Category Archives: Swimming Technique

Breaking Down Kyle’s Stroke

By tjfry | June 12, 2010

Alright, I’m back. Got seriously slammed at work. Throw in 2 kiddos and Ironman training and pecking away at the ole computer took a back seat. Moving on…

A while back I met up with Kyle to take a look at his stroke. You can see right away that he has a good rhythm and is comfortable in the water. He’s an Ironman finisher, so this isn’t exactly his first lap in the pool. There are a couple of things that jump out at me right way though. And that, if you read this site much, is the fun part, as I get to pick it apart. Let’s get started.

Looking at the above video it’s pretty clear that that Kyle is dropping his elbow. This is extremely common, and often hard to fix for alot of people. Watch as his right arm pulls through the water. About a third the way through the pull you can see a definitive “<” form with his arm (Let pretend that this symbol < represents his arm). It becomes pretty clear to see that his elbow is leading that vertical plane of his pull through the water. Want you want to see is is more of an upside-down, backwards “L”. pulling through the water. In other words, his forearm needs to be vertical.  Need a better visual than “<”? Fair enough. Lets do a side by side with Olympian Grant Hackett.

Notice how different Hackett’s pull looks. He gets his elbow so high that he is hyper-extending his lats. It almost looks a little freaky in that last pic. This is extremely effective as you might guess. He’s got some serious Olympic hardware afterall. Now look at Kyle’s. It is almost the exact opposite. For the many of you out there who have asked me and are still confused on exactly what a high elbow is, these pics couldn’t be a better visual.

This tends to be a tough habit to break. Drills like the fist drill, exaggerating a really deep pool, and various dryland/weight exercises can help break this.

The next thing that I notice is the lopsided pull and recovery that you can see from the above water shot. As you can see, Kyle likes to breathe to the left. While there’s no problem with doing this on race day, to do it all the time during training creates an imbalance. In other words, you create a weak arm and a strong arm by favoring one side to the other. Take another look at the above water shot. Notice where his left hand enters the water and extends versus the right hand. The left enters and extends pretty much straight forward. The right, on the other hand, enters the water and extends in a much wider position. There are other differences if you look underwater, but the bottom line is that having an unbalanced stroke can cause problems in your race. You will consistently swim off course, and the weak arm will tire and the form will begin to fail sooner. This all adds up to more work for you. The fix? Pretty easy actually. Learn to bilaterally breathe, or learn to breathe on both sides like a basketball player dribbles on both sides. Once you learn it, then you need to train using that style for at least 90% of your workout. Once you become proficient at it, you won’t even notice you are doing it. Then on raceday, just breathe as you need knowing that your form is balanced.

Here’s another shot of the unbalance. As you can see in the above clip, Kyle’s right arm pulls much deeper than the left. A big part of this is because his body rotation is more pronounced when he breathes. Nonetheless, if one arm is pulling deeper/better than the other, you are going to end up with problems. The fix is the same as before. Learn to breathe from both sides equally as comfortable. Otherwise, you are going to be frustrated come race day.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on Kyle’s kick briefly. In this clip you can get a pretty good look at his kick and his mechanics are really good. He kicks like one kicks a ball and not like he is running or cycling. The problem I see is the lack of flexibility in his ankles. The key to a good kick is that whipping motion you get from from a flexible ankle. Not unlike the motion of a fin. While it seems minor, an improved kick can make your life so much easier in the swim. The best part for kyle is that the fix is an easy one. STRETCH. Regularly do some kick sets with fins, and go home at night and sit on your ankles.

Good luck and see you before the cannon fires.

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Analyzing Dana’s Stroke

By tjfry | March 18, 2010

 So next on the list of strokes that I pick apart is Dana’s. You might notice that Dana is no slouch. He’s a heck of an athlete. He’s raced in Kona among other places, but swimming is relatively new to him. He was a duathlete for a long time before he hit the pool. As you can see though, he hit the pool hard as he is a good swimmer.

As soon as Dana hopped in and started swimming I noticed that his back muscles were flexing on every recovery. Some call this a stiff stroke. I see it as a weak rotation and overcompensating by lifting your arms behind you in order to get your arms to clear the water during a recovery. Ideally, you want to to let your body rotation lift your shoulder out of the water. Then all you have to do is lift your arm straight up and drop it in the water. Very easy and very little effort. When you swim flatter in the water, you have to lift your shoulder/arm out of the water by flexing your back muscles in order to complete the recovery. The can get very tiring after a while and can also cause injury. I talk more about this type of injury here. In order for Dana to get the proper rotation, he needs to work on over exaggerating the  body roll. We tried it a few times that day and Dana mentioned it felt very strange, like it was too much rotation. For me watching though, it looked just right.

One of the other things that I noticed right away, is that Dana has some limited flexibility in his shoulders. Upon mentioning it though, Dana told me that he had an injury in his shoulder and that the the main reason for his lack of mobility. This will be a bigger challenge if you are injured, but still a very important thing to work on. I am always stressing flexibility here, but if one arm is less flexible than the other, then that means you have to over compensate in other areas of your stroke to keep everything in check. Depending on what those adjustments are, you could cause further injury. So if you don’t have symmetry in your stroke for some reason, that is something you should work on right away.

Overall Dana has a good head and body position, but you can see that his feet do sink/drag a little. If I was teaching you the Total Immersion method, I would tell you that Dana needs to lower his chest in the water to bring up his feet. The truth, however, is that Dana’s issue has nothing to do with balance or body position. It has everything to do with his kick. A very slight improvement in his kick will bring his feet to the surface and fix the problem. By burying your chest deeper into the water to avoid the problem can cause more problems (rotation, timing of the breath, etc) and to me, that’s putting a bandaid on a broken leg. Fix the problem, don’t mask it.

Speaking of the kick, here’s something interesting that I picked up on while watching his videos (never saw it at the pool). It’s easiest to see on the clip above (DL5).Dana’s right ankle is more flexible that his left. Why? His body rotates more to the right, so it takes a bigger/better kick to rotate in the opposite direction.  Remember when I mentioned earlier about overcompensating for his injury? I would be willing to bet that this ties in with his shoulder injury. So a injured shoulder causes one ankle

to be more flexible than another. If I just walked up and told you that you would think I’m out there huh? When you break it down though, it’s not such a stretch. Take that a step further, if Dana were to have a foot/ankle injury from running, it would all tie back to the shoulder. Crazy huh? Something to think about the next time you get hurt. Man I’m getting way off track here……Breathing every 3 in training and throwing on some fins from time to time with help his kick which will improve his rotation and the dropping/dragging of his legs.

In terms of pulling, Dana has a pretty good pull. This is usually the part of my post that I harp on dropping your elbow and losing power in your stroke. In looking at Dana’s stroke though, he has pretty good pull. He does drop his elbow a little and can work on that, but overall is good to go. I do notice though that his hands are pulling some bubbles. Very minor fix, but if he enters his hands a little sooner and still extends like he does underwater, he will correct that (He can also enter his hand a little steeper and then extend, it will accomplish the same thing.)

On second thought, Dana should swim less and race more using breastroke. I don’t really like it when he runs me down, so a little more buffer in the water would serve me well.

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Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

By tjfry | February 19, 2010

I was filming a friend of mine the other day (his post is in the hopper) and he thought that I should post my own swimming as a point of reference for others. While I have posted myself on here swimming before, I will admit it has been a while, so if you haven’t been hanging around here very long, you probably haven’t seen any of them. So here are a few shots of me making my way up and down the pool.

I don’t really feel like picking apart my own stroke in any great detail, but I will admit that my stroke does have flaws. Since I don’t slow down the video or point any of them out, most of you won’t see too many of them though. That works just fine for me, because if I let you peek behind the curtain to see the real wizard, then you won’t tap your ruby slippers together anymore…

From under the water:

Above View:

Head On:

See ya at the pool.

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Putting Mark’s Stroke on the Hot Seat

By tjfry | February 13, 2010

For those of you who frequent this site (thank you by the way and tell some friends!!), you may have started noticing a theme here. I have been analyzing a number of people’s strokes, giving pointers, tips and things to avoid. The feedback has been well received and the requests have increased quite a bit as well. (Actually back logged right now if you can believe it). So as long as the requests keep coming, I will keep showing you various strokes and breaking them down. The other stuff is coming too, I just need about 30 hours in a day to get it all done right now. I digress…

OK, So I spent a little time with Mark and going over his stroke a while back. Mark has been a triathlete for a while now, so this isn’t the first time he’s hopped in a pool, and it shows. He has a good body position and a forceful pull. There are a few key things that I picked up on right away though. They are minor tweaks visually, but these changes will shave many, many minutes off of his next swim time. So I will hit each one in my order of importance.

The Pull: This is another good example of dropping your elbow. As his pull begins, his elbow is breaking the vertical plane of the water before his hand. So not only is he not able to utilize his forearm as part of his ‘paddle’ in the pulling process, but his hand is left to pull water that is already moving in the same direction, much like swimming upstream. A big part of his problem is the bad advice that he had been previous given. What was the advice? He was told that he was pulling too deep and needed to be pulling closer to his body. Ugh. I think I need to write about all the bad advice out there. I frequent a few sites and sometimes I just shake my head and move on after reading all the horrible tips. I digress…Think of it like this: if you don’t want to drop your elbow because it will move the water you want to pull (see my upstream comment above), then what do you think your entire body is going to do? To take it in another direction, look at all the great swimmers and see how many of them have a big bend in their elbow and pull close to their body. If you find one let me know.

As soon as I suggested a deeper pull, Mark gave it a try and instantly noticed the difference. He got that A-ha! moment and was swimming better immediately.

Uneven Stroke: As you can see from all 3 videos, Mark always breathes to his right, and doing this has created an uneven stroke. His left arm fully extends as that is the arm that is gliding while he breathes. His right arm, however, doesn’t extend as far forward and also finishes the glide wider than the left. This is going to do a couple things. First, it will cause Mark to swim off course (or have to correct his line constantly) because the left arm is pulling more water than the right. It will also make it harder to properly rotate to both sides. Right now he rotates well when he breathes and is flat during the alternate stroke. So what’s the fix? Alternate or bilateral breathing is the easy first step. It will dramatically help you make your stroke symetrical. This is important when swimming in a pool with a black line and critical when swimming in open water with no guide to look at.

Ankle flexibility: I bring this up almost every time I look at someone’s stroke, so I won’t beat a dead horse, but take a look at Mark’s kick. Functionally it’s really good. He isn’t kicking in circles (or like he runs), but like he’s kicking a ball. The missing piece to this puzzle is that whip you get from your ankle, which is the key to an effective kick. There’s no majic to fixing this. Kick more. Kick with fins. Do ankle stretches. Done and done.

In the scale of  difficultly in swimming fixes, these are relatively easy to adjust to. Fixing the dropping elbow will have the most challenge, but since Mark was catching on before we even got out of the water, I imagine it might already be fixed. Happy swimming.

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