What is the best equipment or exercise in the gym for increasing freestyle pull/catch strength?
To make your swimming stronger, you need to apply progressive overload specifically to your swimming stroke through resistance and battle drills. Transcript: "OK you ready? Nothing. Literally anything you're doing the gym can translate directly to your stroke, to your swimming. Things are doing the gym can only make you more fit, can make you stronger in general terms, can improve your athleticism. But it won't necessarily and specifically make your swimming stronger. If you want to make your swimming stronger, you got to apply progressive overload in your specific gesture of swimming. How I like to do it? That's for machines. That's how I apply progressive overload to my swimming. That's for machines, resistance, and [? battles. ?]"
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Bruno Fratus
Olympic & World Medalist Swimmer
To make your swimming stronger, you need to apply progressive overload specifically to your swimming stroke through resistance and battle drills.
Ray Looze
Head Coach @ Indiana University
Blake Pieroni was an incredibly strong athlete from Indiana, known for his strong upper body strength and his proficiency in Olympic-style lifting. This type of training can help improve overall strength for any stroke, including freestyle.
James Gibson MBE
World Champ 🥇 Swimmer & Coach
The best exercise in the gym for pull and catch work on freestyle is a basic weight-training program that focuses on overall body strength. Pull-ups are especially useful as they can be loaded to provide more resistance. The athlete should focus on developing their overall strength and not just one specific area.
Albert Subirats
4x Olympian, World Champion, Coach
I like to do a simple exercise in the gym for working on my freestyle catch. It involves setting up with either hands or elbows, and pulling with an emphasis on using my core for leverage. The goal is to keep wrists and fingertips before elbows to increase surface area of the catch.
Abbey Weitzeil
2x USA Olympian 🇺🇸, 4x Olympic Medalist
For freestyle pull, I recommend working on pull-ups, lat pulldowns, shoulder mobility and bench presses to gain strength and stability in the water. Med ball slams are also great for gaining strength in the lats.
Brett Hawke
🇦🇺 5x Olympian - No.1 Swimming Podcast Host
The Vasa Trainer is the best equipment for increasing freestyle pull and catch. It is great for people with injuries too, as it allows them to work on their aerobic capacity, power, and strength without getting in the pool.