My masters instructor is teaching me flip turns. I get very nauseous doing them. Would ear plugs help? Anyone else deal with this? Thanks
Awesome that you’re learning flip turns.
Ear plugs might help. I have nausea swimming sometimes when I swim in the middle of the day - I don’t know why - earplugs do help me then.
It may also be just part of the learning curve and when you’re doing the turn correctly (and quickly), it won’t happen.
Can I tag on a question about flip turns? I can do them (watched hours of video on them and practiced literally for hours in the pool doing each step.) But I think I still need to speed up my “flip” part. I can’t figure out if I need to tuck more (I’m really tall, so there’s a lot of legs to flip over my head) or if I should focus more on bringing my head to my knees when I initiate the flip. Any advice on how to make the flip a little snappier?
Physics problem!
Tuck more. Smaller radius = faster spin.
Your turns will also be faster the faster you swim — pushing off the wall when you are swimming fast is like POW!
Thanks! (Actually I think it’s a coordination problem too – I seem to have trouble getting all the various parts of my body to do what they need to do at the right times… I’m not exactly graceful… Maybe it just takes too long for the nerves to transfer from my head to my legs… )
I will be working on getting my tuck tighter today at the pool!
Oh, and so as to not completely hijack this thread, to the OP – I always swim with earplugs or I get terrible vertigo. I think if I tried to do a flip without them I’d end up completely disoriented.
Interesting, I never would have thought earplugs would help vertigo. It clearly helps you so I do not doubt it’s efficacy, but I just don’t get how sticking wax in your ear helps three little pieces of cartilage behind your ear drum stabilize themselves.
As for flip turns, I think it merits it’s own thread and you should be the one that opens it!
maybe during the flip, a little cool water enters the ear canal which can cool the semicircular canals enough to upset your sense of balance, bringing on vertigo.
This is a known response to popped eardrums while scuba diving - dizziness, nausea, etc.
Some people may be more sensitive where they get this without popping their eardrums.
Help me out here, because I’m interested in how you say the better technique allows the nausaus feeling to go away. I mean simple physics suggest that the simple act of “flipping” will always have these issues right? So does it get better with doing it faster and the nauseas feeling is instead of say for 1.5 seconds, it only last for .4 seconds? Or does the body/mind adapt to it after having done it 200 times and than you just dont deal with it anymore?
Basically I tried flip turns, and just hated the “blurry” feeling every time I did them, and I stopped (of course mine was slow/awkward motion). Plus for me, I dont really need to do them, I was just curious if your body just naturally adapts to the feeling the more you do it?
I got very nauseous and disoriented doing flip turns at first, also.
I tried speeding up as I approached the wall, and that seemed to help.
Or maybe I stopped noticing the nausea because of the burning sinuses.
Then I had my first sinus infection in my life, which happened to develop shortly after I started learning flip turns, and I haven’t done flip turns since…
That was a few months ago. I’ll start them again. After my Feb race.
Help me out here, because I’m interested in how you say the better technique allows the nausaus feeling to go away. I mean simple physics suggest that the simple act of “flipping” will always have these issues right? So does it get better with doing it faster and the nauseas feeling is instead of say for 1.5 seconds, it only last for .4 seconds? Or does the body/mind adapt to it after having done it 200 times and than you just dont deal with it anymore?
Basically I tried flip turns, and just hated the “blurry” feeling every time I did them, and I stopped (of course mine was slow/awkward motion). Plus for me, I dont really need to do them, I was just curious if your body just naturally adapts to the feeling the more you do it?
See what HalfSpeed wrote about water in the semicircular canals.
I think that when learning turns, you do a lot of twisting upside down that your body’s not used to. If I do a handstand or too many cartwheels (or just inversion poses in yoga), I get headaches. Gymnasts do those all day and I don’t think they have headaches from them. There’s probably some amount of getting used to it. And the worse your turns, the worse the nausea will be (I would guess).
It’s not turns that make me nauseous, but water in my ears if I swim midday (I have no idea why it happens midday but not AM).
try turning on your back if you aren’t already
.
try to stick your head up your butt…
try to stick your head up your butt…
Or more accurately… lock your elbows and try to use your arms to shove your head up your butt.