra surface area allows them to move more water, which can feel like an improvement. The problem is that this extra load often causes the stroke to collapse much sooner. The paddles compensate for the loss of biomechanical orientation, masking the collapse and giving a false sense of improvement. Essentially, the paddles create an artificial boost that doesn’t translate once they’re removed.
This means that any conditioning gained from using paddles doesn’t carry over to your natural stroke. Once the paddles come off, the mechanics you use without the paddles return, and the benefits vanish. This happens because the key muscle groups that interact with each other while swimming without paddles are different to those engaged when using paddles, due to the mechanical reorientation caused by overloading during paddle use. The paddles alter your stroke mechanics in order to cope with the added surface area, shifting the way your body organises itself through the movement. That’s why integrating paddles or strength training must happen within a program that prioritises maintaining your stroke’s orientation under load. Without that focus, the instant speed and satisfaction from paddles are just temporary, and true conditioning remains out of reach.
Swimming Technical Threshold
- The point at which your stroke can no longer maintain its mechanical orientation under load, causing your technique to collapse and conditioning benefits to be lost.
What Is the Technical Threshold?
The technical threshold is the point at which your technique begins to collapse, not due to effort level or cardiovascular fatigue alone, but because you can no longer maintain your biomechanical orientation under load.
This is a critical concept: technique doesn't break down instantly; it deteriorates subtly, often without you noticing. When you pass this threshold, your body starts adjusting its mechanics to compensate for fatigue or poor balance. You might still be moving at the same pace (often with a slightly higher stroke rate to compensate), but you're actually moving less water with each stroke, meaning the load on your stroke has decreased.
And that’s a problem. Because without sufficient load, your stroke no longer produces the conditioning effect required to get stronger or faster.
You may have noticed this before — either in your own swimming or a training buddy’s — when, by the end of a set, your max effort becomes slower than your earlier 80% efforts. Or no matter how hard you train, your maximum pace has hit a ceiling. That’s a clear sign your mechanics are no longer encountering the load needed to drive performance forward.
What Causes the Collapse?
You cross your technical threshold when one (or more) of the following factors breaks down:
Fatigue
As your muscles tire, they lose the ability to maintain proper stroke structure. The pull collapses, the hands slip, the stroke shortens slightly, the catch weakens, and the kick disengages.
Insufficient Conditioning
If you’re not strong or well-conditioned enough to handle the load generated by correct mechanics, your body defaults to easier but less effective movement patterns.
Poor Balance and Orientation
When you lose balance in the water, your body has to reorient itself to regain position. But while it's doing that, your biomechanics are no longer oriented for forward propulsion. That means the movement that would normally generate propulsion is no longer encountering the load that leads to conditioning.
The key understanding is: when your orientation shifts, you no longer meet the load required for optimal conditioning and future results, to become faster or maintain pace for longer in the future.
Why This Matters
Most swimmers train at or above their technical threshold without even realising it. You might feel like you’re swimming well and holding pace, but if your mechanics are collapsing mid-set, you’re actually:
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Losing your key biomechanical orientation
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Failing to train your stroke for long-term gains
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Reinforcing patterns that don’t create progress
This is why swimmers often plateau, even when training hard or logging large miles.
Every stroke that doesn’t orientate to move an optimal body of water no longer conditions you to become faster or more efficient in the future.
How You Train Under the Technical Threshold
Rather than training until your stroke breaks down, you want to train just beneath the threshold. That’s where real conditioning happens.
Your Goal:
Prevent the natural collapse of your stroke by staying under the technical threshold.
That means holding a stroke that moves a significant body of water without allowing it to deteriorate. The stroke naturally has a proclivity to collapse, especially under fatigue. By training under the threshold, you’re preventing that collapse from occurring and maintaining the conditions for improvement.
When your stroke collapses, all the benefits start to deteriorate. So the emphasis isn’t just on maintaining a certain style of stroke, but on preventing the breakdown of your mechanics. By doing so, you train your body to
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sustain pace longer,
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Increase your pace or endurance,
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Continue improving without breaking down,
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Prevent plateau.
How You Do It
Increase Sets, Decrease Reps
Build your total volume by repeating short, high-quality reps rather than pushing through long sets with collapsing mechanics.
Break your sets into shorter distances (like 25s or 50s) while maintaining the same target pace that you would use for a longer swim, adding a rest period between each distance. This approach ensures that the load on your stroke remains identical to that of a continuous long-distance swim, but with significantly less fatigue.
By breaking the swim into shorter distances, you remove the cardiovascular strain and effort buildup that leads to stroke collapse. This means that the load on your stroke stays the same, but the fatigue does not accumulate in the same way. As a result, you can perform more repetitions at high quality, providing a full set of conditioning without crossing the technical threshold.
This is why using target times at shorter distances is crucial: it replicates the same load conditions without the breakdown, allowing for more repetitions and better conditioning.
Balance and Control
Add drills that improve balance and reduce the need for mid-stroke reorientation. Use exercises like sculling, body-line kicks, and vertical balance drills. If you don’t have strong balance and stability, fatigue will cause your stroke to collapse sooner. By improving balance and control, you prevent the stroke’s natural proclivity to collapse, ensuring that your mechanics remain intact and your conditioning continues to improve.
Progressive Loading
Only increase distance or reduce rest once you’ve confirmed that your mechanics hold. This ensures that you’re always increasing the conditioning stimulus without reinforcing failed movement patterns. Regular test sets help confirm that your stroke integrity remains strong as you progress. Over time, this approach will allow you to swim more comfortably for longer periods, reducing breathlessness and improving pace endurance.
Important Note on Elite Technique
Avoid comparing your technique to elite performance swimmers.
Performance swimmers can alter their technique in unique ways while still maintaining balance and consistent propulsion, but for most swimmers, replicating these adaptations causes the stroke to collapse, as the resulting loss of balance forces the body to reorient mid-stroke, breaking the connection between mechanics and forward movement.
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