The issue with this - as with gait analysis and similar pseudo-objective tools - is that it doesn't actually give any useful insight about *HOW* to change things. I did this - the-camera-and-string-thing with *THE* guy for this stuff - Dr. G - http://www.teamunify.com/...0919&team=iscats

It told me a bunch of stuff that I already knew from 1) simple intuition and 2) what coaches on deck had seen. Basically, the most "profound" conclusion was that I don't (didn't) finish my stroke all that well, and that it's worse on the right hand side. Wow! Thanks for that. "You should really change that." I never thought of that...

There are two huge problems with this sort of analysis. The first, more applicable to advanced athletes, is that it's often unclear what idiosyncrasies are essential to someone's stroke/stride/etc. Think Cadel Evans rocking all over the place on his seat or Geb's asymmetrical arm carriage or Paula Radcliffe's head-bobbing. Typically, these "movement specialists" want people to do things symmetrically or to follow some self-idealized template of "correct." But the best practitioners rarely have such pure technique.

The second issue, as I mentioned above, is that knowing WHAT to change is not really all that useful. It's knowing HOW to change it. That's what you need a good coach for. And, in my experience, it's exceedingly rare that if you have a good coach who has ideas about HOW to change things that they also don't have a very good idea about WHAT to change.

If you go to a properly measured pool with a functioning pace clock when you swim, you are in the only "swim lab" you'll ever need...