I'm gonna leave the stroke critique up to the swim mavens here maybe the trimagnolia club guy will see this.

All I will say is that your stroke is better than 99% of triathletes and you have a lot of great things going on. I think 'perfection' is really over rated in open water in the way most people go about it. You don't have any pauses or gaps where you are decelerating I can see and that is awesome I'd bet on crappy condition days you do even better vs the field. 1:02 is fine swimming dude. I think one of the smart swimmers here might have a few suggestions on how to grab a little more water with each stroke. I dig the constant propulsion you have going on though that is such a huge thing when battling rough conditions the pause and glide people just die unless it's glass calm.

1. Swim more

2. You're going to get the most inprovement by working on distance per stroke.

3. You don't get enough reach at the front of the stroke. Can't see much else, but basically solid that I can tell.

4. Edit to add, just saw vid 2. You're leading the pull with your elbow. Get those forearms vertical.

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Only change I would make is keep your hands pointed down.

you might want to explain what you mean....

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Looks like good head/body position and decent shoulder mobility.


I'll put this in a cycling motif: You are stroking with the smallest ring of a front triple, and the biggest MTB gear at the back (ok not quite that extreme). It's kind of an energy efficient stroke, surprisingly fast - like the guy I saw in Vancouver, rocking lap after lap in the fast lane. He was like 65 years old.

OK To get the idea of a longer stroke : push the arms fully straightened out up front. Then really, almost comically exaggerate your arm action to take these big swooping, round house long strokes - should almost have a bouncing rhythm to it. Then video that and split screen compare to a competition club swimmer.

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Swim long. Try to glide more. Work on minimizing strokes per lap. Your torn over rate is to high.

No, no no no no.....

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Yes yes yes yes yes...

really, no. glide is bad. reach good, glide bad.

the way to improve distance per stroke is not by gliding.

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Really? I'm surprised all you folks think his stroke is so good! It's not bad, but I can pick out more technical things in there than a lot of other folks who are swimming a lot slower and post videos here, but who happen to swim slower.

In fact, it looks pretty much exactly like a stroke I'd expect to see from a fairly dedicated triathlete who has otherwise always gone light on swim training and swims <3000 meters/wk and has never done so in the past as an adult-onset swimmer.

I get the sense all you guys are just judging him by his 1:00 IM swim time, and not actually picking apart his stroke. I seriously wonder if you would all have the same opinion if someone had just told him to swim at 85% of the effort he's putting in in this video (so goes slower), but maintain the exact same stroke. I'll bet you'd be jumping all over his form then.

I am impressed though that the OP can maintain such cadence and pull power per stroke given his very low swim volume and technical limitations. Not that I'm surprised though - you all know I've always been the one here who's been saying how important power and turnover are in AOS swimming, and I think this guy's videos and IM swim results pretty much show how even with suboptimal swim technique but enough turnover/power (from talent in OP's case!) you can still go pretty fast for an AGer.

I can't believe that his 27 strokes per length indicates near error-free form.

I don't recall stating his stroke is near error free. All I said was his stroke looks better than almost everyone else in a triathlon by looking at his footage. Maybe you have a much better crowd of tri swimmers than we do here in FL. I also stated some smart swim minds here might be able to assist him in grabbing a bit more water. It's good enough I'm not going to jump in and mess up a guy swimming an IM split most of ST would kill for that's for sure.

You and I might be different in how we view success in the water though. I only care what the clock says, not what it looks like for the most part. So, seeing a guy with some decent balance not killing himself and not lifting the head and you can have a lot of things going on sub-obtimal and go really well. At his insanely non-existent yardage I have no doubts he is already a sub hour IM swimmer with a decent dose of work not changing a thing. 2 of my pals are IM guys who are a full 5 minutes slower with much better 'looking' strokes, but not according to the clock. If you have a decent body position you can go well with a lot of things that need work. For a triathlete already swimming his pace on essentially a baseline survival yardage program he's doing plenty right. How many ST'ers would cut off their left nut for a 1:02 in their next IM with 9-12k a week?

Fair enough.

But I would definitely disagree that his stroke looks better than 99% of triathletes out there.

I'd say his stroke looks better than 50% of triathletes out there when sampling the entire range, but if you limit it to 1hr or sub1-hr IM swimmers, he'd be in the bottom 5% of stroke technique compared to that cohort. He literally looks like a beginner-intermediate swimmer to me except for the rapid and consistent turnover.

Again, his results are excellent, but it's almost entirely a function of the rapid turnover and stroke power, both of which he's lucky to have talent for (given his super-low swim volume) and has little to do with his technique.

I'm just really surprised that you almost give him a pass on the swimming technique/improvement because of his 1-hr swim time. You know that I'm always the one who's saying how the fish/coaches here constantly hugely overstate how much someone's swim technique should improve their swim time when they see a video of someone going 1:40/100, but in this case, even I'm looking at his stroke, seeing that 27 count per length, and having a hard time NOT commenting on the pure technical stuff that's NOT erroneous!

I'd go so far as to say that if you go in retrospect, and pull up nearly all of the recent self-posted videos of swim technique, that if you could somehow speed up those swimmers's turnover to the OPs in this video, they'd be going just as fast if not faster than him.

I think the OP's video is a pretty good example of what I've found about AOS swimming - that once you get your body pretty flat in the water and aren't rolling all over the place, power/turnover dictates the bulk of your swim pace. Not stroke angles, not head position, not those little things that folks love to point out (appropriately so). Those things help, but don't take a 1hr20min IM swimmer to a 1:00 IM swimmer, whereas someone with near-beginner level form (the OP in this case) can swim a 1hr flat almost entirely on the basis of his power/turnover despite making a whole of stroke errors in the process.

once you get your body pretty flat in the water and aren't rolling all over the place

that's kind of a big part of "technique is important" though.

It's all related. all of it. power, form, turnover rate, DPS. Swimming is ultimately a fairly simple sport, but don't oversimplify to just one thing. It ain't "just one thing"

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Yes, it's a big thing, but you yourself have seen coaches/fish on this forum look at other self-posted swim videos with excellent flat body position in the water, better stroke technique than the OP (but a lot less power), and attribute their slowness in the water to technique, not power.

And you definitely know how important I've considered power in swimming having disagreed with me on it in the past!

The way I look at it, power is a given. More power is always better, so why bother talking about it? if someone is asking for advice on technique, it doesn't make a whole hill of beans difference to tell them "more power". That's a discussion when talking about training frequency, types of training, etc...

The trick is how to get what power the individual "does" produce, whatever that might be, to move them through the water efficiently.

On a side note, I don't see a lot of folks with "excellent flat body position". Most folks who post who are slower than the OP, that I recall anyway, have significant body position issues. Sometimes its caused by them trying to be efficient, but to them that means gliding, which causes a bunch of issues in itself.

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Power is a given, but you can't not mention it if it's the single biggest reason (like 90%+) why a swimmer is going like 1:50/100 compared to 1:30/100. It's just false advertising to say they can slightly improve pull angle or head position and suddenly go faster, as many on these swim forums do seem to suggest.

I'll also disagree that most people posting videos here have poor body position. I've seen like 7 of them in the last year posted here, and I can't recall a single one having really bad leg drag. At most, a minimal dip in the legs, but nothing horrendous. In fact, the majority of swimmers who posted videos don't look much worse than the OP in this thread - just with like 2x slower turnover.

Well, dropping your legs 6" below where they should be results in probably a 50% increase in the drag forces, as a rough guess. So what you see as not that bad, i might view as terrible.

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I've yet to see anybody do that on their videos, honestly. Although I have seen some 'kicktastic' swimmers that are probably using a kick to keep their legs up, and I've mentioned that.

I think superficially it looks OK. Body position is OK, he has reasonable body rotation, got a good kick, but he has a very inefficient technique. High stroke rate, but is moving slowly, he's generating very little power, despite an 80 spm stroke rate. He basically has a poor catch and pull. So not the worst technique I've ever seen, but it would be one of the poorer ones compared to other 1hr/IM swimmers.





Yup I agree.

While I agree with you re glide being bad, gliding ever so slightly when doing the distance per stroke drill, helped me learn about engaging the large back muscles, lats, triceps, pectorals etc Slow down the stroke, almost over-extend, catch and pull, feeling all those muscles work. Perhaps it's a poor way of doing it, but it helped me.

Don't you think the OP is swimming too flat though??? Seems to me he's not rotating enough to get that big power reach that he needs. He needs to watch some Oly relay videos to see how various guys get their arms more up out of the water and then reach further out in front. OP, try to model your stroke off of one of these guys, several slightly diff styles to choose from:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nmke435DPE

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I misspoke. I was thinking "level" , fore / aft, rather than flat, tbh.

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That's fine if you do it deliberately, knowing that it's just a drill. It's when you think you should be normally swimming with a big glide that you get into trouble.

I do catch up drills all the time. Lots of "glide" in that drill, but you don't do that as a main set.

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I agree with this. Gliding isn't necessarily bad. Gliding to the point of slowing down is bad. In competitive swimming, the two fastest parts of a race are the start and turns, both of which you are gliding during. The main thing to know is WHEN to start swimming, ie when swimming is faster than the gliding. Same (albeit to a smaller degree) in your stroke. Glide for a second until it would be better/ faster for you to take another stroke.

1. Roll your shoulders more to allow your arms to recover (over the water) easier.
2. While rolling your shoulders more, keep your hips rolling in sync with your shoulders. Right now, it seems like your hips are rolling more than you shoulders, resulting in a wiggle from the waist down.
3. Extend your arms fully when they enter the water. Try to catch "clean" water (no bubbles). A good drill for this is catch-up. Nice and slow.
3. The first move your arms should make is a downward motion with your palm, wrist and forearm all in line, bending at the elbow, catching water the whole length of your lower arm. Be sure to focus on catching as soon as your arm starts pulling. Many people let their arms drop a few inches below the surface before really putting pressure behind the stroke.
4. Don't be surprised if all of this slows down your stroke. This is a good thing. Better distance per stroke will result in fewer strokes and hopefully less fatigue.