Wondering if it is a good swim thought regarding form: To keep the elbows as far away from the body (trunk) as possible during the catch and pull? I tried this in the poll the other day and it seemed to help keep my elbows up.
i’d love to hear some swim experts give more color on “high elbow.” i always thought of it as more of focus on leading with your elbow; in other words, like you’re “swimming over a barrel.”
when i watch strong swimmers, including “mr. smooth”, their elbows seem only modestly bent:
What other strong swimmers are you referring to? From what I’ve seen a high elbow is pretty commonplace among top-tier swimmers. Not trying to argue, just curious so I can take a look. I’m trying to hone my technique and high elbows is one place I’ve been concentrating.
High elbows refers to two things. Out of the water it means don’t swing your arms about. the elbows stay high and the forearm just hangs. That’s easier to do if you have a good roll. In the water high elbows means don’t lead with your elbow, let your whole arm be the blade of the paddle.
i’d love to hear some swim experts give more color on “high elbow.” i always thought of it as more of focus on leading with your elbow; in other words, like you’re “swimming over a barrel.”
Yes, but which way is the barrel oriented? Parallel or perpendicular?
Maybe I’m missing something here but Mr. Smooth doesn’t look like a high elbow at all to me.
It’s my understanding that high elbow means, among other things, that your elbow always stays above your forearm/hand from recovery all the way throughout the pull. Imagine there is a barrel in front of you as you swim, laying on its side. So you you “reach around the barrel” to make you entry into the water and then make your catch. If you did that around a barrel, you wouldn’t be able to do anything but keep your elbow “high”, or at least above your forearm and hand, and, it would stay that way as your pullled the barrel behind you.
What you don’t want is entering the water with the pulling hand/arm and dropping the elbow below the hand … this will cause any glide or forward momentum you have to slow down so you have to re-accelerate each stroke.
There is alot of nuance to arm position but at a basic level, you are trying to maximize the force you can apply to the water. There are 2 parts to that. One is getting your hand to stick, the second is positioning your arm and hand to generate a high force. (The 3rd part is maximizing the effect of the force on forward speed by reducing drag but thats more of body issue than a hand/arm issue).
A bent arm, with the hand leading (ie ahead) of the elbow is where the max force can be applied. When swimmers takl about high elbow, that is what they are referring to. A good swim stroke, at least the middle part, is basically the same motion as pushing yourself out of the pool, that is, hands closer to the chest, elbows bent and the elbows getting above the hands as soon as possible.
So, If what you are describing is getting your elbow far away from your body by bending your arm and bringing your hand up closer to your chest, than yet, you are on the right track. The basic arm position will tend to happen naturally for most people. The real trick to swimming fast is both keeping your hand to “stuck” to the water and reducing drag so the force your bent arm with high elbows can generate goes into producing foward motion.
High elbows, as it pertains to actual propulsion (not style points) is below the surface of the water. The thing about this is, you can look at almost ANY swimmer (even some elite ones, though we won’t see too much in the videos below) and be like “you drop your elbows dude” to which they (having spent the better part of the last 18 months working on elbow position) may reply in their mind “great! I am totally screwed, I am quitting the masters team and buying a powertap”. 
Seriously though, there still is a degree of “allowable” elbow position in elite distance swimmers. My general conclusion on this is that it makes the most difference once you are in the sub 1:20 per 100 threshold club.
But anyhow, if you want some high-elbow posters for your wall - here are a few clips:
Keiren Perkins - pretty high elbows here, though his left might drop a tad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIgstGRkTxQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=94s
Janet Evans - relatively low elbow on the left arm, right arm higher elbow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YrZXqBKwuc&feature=player_detailpage#t=82s (starts right at a 5-8 second underwater segment)
Grant Hackett - another “looks like non-breathing side drops a tad”, but could be the camera angle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYp9xmGen5U&feature=player_detailpage#t=7s
Some dude next to Larsen Jensen - wow, very high right elbow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LtBWw6c-Aw&feature=player_detailpage#t=390s
Enjoy!
r.b.
“To keep the elbows as far away from the body (trunk) as possible during the catch and pull?”
Your post points out the difficulty of writing and even speaking about swimming without speaking very specifically. Coaches like to paint word pictures, but they can be misinterpreted.
In reading what you said there, I can think of several ways to interpret it. I think you are on the right track, and I think I see what you mean, but i can also think of a few interpretations that don’t really make much sense.
In reading what you said there, I can think of several ways to interpret it. I think you are on the right track, and I think I see what you mean, but i can also think of a few interpretations that don’t really make much sense.
Yes, I see what you mean. Your elbow could be extended as far from your trunk as possible but if the hand and forearm are not beneath the elbow than it’s not a high elbow at all.
That’s what I have noticed on my stroke as well - my non-breathing side arm will drop slightly and the elbow on that arm is not as high. If I go to alternating on my breathing and breath every 3rd stroke I don’t notice it as much. But if I breath every 2nd stroke (which I do to the right), my left arm is not nearly as effective.
I believe the issue is that I am starting the pull with my left hand too early (or letting it fall, whichever way you want to look at it). As a result it isn’t a full stroke, more like 2/3rds of a stroke. From watching video of Thorpe, it looks like he doesn’t start to stroke with the non-breathing arm until he is finished with his breath and is turning his head back toward the bottom. I am starting my pull a little before that, which means my shoulders aren’t squared and that is causing a low elbow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8qUpeDb8kI&feature=related
It’s a different rhythm but when I hit it just right I can tell it helps.
From watching video of Thorpe, it looks like he doesn’t start to stroke with the non-breathing arm until he is finished with his breath and is turning his head back toward the bottom
I think that this is a solid gold observation. How to ingrain it in the average developing swimmer, while not derailing their other development is the challenge of course.
Regards,
r.b.
I’m glad you agree. It’s always a little worrying to be working on technique without having someone back-up the idea.
Getting the technique to stick will probably be tough, but I swam on my high school team and some before that, so I think overall I’m in a good position to address this particular weakness.
I have noticed that when I use paddles I can really feel it when I get the timing right, so I’ve been doing some sets like 10x100 alternating paddles/no paddles.
Would be really interested in what you play around with, what sticks, and how much faster you get as a result.
Regards,
r.b.
How much faster will be tough. I guess I should do a 200 TT or something to get a baseline. I have a feeling that any speed improvements will be hard to pin-down to just technique though. I am still improving as far as swim conditioning goes, so I’m sure my speed will increase from better conditioning as well as technique improvements. I just started swimming again at the beginning of January.
If I figure out any good drills for it or find that I’m getting the hang of it I’ll let you know what helped.
i’d love to hear some swim experts give more color on “high elbow.” i always thought of it as more of focus on leading with your elbow; in other words, like you’re “swimming over a barrel.”
when i watch strong swimmers, including “mr. smooth”, their elbows seem only modestly bent:
The “High Elbow” is usually refering to the recovery over the water where the elbow is bent, and the lower arm and hand hang relaxed and move from hip to point of entry with the elbow bent so you are not swinging the hand and forearm in an outward arch. Underwater, you should not drop your elbow and may also be refering to a high elbow where the hand pushes down at the catch maintaining your elbow at a higher plane so you allow your forearm to catch and pull your body through the water. Dropping the elbow at that point, positions your forearm so it cannot push on the water. A good underwater drill is fist swimming. Swim 100 yards with clenched fists, feeling you pull on your forearms, then swim another 100 without and feel how much more solid your pull feels. The above water drill for high elbows is finger tip drag, where as your hand exits at your hip, you drag your finger tips in a straight line from the exit to the entry point in line with your shoulder, just above your head. It should be noted that many top swimmers do not have a high, above water elbow and do swing their arms outward, but it generally is recommended if you are flexible enough.
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It’s interesting - I had a HS coach at the school where I work tell me to really follow through and fully extend my arm (tricep power) at the end of each stroke. Mr. Smooth doesn’t do that. Is that arm “snap” wasted energy?
i’d love to hear some swim experts give more color on “high elbow.” i always thought of it as more of focus on leading with your elbow; in other words, like you’re “swimming over a barrel.”
when i watch strong swimmers, including “mr. smooth”, their elbows seem only modestly bent:
That’s what I have noticed on my stroke as well - my non-breathing side arm will drop slightly and the elbow on that arm is not as high. But if I breath every 2nd stroke (which I do to the right), my left arm is not nearly as effective.
I believe the issue is that I am starting the pull with my left hand too early (or letting it fall, whichever way you want to look at it). As a result it isn’t a full stroke, more like 2/3rds of a stroke.
What you say there is point 2 of my “Five things you gotta know about freesyle swimming” presentation. I say that 94.76% of adult onset swimmers have this issue when they start swimming. You have a pretty keen sense of what is going on, most folks don’t realize this is what is happening.
Think of it this way, You lift your head to breathe, conservation of momentum says that if your head goes up, something else is going down. That something else is your leading outstretched hand. Big problem here is that it means the first third of your stroke is spent pushing DOWN into the water toward the bottom. That is rather then getting in catch position and moving water somewhat backward, you are moving water MOSTLY down in order to lift your head.
In some people. they have stopped lifting their head to breathe and yet the habit is still there and they still drop their hand and push down when breathing.
The drill progression I use for this is stick drill / catch up / modified catch up / swim.
I wrote entirely too much on the finer points of these drills and the possible dead ends you can arrive at by using them here, http://acadianendurance.blogspot.com/2008/03/discussion-of-catch-up-and-stick-drill.html
Actually, even though I use those drills to work on pushing down when you breathe; I am pretty agnostic on stroke timing. I think a good example was the 4 x 100 relay at the olympics. Jason Lezak with pronounced catchup while he is breathing and Alain Bernard with no catchup whatsoever**. However, in both of their cases the side views showed that neither of them wastes much energy pushing down in the water. There is always SOME just do to the geometry of how hour humerus rotates around your shoulder joint. There will always be some vertical forces. The key is that your wrist and elbow should be bent a bit and you should be internally rotated at the shoulder a bit to encourage MORE horizontal forces and less vertical.
When this is problematic what you might see underwater is an extended wrist and an externally rotated shoulder so that the point of the elbow is pointing either down or backward. This tends to orient your hand facing more toward the bottom of the pool than backward and we might say that it wastes the first third of your stroke. That’s not totally true about wasting your stroke, but true to a point.
So, I have people go through the stick and catch up drills, but if they later lose the catch up timing I am cool with it as long as no effort is wasted in pushing down.
**Of course Lezak came back to win, but there is no doubt that Alain Bernard has an effective freestyle stroke!
A few comments about Mr. Smooth.
First, the exagerated tricep finish to the stroke is falling out of favor. Many people contend that when you compare that final snap, and the energy expended by the tricep that it’s less beneficial than finishing the stroke sooner, getting the arm recovered, and beginning that next stroke that much sooner…thereby favoring the efficient power generated by the catch, and the lat-motivated pull. I’m not really convinced yet, somehow I feel that I swim distance better with more of a tricep finish, but I’m still experimenting.
As for the pull technique. I remember one of the Mr. Smooth creators posting here that they purposely modeled a good stroke that can typically be obtained by an adult-onset-swimmer. The very beautiful, exagerated, high elbow catch requires extreme shoulder flexibility that most people find can only be accomplished by childhood swimmers and not those who started in adulthood. So for many of us, what Mr. Smooth does is the best we can achieve and immitating him will get us further ahead than trying to immitate Thorpe.