Practice makes perfect when it comes to improving your stroke technique or enhancing your speed, and that usually means you need to be in the water quite a bit. But what if you can’t make it to the pool as frequently as you’d like?

Thankfully, there’s a solution: the Vasa Trainer!

Get your own Vasa Trainer here!

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What is the Vasa Trainer?

A Vasa Trainer is a swim training bench designed to help swimmers maximize swim-specific and total body strength and improve technique. Targeted exercises strengthen the muscles you need to make performance gains. That increased strength means greater speed in the water.

The Vasa Trainer is compact and can easily fit in your garage, living room or backyard.

Why It’s Important

Build Swim Specific Strength

The Vasa Trainer offers more than 200 functional, swimming-specific exercises that help you build stroke-specific strength and improve your body position. You don’t get the opportunity to practice proper body position in regular dryland training, but the Vasa makes that possible!

Improve Stroke Technique

Isolate your pull on the Vasa Trainer to fix common stroke flaws, especially Early Vertical Forearm and your catch. While you can certainly practice this in the pool, the Vasa allows you to really slow down the movement and perfect it.

Develop Core Stability and Balance

The Vasa Trainer puts your body in a position that’s extremely similar to how you’ll actually swim, helping you develop proper core stability to keep your hips up and body in alignment. 

Total Body Workout

In swimming, you use every muscle in your body. You may have seen the Vasa Trainer used mostly for pulling and upper body work, but there are numerous ways to get creative to work your legs and core, too. For example, you can use the Vasa’s push off platform to work on exploding off the wall. You’ll experience a similar zero-gravity effect to pushing off the wall in the pool — something you just don’t get with squat jumps.

Rehab and Prevent Injuries

Isolating your technique can help you avoid overuse injuries, or help rehab your body by reinforcing proper technique as you recover from an injury.

Related: How to Get Back into Swimming Shape

When to Use a Vasa Trainer

The Vasa Trainer is a great addition to your swim training. Incorporate it into your dryland training sessions to build more strength, or add Vasa-specific workouts into your routine. 

Elite athletes will combine swim training with dryland in the gym and separate workouts on a Vasa Trainer. Top tier coaches, including Matt Kredich, David Marsh and Mark Shubert, regularly use Vasa Trainers to supplement their swimmers’ training.

You can also use the Vasa to substitute for pool training if you’re unable to swim or if you need to get a quick workout in.

Related: Get Started: Remote 1-on-1 Swim Coaching

Vasa vs. Dryland

You may be wondering: How do I incorporate a Vasa Trainer into my training routine? Ideally, you would combine swimming with dryland and Vasa Trainer workouts. Dryland and Vasa workouts certainly complement each other, but they have their own benefits:

  • Dryland: Build total body strength and power. Check out the dryland training plans in the MySwimPro app for inspiration!
  • Vasa: Build swimming-specific strength. There’s certainly some overlap with regular dryland training, but Vasa Trainers provide the opportunity to work on technique and body position.

Related: How to Do Dryland Workouts at Home

At-Home Brick Workouts

For triathletes, a Vasa Trainer allows you to do brick workouts at home! Get a Vasa session in and then head out on your bike or go for a run — it’s ideal for busy athletes who might not always have time to get to the pool.

How to Set Up Your Vasa Trainer

Fares put together his Vasa Trainer Pro in about 30 minutes. It is pretty portable, and easily fit in his car when he wanted to move it around. You can place it in your garage, your living room, your backyard — anywhere you have the space!

The Vasa Trainer comes with a few different accessories, including different handles, varying resistance cords, a push off platform and a manual that contains hundreds of exercise examples. There are a couple different models to choose from depending on your needs.

Example Vasa Trainer Workout

Give this full-body Vasa Trainer workout a try!

  • 5 Minute Dynamic Warmup
  • Main Set (4 Rounds)
    • 20x Butterfly Pulls
    • 10x Plyometric Jump Squats
    • 10x High Lat Row
    • 50x Freestyle Pulls
  • 5 Minute Static Stretching Cool Down

Have you ever used a Vasa Trainer? Let us know in the comments. To learn more about Vasa and to explore their products, click here

Disclaimer: We are affiliated with Vasa and may receive a commission from sales generated by affiliate links in this post.

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4 Comments

    • Taylor Holmes on

      Absolutely! A lot of the Vasa exercises are useful for all 4 strokes. The manual that comes with the Vasa Trainer has over 200 exercises in it!

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