I'm going to throw in 1 other significant thing.
You're brearhing every 2 strokes - always on the right.
Whilst I get it allows for sucking in more air than breathing bilaterally (every 3 strokes), it just encourages being unbalanced and lop-sided.
I know... I used to only breathe to 1 side too.
I personally find that by breathing every 3 I get a better rotation or the body on each stroke (so use my core / lats as part of the muscles doing work and not just my shoulders and triceps) and I'm just so much more balanced, straight and symetrical (on part of one early vid you look bent when viewed from above not straight. Being curved amd wriggling in the water also adds drag.
It took me about 3 or 4 months of forcing myself to breathe bilaterally for it feel 'normal' (swimming 3 or 4 times a week then, typically an hour or so each time). But now its the normal and unilateral is mainly saved for sprinting or when the waves in OW mean I can't breathe to one side without gulping water half the time - handly as if there's a big OW swell from one side, 50/50 chance it's the wrong side to breathe).


For the arm speed topic (the RPM so to say) there's a balance to be struck - too slow and you will over-glide (and risk putting the brakes on with your hand every stroke) but too fast and what happens isbyou shorten the stroke and finish it early - chopping out the very powerful latter part of the stroke in order to turn your arms over faster.

I know from timed sessions that if I raise my rpm too much I actually go slower despite putting more effort in - I just get inneficient.

I disagree with this.
I can see the merit in being able to breathe to both sides sides.
In races, however, oxygen is king
Sure, learn to do it and breathe away from the chop, but I'd still be breathing every two strokes.

Your ellbows are still low, like in 2019.
tmho, although I am a rather bad AOS, you can only change that in that you rotate your shoulder. I know it might be difficult because we AOS do not have a lot of shoulder flexibility. But if you want to keep your ellbows high during hinging your underarm down/inwardly as you have to do for the catch, you can only do that in having your shoulder rotated inwardly, that is clockwise on the left and counterclockwise on the right, seen in forward direction. It is an unnatural movement for us non-swimmers but you have to try to do that.

Will it cause shoulder injury?

That is a good question, I do some shoulder gymnastics because I have a sensitive right shoulder. Caused by an impingement syndrome.
But I think indeed AOS have stiff shoulders. This is something good swimmers are nor aware of from their own experience which causes sometimes communication problems.

You need to find someone who can help you with you Technique , to many swim squads are only interested in "Sets" and Kms you need to spend more time on getting your 50ms/yrds under 40s and that speed will translate in more efficiency ..= faster

As the total immersion coach I've approach can't promise me a set date for resuming the lessons, I have decided to find another coach to have some 1-1 lessons first which I will start next Tuesday. He's a national triathlon team member, therefore I believe he can teach me technique which will be useful for long distance open water swimming.

Also, I have taken some videos today as a record. Please advise.

There's much better folks than me to critique.
But one thing that looks SOOOO much better than last year's video as starters - your legs are at/near the surface and heels just breaking the surface. You look a lot flatter in the water.
That HAS to make an improvement as your drag will be so much less than before.

  Thanks for keeping us up to date and providing us with a subject matter / example to comment on. It's easy to see the faults in other swimmers - damn hard to improve your own swimming ability. I made a couple of comments back in November in which I declared myself a "competent swimmer" and thus qualified to give you advice. The advice was good (and still is) but a few weeks ago I had an opportunity to do my own full swim analysis with a professional coach. After reviewing my video I can say I was shocked at how much I could (and needed to) improve my stroke.

This is the set up my coach provided for the 1 hour session: an Endless Pool with 2 mirrors to view yourself, 2 cameras and a big screen monitor for playback, wireless headphones so that she can give real time instructions as you swim, an edited video analysis to take home and re watch as needed. As a coach and instructor I was hugely impressed with her ability to break down the issues, demonstrate the right and wrong way to do things and come up with a plan to fix them. You still need to internalize all the movements, repeat them correctly 10,000 times and finally you can bring your fitness into the equation.

It was a bit humbling but very much worth it, if you find a similar situation where you live I would recommend checking it out.

---

"They know f_ck-all over at Slowtwitch"
- Lionel Sanders

I took my first 1-1 lesson with Abraham Kok (a national triathlete) today. He mainly taught me to add kicking and increased my cadence. He also told me to keep my hips flat. His explanation is that the pull is more powerful if my hips stay flat rather than rotate together with my body and shoulder, which makes the power slip away, and also makes my legs swing. I had serious doubt about the method because it is directly opposite to the TI methodology. He also explained to me that if I want to increase my 10 km speed I need to make my 100 - 200 - 400 m faster first which is done by increasing cadence, and kicking helps it.

When I started swimming 2 years ago I didn't know how to kick at all. Then last year I took a TI lesson with Chung Ho who taught me the 2-beat kick, rotation from the hip and weight shift. It got me improvement overnight so I planned to have further lesson with him from February, however it was suspended due to pandemic and he hasn't resumed lessons yet and I don't want to wait anymore, so I have decided to find another coach temporarily.

At the end of the lesson, he timed me a 100 m and a 50 m. He asked me what was my best time in my 100 m which I was at 1'33" a few weeks earlier, and 1'36" in the last year. Then he showed me the stopwatch which showed 1'30". I basically couldn't believe what I saw at the moment.

In the 50 m afterwards, after I arrived the opposite end, he first asked me to guess what would be my time. My best time in a race (i.e. with diving start) was 42", and in practice without diving the fastest was about 45", so I guessed 45". Then he showed me the watch showing a figure just under 40". It was out of my imagination! However it stressed me so much on my fitness which I could never reach before using the old method (i.e. slower cadence with 1 kick per arm stroke).

I told him that the method I wanted is to improve my streamline and catch to make my stroke as long as possible in order to gain speed (i.e. increasing SL in the equation V = SL × SR), and he explained to me using biking terms that making a long SL is like using a high gear, a larger diameter with lower cadence (i.e. used when the speed is already high), and making that long stroke will need a large force (which I don't have).

My doubt about the method has become a self-doubt on what's wrong with me because I firmly believed in the total immersion method which claims to help a lot of swimmers / triathletes to make their goals, and also made me improvement last year but now he teaches the complete opposite thing to me yet makes even a larger immediate improvement.

In the coming weeks I need to do more practice to get used to what he teaches me, then to see if my 400 m or above time also improves as well, but my concern is that, because this method gassed me so much even in a 50 or 100 and made my heart rate so high, how the heck I can use this method to do a 10 - 20 km race?! Also this method is directly opposite to what TI does, and it also doesn't seem effortless, will it be a way of no return to TI that I'll eventually struggle in my swim because it is so hard despite it is faster than my old method?

Now, I am 20lbs too heavy, very much an AOS and freakin slow in the water (2:10 / 100). But I can tell you that I suspect with time your fitness will adapt. Ever train above threshold on the bike? Do running sprints? What happened over time? When you first started to swim ... how gassed were you at the end of a session? A couple of months later, what were things like?

I have so freaking much low hanging fruit I can fill a grocery store. But my other experiences says your body will adapt.