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Disregard the following ...
by Terry Laughlin
Swimming is simple--swimming advice gets complicated. Here's how to ignore the right stuff.
Of course you're not happy with your swimming. You didn't know that "The most effective applications of propulsive force occur when the insweep and upsweep are made on a diagonal of 50 to 70 degrees...the patterns range in depth from 61 to 74 cm and in length from 29 to 45 cm." Well there you are. Now go try it.
That's a quote from a discussion of the freestyle armstroke which plunges on that way for 18 (yes!) pages. It's in a volume entitled, with inadvertent humor, Swimming Even Faster by Ernie Maglischo, considered the premier sourcebook on technique. Some of you have probably even tried to read it. The volume is loaded with, among other things, minutely detailed descriptions covering every angle, degree and inch of movement as the hand travels through water. Then Maglischo continues over the next 30 pages to discuss kicking, timing of arms to legs, breathing and 20 different possible stroke faults, before dispensing with body position--much simpler to teach and with far more improvement potential--in a cursory paragraph or two.
No wonder so many adult athletes are put off at the thought of regular swim workouts. The advice they get makes efficient swimming sound like rocket science. Swim coaches for adults are in short supply, leaving many would-be swimmers struggling to extract their technique tips from books like this. But even athletes with coaches can be swamped. As one complained recently to me, "I've been told a thousand different things about how to improve my stroke. How can you ever hope to do them all well?"
You can't of course, unless you do some weeding. Most books and articles, treat swimming as simply a matter of getting in shape, telling you how to swim laps rather than how to swim them better. Even Masters coaches are known more for giving workouts than for instruction. But when they finally do turn to technique, wow! An admittedly demanding motor skill becomes a complex sounding as nuclear physics. You can see the athletes' minds working. "If it's technique I need to get better, not lots of laps, and if technique is that, well, technical, I'm outta here."
Wait! Come back. I teach technique to hundreds of adults each year, and I usually have just Saturday and Sunday to get them swimming smoothly and ready to coach themselves. We have time for what really matters, nothing else. And each year I've been coaching, a funny thing has happened: I've I taught less than I did the year before, and my hundreds of newly hatched swimmers have improved more after the streamlining. Here's some common stroke trivia you're better off without:
Is your arm is at a 30 degree angle as it enters the water?
How do you pitch your hand as you make the catch?
How high is your elbow as you begin your outsweep?
Are you making a good sculling motion on the insweep?
Do you have the coveted "S-stroke" yet?
If so, does your pull cross the body's centerline?
Is your hand at least 61 but no more than 74 cm deep as you pull, using your triceps to extend all the way with your hand to finish the stroke?
Are you accelerating your hand through the stroke?
Where is your palm facing as you take your hand from the water?
Where is your elbow relative to your hand as you recover?
Where should you look while breathing?
Are you kicking with a 2- or 4- or 6-beat kick and how is the timing of your arms to your legs?
Hey, where are you going; we're not finished yet! Come back and try this. Focus on the simpler and far more critical job of adjusting your body position to minimize drag. In the scheme of speed things, it's at least twice as important as how your hand pulls you through the water.
If you get your body balanced then rotate your trunk and hips as you stroke, you'll move through the water pretty well, flawed stroke or no. Students at my camps have improved their speed and efficiency as much as 30% in two days, making scarcely any changes in their arm movements.
Here's the stroke-made-simple lesson: Slice your hand in as soon as it passes your shoulder, extend it to the front as far as you can, take your time about beginning your pull, and pull straight back under your body, neither too deep nor too close to your trunk. Then take your hand out of the water and do it again. You're swimming fine. Put away your metric tape measure.
Are there useful refinements beyond those mentioned? Of course. But they pay off far more if you're eyeing a berth on the Olympic team. Consider this: the typical novice is maybe 10 to 20 percent as efficient as a world-class swimmer, but can close most of the gap--to maybe a 20% spread--by simply improving body position, rotation and alignment. Working on just that can easily deliver a year's worth of progress. Then you can begin to think about your hand pitch and path, which may grudgingly yield another 5 or 10 percent gain after just as much work.
Basic, sound swimming comes down to this: Lean into the water with your upper trunk (to balance) so your suit is just breaking the surface; rotate your hips around your spinal axis (to propel), getting them completely out of the way as each hand passes through; and think of your arms more as extenders for increasing the length of your body line--which automatically makes you faster--than as pulling tools.
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