Swim Racing Start Dive Drills 

Todays focus on dives and a couple of my favorite dive drills.
So if you’re foolish enough to ask your swimmers, “what do you want to work on today?” I can almost guarantee multiple people are going to say starts. And no one says distance fly. Starts are just more fun. But on a serious level, the start is critical. And swimmers with high aspirations need to develop good ones. It doesn’t happen without work.
One of the best places to start might be behaviors we’re trying to extinguish. These are the typical habits all coaches will see in developing swimmers. First is that butterfly like arm swing. Where does this come from? I don’t know. Its going to propel swimmers down, and it takes unnecessary time to do. The other the short entry, more like falling forward. We need push, arc, or power to develop a racing start.
I’ve heard before the best coaches are the best thieves, and the following drills are not my own. So here are a couple drills that I’ve found elsewhere that have helped me improve the kids and have fun.
The first one is med ball starts. As you can see, pushing the ball forward is bring focus to getting out and forward with power rather than straight down without power. Kids can be a little nervous at first, but they should be diving safely under the ball they throw. After the ball release, the athlete needs to tuck their chin and prepare for smooth entry. Forgetting this part usually results in a belly flop and generally only happens once.
The other drill, pull buoy throws, is more of a recent discovery and helps to build starts that replicate the arm motions of senior level athletes using arms to push off the handles of front of the blocks. After trying a couple of these, I instructed swimmers to aim low, below a certain line on the wall behind them. They looked great. You’ll see little Sammy with the butterfly arm motion looks fantastic in this drill. Remember what he looked like before?
You can immediately see when we switch back to regular dives without the equipment, we quickly lose some of the motions and components that made the drills look great. So unfortunately, the kids are right. We do need to practice these, forego the distance fly set from time to time.