#####Please, please, please fix my swim (video)#####

Triathlon Forum
1

It took a ton to get this video so I hope it is helpful! The video is very poor quality, but that is the only way I could get it on Youtube. I have the original dvd and it is much, much better in quality. I noticed several huge flaws immediately-1)Big problems with left arm including a bad cross over and a pull that almost “sculls” me to the right. This is good to know since I have been having problems in open water and never new why I always drift right of the course. 2) Poor body position. I am almost swimming uphill. I have been working on trying to get some type of kick and lowering my head. I see I have a long ways to go. 3) Problems developing power in the catch. I am sure there is a ton more. It is a wonder I stay afloat at all. The good news is that there is so much to correct that my current 1:35/100 should drop to mach 1/100 once I get it all fixed. Now it is up to you to help me fix it. Please tell me what to do to correct these flaws. I have heard most of the usual stuff about pressing your chest, etc. That stuff hasn’t clicked as you can see. Let me know if you need more background or whatever. Hope this works!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwNXGAXFagQ --video is 7min total. It gets a little better after first couple minutes.

chris

2

You nailed most of it. You are losing power in your pull by dropping your elbow and not finishing the pull, your kick is a liability not a help, and you are pulling to the side. You have heard it all and know the words, so it is up to you now to hire a local coach to work with you 1-on-1 to correct it. You will not get better by reading, you will get better by using a local coach who can show you the right way.

3

Ah yes, the hire the coach answer. The flaw here is that I have–several times. Not to say that they were/are bad, but many have not even mentioned some of the things I saw on that video. I can’t correct something I don’t know is there. One could make the argument that they were trying to correct one thing at a time and didn’t want to overwhelm me with too many flaws. This could be the case.

Yes, I know what the problems are and they have known/know what the problems are, but they remain which means they aren’t fixed which means I still need to find a solution to fix them which is why I put the video on which just caused me to write this very long run on sentence. Ok?

chris

4

I will add that the stroke looks pretty good. Yes, you have the flaws that were mentioned above, but they can be fixed. And I would say, even without a coach. Lots and lots of drills (below are some of my favorites for those flaws):

  • For your body position and kick, I would swim with ankle bands (you can make these out of old bike tire tubes). This will force you to get your head/chest down, bringing your legs up. Your kick isn’t horrible, as I was counting 6 kicks per full stroke.

  • The elbow is definitely dropping. Think high elbow or reaching over a barrell (1/2 barrel of miller lite works for me), but I am sure you have heard that before. The drill that will help here is closed fists with a pull buoy. Really work on catching the water and then pulling with the forearm. With any drill take it slow, get it right and repeat. Paddles and pull buoy work, too, but you need to get the catch and elbow high before paddles.

  • Do flip turns. Great coreworkout, and also helps with breathing/timing.

Thats all I have. Good luck!

5

~ As you stated, your left hand enters waaay too far outboard. I’m surprised that you don’t swim in circles. You must develope a feel for where your hand is entering.
~ It also appeared that your left elbow is too low.
~ You are holding your forehead up. Focus on keeping your chin down/tucked towards the chest. That might take care of several issues.

6

#1 Get a kickboard and use it. An efficient kick will lift you legs, even while using a weak version of it during a triathlon.

#2 Not only are you dropping your left elbow in the pull phase, you have a low left elbow on the recovery. If you look at your roll (side-to-side motion while you swim) your body rolls higher on the right side when you breath. Your kick is affected as well, getting a bit of a scissors kick, which kills your speed. You need to work on rolling the same to both sides, getting the same height elbow during recovery, and your dropping elbow on the pull phase will probably fix itself. You want your body to roll evenly to both sides, like a log. Concentrate on elbow height. You want high recovery and lots of roll. Concentrate on keeping your feet close together during the kick.

Learning to bi-lateral breath will help balance your stroke as well. Even if you do not want to use it during a race, it is good to train using it. I follow a pattern of breath 3 times on each side then switching, during long training sessions. That way I feel like I am getting enough air and know I am working on keeping an even stroke. During races I either breath on one side, away from the sun, or use a 5 on each side pattern.

7

Thanks. I am going to try the tire tube thing. I have heard of it, but never tried it. Do you think it would help my pull if I try to pull in towards my belly button instead of the wider pull I seem to have on the video? Maybe I am not explaining it right?

chris

8

To me the question is why the heck does that left arm look so bad? Why is the recovery so low and the elbow drop so bad?

Bilateral breathing is something I should work on and will consider. Anyone have any luck using a snorkel to even out there stroke?

chris

9

you’re pulling too wide with both arms, you should see your arm directly under you.

while others have mentioned your kick, I think you need to work on your glide. You have none. You are pulling immediately after your arm has extended and there is a giant space between your head and your shoulder, it slows you down. Finishing the end of your stroke will help with your glide, but try to keep your chin glued to your shoulder before the pull.

you could try pulling with a kickboard between your legs. I only do pull this way because it helps with your core muscles and its harder to balance. At the end of your stroke, reach back and try to touch the kick board before you do the recovery. This help you to finish your stroke, improve your rotation, and will help with your glide (keep your chin down!). Another drill you could do is under-water recovery. You’ll look a little ridiculous but its a great drill.

10

you’re pulling too wide with both arms, you should see your arm directly under you.

 Exactly opposite from the advice I got from a competitive swimmer.
11

Christian,

You took time to shoot, load and post and I disagree with a few of the responses - so I’d like to add my two cents. Let me kick that off with something positive…nice recovery, I like how your elbow is high and your wrist/hand is low and you’ve got a good lookin’ triangle there - it’s nice. As is your long axis rotation which - yes, is a bit more to one side than the other but c’mon that’s not a priority at this time.

Now, on to the fixes.

The number one priority in swimming is reducing drag. You can forget about trying to creating propulsion until you reduced the major drag. I’m shocked that a forum such as this where “aero” is sacrosanct that we’d overlook that. Seeing as how water is 800 times thicker than air you’d think we’d care more.

You have the number biggest drag: body drag - your hips are ~5 inches below the surface of the water and your feet are ~10 inches below the surface so you’ve got drag at chest, stomach, hips, thighs, knees, shins and feet. You could attempt to “get level” with a harder kick but I don’t recommend it. You should find balance and get level in a more efficient manner - if you choose to kick harder down the road let that kick be about making you go faster not about leveling off your body.

The body in water is kinda like a sea-saw on a playground : when something in the front goes down something in the back comes up. We have three tools with which to solve this: lead arm depth, head position and pressure. You’re a bigger guy with lots of muscle and not too much body fat (probably dense bones too) so your legs want to sink and you’re gonna need all three (arm depth, head position and pressure) to get level. You’ll end up riding deep in the water but depth doesn’t matter just being level matters - on a side note, I’m built like you, many of us are this is not a detriment to swimming fast.

You already have a deep entry on the right arm so leave that for now but put the left arm on a trajectory of entry so that it too goes as deep as the right (down the road it can shallow up some so you send energy forward more - but for now get 'em both deep). Your head position is pretty good but many still need to tilt down just a hair - you have a good head position on your push off but it creeps up a bit after a few breaths and, again, with your body type you’re gonna need every thing you can get. Lastly, and this is the biggie for you, you need to press down on your upper chest. While you swim think about keeping pressure on your arm pit and then as you roll move that pressure across your collar bones and on to the other arm pit. That pressure, combined with existing entry depth (I’m talking about your arm going in deep as it does now) and a slightly deeper head position should get your hips very near the surface and your ankle bones just an inch or so below.

The left arm cross over is a bit of drag too - for that I just say this: in the water when we move something a millimeter it feels like a mile so you’re going to need to swim with the mantra of “enter wide, extend wide” and it needs to feel crazy wide to probably be right. There’s a down side to this… by focusing on “going wide” to fix the cross over it will work against the fact that you pull too wide and need to be pulling under the body BUT I urge you to put that off for now and just focus on getting the body level and solving the cross over - reduce the drag, you’ll be faster with less effort - then you can fix the catch the arm sweep, the finish and add in kick if you must.

One last thing - trying to improve technique in swimming is not about the old saw “practice makes perfect”. It’s about “perfect practice making perfect”. What I mean is this…swim short bits: 25s, 50s, 75s. Swim them easy. Rest a ton between each piece. Forget about trying to get “fitter” by swimming faster or longer sets or less rest - just swim for technical perfection now and improve your fitness via bike and run.

You’re needing 25 strokes to cross that pool (not sure it it’s yds or meters) but at your height I KNOW you can swim that speed at ~20 strokes by just fixing your body position so go after that first and you’ll feel a break-through quickly if you swim often with focus and purpose.

All the best, Ian

12

By no means am I a swimmer or fast swimmer, but with consistency my stroke and speed increase.

A coach or master’s coach is helpful, but I think the key is working on certain phases of the stroke (i.e. catch and balance/rotation) and having a set of drills that you can perform correctly to build from.

A few thoughts:

1). Looks like you are pulling with your shoulders (shoulder drop), rather than catching the water with you forearm and pulling with a high-elbow and using your back muscles.

a). Not sure of the technical swim name but a great drill is… you touch at entry, pull your hand back to hip area and than back to entry while maintaining a high elbow, you than pull with your lead arm and repeat on other side. It really teaches you great balance/rotation as well as leaving your other arm out to catch and pull. It’s difficult at first, but overtime it should help with overall technique and feel.

b). Another key is to focus on rotating with your core and hips which should initiate each stroke. A pull buoy helps with getting this feeling as does the above drill.

c). Kicking is a seperate topic as some debate kicking during triathlon racing. Kicking will make you faster, but if your kick is not efficient you can waste a lot of energy.

Practice drills for 500yds. at the beginning and end of a workout. Their drills so you should be concerned with form/technique rather than speed.

13

Do you have a better description for a.? I am really not understanding.

chris

14

Here are a couple videos of drills that we often do at master’s workouts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9vLoMKQrKU

This is a variation of (a): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R1A2qEgp6Q

Go to entry point, back to hip and than back to entry and pull with the opposite arm. Do they same with the other side.

15

To me the question is why the heck does that left arm look so bad? Why is the recovery so low and the elbow drop so bad?

Because you are letting it look bad. Because your rotation is uneven. Concentrate on getting the damn elbow up on recovery. Lift it up. The body will follow. Your rotation should get even.

I had a coach yell at me for weeks about getting my elbows up.

“How does me pull look?”

“LIFT YOUR DAMN ELBOW UP!”

“How is my kick?”

“LIFT YOUR DAMN ELBOW UP!”

“Does this suit make me look fat?”

“LIFT YOUR DAMN ELBOW UP!”

I had to lift it up. It was low because I was swimming with it that way.

If you want to fix stuff, isolate the problem and concentrate on it. When you swim any practice, concentrate on what you want to do right. I always pick something to think about when I swim. I am always trying to make stuff better. I like watching Olympics and World Championships, visualizing their strokes, and trying to copy them. It works!

I had a kid swim for me who had very little swim experience. His father started showing him videos of the Olympics- 15 or so years ago. Next thing I know, this kid shows up wearing a swim cap, mirrored goggles (which he would keep on to look cool), and he was imitating the swimmers he watched. He copied everything he could- diving stance, strokes, look, race face, whatever he could pick up. The kid copied technique. He visualized being those other swimmers. He got really good. The father told me the kid did the same thing when he started playing football.

16

you are having problems with the left hand/arm for two reasons. First you are always breathing to the right so the left hand is coming across to counter balance to bad rotation to the right. Second is the bad rotation. You are rotating at the shoulders and then letting the hips follow. Think about locking your core muscles and initiating the rotation from the hips and allowing the shoulders to follow that rotation.
I would also work on the kick. Not to get more propulsion from it, but to increase the surface area being forced down with each kick stroke. You are kicking from the knees so the effective surface area being pushed down each kick stroke is just the lower leg. Practice kicking with a straighter leg (not exactly a locked knee, but close) and kicking from the hip so that you have the whole leg moving down. This will give you a greater surface area being forced down which in turn increases the amount of lift that you get to help streamline the body more and get the hips and legs riding higher in the water.

17

Not every stroke style works for everyone. Michael Phelps has a hideous lop-sided freestyle but it works for him. I suggested that OP pull that way because it works wells for me and reduces stress on the shoulder.

18

I have been swimming for many years and continue to do these drills each workout as part of my warm up and cool down.

  1. Finger tip drag to get your elbows high - instead of recovering your arm out of the water at the end of the stroke drag your finger tips in the water along the side of your body until they reach the point where you are going to start your entry for the pull.

  2. One arm drill - swim a 25 with the right arm and then one with the left arm. I usually alternate with a regular 25.

  3. Catch up drill- when you complete the stroke instead of starting the pull immediately with the opposite arm wait until the arm that just finished the stroke catches the other arm in the front.

  4. Fist drills - swim on the odds with your fists. This is an amazing drill.

To get the feeling of getting your legs up you need to swim like you are going down hill. Look down at the bottom of the pool and then feel as if your pushing your chest down. To get the elbows high think that you are reaching over a large barrel and pushing it down along your body. To make sure that you are finishing the stroke completely brush your thumb by your thigh as you finish and begin your recovery.

About your kick. I never ever swim with a kick board but I also never ever do kicking drills on my front. I always kick on my side alternately going down on the right back on the left and keep your arms down at your side. This forces you to keep your upper body down and your legs up so that you can propel yourself along. This will help you develop balance in the water.

Once you have gotten comfortable with the drills then start bilateral breathing.

In graduate school I learned these drills from that IU coach Doc - you know the guy who coached Mark Spitz to some gold.

19

One thing about freestyle recovery that’s not obvious is that it works best when it’s shoulder-driven and not elbow-driven. Do the right thing with the shoulder and you can keep the arm pretty relaxed on the recovery and still have it end up in the right place for the catch.

Back to the video- you’re trying to correct the overreach on the left by sliding the hand way left once you hit the middle of the catch.

Right side the problem isn’t so much a lack of glide but that you never get your body fully extended on that side.

You’re decidedly asymmetric, which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but in your case you’re looking at different sloppiness issues on each side. As part of your regular warm-up, I’d try about 200 breathing only on your off side while trying to make it look pretty. It will feel very different, and for some reason you can often feel how it should be when you go back to a more comfortable breathing pattern.

The fix for the crossover is pretty much just forcing it to feel awkwardly wide on entry until you get the feel for how your body rotation naturally rolls everything toward the midline. If you do other strokes, backstroke is actually pretty good for working on wide entry because it lets you take the breathing thing out of the equation.

20

Bilateral breathing is something I should work on and will consider. Anyone have any luck using a snorkel to even out there stroke?

chris

Hi Chris

I’m glad you’d consider developing your bilateral breathing as the lack of it is what is causing the majority of your asymmetry in the water. It is also what is causing you to pull wide and press down on the water with that left arm. The effect of this is that you constantly lift your body high at the front of the stroke (to breathe) but the result is that your hips and legs sink very low.

There are two reasons why you won’t be breathing bilaterally at the moment:

  1. you feel like going from every 2 breaths to your right to every 3 strokes either side will result in you not getting enough oxygen IN. Paradoxically it is not this that you should be concerned about as you actually need more time in your stroke to breathe OUT. The benefit of this is that it will lower some of the buoyancy that you have at the front end of the stroke but will in turn lift your hips and legs and make you more relaxed also. Double bonus. We’ll come back to the stroke rate thing in a moment.

  2. you simply feel uncomfortable or lack the rhythm and timing to breathe correctly to the left hand side. This is simply explained by the fact that you do not rotate towards your left at all. This causes a very low sweeping stroke over the top of the water with that left arm and would possibly be causing you some undue stress on that shoulder. No amount of “high elbow lifting” on that side will bring your elbow up UNLESS you learn to rotate better to that left side. Ironically , this rotation is unlikely to develop if you do not try breathing to that side.

Have a look at these tips and techniques to develop this aspect of your stroke:

http://www.swimsmooth.com/exhalation.html

http://www.swimsmooth.com/bilateral.html

http://www.swimsmooth.com/rotation.html

Back to the stroke rate angle. A number of posters above have suggested you need to try and reduce the number of strokes you take per lap. In conjunction with this, your actual stroke rate (number of strokes per minute) is quite high at around the 70spm mark. I would agree that inline with the bilateral work that you need to focus on developing the balance between your stroke rate and stroke length as at the moment it appears too short and too fast for your swimming speed. Visit http://www.swimsmooth.com/strokerate.html and try plugging in 70spm and 100 seconds into the Stroke Rate Chart at the bottom of the page and you’ll see that you’re in our “red zone”. Now take a look at the video clip at http://www.swimsmooth.com/highsr.html to see how one swimmer worked with us to develop his stroke in a similar manner.

The interesting thing about the stroke rate is that for those who have a very low stroke rate (the serial “over-gliders”) bilateral breathing feels challenging because there is simply too much time between breaths IN. What is different about your stroke is that the slightly rushed appearance means that rather than you having too long between breaths IN, you simply haven’t got enough time between breaths in to breathe OUT enough to get your next breath of air in properly! Horses for courses obviously, but this is what I’d suggest you need to do to take your stroke to the next level.

Keep us posted and hope this advice helps.

Cheers!

Paul