Standard Warm-Up: Flow

Eddie Reese is the most successful college coach of all time. We have had the good fortune of hearing Eddie speak many, many times. And every single time he mentioned 1 simple fact: 1x per day his swimmers do 8×100 Flow on 2:00 minute restarts. Many years ago, we took his advice and started to include 6×100 Flow every day in our programs. Of course, we include NO social kicking with kickboard and freestyle kicks. We do include 5×100 kicking on the back after we do 600 Flow every day. We break down some of our logic for this in a different article for this article we will focus on how and why we do 600 on the back body dolphins (i.e. Flow) every day.

Why we do it (beside Eddie told us to) everyday:

It builds the Core muscles. Without a strong and well-connected core, all of our strokes fall apart. But swimming itself does not necessarily build core muscles for novice swimmers. And few of us have enough hours per week of dryland to really target much dryland time to the core muscle chain. So, in our opinion, Flow is one of the best ways to constantly build the core muscle chain. We have some other methods that we use 1x per week, but Flow is our constant focus on building the core.

It builds recovery kick muscles. When you do freestyle kick with a kickboard (i.e. social kicking) you drop the hips and essentially just bend the knees to kick. This does NOT build a recovery kick muscle chain that engages from the glutes. We feel one of the best ways to target the recovery kick muscle chain with doing flow and back kicking.

Trains a chest-led undulation. So many swimmers mostly ‘knee kick’ when doing their underwater undulations. They don’t start their undulation from the sternum and let it ripple to their feet. When you do flow every day, they learn to use their sternum and spine for the undulations. This not only develops the proper muscle chain but also the proper muscle order of engagement for your underwater undulations.

How We do it:

The technique is relatively simple. We stay on the back and leave the arms down by the side (avoiding little pushes with the hands that many novice swimmers will try). It is essentially that swimmers focus on ‘pressing the chest’ (or sternum) and NOT trying to kick from their knees or from the hips/hinge movement. Believe it or not, we have our 5-year-olds swim Flow for 200 yards each practice. To train such small people with such sporadic learning skills, we have them stand (out of the water) about 6 inches from the wall and have them ‘bump your booty’ against the wall. As they bump their glutes against the wall, they are also moving out their sternum. Then we put them back in the water and just repeat ‘booty bump’. It doesn’t take long to have our 5-year-olds training with Flow every day.

How we make it valuable:

Frankly we don’t believe in repeating the exact same thing in the exact same way every day. Not only is this boring, but it limits the value and increases the chance of bad habits. Instead, we do Flow everyday with different resistance gear. Every change in equipment will target slightly different muscle chains and train our swimmers to constantly improve their technique. We don’t do ‘bare’ flow more than 1 out of 7-8 practices. The rest of the time, we use a combination of equipment, so it is constantly changing. Of course, we own both ONESwim and our own swim team, so needless to say, our swimmers have a LOT of different pieces of equipment (including a lot of prototypes of new things we are working on at all times). But in order to limit what equipment we use throughout each practice, we generally pick our gear for Flow at the start of each practice and then generally use that same equipment (plus a few others) for the rest of the practice. This helps us do the same drills and methods throughout the week but constantly change the muscles and feel of the drills by changing up our gear. We don’t like to waste time getting equipment, digging through equipment or changing equipment during our sets (frankly we are obsessed that all equipment changes should happen in 5-20 seconds). This is helped by not having too many different things on the deck that are in the way or making them dig through their pile.

The primary 2 reasons we change equipment regularly for Flow is to; 1) target the muscle chain differently, and 2) change the feel of the Flow so they improve their technique over time. So let’s dig into they equipment we use and why:

Wide silicone fins – to build recovery muscle chain (must force their downward muscle which in turn requires a better press of the sternum toward their back). We call this direction the ‘donkey kick’ movement.
Dual Ankle Buoy – heavily forces them to drive the chest down to counter the float, but then the float lets them relax a little on the forward ‘kick’ of the feet so they have to mostly focus on the downward chest press and the downward feet push
Ankle Weights – this is just the opposite of the Dual Ankle Buoy. With Ankle Weights, gravity will help drop the feet down so they have to work their muscle chain to finish their forward kick (we say ‘football kick’ direction).
Power Bags on the Calves – We love this as an all-around power development as it forces the swimmer to focus on both the forward and recovery part of the kick motion.
Power Bags on the Feet – You will certainly need to slow down your restarts for some groups with this as it will be slower. They will have to hyper focus on finishing both their upkick and their down kick by really whipping their ankles to get a change of direction in the bags. This really builds the ankle flexibility and muscle chain. However, it can also be more frustrating so we don’t recommend over-doing this or just doing the last 100 yards with bags on the feet occasionally.
Weight Belt – Our weight belts are not like others with stupid heavyweight levels. We let you add 3, 4 or 5 pounds to the waist with our belts. This will force the swimmers to focus on the flow through the back and hips as they have to press their hips up with purpose.
Pro Eel-Fin – We use these 1 session per week. The Pro Eel fin elongates the kick, connects the core and forces them to drive through the chest
PowerChute – Add forward resistance/frontal drag to help them drive forward and not just up and down. This is essential for helping to cross-train Flow and underwater undulations. The goal of undulations is to move forward, not wiggle back and forth. By adding frontal drag, they are learning to drive forward.
Parachutes – Also add frontal drag. But please don’t overdo this. Use smaller chutes at first such as 6” or 4” size chutes to keep them from being frustrated and to keep their speed and tempo at a normal pace. You can move up to 8” or larger as you have more powerful and efficient swimmers with time.
Combinations of gear can be endless, but here are some of our favorite combos:
Power Bags on Calves + Fins
PowerChute + Fins
Weight Belt + Power Bags on Calves
Weight Belt + Ankle Weights

While we are on the topic, we will touch on how we feel you should piggyback Flow with 5×100 Back kicking. We use the same equipment each day for both Flow and BK kick (except the Dual Ankle Buoy of course). You can argue that FR kicking with a snorkel is just as good (let’s agree to disagree with any social kicking). However, we feel that BK kicking is more valuable than FR kicking with a snorkel. Our 5×100 BK kick every day is done with the same equipment we used on Flow and we have the arms up in tight streamline. We also have them practice their IM Crossover turns since all of the added gear will make their backstroke count irrelevant anyway.