If swimming is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) swimmer swim slower/easier? You surely don’t intentionally compromise technique. Does everything just slow down to make it easy, and then speed up to go faster again?
Turnover and effort.
Basically, yes. Do the exact same thing, (or try to) but applying less force.
Good swimmers have as many different gears as a road bike- tell them to swim at pace X and they’ll know they have to swim at exertion level Y to do so. And when they’ve got the right feel for the water and the clock in their head is on, they’ll be within a second or two of pace X for every single repeat.
My swimming rear cassette is missing some cogs. I think I swim in my 39-23 most of the time, but occasionally I’ll kick’er down into 39-17 for some really fast repeats at a blazing 1:35-1:40/100 pace. I guess that is about right according to all the swim snobs that say it takes 10 years to learn to swim like a swimmer should. Maybe you add a gear to your cassette every year, thus a 10 speed:-)
I don’t mean anything about the snob thing, I just suck at swimming and want to get better at it in a little less than 10 freaking years!!!
I guess I would say that…
good technique does not make you swim fast or slow, it just give you the set up to swim as fast as you choose to swim
technique + endurance + strength = FAST
monkey with any of the three components and you can effect effort and/or ability
If swimming is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) swimmer swim slower/easier? You surely don’t intentionally compromise technique. Does everything just slow down to make it easy, and then speed up to go faster again?
If throwing a baseball is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) thrower throw slower/easier?..
Swim faster=pull harder
Technique should be the same.
Stroke count may go up a little, but shouldn’t go up too much.
Or so I’ve been told by a :52 IM swimmer
Fla Jill said it best: “”“Good swimmers have as many different gears as a road bike- tell them to swim at pace X and they’ll know they have to swim at exertion level Y to do so. And when they’ve got the right feel for the water and the clock in their head is on, they’ll be within a second or two of pace X for every single repeat.”“”
It’s just like cycling or running in that you can ride easier or you can ride harder. The difference is the effort required.
Great post Fla Jill
If swimming is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) swimmer swim slower/easier? You surely don’t intentionally compromise technique. Does everything just slow down to make it easy, and then speed up to go faster again?
If throwing a baseball is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) thrower throw slower/easier?..
Well, you can’t throw some pitches slowly. So if we use that analogy, then I would say that a great swimmer can’t swim slow with the same great technique.
If swimming is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) swimmer swim slower/easier? You surely don’t intentionally compromise technique. Does everything just slow down to make it easy, and then speed up to go faster again?
If throwing a baseball is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) thrower throw slower/easier?..
Well, you can’t throw some pitches slowly. So if we use that analogy, then I would say that a great swimmer can’t swim slow with the same great technique.
I didn’t say “pitching”.
If swimming is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) swimmer swim slower/easier? You surely don’t intentionally compromise technique. Does everything just slow down to make it easy, and then speed up to go faster again?
If throwing a baseball is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) thrower throw slower/easier?..
Well, you can’t throw some pitches slowly. So if we use that analogy, then I would say that a great swimmer can’t swim slow with the same great technique.You are a little bit right as it’s hard to swim butterfly slowly or easily unless you are really good at it. Like Mary T good at it. Unless you keep up a certain degree of speed, you sort of sink. But, for freestyle and backstroke, it’s fairly easy to adjust turnover rate, how much you are gliding, how hard you are pulling and how hard you are kicking. Same general idea for breaststroke. I don’t see why swimming faster or slower is much different from running faster or slower.
Generally speaking, good runners adjust their speed by altering stride length, turnover stays pretty much the same.
Good swimmers adjust by altering turnover, distance per stroke remains pretty much the same.
I cannot wait for the day that I can swim ‘easy’. I have two gears - difficult, and more difficult.
Short axis strokes aren’t that hard to mix the pace up on. Swim 50 flys and 200 flys in the same meet, and you figure out the difference between all out sprinting and anaerobic hell (aka 200) pace pretty quickly.
But then I’m a freak who finds slow butterfly to be rather relaxing.
I could never swim fly slowly, I found it just felt really weird. I mostly did one-armed fly if I had to do it slowly.
Of course, in this set, I ended up doing some pretty slow fly by the end, as my arms were falling off.
10x200y fly on 2:45. (might have been on 2:35). There were 2 of us on the team who were fairly close in the 200, I was a little faster at the 200, Rolf was a little faster in the 100. We were trying to kill each other. Best workout I ever had, I was shattered for 3 days afterwards.
Obviously the 50 fly and 200 fly are much different races; you might only breath on the turn in the 50. 200 fly is a great race when you are shaved and hit the taper though; I dropped 6 seconds both times I swam in shaved. But, I am also fairly confident that my last 200 fly was in 1986.
What I was saying is that it’s hard to swim fly slowly. Just about anyone any reasonable high school or college swimmer could swim 10,000 yards straight freestyle or backstroke Hardly any could swim more than a few hundred yards of fly straight without starting to cheat a lot like crazy, like one armed strokes or whatever.
Hardly any could swim more than a few hundred yards of fly straight without starting to cheat a lot like crazy, like one armed strokes or whatever.
David Wharton: 16,000m IM. Straight. Long course.
May I add a little something to technique+endurance+strength =fast.
I teach the kids on our swim team thus: technique + conditioning(endurance,strength)+ attitude = fast
You don’t want it, you won’t get it.
I trained in the same pool as Dave Wharton for a couple weeks in late December 1985 and January 1986. It does not really surprise me that he could swim a 16,000 IM. But this confirms that it takes a remarkable swimmer that is well coached to swim more than a few hundred yards of fly without cheating. I swam for his coach, Dick Shoulberg, when I was 10 and 11 and a few times after that during summers and Christmas breaks. Dick was very good a limiting how much you could cheat swimming fly in practice, which made you much better in races (but not so good at keeping you from cheating swimming backstroke). For example, in 1983, Dick had us swimming at this pool during the summer where you could swim about 100 meters straight if you swam across is diagonally, and he would have us finish 3 hour practices by doing 100 meter flys without stopping and without turns obviously. There were about 100 swimmers in the pool doing this so it makes the average open water swim seem like child’s play by comparison.