Got my swim recorded a few weeks ago and it really opened my eyes to how bad of a swimmer I really am. I knew I was slow but never knew how ugly it looked. This was after two months of no swimming so I was a little rusty. Before the lockdown, I was averaging about 2:00/100 yards. I’m training for a full Ironman in September and would like to get my pace down to around 1:50/100 yards.
I’ve been working on my catch and pull and it has improved a lot over the past few weeks but I’m really struggling to stop kicking from the knees and prevent my legs from sinking. I’m having a hard time engaging my hips and kicking from the hips.
Here’s the video. Any advice/drills to really work on kicking from the hips instead of the knees and how to stop my legs from sinking? Any other tips or suggestions after watching the video? Thanks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xKltmKGgso&list=PLgC1WGRGqgP1ActYS_zVeKKFPfXobvmFK&index=2&t=0s
With the caveat that I am not a swim instructor or coach (although I have worked extensively with swim coaches), I would offer the following comments:
To help keep the legs from sinking, you should be looking more towards the bottom of the pool. The more you look forward, the more that your legs will sink.To help with your kicking, I would suggest spending some time with a kick board. This will allow you to focus on the kick rather than the stroke and will accentuate kicking from the hips.Related to the above, try to point your feet backwards.Also, you seem to have a lot of scissoring in your kick. As you are kicking think about having your big toes touch each other as your feet pass each other.One final observation, perhaps more bend in the elbow during the pull phase. This will make you more efficient as you move through the water.Good luck!!
That right arm is going straight down on entry. Reach out ahead of you. A drill for that is passing a stick or tennis ball between your hands with each stroke (as long as the handoff is out in front of you).
Put a band around your ankles and a buoy between your legs if you need it so you can get the feeling of not kicking those knees down. Or, for a bigger challenge, hold a buoy between your ankles or feet.
I might also recommend a snorkel at least while you’re in that flume. I think when you turn your head you are losing your balance which is what causes you legs to splay out. Maybe try to look forward a bit more during the breath (looks like you are almost looking at the ceiling behind you). If you put the snorkel on and your legs stop splaying so much, then you know you need to work on your head position while breathing.
Do some kicking on your side, or some ‘kick-roll’ drill. This is where you take a stroke (breath optional), and maintain your hand out front, while your body is in the reach position (so rolled to one side), count to 5 or so kicks, then repeat on the other side.
Put a pull buoy between your ankles and stop kicking.
Your right arm is pulling straight down.
Your left arm is pulling out to the left.
I don’t even know what to say.
There’s soo much there to “fix.” As an adult onset swimmer, I can relate. So please don’t take that as a knock on you! I mention it to highlight that you should find just a few things that are slowing you down the most and focus on them and not all of the issues at once. When I got connected with a masters coach, here are two things that he had me work on and think about for the first few months-and it looks like you could benefit from them as well.
Start with small changes that will make big differences. Two things I would recommend starting with is to “press your bouy” for better body balance. Here’s a visual of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35pVR7hUWXw. Maybe someone with more swim expertise can provide better drills for this. Another is to get more reach. To steal another Total Immersion term, you need a “longer boat.” Here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4iO34K1Ufo. I hesitate to say “reach forward as far as you can with your fingers” because that tends to lead to a dropped elbow. Again, maybe others have a better way to explain how to reach forward effectively.
I bet with those two things you can get to 1:50 no problem!
Man up, reach forward, and pull some water. Turn the water speed on something other than babbling brook and learn to not be shot out the back.
If you can swim 2:00/100 with that technique, getting to 1:50 will be a cakewalk! (No offense!)
Your biggest problem right now is your lack of LENGTH. To swim flat in the water, you need to think of your body as a long pole, almost as long as possible. To get this long, you need to REACH forward further than you are right now. The extending arm will go forward, and at the last bit, the shoulder goes forward a little (but not so much that you cross the midline,etc.) Be careful not to cross the midline with that reach, it’s a common side effect error once you start getting a good reach.
The next biggest problem is your legs. It’s clear to me that right now, you are using your legs to offset a big stroke imbalance (this is just about 100% prevalent in nearly all beginner swimmers.) Which is why they have to bend so much at points which creates tons of drag and wastes energy. To solve this (and your body position), you should incorporate regular sets of swimming with a pull buoy between your legs + an ankle band to PREVENT you from kicking. You will be just using your arms to pull yourself through the water. It will seem impossible at first, but should improve quickly, and that will self correct most of the stroke imbalances that your legs are currently compensating for.
In summary:
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Think REACH on every stroke. Get as tall as you can in the water (without totally overdoing it., but honestly, right now overdoing it would likely help you as you have minimal reach)
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Do a bunch of swimming with PB + ankle band. No kicking. Yeah, it’s gonna suck hard. But you will gain more from learning to swim without struggling doing this drill than any coach can teach you right now, as your body has to figure out on its own what imbalances need to be corrected without the kick.
Come back when #2 is almost routine, and I’ll bet you’ll be near 1:50
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And to make you feel better, you are a much better swimmer than I was in my first 6 months of triathlon. Even with serious effort on my part, it took me well over a year to correct a huge x-over, fix my stroke imbalance, correct over-breathing, etc. and I was still 2:00+/100yds in the pool for my first 18 months of swimming, and I was seriously trying to improve as fast as possible. My first swim videos are so embarrassing I will never post it, ever! So you’re doing well, actually. I now finish the swim split of tris from top 20-12%, which is a ton better from my bottom 5-20% finishes my entire first 2 years of tri.
I’m no expert either and late to the swimming game like yourself. The biggest thing I see is that you need to make yourself a lot narrower and streamlined. I would spend time with a combination of pull buoy and snorkel so that you can isolate parts of the swim. I’ve always thought of swimming as being similar to a golf swing - a lot of moving parts that you have to coordinate.
Your 2:00 / 100 yards is based on the Endless Pool? I wouldn’t put very much stock in what that reads, other than as a comparison point for training. I suspect your pool and open water times will be quite a bit different than what the Endless says.
how to stop kicking from the knees
flutter kicks - perfect form, legs locked, point your toes
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The above is what ended up with me taking a long long time to get any better. Basically there are so many things to tweak that I becomes overwhelming.
My swimming was transformed by stopping training on my own, and getting some 1:1 coaching and then joining in that squad.
I had all your bad habits and some. Over time, working 1-2 things at a time then we cracked most. Interestingly some were done as mentioned in the posts above, a few the exact opposite. But like Karate Kid. You can walk on the left, or the right, but not in the middle of the road. Choose one coach/person and listen to them. Not saying others are wrong, but if you try changing everything, or follow 2 different approaches to solving a specific issue you’re going to struggle.
And so whilst I’ll avoid any additional ‘advice’ to those above, I will say stick with it, there will be times of frustration, and indeed many occasions you’ll get slower / feel worse for a bit, but equally there will then be those sessions where it clicks and then stays.
I’m now swimming 1:40/100m a year after being in the same position as you, so not quick, but competent enough to not get my own kayak/lifeguard anymore.
As others have mentioned there is a fair bit going on here to look at fixing.
Lots of potential advice to offer, I will try and put some key things here:
- In swimming technique is key, but it is often hard to fix more than one thing at once. I often recommend to people to focus on one thing for a few weeks, lock in the changes, then move to the next thing.
- You would benefit from a significant amount of intensive swim coaching in a 1:1 environment. When I say intensive, I mean 3-4 times a week for 2-4 weeks. Standard squad swimming is not going to do anything for you as it will only reinforce the technique issues you currently have.
- It is generally advised to have a deep rather than shallow hand entry, but your hands enter very deep on both sides so there is no stretch at the start of your stroke. This is kinda the reverse of an over-glider, you are going straight down at an almost 45 degree angle…think more about reaching out in front so you can then grab maximum amounts of water.
- Your stroke turnover is pretty low…eyeballing it would make it somewhere between 45-50 strokes per minute, which is low. A higher stroke rate will help fix many of the other issues that are apparent.
- Your left arm swings way outside the line.
- Your right arm is better than your left arm but no where near ideal.
There is more than one thing to concentrate on here…I would start with some of these before worrying too much about the legs, as you need to fix the front before the legs will easily sort themselves out.
What about golf … Its a great game and you won’t drown !
Don’t get me wrong but there’s too much going on here to fix. This can’t be fixed with some exercises or cues.
I’d strongly suggest you get swimming lessons, otherwise I don’t think it’s possible to have enough progression to get anywhere near where you’re gonna be happy with your swimming in the coming years
I’ve been working on my catch and pull and it has improved a lot over the past few weeks
https://www.youtube.com/...amp;index=2&t=0s
I also started swimming as an adult and basically never learned it although I’ve been struggling for 13 years. I can say something about your swimming though.
That is the best video I ever saw about swimming in the sense that you can see every error from every side in that endless pool.
-First of all you write that your catch has improved. Sorry to say but to my point of view there is no catch at all because your arms stay straight the whole movement through. You should create a catch in that, after the arm enters the water, you move your underarm downward/inward rotating it around the elbow. Not before the underarm and upperarm have a 90° angle, you start moving your upperarm downward and backward.
-As someone said, you move the left arm very much left of your body. But also the right arm should move more under the body. The movement of the arms should be such that, seen from above, they move towards the centerline of the body (of course they can not start in the centerline, but during movement they should get there.)
This you can learn as the other posters said in that you take a pullbuoy and leave your legs not moving.
Do not feel offended of the reactions, try to learn from it and do not become desperate if you do not succeed straight away.
I’m no expert but I agree with a lot of lighheir’s feedback. It seems to me that a lot of what’s going wrong with your legs is compensation for what is going wrong elsewhere. Combine that with the fact that freestyle swimmers get almost all of your propulsion from the pull, and it says you should be working on how to make your stroke work with completely inactive legs (i.e., band or pull buoy) – rather than trying to focus on your kick and your leg position. Work on other stuff first and some (maybe many!) of your leg issues will follow naturally.
Two related notes:
- You are pulling a lot of water downward towards the bottom of the pool at the front of your stroke, which will generally tend to torque your body into a sinking legs position. Think about exerting as little downward force on the water as possible and as much backwards force – this is greatly helped by getting your arms into a bent-elbow position with internally rotated shoulders (like the position your arms are in when you are lifting yourself out of the pool) as quickly as possible following the catch.
- Your stroke is very asymmetric. Can you breathe on the other side? Although it can be quite uncomfortable to breathe bilaterally at first it may help fix some of your left-right imbalances which would go a long way towards addressing some of the scissoring/knee compensation in your kick.
With all the responses, none seem to address the actual reason swimmers’ legs drop: it’s about not using the correct muscles. Not about head position, not about kicking. All good swimmers do this. To some it came naturally, others (like AOSs like myself) needed to learn it. Get past the goofiness of this video, and learn why your legs sink:
I don’t mind the goofiness of the video. I’ve tried to get myself into a horizontal position when just floating but no matter what I do, my legs and I sink. It befuddled my adult swim instructors.
I don’t mind the goofiness of the video. I’ve tried to get myself into a horizontal position when just floating but no matter what I do, my legs and I sink. It befuddled my adult swim instructors.
“No matter what I do…” means you aren’t doing the correct things. Millions of swimmers around the world are doing the correct things, and you should be no different.
Lie on your stomach on the ground. Lift your legs off the ground, keeping them straight. The muscles you feel in your back, your butt, and your hamstrings are the ones that you engage to keep your legs at the surface. Use those. It’s a lot easier to do in the water than on solid ground, but this exercise tells you where are those muscles. Once identified, it is a matter of thinking about it every time you swim, engaging those muscles, and doing it enough so that they have the endurance to maintain that engagement for however long you swim. It takes very little strength to do.
And ensure that your hip flexors are loose, too.
That video is certainly spot-on about a big part of keeping your body linear in the water and parallel to the surface. But I don’t think it’s correct from a physics standpoint - isometrically contracting posterior-chain muscles can’t magically shift your center of gravity higher on the body! Holding your breath too much, however, can shift your center of buoyancy too high and torque your legs down, and fully extending your arms can help to shift your center of gravity up and help minimize leg-sinking torque. So I do think the physical concepts introduced are useful, as is the point that posterior-chain contraction is necessary to avoid sunk legs because your body is bent at the pelvis – but that contraction is not the only thing you need to do to get to a flat body position in the water (especially while moving!).
I don’t mind the goofiness of the video. I’ve tried to get myself into a horizontal position when just floating but no matter what I do, my legs and I sink. It befuddled my adult swim instructors.
That video about floating flat in the water (without swimming) is helpful for some but can be misleading for the OP, and likely to you as well.
The OPs sinking is legs NOT just because he is not pressing the chest down and shifting center of buoyancy. It’s PRIMARILY because his stroke path and pull is totally haywire (which happens in many, if not most beginner swimmers.) His right shoulder dips deep on every stroke, dragging his chest and shoulder down (which is a problem) and then when he breathes and strokes left, the whole situation reverses. It honestly doesn’t matter how linear he can keep his body with nonpulling drills - the moment he starts pulling, his upper body oscillations will make it impossible to stay streamlined and straight in the water.
As I mentioned, he can actually fix a lot of this on his own, possibly even better than with a coach trying to microfix the countless errors in combination (as critique by Jimbeyond above with ‘I don’t even know what to say.’) Just do slow swims with the pull buoy and ankle band. As I said, it will be literally be impossible for him at first, as the stroke will kill all balance. But with steady practice, it will absolutely improve to the point he can do it, and in that process, he will be autofixing most of the major stroke path errors he has.
A coach at this point could say “don’t drop that right shoulder so much”, but then he’d do it, and something else would go haywire. Or he could say ‘press your chest deeper’, and then his stroke would get even worse and the bobbing would get even worse. He’s at the stage where is cerebellum and nerves just need to work together but in the mostly right pathway, and removing that kick to expose the stroke errors is step #1 for him. Coach critiques of this and that won’t help so much - they’ll just cause different problems as his body chain can’t isolate each other enough to fix one part without messing up another. The ankle band+buoy absolutely helps this big time - forced isolation and exposing of stroke errors.
As said, I guarantee the OP could do hours of that non-swimming float horizontal drill and still totally suck at body position once he starts swimming as his stroke completely kills any balance in the water. That is a low yield drill for him (I’d say NO yield at this point.) Also, you can still swim REALLY fast even if you cannot do that floatie drill perfectly. As well, a wetsuit typically solves most leg drop problems if it’s really just a body position issue of chest placement, but for the OP where the stroke kills his position, fugettabout it. He will look just as bad if not worse with dragging legs even in a wetsuit. For sure. Because the stroke-arm action is where is problem is, not his sensations of center of balance water buoyancy.