A great dive start is explosive and powerful with many contributing factors.  You want the up most efficiency with all power and energy moving you forwards. The ingredients that make up a dive start need to be developed on dryland, moving slowly at first before progressing to speed. 

Too often the stability and balance on one leg is under developed. We always do dives as fast as we can and we should because they don’t work too well slow. However, if there is instability on one leg it will show up in a less than powerful dive start, maybe the knee is wobbling side to side and not tracking in line with the foot, or the body is working so hard to find balance in a split stance you don't have anything steady to launch off at full strength and speed.

Once the base is stable, we develop leg strength and there is no limit to how strong you can get in this phase. Then we turn that strength into power, moving with speed. This is how we create a dive that explodes off the blocks.

Method:

"move slow before you move fast, develop strength before you develop power”

1. Create stability through the pelvis and lower limbs.

2. Develop strength in the glutes, hamstrings and quads with correct alignment.

3. Build power with exercises focused on speed and quickness.

4. Explode off the blocks and enjoy the head start.

Use the time in dryland to prepare swimmers for a good dive start or stand poolside shaking your head and delivering the same feedback time and time again? The swimmers that struggle to dive start often struggle to hop.

It isn’t easy to make technical changes to a dive start when it can hurt when you get it wrong. As gymnasts we are use to making mistakes time and time again in learning a skill but this is a different learning style not so commonly practiced in swimming. In gymnastics coaching we analyse the physical components required for the skill and the movement pattern creating a program that has exercises for both in order to fast track the learning process. Giving them the ingredients from dryland training will give your swimmers a head start in.

If you are looking for dryland exercises specific for improving dive starts check out our dive start bite sized training program. It includes a 60min instructional video, an assessment checklist of how you are progressing through stability, strength and power along with a program PDF to take your dive start from a flop to a pop!