Love your RACE club videos on YT. You are providing such a valuable service from a “fountain of knowledge” standpoint, with all the tech. It’s great.
Since the smart paddles are measuring pressure on both sides of the paddle, why not use the surface area of the paddle rather than of the hand??? Thanks so much for coming onto this thread!!!
You are right. Water is incompressible. We don’t push water backwards during the pull. The water flows around the hand which is flat causing a big vortex to form on the back side of the pulling hand as it moves backward. The big difference between the pressures on the palm and back of the hand (drag force of the moving hand = propulsion) is what leads to the our pulling propulsion.
Thanks Gary!!! Now getting back to my original proposition, would you agree that, generally speaking, the fastest swimmers are also the strongest swimmers in terms of their swim-specific strength. Obv this is most important in the short events but even D swimmers need a lot of strength to maintain 25.X per 50 yd for 33 in a row. Bobby Finke may “only” be able to go 20.X for a 50 but that’s still pretty damned fast!!! This is the reason that virtually all semi-serious swimmers have the V-shaped torso. 
[quote=“gary_sr, post:179, topic:1283457, full:true”]
The propulsion from the down kick is generated by the top of the foot moving downward (against or through the two vortices). The more plantar flexion and inversion of the ankle (which triathletes usually don’t have much of), the more surface area and propulsion from the foot can be generated.
Although this thread started out as a discussion primarily about upper body strength etc etc I couldn’t help but barge in about this part of your comments.
It seems to me that most of the time on here we are talking about two kinds of swimmers in Triathlon. Those that come from a swimming background and those that come from a running or some other background. Ankle/foot flexibility and the ability to kick tends to come from a swimming background. I don’t believe that those with inflexible ankles ever really develop much of a kick and many who are blessed with flexible ankles and a good kick will never quite understand why not. End result is some poor sod spending hours kicking in the pool and getting nowhere. When the most speed comes from upper body strength, technique and endurance.
As an AG competitor I am quite used to passing swimmers from earlier (younger) groups whose feet are literally at right angles, churning away, slowing them down. I was a breaststroker (in my youth) and have extraordinarily high arches (my foot makes two wet marks) I also have inflexible ankles and my kick is less than useless. So, in a race (mostly wetsuit legal) I point my toes and pull like crazy. I only kick if someone tickles my toes… 
The reason I can swim at any speed is because I still have some upper body strength, some endurance and (a 1970’s) technique (rapidly declining).
Which brings us full circle to the question what is most important for a Triathlete trying to get the best result from the time and training they can manage.
But I would have loved a pair of those paddles when I was younger than today.
1 Like
It’s sensors that go on your hands. They have an accelerometer and force plate. You set up the sensors by orienting them towards the front and back of the lane that you are swimming in.
If you want to make it difficult, you can think of it this way - your body is rotating around your hand which is always pointed towards the back of the pool except for a very short period at the entry of the hand at the top of the stroke. The reason that good swimmers create “spinning” water or vortices at the back of the stroke is because the hand has to turn out to remain pointed towards the back as the body rotates. There is a little bit of a “flick.” Have you ever tried to swim freestyle right behind a very good back stroker? It’s tough to do, because you can’t grab the water since it’s spinning and turbulent.
The easier way to think about this is to throw the water to the wall behind you.
I hope this helps.
Tim
1 Like
My favorite part of this thread is Eric asking every swim coach who chimes in if he was actually right all along.
2 Likes
Yes swimming behind backstrokers is the dumps as they push so much water all over the shop, whether its spinning or not its no fun!
I feel seen 
this works for running also… it was a revelation to me after being useless at team sports for years, despite daily practice, that I could just simply run every day and get steadily better…
1 Like
On the whole I think most of the coaches and long-time swimmers do agree with me. Now the guy with the fast 10 yr old kiddo is going to disagree b/c his kiddo can not do a single pullup w/o assistance. Well, this is prob b/c she has not practiced doing pullups. I read an interesting article about 10 yrs ago about one of the US’s top female 4 x 200m Oly relay swimmers,1:55 from a flat start. Before starting trying to do pullups, she also could not do one pullup w/o assistance. However, after 5-6 months, she was up to doing 15 straight. Her times did not drop, at least not immediately, prob b/c the pullup motion is not exactly the same as the freestyle pull. This swimmer had already maxed out, or come very close to maxing, her swim-specific strength and when she applied that strength to pullups, she was simply using her strength in a diff way.
This is all on point. That 10yo who may not be able to do a pull-up probably has swim specific strength in a strength to weight ratio that rivals strong adults.
I myself was a mediocre swimmer by my standards and a similar experience. I went to college unable to pull-up for beans and trained myself into it. The strength was there but at the end of the day it’s not a swim move. 15 pull-ups with a 25 lb plate on a weight belt later my 100 fly time was still stuck.
All that said, your initial premise, IMO, is real close… upper body strength is very important and goes hand in hand with fast swimming. Why else would a fast swimmer be able to so quickly adapt to upper body weight training?
Swimming with my ex national champion mate is always a stark reminder of how important technique is. He rarely swims and subsists on a diet of beer, pizza and weed with a decent sized beer gut yet will still smash me in the pool.
I just think there are so many little nuances to the freestyle stroke that some people will simply never master it. Maybe some of the weaker pros in the water have actually worse technique than we think, but are doing so much volume that they can knock out an OK swim split i.e if they were doing AG swim volume, perhaps their swim times would be actually quite poor.
2 Likes
This is excellent. Yes, the body rotating around a forearm/hand paddle largely pointing torwards back of pool. I think the challenge in all sports is getting a visualization and understand of what our bodies are doing relative to external reference points (back of pool). It can be the same if you are throwing a football, serving a tennis ball, skiing a slalom gate…whatever the sport and external reference points and generally most of us have difficult if we are trying to get spatial awareness relative to something outside, whereas spatial awareness relative to our own body parts is much easier to execute.
In any case the discussion went off the rails because some of the frames of reference were not well defined. Rotating body as it passes around a “static forearm” really helps the visualization
ive got a mate like that and while he wasnt a nat champ he did swim at trials back in the day in the 400 medley and 200 breast so racked up some kms. he is a big lad but appears to also subsidises some of his recreations with fairly succesful (althoug infrequent) winnings from punts
1 Like
He may have a beer gut and only swim on rare occasion but he still has that great swim strength he developed back in his hard swimming days. I too have experienced the same thing many times but I put this down to these former top swimmers strength, not their mastery of “many little nuances”. As one top swimmer put it, “just grip it and rip it”. Once you get the basics down, the big thing is working hard in the pool. We may have to simply agree to disagree.
Decades ago, a college swim coach (and masters swimmer and emeritus professor of exercise physiology or something) did a study in season with his swim team. Some did swim-specific weight training in addition to the swim training that both groups did. Result: the WT group got stronger, but no faster.
In this investigation, dry-land resistance training did not improve swimming performance despite the fact that the COMBO was able to increase the resistance used during strength training by 25-35%. The lack of a positive transfer between dry-land strength gains and swimming propulsive force may be due to the specificity of training.
I’m sure that there have been more recent studies that may have concluded otherwise.
Not saying I disagree. Freestyle/swimming is a very peculiar sport in comparison to something like running for example where technique is of less importance and age weight can be a huge disadvantage.
I don’t how it works with strength v technique, as you obviously get young kids who are 50kg dripping wet with tiny lats who still go well…I guess with my mate it’s a case of he has the strength and technique to take advantage of that strength.
I THINK if you look at the lower levels of swimming (whether we are talking 8 year olds, 12 year olds or 80 year olds swimming way slower than real pro swimmers, we may find people with minimal “muscle/strength” (call it what you want), but @ericmulk you are 100% correct that at the pro level for the speeds they go and the body sizes they have to haul through the water to swim that fast, they all have a ton of strength and is is specific strength. At the lower levels althought the strength is specific, you can have skinny kids doing circles around adult triathletes, but for those kids to eventually swim pro, they need to develop pro level body size and proportionally to move that pro level body at the requisite speeds to competem their upper bodies get pretty massive.
I have a picture from the 2016 Dutch Olympic trials that happened to be going on in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. I was was there on biz, and finishing a swim and bunch of these guys started coming in as I was exiting the pool for their warmups (after public swim was over). Literally everyone was twice my size (that’s not too hard), but what was funny was a few years ago, I was in a hotel after an international marathon and hanging out with some Kenyan pro runners and they asked me what my marathon PB was and what my weight was…to which I replied 145 lbs at 2:48. They told me I was 25 pounds heavy and needed to get down to sub 120 if I wanted to run below 2:20 but really even if I went on starvation they said I had no chance to be a real runner because I was too fat and had too big bones !!! I am really built to be a gymnast or diver…neither a runner nor swimmer but here we are stuck between sports that I am not quite designed for.
technique matters a lot in running too. maybe cycling is bettter example
Your comment matches my experience. I was a very slow club swimmer, however, I could hold my own in the weight room. One of my mates swam in the Olympics, I honestly can’t recall what he was doing in the gym exactly, but I don’t recall anything epic. In the pool, different story, this guy was in a league of his own but it had nothing to do with increased strength beyond a limit.
1 Like