I'm no expert but this is my understanding: I've been told that the finger drag is so that in your non-drill crawl you don't swing your arms over and slap them into the water. It helps you to reach out into the water rather than exert more energy. by doing the finger drag you're raising only your elbow up and learning to keep it bent so your hand will just go above the water. With the catch-up, I focus on rotation...making sure that my body is turning almost on its side and that my kick is in rhythm with it. you don't want to keep your body completely horizontal to the water as you front crawl...you want to get a good side to side rotation. Hypoxy drills (breathing only every 3, 5, 7 strokes) is less about oxygen deprivation and more about learning to control your form and keep it strong as you get more tired.

The most important thing is your balance in the water. If your hips are lower in the water than your shoulders, all the other drills won't help you much. The lower your hips, the more drag you have and the slower you go and the more effort it takes to swim. The finger drag is to make you swim with high elbows when your arm is out of the water. High elbows mean that you am enters the water at a better angle allowing you to get more power when you swim. If your elbows are low you will probably slap the water with your hand and enter the water at a less powerful angle. Fist drill is to teach you that your forearm can provide as much power going through the water as your palm. When you learn to use your forearms, and then use your palm too you get more more power and can go faster. Most people are used to only using their palm to push agains the water. The fist takes the palm away. When you do the fist drill you want your hand in a tight ball, not a loose fist so some of your palm can still be used. TC already gave you a good reason for the catch up drills.

I don't do drills; I just swim laps. Because I don't have a coach, my time is limited, and I haven't swum with a team, I haven't experimented with drills. Also, I've been thinking about getting into marathon swimming, and all those swimmers that I've read about just do laps. I'd be willing to listen to others who think that we should be doing drills, though, especially if their drills have helped them swim better and they're good at explaining precisely what to do.

For running it is easy to get better by doing a lot of running. Not so for swimming. Of course there will be some benefit from improved strength in key swimming muscles and such. But having proper form in swimming will help so much more than better conditioning. As mentioned, body position is one key element of proper form, as your body position has a huge influence on the drag experienced. Poor body position in the water is like "swimming with the brakes on". When I decided to start doing some triathlons a few years ago, the first thing I realized is that my swimming was poor, and so I signed up for swimming practises with a local masters group. With some conditioning from running, I thought I would be able to keep up in swimming. Was I ever wrong, just doing a couple lengths was extremely difficult. Now you don't necessary have to do a lot of drills or join a team to improve your swimming performance. Just by regularly doing laps you will tend to get better. However, I've seen many (especially triathlete) swimmers grind out lap after lap with very bad form. Repeating bad technique only makes it more ingrained and hard to unlearn, and your swimming speed will level off at some point without reaching your true potential. Just adding more distance to your workouts will have diminishing returns. If your technique is already quite good (professional marathon swimmers), I can understand incorporating a lot of laps in your workout. If you're not swimming at a professional level, you can probably gain quite a bit by incorporating drills in your swimming. With my team I have never done these drills mentioned previously in the thread: Catch-up freestyle: This will help you focus on gliding between strokes and can also be used to correct a 'wind-milling' stroke. However this drill is no longer in favour, because a negative side effect of catch-up is that the roll in your body is inhibited and unnatural, and has the risk of teach a bad habit in this aspect. More details here: http://www.goswim.tv/drilloftheweek_comments.php?id=2273_0_20_0_C -finger drag Part of the point behind finger drag is to relax your arm during the recovery phase and force full body rotation. I do not believe that the angle at which (or even where exactly) your hand/arm enters the water is as critical as claimed Cashmason. As your arm/hand enters the water, your body is still rolling and your arm is still being stretched out/reaching forward. At the fully stretched position there is almost a brief pause as you anchor with your hand and forearm and through a longitudinal role move past your hand. Look at some underwater footage of Olympic swimmers, and you'll notice that they really glide with their arm outstretch. For example Ian Thorpe in slow motion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjbQp5fjBO0&NR=1 More details on finger drag drill are here: http://www.goswim.tv/drilloftheweek_comments.php?id=5058_0_20_0_C I have done many hypoxic drills in swimming, and they do help focus on your technique because you're not moving your head around to breathe. It also helps with your breathing discipline in swimming, as well as running. Bilateral breathing (breathing after every odd number of strokes taken) is better than every 2 (or 4, etc.) strokes for symmetry purposes. If you always breathe on the same side there is the risk of developing a highly asymmetric stroke. If you're looking for more drill information, http://www.goswim.tv has in fact a lot of good content on swimming drills and suggestions for technique improvement. If you swim without any coaching, ask another swimmer in the pool if he or she can look at your technique and comment on any obvious deficiencies (find someone who is experienced/swims well). It is much easier for a third party to see shortcomings in your stroke than it is to recognize them by yourself (video footage of yourself while swimming can be useful here). Maybe I'll make another post about some of the drills that I do while swimming, but it is bedtime now.

all the other drills won't help you much. The lower your hips, the more drag you have and the slower you go and the more effort it takes to swim.

How true!! Swimming is my worst discpline of the three- I know I am slowing myself down horribly by not being as horizontal as I could be but don't really know how to fix the problem.

A drill we do in practise to focus on horizontal positioning is described here: http://www.goswim.tv/drilloftheweek_comments.php?id=2910_0_20_0_C This drill is great for body position, and also helps with the glide position with the leading arm. Occasionally, we do a modified form of the above drill. We do not take any strokes with our arms at all, and remain in the extended glide position (rotated on our sides with face down toward the bottom) for one length while kicking. One arm will lead and the other arm along your side (or crossing the arm resting on the opposite side's hip bone). Keep your head in the water looking down, and only take a breath when necessary. You should focus on pressing down with your arm pit of the outstretched/leading arm. Don't think about speed, but rather the body position. You can alternate sides each length.