I think the most important thing to focus on while changing your stroke is that your hips and shoulders must stay "connected" so with this newer style, you will be rotating faster and it's important to keep your hips rotating at this new speed.

Good luck, changing strokes is difficult but usually very beneficial

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http://www.danfeeneyracing.com

Thanks. That's actually a bit tricky for me as it feels... unstable.

It will for awhile. I know when I get tired and "rush" my stroke, my arms will speed up to a point where my hips and legs cannot counter and I get off balance. That's probably what you're feeling, but with time you create new motor patterns and it feels more natural.

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http://www.danfeeneyracing.com

By catch up, I'm guessing you mean that there is a huge glide phase and the recovering arm is in the water by the time the pulling arm starts the catch?

Head up free is really hard to do if you glide/pause at the front of the stroke.

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quite easy. pull back quicker once your hand enters the water. move your arms quicker in general.

Thanks!

I'm no great swimmer but I have lots of opinions. Here's a few of mine that vaguely relate to your post :-)

1. I don't necessarily think a catch up stroke is bad, or need fixing.
2. In swimming, particularly in tri's, noone cares what your stroke looks like. They care about speed. If you think you are going too slow compared to your fitness, work on it, but if you are pretty happy with your speed, considering your fitness, how fresh you are coming out of the water etc, then worry about your bike.
3. If you decide your stroke needs work, work on your technique. Of course, anything new will feel weird. If it feels weird, or if you get sore in new parts of your body (your shoulders) that's a good thing, as it shows the targetted technique changes are actually happening.
4.Over exaggerate your new technique in training. When you do the new stroke mechanics on your own, you will almost certainly gravitate some way back to your old ways, ending up somewhere in the middle which is probably where you should be.
5. Long 'catchup' type strokes are actually very efficient, so regardless of what speed you are swimming, you will probably be going that speed for less effort/energy expenditure than anyone else going that speed.
6. Swim styles are very fashion conscious. As soon as some guy breaks a world record, the swim coaches all think that is the best way for everyone to swim. They teach that method until someone comes along and breaks the record again. None of them ever seem to suspect that the new fast guy is on drugs, and not actually a better swimmer technique wise.


IF you do actually want to change your stroke, in the hope of faster or more efficient swimming, then look into biomechanics and physics, and then question your coach. I've run across coaches who could swim fast, and get students to swim faster, but had no idea why their method worked. I query all my coaches about why we do stuff. Thankfully I'm an engineer (thermo and hydro dynamics) with a keen interest in the WHY of everything. I'm also blessed with a good bullshit detector. Question your coach and question their answer as well. At the very least you will help them understand what they are doing, better.

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

Watch the "overglider" videos on swimsmooth.com. Good info.

Thanks, good stuff there.

I would think that a catchup style stroke would be inefficient as it would be like accelerating to 30mph on the bike and then coasting down to 20mph then reaccelerating to 30mph all in an effort to average 25mph. It would take less energy to just hold 25mph because of the exponential nature of fluid resistance.

catchup does not necessarily imply slowing down and re-accelerating as you mention. done badly you are right, done correctly, you're not.

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

I think of catch up strokes as the fastest for distance, if done efficiently.
If we look back to our physics education, for a displacement hull moving through water (that's what we are); the longer the hull, the higher the max hull speed.
One reason taller swimmers can be faster.
Have you seen ships with that bulb like extension on the bow?
That's kinda what we are while we have our hands in front of our heads.

To the OP, if you are only slightly slower while making a big change to your stroke; you will probably be faster as you get used to it.

I'm not a naval architect, but read naval architecture magazines as often as I can (a colleague is a member of RINA) and go to naval architecture lectures from time to time.

It is great to hear that I'm not the only one that knows about bulbous bows, what they are for, and how we are similar to them when we swim.

Now if you'd mentioned Froude Numbers in your reply, I'd have wanted to have your babies. :-)

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

Only from a hip driven style swimmer. Must have a very efficient kick. I get what you are saying with bow but look to the Gary Hall Sr thread on when we are moving the fastest while swimming. Its not with our hand out in front. So consequently the longer its out there the more drag

Suggestion: Try putting a band on each workout. No pull buoy. Work on it. When you can do 500M non-stop in a relaxed fashion, your catch up will be as it should be. So will your pull. So will your high elbow. So will your body position.

O_o

That sounds absolutely exhausting. I can barely do 100m with a band before being completely out of air.

I guess it is a work in progress...

My tip is drag shorts. The dead spots appear much more when your drag increases.

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Endurance coach | Physiotherapist (primary care) | Bikefitter | Swede

I think we need to be careful defining terms here. A true "catch-up" free has a phase where there is no propulsion coming from the arms, i.e. an extended glide phase. a catch-up free is always bad, and isn't efficient, regardless of how strong your kick is. It isn't that there is more drag, its that there is no propulsion.

What you see some of the better world class swimmers doing is better described as a front-quadrant free. There is no, or at least an extremely minimal, glide phase.

Front -quadrant is fine if you have a couple of things in your stroke. you need an efficient kick, and most importantly you need to be able to generate propulsion early in the stroke. Most of us don't have the flexibility to pull that off.

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thanks for the clarification

I agree with a lot of what you say, but you mention a couple of things I wanted to address.

I don't necessarily think a catch up stroke is bad, or need fixing....Long 'catchup' type strokes are actually very efficient,

a long stroke is indicative of efficiency, but a catchup stroke is not actually efficient. See my previous post, there is a difference, in my mind, between catch up and front quadrant.

Swim styles are very fashion conscious. As soon as some guy breaks a world record, the swim coaches all think that is the best way for everyone to swim.

Bollocks. Some might, but they aren't the good coaches. What happens in reality is that someone does something new, the coaching community might try it out, and if it doesn't work it gets tossed. That's why you see a variety of styles at the world class level, Janet Evans at one end, and Sun Yang at the other. As far as I know, most coaches didn't have their swimmers do things that didn't work. Coaches have a fantastic feedback mechanism called a stopwatch, and they use it.

If it feels weird, or if you get sore in new parts of your body (your shoulders) that's a good thing, as it shows the targetted technique changes are actually happening

Maybe. There is good soreness and bad soreness. The athlete needs to be able to discern the difference.

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I remember hearing a quote from Johnny Weismuller (sp?), Tarzan, way back almost 100 years ago, and I think, Olympic Champpion. He claimed "you can't swim fast with your head in the water. You need to be able to breathe" Oops, that was clearly wrong, but as the best swimmer in the day, everyone swam like he did. Well, except for whoever it was that actually put their face in the water.

Janet is another fine example. She had the famed windmill style that was certainly emulated and coached. She also swam with her fingers slightly apart. EVERYONE in swimming thought that was a bad idea, and that you had to have your fingers together to get a full handful of water. Turns out that the extra friction from the sides of the fingers was beneficial, but only when the fingers were 'just so' and the boundary layers of both fingers touched, forming a wider virtual hand.

I come from a skiing background. Skiing is similar to swimming in that technique fashion has changed over the years. I taught and coached skiing for 10 years before foolishly switching to engineering :-( When I was coaching, there was a strong emphasis for single leg skiing so to speak. There would be 95% of ones weight on the outside ski. That gave great balance and a strong edge for a stable turn. Now, and I'm not quite sure why, there is an emphasis for 'two footed skiing', with much more weight on the inside ski. It's very easy to see the difference between the two styles. I'm sure there are cases for 2 footed skiing, but from what I saw in the Olympics, across all the disciplines I watched, I saw a lot more skiers missing turns, or washing out turns and running wide, than I remember seeing in the past. The fashion in skiing has changed, just as the fashion in swimming has changed.

As an engineer and inquisitive person, I don't just do what the coach says, I want to know WHY the thing they are suggesting is allegedly better. Often, when asking "why", I don't get very satisfactory answers. I get flakey answers, that are clearly regurgiation of a semi-answer from someone up the food chain. For example, I think the old S stroke was good. It had lots of science behind it. The more modern straighter pull, doesn't make as much sense to me, from a scientific basis. I'm not saying a straight arm is slower, I just haven't heard a convincing argument WHY it's better, compared to an S pull.

similarly, a catchup stroke (or very close to it) makes sense to me from my understanding of hydrodynamics point of view.

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

I don't think bringing up Weissmuller as an example of cutting edge coaching is exactly helping your case. How long ago was that?

Re Janet, the consensus among most coaches I came in contact with wasn't that the windmill should be emulated, it was that hey, it works for her so as long as you get the underwater stuff right. So doing the windmill must not hurt anything too much, but it wasn't coached as the correct way to do things.

The s shaped pull is inefficient. It's just an extraneous movement that adds nothing to propulsion, that's been my experience as I've dropped it, although it was drilled into me as a kid that the s curve was the way to go. I'm faster without it.

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To a certain extent it doesn't matter why it's faster, it's that it is faster. The "why" comes after determining that it "is". So many things are interconnected that trying to put the theory first is tough. The best approach is " maybe this will work", try it, and adjust from there.

For example, front quadrant is great if you're a middle distance /distance swimmer. It doesn't work as well if you're a 50 swimmer, where max power is king, even above hydrodynamics.

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Boat propellers in essence do an S stroke through the water. (ie slicing diagonally through the water)

As straight pull is more like an old paddle wheeler boat that is WAY less efficient and WAY slower for the same power input.

Your statement about being faster with a straight pull is subjective at best and a N=1 sample. Me? I'll stick with evidence based objective investigation. My suspicion is that you didn't execute the S stroke in an ideal manner, similar to the way many people failed to execute Janet Evans separated finger technique.

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"