What happened with your body fat/no caffeine speed quest experiment?

I am going to de-rail this thread to something useful...

What is that drill for?

could not agree with you more. I have been coaching swimming for 19 years have worked with some of Canada's best and I look at this post and for the life of me can't figure out what this pose has to do with anything related to swimming fast or even swimming. I am a true believer in a strong core to be a good swimmer but I can think of about 2000 different ways to achieve that before I would do this pose. I am one willing to try things but really do not see point on this one

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It's for giving Coach a laugh at your expense....

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

It's just a series of lunges with some arm movements added. It's probably fine as part of some kind of general conditioning dryland program, but it has nothing to do with actual swimming.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

What kind of drum set is that? Got any more pics?

I'm going to do some jumping jacks in the diving well tonight to work on my flip turns. #innovator

OK swim fans, let's take it from the top:

Abstract
Club swim programs designed for highly neuroplastic youth create an environment of adaptation where the co-ordination of the freestyle stroke evolves naturally as a by product of the intensive water time, drills and training.

The adult swimmer faces a greater challenge in the learn-to-swim phase. After many years of land-based activity, unlocking the range of motion and specific coordinated movements along the sagittal plane of the FS stroke, require a more specialized technical approach vs the adaptive process used for young club swimmers.

Evidence
Is this required?

Solutions

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Training Tweets: https://twitter.com/Jagersport_com
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"intensive water time, drills and training." Found the solution.

i don't understand why people just don't swim...you'll get the "mobility" or whatever buzzwords you want to use by ACTUALLY DOING the sport.

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"The person on top of the mountain didn't fall there." - unkown

also rule 5

The secret to swimming well is that there is no secret. There are no shortcuts.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

God damn it. FFS. I thought the only thing separating me from Phelps was a secret.......

This is my favourite pose for butterfly.

Shark as far as solutions go I'm not sure you want to hear what ended up rescuing me from over 2 decades of total swim frustration. In short it's pretty much everything you don't do and nothing you regularly present. I'm not saying don't do it go for it as long as you are doing what you enjoy. I only bring this up b/c you keep coming back and back with everything other than swimming more and it seems like you might not be getting to where you want to be. It's a tough endeavor to swim well and a lot of people don't have access to swim coaching I get that. Do you know a swim coach? If so take advantage of it and forget weighted swim caps, caffeine experiments and the like. Not a triathlon coach, but a SWIM coach. There are some fantastic triathlon coaches who get swimming, but your chances of finding someone who really knows what they are doing is if they are a dedicated swim coach. It took me the off season winter months to go from swimming like a knuckle head to swimming free of gross technical errors. Granted I was in there 4+ days a week, but I was determined to make it happen and it took a lot of hard work in the pool gaining fitness to be able to get my body to do what my coach needed it to do. I have been out of the pool most of the last year due to work travel, but having lost both fitness and flexibility I know why I'm slower.....zero mysteries or excuses. I can still whip my old self's best, but I am never going to get faster until I get back int he pool regularly and put time in the pain cave.

I hadn't swum in a decade till last Jan. last jan i started swimming and swam 3 times a week LCM till my half in June where I swam 34 I think. All i did was swim with no structure.

I'm 90% confident that the last 6-8 weeks I have swam at "Masters" have increased my speed more than the 5 months I swam last year because someone basically told me to swim faster.

If I want to swim the fastest I can, I have to swim a lot and swim fast alot - its not that complicated and in fact for new adult onset swimmers I'd suggest that if they want to swim better than they currently do they swim more than they currently do

Abstract

Adult onset swimmers are shit - cos they've never done it

Evidence

They dont swim very well or very fast

Solution

Get a lesson and swim more

I'm not convinced I couldn't have reached the same level after those few technical winter months had I just gone right into swimming sets with his eye even as bad as I was technically and just fixed it along the way. Could have happened faster possibly that route, but I begged him to tear my stroke down to build it right from the ground up so he did. If I was going to commit to it I just wanted to reformat the hard drive in a matter of speaking. I think the 20+ years of floundering had all but taken the steam out of my engine I was kind fo thinking 'if this doesnt' work I'm out completely and done so give it your best shot.'

The only way I'm going to get some speed back is to put my big boy pants on when I get a break in travel this year and suffer through a week or so of drugery until I get that moment when I know I can take it and the yardage number just disappears. It's about getting comfortable being uncomfortable again.....until then.

  


yeah I do swimmers' pose all the time. The pose is kicking and pulling, and you're facedown in the water.

I do flip turn pose a lot, too.

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maybe she's born with it, maybe it's chlorine
If you're injured and need some sympathy, PM me and I'm very happy to write back.
disclaimer: PhD not MD

Thanks for the good information - from everyone, but let me clear up this first & foremost, this thread is not for me! I did learn how to swim and very happy with where I'm at!! Certainly FOP AG this summer. After smoking swim and bike, I need to work on my running OMG. I had some fun tonite and made a before/after swim video called "Touch the Sky":). It's framed as a new swim system method on my Youtube channel. I'll post it on my Twitter account too. Don't take it seriously, it's supposed to be funny.

My wife is a swim coach & the club is on fire. I have swam with very good coaches, top swimmers too, current & past record holders, etc. I took lessons. However, nobody and not in any swim system including SS and TI actually tell you specifically how the mechanical sequencing of the full body, 6 Beat freestyle stroke works. That is on a technical level. I'm talking hitting specific mark points within a several mS tolerance +/-. to hove through the water. ( eg. The same tolerance that I would expect a musician to keep, or that player goes out of time).

In my particular case, I swam REVERSED for about 2 years, tearing up my body. So in that fundamental Swimmers Pose I posted, I had my legs switched, relative to my arms. I was tearing apart my lower back, sinking my legs, creating gobs of drag, working against my shoulders - what a biomechanical mess.

I didn't know. It wasn't until I did split screen video and lots of hmmmm... that I saw that my heels were switched. Then I set out to fix that, come hell or high water. Designed my own set of drills and workouts to fix the problem for good. Boom it felt like I just learned how to ride a bike.

I think there is an opportunity here to actually say outright, "this is how you swim the FS stroke". Something like "I need your hand here, your leg here. Now I need your hand there and your leg there. Your body needs to do this". Like someone said before on ST it's a dance. So how do you move like Jagger? You move from pose to pose and in between there the damn kicks.

I'll give some example results of this:
- You'll never want to use a pull buoy, unless under specific circumstances
- You'll naturally 6BK no matter what the distance. (a 2BK throws me off rhythm at the moment)
- Back feels much better
- More shoulder twist, and driving to seek more length
- Way more power, grip and more hydrodynamic

How cannot it not be all of the above? The sequencing of the stroke is (finally) correct.

I'd like to see a new swim approach or system that says this how you swim FS, just like this how you surf, or snowboard. Those sports have got it. Has anyone learned to snowboard later in life, get instruction, what happened ?

So that is the reason for the swimmer's pose and it's just trying to frame, illustrate or articulate what I learned this summer.


PS:
I use a chin block (not head weight) I pulled it out today because I was lifting my head into the wall grrr...

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Training Tweets: https://twitter.com/Jagersport_com
FM Sports: http://fluidmotionsports.com

Well big mea culpa on my part. I had absolutely no idea you were an FOP age grouper I wasn't gleaning that from your posts. Rock on dude.

Well there isn't a secret but there is an explanation of process. What swim coach has said to you "at your stroke top dead center (TDC) I want to see your right heel catching air, priming for the power stroke". And "I also want to see your recovering arm as far forward at TDC as you can get it, so that mass is over or beyond your center of buoyancy". "I want your recovering shoulder catching air and your hip flexors and quads to be loose so that you can pull these up into the slip stream of the torso to reduce drag"

Here's the swimmer's pose in side view. If this tight sequence of the flying machine is not made, then the FS stroke isn't correct. I naturally started out legs reversed (so right leg down, left leg up @ TDC) and it was hell. So there's the secret.

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Training Tweets: https://twitter.com/Jagersport_com
FM Sports: http://fluidmotionsports.com

Basic Freestyle swimming: I went to work and did a full video on my thoughts around learning the basics.

- start slow at first
- ditch the pull buoys
- fear not the wetsuit swim
- add length and reach
- no more sinky legs
- less drag, more speed

It's all fresh in my mind, as I went from seriously horrible to a now what I consider a decent starting point. At least I have a solid starting point, something to build off of.


For schooled swimmers they would go huh?? because all of this is so second nature. For the swim coaching system - I have no idea why this simple fact of FS swimming is not strongly articulated and drilled into the basic program. So that is why I did this video.





And here's another recent video by Chloe Sutton. Besides her stroke being impeccable, if you listen carefully she does mention quickly the same subject matter much better than previous videos I've seen. Strawberry, blueberry :) .





Share the love!

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Training Tweets: https://twitter.com/Jagersport_com
FM Sports: http://fluidmotionsports.com