I would say the "relax" part should be applied more to your recovering arm and perhaps your kick. The rest of your body you want to be "firm". Basically, you want your body to stay in as straight of a line as possible from your head to your feet. You don't want to fish-tail through the water. Try using a pull buoy just above the knees. You should feel the muscles in your glutes and back engage and you should be able to swim with your heels pretty close to the surface. Then try putting the pull buoy down by your ankles. If your body is fish-tailing you'll really feel it and you'll figure out how to engage your core muscles to correct it.

Be patient and keep swimming :)

Thanks for the thread. I was sure that I was the only one who was confused by the looseness-to-tightness issue.

We are told "don't fish-tail" but shouldn't we swim as much like a fish as possible?

Will try the pull-buoy exercise today to see how it goes. Swimming is the least intuitive thing that I've ever done in my five plus decades. So I should not be surprised by this also feeling contrary to gut feeling.



BTW, now that I've (barely) learned to swim and have done some big kid tris, will have to consider a new screen name.

Becomes a habit over time, as with everything else, consistency will yield the results you are looking for.

Squeeze your glutes together with a pull buoy, tighten your stomach like you are about to get punched in the stomach. Doing both of those will help with what you are asking, and your hips will elevate. Push your chest down in the water too, arching your back, or going in extension will actually disengage your core muscles. BTW "core" is a big buzzword people use now, my definition of your core is everything and anything besides your arms/legs, and below your shoulders, this includes all muscles, bones, diaphragm, etc.

Use fins. / end of discussion.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I'll also give the pull bouy drills a shot in the pool tomorrow.

Guess it is just a matter of getting used to tighten up that core and make it a habbit :)

I always notice, especially when I start to get tired and my stroke deteriorates, that thinking about tightening up your lower back (not arching it, just kind of tensing the muscles) helps bring your legs up. When you're cruising around at warm up pace, just try that, it's one of those weird things in swimming that gives instant effect. Tense the muscles, legs automatically ride higher in the water.

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Long Chile was a silly place.

A pull buoy has a lot of uses, strengthening core muscles is not one of them. I wouldn't say it has the opposite effect - because it doesn't weaken them - but it does allow you to get away from engaging them.

How about the drill with the pull bouy between the feets?

I actually relax my core as much as possible when swimming, especially for triathlon distance races. When I do timed sets of like 10 x 200 on a 10sec rest between each, relaxing the core does seem to significantly decrease my overall fatigue during the workout so I stay faster in the final sets. I have to actually think about relaxing my core as much as possible because it's not a natural thing for me to do since my arm is pulling as hard as I can during those sets, which tends to make me want to clench up my abs/back/glutes, which definitely burns unnecessary aerobic energy.

I'm overall underwhelmed with the concept of specifically training swimming core fitness further than gaining it naturally from actual swimming. If you've read my posts, I spent a lot of time on a Vasa trainer last year, typically doing like 6-8 hours of Vasa with 1-1.5hrs of pool per week during a 7-8 week swim/run focus block. On the Vasa, you don't need any of those core engaging muscles since you're lying on a bench - it's all about the arm/shoulder pull muscular endurance and aerobic engine to drive it.

Despite that minimal pool work, I was substantially faster in the water overall. Not once did a weak core limit me, even when doing 4500yd workouts in the pool to see if I would fatigue early. My real gains on the Vasa helped me to self-debunk some of the myths I was holding that probably held me back a lot in swimming, the first being that "techique yields just as much speed as power for MOPers", which I found to be patently false (I get flamed a lot for this perspective, but it's absolutely true for me) and rather that power >>> technique once you're past the sloppy beginner phase and your body is pretty flat in the water), and the other being that "you can't get faster without building up a strong swim core", which also doesn't seem to be true since I didn't build any core on the Vasa yet swam over 15sec/100 faster by the end of the swim block.

How fast do you do the 10 x 200?

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Tiago
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Sponsors: : Blueseventy :

I think you have a slight misunderstanding. You are right, there is a tendency to "over-clench" the glutes, back etc. when you pull hard. But Without these muscles firing you cannot pull hard. How many good swimmers do you know without a six pack?

In the end what you discovered is you get faster by swimming your butt off. Who knew?

How about fins instead : )

I have to say this is what my coach did for me in 2010 and suddenly powering my stroke from the core wasn't a mystery and longer. I don't know if you meant that as a tongue in cheek, but it worked for me! Lot of kicking both with and without fins. I had no kick like most triathletes. Once I was taught how to kick and kick all the time.....well....my core was the primary driver from then on. Not spastic sprint kicking, just properly timed and properly executed kicking. Then I learned how to use that torque from below to power across my torso to the anchoring arm. That was when I went from so so swimming to pretty darn respectable. It took SO much pressure off my front end and suddenly my arms felt almost passively involved compared to the old stroke of yanking my arms as hard as I could.

Not sure if this will resonate with you OP, but it's what pushed me on to swimming far faster than I'd ever thought of! Hope I described that clearly I'm not the greatest with putting these swim theories to words. Good luck and keep swimming dude!

The core engagement debate is one (of many) things that is frustrating about learning to swim competitively.

You'll find that practitioner advice is all over the map and vague. Often times, contradictory; good swim coach advice can be very elusive and did I mention vague?

To make matters worse, there is a very distinct shortage of talented, proven, accessible swim coaches out there who incorporate solid video analysis with their teaching/evaluation methods.

If anything, for me, it keeps things interesting and I enjoy it when I make little discoveries here and there that work-quite literally through trial and error.

Swimming is one of those rare entities where the "how" is far more important than the "why".

Cheers!
G

No I meant it 100%. And I thnk there is a general concensus of this within the coaching community.

I can't speak to the broader coaching community as I didn't grow up a swim kid, but I have spent the last 4+ years with a great swim coach who has those sentiments as well.

Don't feel bad. The over whelming majority of people are as well.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

And I thought the answer was Flip Turns!
(Which do engage your abs very well- like a monster crunch at the end of every length)

The fish tail thing happens to me when I'm doing ankle band laps... Is that a weak core issue?

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@floathammerholdon | @partners_in_tri

Not weak per say but improperly used. Could also be from a crossover or a messy pull.

But would your recommendation not depend on how well the swimmer can kick w/o fins??? As we've discussed previously, some swimmers like Ken Lehner (51.X for 100 scy w/ zero kick) and your 55.X/100 scy swimmer who couldn't kick 100 scy in 3:00 for example, just never develop much of a freestyle kick, despite huge amounts of practice kicking w/ and w/o fins. Certainly these guys engage their core when pulling but their stroke will prob always be shoulder-driven rather than hip/kick driven. Thus swimming w/ fins might not help this type of swimmer very much since when he/she takes off the fins, the kick contribution to their swim speed drops to close to zero.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

SnappingT wrote this:
If you are having trouble with body position in the water, the best tool that you can use are fins. And don't listen to me, Russel Marks who is the high performance consultant for the US Olympic Swim Team, said the exact same thing in an online discussion he recently put on. The reason fins work better is they give you the lift in the water, allow you to kick which engages the core and helps build the "kinetic chain."
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The works better he is referring to is buoys or sim shorts.

Ya, i recall reading that. I suppose it's possible that fins might help even if a swimmer has a weak kick but i'm just skeptical. Maybe i'll try more swimming w/ fins in my workouts and see what happens. My previous experience though has been that, once i take the fins off, my swimming is slower and more upper body dominated. I've never seen a real fins benefit per se.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

This is basically me in a nutshell. I kick 100m without fins right about 2:00. With fins that falls to about 1:15 assuming my feet don't cramp (short TYR fins). I just don't have the right range of motion without fins to apply force to the water with my kick. My kick range has to stay very small in order to not be counter-productive. As such the fine folks at The Race Club had me switch to a higher stroke rate shoulder driven stroke.