All I get after hard sets are my shoulders and triceps sore, but my back muscles barely even feel it. What am I doing wrong? What should I focus on and try to fix it?
Stand up. Put your arm outstretched and put your hand at a shelf so that your arm is parallel to the floor. Try to push your arm down. It shouldn’t go anywhere. You feel that sensation in your lats? You should feel that when swimming. Now that you know what it feels like, it should be easier to try to replicate it in the pool.
Stand up. Put your arm outstretched and put your hand at a shelf so that your arm is parallel to the floor. Try to push your arm down. It shouldn’t go anywhere. You feel that sensation in your lats? You should feel that when swimming. Now that you know what it feels like, it should be easier to try to replicate it in the pool.
Perfect drill but I’d add one thing - try it once with your elbows below your hands (ie closer to the floor than your hands). Then try it with your elbows above your hands (ie your elbows are farther form the floor than your hands). The second way you should be able to generate more force and you should also feel your lats coming more into play. Generally speaking, that is the relative position of hands and elbows you want to replicate in the pool during your stroke.
The orginal poster asks great questing but as for using specific muscle soreness as a guide, it can be deceiving. I swam competetively for years and eventually ended up with lats that made me look like a flying squirrel. They were definitely engaged. But, my shoulders and tricepts always hurt alot more than my lats did after a hard workout. Pain alone is not always the best guide to which muscles you are actually using because it might just be showing you which muscles are relatively the weakest rather than which ones are being used most effectively.
Just like Eric said…another one to try is in the deep end of the pool, place your arms on the deck—palms to elbows. Keeping your weight primarily on your forearms (rather than your hands) pull yourself up until the middle of your chest is on the deck.
That activates the muscles in the back the way the pull should. You need to think of pulling the elbows back, not the hands.
I’d say it comes with combination of a proper body and arm position. Before you initiate your pull, while your hand & arm you are about to pull with is maximally extended out front, your body should be rotated onto your pulling side, but just about to initiate a rotatation to the outher side. Now how deep is your about-to-pull hand, especially relative to your pulling shoulder? Is it sitting right at the water surface (i.e. upward arm angle), in line with the shoulder slightly below the water (i.e. straight ahead), or slightly deeper than shoulder (i.e. slight downward angle?).
It should be at least shoulder deep, if you have really flexible shoulders, or slightly downward if you are like the majority of the population. If you pull with arm straight ahead you are going to be using more shoulder muscle to get the arm back to the proper pull position. Now is your elbow high and outside as you pull? If so, and arm is right depth and you are rotating from hips properly you can’t help but use your lats to drive the pulling arm. If you are initiating rotation at the front of your body instead of at the hips, you are probably using your shoulders to rotate, even more stress on shoulders and more shoulder muscle use. I’d guess that if after shorter/harder sets your shoulders are really sore, then you are losing hip rotation drive as you try to speed up, or maybe dropping your elbows in effort to increase turnover?
excelent response, I’ll guess I’m the one with the dropped hand, elbow, I’ll have to check on my rotation also, I’ll do the test let you guys know.
bump, anything else ?
I will add to the already great information with this:
Always make sure to think that you are pulling your BODY through the water and NOT your arm. I see this all the time with new and even older/more seasoned swimmers. Many try to pull their arms as fast as they can through the water rather than trying to pull the body. Anchoring the hand and pulling your body over it seems to do the trick for most I have dealt with. Good luck!
ONE other thing… think more about the movement and engaging the “bigger” and stronger back muscles/torque producers rather than trying to emphasize just one muscle.
thanks, do you have any references of someone pulling the correct way that I can see for some visualization.
Try this…
http://www.virtual-swim.com/3d_mv/top_btn/free/2000wc_1500/2000wc_1500_q.html
One can play with the angle of observation and see exactly where the ‘catch’ begins and what goes into it. Enjoy!
After some serious shoulder issues resulting in months out of the pool, I started using some bands each day prior to swimming. I do some bent over “swimming” and 2 other exercises. The bent over swimming forces me to engage my lats, even though it’s not that strenuous, and it sort of “wakes up” those muscles which I want to use and concentrate on when swimming later when I do go the pool.
Wow. That’s a fantastic resource. Especially when trying to explain things over the net.
Some really good advice here. I agree with unclerock that rotation is really important and eDeRoche is spot on regarding pulling your body past your arms not your arms through the water.
If you look side on at the catch of the animation eDeRoche sent you’ll note the sharp down movement with the hand/wrist/forearmwhich which initiates the catch while the upper arm / elbow stays pretty much level with the water surface. It’s pretty much impossible to overemphasise this phase of the stroke and in my opinion it is the key difference between good swimmers and casual swimmers. If you’re not used to catching like this when you start you’ll definitely feel it in your lats.