by
Olivier Poirier-Leroy
The swim snorkel has become part-and-parcel of every competitive swimmer’s gear bag. Here are a bunch of reasons why you should use it in practice today to swim faster.
The swimmer’s snorkel is one of the best additions you can make to your swim training.
Choosing the right swimmer’s snorkel encourages better technique in the water, reduces overuse injuries, and can be applied in a broad number of ways to help promote faster swimming.
The benefits of a swim snorkel include improving technique by promoting better head and hip position, removing stroke errors from breathing, enhancing body alignment, and much more.
In this guide to the reasons to strap up with a swimmer’s snorkel, we will look at the full range of benefits of swimming with a snorkel, offer some suggestions for how to use a snorkel for maximum improvement, and more.
Let’s dive in.
Using a swim snorkel offers a range of benefits that can improve your swim training and technique.
The ways a swim snorkel can help you swim better include:
Easily the biggest benefit to using a swim snorkel is that not breathing to your dominant side means that your stroke is more balanced.
This is especially important for sprinters who need a smooth, kayak-like stroke turnover. Being able to turn your arms over quickly and evenly gives you a smoother stroke that maintains velocity across the pool.
For mid-distance and distance swimmers the benefits of using a snorkel leans more towards balancing out the workload across both sides of your body and to avoid over-loading one of your shoulders.
Fun Fact: One of the leading causes of swimmer’s shoulder includes muscle imbalances in the rotator cuff in the shoulders. A study found that just 16-weeks of swim training caused significant muscular imbalances in the rotator cuffs in competitive swimmers1.
Using a snorkel is a great way to help balance out the shoulder load.
Swimmers naturally pick their heads up when swimming freestyle.
Swimming with our faces pointing at the bottom of the pool goes against our natural instinct to look where we are going. It’s not so much a bad training habit as it is an over-riding safety mechanism.
While using a snorkel won’t completely remove a swimmer’s need to pick their head and eyes up to find the wall (or avoid a fellow swimmer), it does encourage you to look down.
For you swimmers out there who rock their heads from side to side while swimming freestyle you are in for a soggy surprise when you turn your head and dunk the tip of the snorkel into the water like a straw.
A snorkel can help correct the wandering head and reinforce a straight-line from the top of your head to your ankles.
One of the most important aspects of fast swimming is keeping a straight body-line in the water. This includes keeping a straight head—something that the snorkel forces on you. It instills that propulsion comes from rotation of your hips and shoulders, and not wiggling your head around.
Swimming is all about technique, and if we introduce tools and equipment to the poolside, they should solidify good technical habits.
Whether we are talking about paddles, stretch cords, or fins, if we can’t perform the swimming motion with proper technique, we are creating and/or reinforcing bad technique.
A study published in the Journal of Human Kinetics titled “Wave characteristics in breaststroke technique with and without snorkel use” found that swim snorkel use by competitive swimmers caused breaststrokers performing a series of 25m sprints to slip into a flatter and slower stroke.
Good technique usually means that you are being more efficient in the water…and you know what that means…faster swimming!
Another study found that national-level freestylers and breaststrokers rocking out with a snorkel over a 100m sprint swam significantly faster compared to regular swimming. Improvements of over 6% for the breaststrokers and nearly 5% for the freestyles.
(Alrighty then!)
So yeah. I think the lesson here is that if you are going to use the snorkel, don’t be trying fancy new stuff with your technique that isn’t going to benefit it.
Swim snorkels can help to reduce excess hip rotation. For swimmers who swing their hips too hard when turning to breathe, using a swim snorkel can help teach more efficient body position in the water.
A study titled “The Effect of Breathing Laterality on Hip Roll Kinematics in Submaximal Front Crawl Swimming” examined the hip roll of 18 elite competitive swimmers while swimming 100s freestyle at 70% of max effort.
When using a swim snorkel, the swimmers exhibited a more balanced and bilateral hip roll at submaximal speeds.
Swimmers who struggle with excess hip roll, particularly roll asymmetries from breathing to the same side over and over again in training, can use a swim snorkel to bring balance and efficiency to the hip roll of their freestyle stroke.
Something that I almost immediately noticed the first few times I strapped on a snorkel—and the panic of not turning my head to the side to breathe passed—was that my flutter kick was engaged more often.
Why is this?
Because a common dysfunction with swimmers is to cross their ankles momentarily when they turn their head, halting the flutter kick motion behind them.
With no fish-tailing movement that encourages that dreaded ankle-cross that stops your kick cold, you end up kicking more consistently.
I will be the first to admit that I love using my kickboard.
Whether it is to warm-up, do some blast kick sets, or even do some super slow kicking to develop foot sensitivity to the water (yup, that’s a thing!), you’ll rarely find me at the pool without my big, ugly green kickboard at the end of the lane.
But that being said, it doesn’t always encourage the best body position, and it also removes the ability to kick while also engaging shoulder and hip rotation (like you would be doing when usually swimming).
Here’s where a snorkel can come in supremely handy—you can kick in a streamline for max speed. Or you can place your arms by your side and simulate the rolling motion of your shoulders and hips to mirror your natural body position while swimming full-stroke.
A swimmer’s snorkel offers a way for swimmers to kick in a way that more closely resembles the body position used when swimming.
US Olympic swim coach Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps’ longtime swim coach who helped the “Baltimore Bullet” swim to 28 career Olympic medals, uses snorkels with his athletes to kick in a more natural swim-specific body position.
“I’ve gotten into using a swim snorkel quite a bit when they’re kicking because that allows their head, neck, and spine to be in a more natural swimming position.“ – Bob Bowman, Olympic and NCAA winning swim coach
This is purely a personal anecdote, and so I imagine the case is different from swimmer to swimmer…but whenever I do some easy freestyle with a snorkel, my stroke feels pretty darn good the moment I take it off and return to regular swimming.
I can’t really explain why. It could be the awareness of better stroke mechanics, or the smoother arm rotation, but the focus on better body positioning and consistent kicking transfers well over to regular swimming.
What does this mean for you?
If your feel for the water is slipping, or you simply aren’t hitting the speeds you want in practice, take your stroke back to basics and do some super slow swimming with the snorkel.
While I can’t promise it will magically fix a bad workout, it will help you feel a little more efficient and smooth in the water.
Like anything else in your swim bag, your snorkel should serve your goals and ambitions in the pool. Perhaps the best part of this relatively cheap tool is that it is highly versatile and you can adapt it to what you want to improve on.
Better body line in the water? Kick with a snorkel.
Want to experience race-pace, no-head turn sprinting? Strap on a snorkel.
Balance out your weak shoulder with the dominant one? Well, you know the answer.
Swim snorkels are an awesome tool for better and faster swimming.
But which one is perfect for you and your swimming?
Below is a quick look at my favorite swim snorkels. I’ve used them all in varying amounts over the years and can heartily recommend them.
Remember how I mentioned if you had bad head position in the water you would end up drinking some pool water?
The FINIS freestyle snorkel, obviously designed for you freestylers, ensures that you keep your head down and locked in. Pick your head up, and you are sipping on a chlorine-colada.
FINIS has been doing it since day one with swimming snorkels, so gotta rep them at first place.
This is the “regular” FINIS snorkel. The one that got the whole craze started.
FINIS was the first company to have head-mounted snorkels, and exclusively held the patent on it until 2004.
This is the most popular swim snorkel I’ve seen on deck.
FINIS also offers this O.G. model in Junior size for younger swimmers looking for their first swim snorkel.
Speedo was a little late to the swim snorkel game, but when they finally released a swim training snorkel they dropped an absolute beauty.
Speedo offers the Bullethead in a variety of colors and prints, and the thick head strap helps keep the snorkel firmly in place, even when swimming at higher speeds.
FINIS Stability Swim Snorkel Review – The Swimmer’s Snorkel Just Got a Whole Lot Better. The FINIS Stability Snorkel is a big upgrade on the classic swimmer’s snorkel. Here’s a detailed review of this game-changing snorkel.
10 Pieces of Swimming Gear Every Serious Swimmer Should Have. Ready to take your swimming to the next level? Here is the swimming gear every serious swimmer should be rocking in their swim bag.
Olivier Poirier-Leroy Olivier Poirier-Leroy is the founder of YourSwimLog.com. He is an author, former national level swimmer, two-time Olympic Trials qualifier, and swim coach.
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