First why are you doing breast stroke and then a kinda back crawl stroke? kidding looks like to me your elbows are not high enough and your hands are entering to far to the sides. Also think your butt (ass) is to low in the water. Think if you swim with a bouy or float between your legs and get your body used to where your position should be you will also get a beeter kick out of it and become less fatigued on longer distances maintaining a faster speed with les effort. Just my opinion though. Also using a kick board could be helpful to you also.

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Your head position is slightly high. The waterline should be around the middle of your head, not your forehead. I tell swimmers to point their nose to the bottom of the pool. It is a head tilt, your head shouldn't be buried underwater.

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Bruce
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It looks like you just don't want it. Kind of like your in the pool and going through the motions.

I am not an expert by any means, but it looks like your arms just aren't grabbing water. Your pull looks like it is taking the path of least resistance.

Does this describe you?
I can go forever with out getting too tired. My lats and triceps are rarely fatigued after a workout.

I think you should add some paddle workouts and swimming with a tennis ball in each hand. You need to grab more water.

Yes, that is what I realized too when I looked at myself, it looks like I'm gently stroking the water. I will try the paddles (I have the toys, I just rarely bother to bring them pool-side). I have done a bit of fist-swimming, but I probably should do more.

Sounds good. The camera work was pretty impressive, what kind of camera?

Canon PowerShot A620 (couple of years old now) for which I found an under-water house on sale. My camera-holding friend did his best to swim steady with fins beside me :-)

That was my thought too. Your position doesn't look horrible, but you just seem to be out for a easy stroll as you take each stroke.

chris

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You dont think his ass is underwater a bit to much causing a weak kick ?

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I think the kick itself is appropriate for what he's doing- it's helping maintain even speed when hands are off entering without it looking like he's killing himself in the process. Might aim for about 4-6 inches wider on entry on the right side, but it's not a huge crossover issue.

One common tri swimmer issue that seems to be showing up here is a disconnect between good body rotation and using that body rotation to get full extension on the front end of your stroke- think about how it feels to try to reach for something on a high shelf, and how torso, shoulder, and arm all have to work together in order to reach that item you're going for.

FLA Jill: Thank you! I realize that now, when I look at it again, that I rotate, but I leave the arm pretty far from fully extended. When I've tried to extend more it has felt rather taxing, but I guess I'm a bit too inflexible in the shoulder atm. I'll try and work on that.

I agree with those who think your feet and lower legs are too low in the water.

Agree with Jill. It also looks like your catch is off. Elbows up and really grab the water on the pull. Maybe work in some scull drills, one arm drill etc. to try and improve your feel for the water. It looks to me like because you catch is flawed, you're pulling way to deep with nearly a straight arm. It's going to be really difficult to generate a lot of speed like that.

x2 on the good camera work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyR7JYllk9U

enjoy.

First thing I noticed is when you push off from the wall, you instantly grind to a halt. A major reason for this is that your arms aren't properly streamlined, causing huge drag in the water. You need to bring your elbows in, your biceps should be squeezing the sides of your head.

You seem to do the same thing with your elbows during your normal stroke, not fully extending the arm.

You are a little sloped in the water, with your feet lower than your hips and your hips lower than your head. You need to engage your core muscles to lift your feet up.

I'm not sure about the comments about you not looking to be putting much effort in. It shouldn't take much effort to swim at a decent speed. When I see a video of myself I always think I look like I'm about to fall asleep or something. I just put one up on youtube that is a good example of my lethargic looking swimming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qnaZkvn1sA
That's me in the blue hat. It's the GB Masters Champs 2006, where I won gold in my age group, despite looking like I'm just doing a warm up or swim down. We have to race 2 per lane, so the people in blue hats are in one heat swimming on one side of the lanes and the yellow hats are a different heat swimming on the other side. I promise you that my power output is almost certainly as poor as it looks. I don't have any kind of amazing physiology, my best ever 1 hour power on a bike is just 266W.

I find it hard to see whether or not you need to grab more water. Your arm pull looks reasonable to me, but it only takes subtle invisible changes to lose a lot of the strength of the pull. What is the lowest number of arm pulls you can take for a length, not doing anything silly like pausing each stroke for ages while you kick yourself down the pool, just a normal continuous stroke but trying to really grab as much water as you can? I can do 11 arm pulls for a 25m pool.

Streamline: Yes, this is probably the same as my poor reach, my shoulders are (atm) too stiff, and my arms are used to not being overhead.

On the effort: Yes, I was actually pushing in these videos, but I think the point is that the work I put in doesn't result in speed.

When doing a 50lcm in 50s I do somewhere slightly above 40 strokes, but probably below 45. In the surface video I'm at 21 on the half-way mark, and with my poor push-off that indicates 40-45 for the entire length. When I've tried to minimize stroke count it usually give the same result, I loose too much speed when focusing on stroke-length.

I'm not sure I fully get the position-comment. Should my head be higher? As far as I can tell my head is in ok pos, the problem is hips and legs (although correcting those without adjusting head is probably difficult).

If that is arm pulls rather than complete stroke cycles, that is a perfectly reasonable stroke count. If you did one arm pull per second, you'd be going at 1:30 per 100m. I always find it hard to judge stroke rate from looking at people, but you must be stroking quite a bit slower than me (or your turns must be terrible).

No, your head certainly doesn't need to be higher. You can't raise your body overall any higher in the water, as that is just a function of your buoyancy level, but you can lift your legs and feet up. I think it's something many people find hard to grasp, because I try to get people to do it at my health club, and many aren't able to achieve it. Lie on the floor face down, keep your legs straight, and simply lift your legs up off the floor. That is what you have to do when swimming, though the force required is massively reduced in the water. Your feet should be just breaking the surface at the top of each kick. Try exaggerating it, see just how high you can lift your legs and feet while swimming along. I can easily enough swim with my feet right out of the water if I want to. Once you have got the hang of how to bring them up in the water, letting them go down again to find the optimum position is easy, I've never known anyone fall into a bad habit of having their legs and feet too high in the water.

Yes, 45 arm pulls, 22 something stroke cycles. My turns ARE horrible, but that doesn't matter too much right now, as the lane I'm supposed to swim in usually has a lot of people hogging the wall, making good turns impossible.

I can do 100m in 1.30, but not two in a row.

You could work on trying to speed up your stroke using a tempo trainer - a little thing that you put under your cap or clip on your goggle strap and it beeps at a programmable rate. Obviously you have to try to speed your stroke up while not taking more strokes per length. For comparison, look at Laure Manaudou here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94NMeB07eJ4
On her 3rd 50m, I count 50 strokes, yet she is swimming 1:55 for 200m. It can be very hard to appreciate just how fast the top swimmers are turning their arms over.

Your technique does look a little "sloppy" in places, not the same every stroke, but you can see some individual strokes where something moves in a way it shouldn't. If you do try to speed your stroke up, try to also keep it "tight", where every movement is under control. This doesn't mean you should be tense, it needs to still be relaxed while at the same time being tight and controlled, if that makes sense.

While the swim isn't that important in a triathlon, and hence triathletes tend not to do much swim training, I have wondered if they could benefit from having a period of doing much more swim training well away from an important triathlon, e.g. do a month of swimming 30km a week, to try to really develop good technique and fitness, and hope that you can then retain some of that technique improvement when doing much less. Even though my technique is pretty reasonable at 15km a week, I do feel it improves significantly at 30km a week.

Hm, so my spl is actually not far from ok. Sometimes you get the feeling (here) that anything above 30 spl sucks.

Right now I'd be glad to get to 10k/week. I guess it's time to stop refreshing this page and get to the pool.

30 would be really really low for a good swimmer. I just checked my video of the 2004 Olympic 1500m final, and Grant Hackett took 33 strokes on his second 50m. He is a huge guy, most of us stand no chance of stroking as long as that.

Another example - top female Masters swimmer Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen, I have a video of her swimming in a meet over here. She took 50 strokes on the 2nd 50m of a 400m.

Brooke Bennett was also in the 50/50 LCM range when she was winning Olympic gold medals.

I think that Ian Thorpe actually ended up causing a lot of harm when it came to teaching 'proper' freestyle. Because unless you're a genetic mutant who is at least 6'4" and can kick 100M in 1:10 or less, you're never going to be able to swim like him.

I'm still trying to figure out who has the best 'three bears' freestyle to use as an example- a swimmer who isn't at either the Thorpe/Hackett or Bennett/Pipes-Nielsen extremes of the stroke spectrum but is rather 'just right'. I used to say Lindsey Benko, but it's hard to find video of her on the intrawebs. Maybe Katie Hoff?

Even Katie may well still have an astounding kick by the standards of most swimmers. I don't have any info about her kick in particular, but GB swimmer Caitlin Mclatchey is a similar size and I've been told she can kick 100m in 1:12. This makes sense to me because I know a male Masters swimmer who races similar times to Caitlin, and he can also kick 100m in 1:12. 1:12 is exactly how long it takes me to kick 100m if I use smallish training fins, and funnily enough, I can then also swim full stroke at a similar speed to these people, which has led me to believe that having that standard of kick is pretty much mandatory to swim that fast.

I just checked out some video footage of Katie in a 400m free, and it was hard to count exactly because she wasn't always in the shot, but I got her at around 39 strokes for 50m. I find that pretty impressive, because I took 40 for my second 50m in a 1500m race, at nothing like her rate of arm turnover.

I suggest you to do the 4 following things and this will likely improve your stroke quickly:

- reach: make sure to put your shoulder against your chin (and not against your hear as you do);

- beginning of the catch: position your hip, shoulder, elbow and hand along a straight line with the hand pointing a bit below your chin ; right now, your hip is below your elbow which means that you just sink.

- catch: bend more your elbow: your elbow should bend with a 90° angle (better catch, less resistance)

- finally, choose your swim style; are you a hip driven or a shoulder driven swimmer ? it is hard to tell. Depending on your style, you should either rotate less your hips and use your shoulders or rotate more your hips. You are in between which is counterproductive in a way. For more info about these styles: http://www.theraceclub.net

Good swim!