Rip is an accomplished athlete but hitting the pool is a more recent endeavor. In watching him hop in the pool and go, a few things popped out at me right away. First off I noticed that Rip crosses the centerline of his body when his hand enters the water. This is more exaggerated when he breathes. Its pretty easy to see in this first video.

Pay attention to his right arm as it enters the water. Ideally, you never want your hand to cross over the top of your head. Imagine a skewer going through the top of your head and extending straight down through your body. With that as your guide, you never want your hand to cross that skewer and come over to the other side of your body. This will immediately cause you to swim crooked, among other things. So if you cross over with your right arm, you will most likely swim off to the left. If both arms cross, you get a bit of a wormlike stroke. An easy tell is if you see someone wiggle their behind back and forth as they swim. The fix is simple enough. Point where you want to go. Yep. That’s it. You can look up drills online til you’re blue in the face, but it really just boils down to pointing, or positioning your hand, so that it lines up with the direction you want to go. So as your hand enters the water, make sure your hand is pointing to the cross at the other end of the pool.

The next thing that I saw was very common if you read this site much. That is, Rip is dropping his elbow when he pulls. By dropping his elbow, he is losing a large amount of surface area that you use to pull, leaving each pull rather ineffective. This is a tougher problem to fix as this type of habit gets pretty well ingrained in your muscle memory. Additonally, as you get tired, you naturally begin to drop your elbow in order to keep the cadence consistent.

What Rip needs to do to fix this is a few things. First of all, the pull needs to be deeper. Try and get away from bending your elbow at 90 degrees and more like 10 degrees. A deeper pull and straighter arm will fix some of the issue almost immediately. Next try swimming while making a fist. If you lose the surface area of your hand, you will be forced to get though the water using your forearms as your “paddle”. This will bring your elbows up higher so that your forearms have a clear shot at the water. Takes a bit of work, but the results will be substantial.

Finally, I noticed this once we left the pool and I started looking at the video. It was pretty obvious, but I missed it at the pool b/c I am looking at a number of different things all at once as someone swims across the pool. That’s why video is so great!

OK, So take a look at Rip’s arm cycle. Notice how his arms are almost always opposite of each other, like a windmill. This causes a gap in his stroke in which the pulling arm is behind him and the recovery arm is still up in the air.  With no arm in front helping to streamline and no arm pulling, your freestyle will hit the brakes in a frickin hurry. The fix is what some people call front quadrant swimming. In other words, most of the power and all the the streamlining happen from roughly the chest up. so as one arm pulls, the other arm should be gliding, which helps to maximize that pull. The common drill used to practice this is called ‘catch up’ drill. In catch up, that hand that is gliding doesn’t begin to pull until the other hand literally ‘catches up’ and touches the gliding hand. Like playing tag with your hands. It’s going to feel very strange at first, but you will start to notice that you are gliding more and that it takes fewer strokes to get across the pool. And less strokes across the pool allows you to take all that energy you just saved and apply it to the pull. Once you get that down? Duh… Winning!

Happy Training.

The first thing that I have to mention is that these swim videos are done with a wetsuit on. The problem with that is that it can hide certain flaws and habits with all that added buoyancy. Having said that, I can still pick out a few of them even with the suit on. More on that in a bit.

In watching Jay swim, I can tell that he is very comfortable in the water and a good swimmer. I don’t have any racing times, but I’m quite sure he’s not bringing up the rear. Of course this wouldn’t be any fun if I just complemented the stroke and moved on. So let me pick this sucker apart..

First thing I want to touch on is the easy one, and that’s Jay’s pull. Like a lot of people, Jay is dropping his elbow on his pull, and in some of these shots it’s pretty pronounced. As I have mentioned in other areas of this site (here), by leading the pull through the water with your elbow, you minimize the surface area in which you’re pulling yourself through the water. In addition, you use more tricep and less lat by dropping your elbow. Take a look at the still shot of Jay here:

And compare it to the pictures here of a pretty good pull. (There’s also a great one of Grant Hackett on a previous post)

While my pull isn’t perfect, this makes it pretty easy to see the difference, and what needs to be adjusted.

I also noticed that the left arm is entering/extending wider and pulling more air, especially when he breathes. This is easiest to see in the brief head on shot, but you can still see it pretty well on his return trip when the left arm is closest to the camera. The fix? Bilateral breathing. By breathing to both sides you start to move equally between the left and right sides. It also will help prevent injuries as the yards add up as there are fewer ways to favor weak habits.

Another thing I see is that Jay is lifting his head a bit too much to take a breath. While it’s not a big deal in and of itself, a head high in the water usually means a lowering of the hips and forces you to kick harder to keep the proper body position. Try keeping a goggle in the water (or as close as you can) when you rotate to breathe.

Kick. here is one of the areas that a wetsuit is good at hiding. A good kick is used to help facilitate body rotation, body position, and a little bit of propulsion. (more on that here). Ideally you want to minimize how much you kick by making each kick as effective as possible. (For the distances of triathlon, I recommend a 2 beat kick). The less effective the kick, the more kicking you have to do. When I look at Jay’s kick, it looks like the wetsuit is hiding some flaws in his kick. From what I see, the basic fundamentals of the kick are pretty good. Starts at the hip, bend in the knee, whip in the ankle, like kicking a ball. The big problem that I see is the timing. The kick should start the rotation, so when you are rotated to one side, the bottom foot should initiate the rotation in the other direction. In watching Jay, you can see a pronounced kick with his left leg, especially when he breathes. This is simply because Jay is rotating more when he breathes and needs that forceful kick to get him rotating in the other direction. What you don’t see is that same type of timing and force on his right leg. Easiest way to fix this is for Jay to start …..everyone together now…breathing bilaterally. By breathing to the left he will begin to balance out his stroke and force that kick to be more purposeful. Between that and a heathly dose of kick sets, Jay can improve his kick so he rotates better and gets to his bike a bit quicker.

Lastly, You’re arms should extend straight out in front of your body. Jay’s arms are extending in downward (say, 4 o’clock) trajectory as the swim progresses, which shortens the length of his stroke and negatively effects his streamline. Usually this is a flexibility issue, so I would recommend focusing on a good streamline off each wall and a generous amount of stretching when you get out of the pool.

Hopefully there’s a few take home points here and it quickens everyone’s times. Questions? Fire away.

Oh and Jay, thank you for your service to our country. It’s greatly appreciated.

There are a couple of other things going on here as well in conjunction with this, but you have to look a little closer. First of all, if you look at the above water shot, you can see that the head doesn’t just dip down, but it also dips over. This will cause a person to swim crooked faster than anything. In swimming, you have to envision yourself on a barbecue skewer. The head and body stay in a straight line just as if you had a skewer running through your head, while your body rotates on that axis to pull, kick and breathe. If your body breaks from that axis by wiggling, bending or moving your head from one side to the other, you lose efficiency and often swim crooked. That can kinda be a problem in the middle of a lake. Additionally, watch the left hand as Kent’s head takes that dive. Notice how his hand turns to the side with the pinkie finger down at the onset of the pull. It looks as if Kent is attempting to keep the entry and pull in in-line and he overcompensates for the head by dropping the elbow on the extension and turning his hand so as to keep the good rotation. The problem is that his misses the first and very powerful part of the pull because his hand is sideways. Keeping the head straight should correct most of this, but focusing on the position of the hand as the pull starts will be important in order to correct this.

Speaking of the pull, look at the right arm during the pull. The pull itself looks really good on both arms as you can see that he is getting some power out of each pull, but during that pull there are a bunch of bubbles being dragged through the water. This mostly has to do with the hand entry. His hand enters well beyond the top of his head and is therefore entering at a steep angle. If Kent were to make a shallower entry by entering a little closer to the top of his head, he can remove those bubbles and get  a better grip on the water.

Finally, I want to touch on the overall body position. From the side-view video you can see that Kent’s legs are dragging just a tad by the end of the length. This is due mainly to the effectiveness of the the kick. While the mechanics of the kick seem to be spot on, it’s the ankle flexibility that is the problem. Simple enough fix. Stretch out your ankles and you will generate more power from you kick.

The beauty here is that a couple of small adjustments will probably fix a number of issues, so there aren’t tons of things to focus on and get confused with. Hopefully straightening the head and bilateral breathing will have a domino effect and fix some of the other issues in the stroke.

Now go get in the water.

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.

One of the first things that you notice is Sheri’s body position. You can see pretty quickly that her hips are riding a bit low in the water. Typically, this is a simple head position issue. You want to have your head lined up with the rest of your body, as opposed to having your head up, looking out in front of you. In this case though, Sheri does a pretty good job at keeping her head in the proper position. In fact, even when she turns to breathe she does a nice job at not lifting her head for air. Instead, Sheri’s poor body position is because of two different issues; she tends to swim with her chest rather high in the water and her kick is generating almost no lift.

The solution to the first part is rather easy, the second is a bit more of a challenge. Sheri needs to lower her upper body down into the water by a few inches. It’s very simple to do but will often feel awkward because it takes a while to get comfortable swimming so low in the water.  One way to make the adjustment is to push off the wall in a streamlined position,  and with no kicking or pulling, adjust your body position so that you are flat or horizontal in the water. It may take a kick or two to keep your feet on the surface once you slow down from the push off the wall, but once you find that flat position in the water, you need to use it in your regular swimming.

The next piece of this puzzle is her kick. Sheri’s kick looks to be a 4 beat crossover kick. This means that she will kick twice for every arm stroke and  that at a certain point in her kick the left leg crosses under the right. Why the crossover? If you watch, you can see that she has good body rotation when she breathes to the left, but much flatter when she rotates to the right. A good kick is typically straight down and initiates the rotation to the other side. Because her kick is weak and rotation not as strong on this side, Sheri’s left, or bottom leg tries to compensate by kicking diagnally and across her body. Hence the cross over.

The main problem with Sheri’s kick is that it is almost entirely from the knees down. She is generating no power from her hips. As I have mentioned other times, you want to kick in freestyle like you kick a ball. The hips start the kicking motion and you finish through the knee and ankle. Sheri’s hips and knees aren’t coordinating with each other, so any force that she is creating is coming from her knees and ankles.

Fixing this can be a bit more of a challenge, because the kick creates a rhythm and a timing for the whole stroke, and so changing this bad habit often feels like you are overhauling your entire stroke. I would recommend that she dedicate some serious pool time this winter to kicking, both with and without fins, and really focus on kicking a ball everytime.

The final piece of Sheri’s stroke that I want to address is a common one. Dropping her elbow. As Sheri’s arm begins the pull, you can see that it’s her elbow, not her hand or forearm that is the leading edge through the water. In fact, her forearm doesn’t get vertical until her pull is at her hips. I go into greater detail about this problem here, but in a nutshell she needs pull with her hand and forearm and not her elbow. A good drill to do to work on this is swimming with a closed fist. By removing the surface area of your hand you are forced to use your wrist and forearm to move you through the water. By doing this and focusing on where your elbow should be in relation to your forearm, you can correct the problem. Doing the pull correctly usually results in that AH HA! moment as you generate considerable more power from each stroke immediately.

Fixing bad habits in the water can be a bit frustrating, but if Sheri spends the time now making these adjustments, she will be coming out of the water faster and have used less energy. I’m sure this will be a motivator, because I know Sheri would love nothing more than to get the heck out of the water and onto something else, like the bike and the run.

Body Position: The first thing I noticed was the body position in the water. Her hips are riding a little low in the water, and this is the main reason her kick rate is so high. (See the pic below as well) She’s using her kick not for rotation or propulsion (see more on the kick here and here), but for lift. The kick is trying to keep here hips/legs high in the water. By adjusting her overall body position slightly she will save her legs from all the kicking and save gobs of energy in the process.

Pull: In watching her swim, I could tell pretty quickly that Ana drops her elbow as she pulls. It can be a little difficult to pick up if you don’t know what your looking for, so I grabbed a still shot so that you can see what I am trying to point out. As I have mentioned before, dropping your elbow is very common in all levels of athletes, and especially so as you fatigue because you can maintain your cadence. The problem is that you’re reducing the efficiency of your pull dramatically as you do this. So once we adjust the body position, we can focus on maximizing the pull. (I go into the high elbow in much greater detail here, but in a nutshell, by leading your pull through the water with your elbow, you can drastically decrease the effectiveness of your stroke. We worked on the pull a good bit while we were there and I could see some great improvement by the end of the session. In fact, if you look at the two videos posted here you can see a difference in the second video (taken towards the end of the swim).

Kick: Now that the position is corrected, we can adjust the kick itself, because if we tried to do it first, her legs would just sink or she would revert back to her old ways so that she wouldn’t sink.

Ana has a 6 beat kick, meaning that for every stroke cycle she kicks 6 times, or 3 kicks for every pull. It takes her about 15 strokes to swim (which by the way is quite good) so that means she kicks 45 times for every 25 yards, or about 7,600 times in an Ironman swim. If she can convert her swim to a 2 beat kick (more about the 2 beat kick here), she could reduce her effort by 5,100 kicks in the Ironman. That energy would be much better spent on the bike and run. Improving her kick will also improve her body rotation, which will help her pull and body position.

For those learning to swim, or even for those who’ve been swimming for a while, this might seem like I’m beating up a a good stroke. Truth is, it is a good stroke (Don’t worry Ana!) but there are some key things holding her back from getting to the next level. And for the purists out there, yes there are some other things going on, like the pitch of her hand and her entry point, (causing some of those bubbles during her pull) for example, but these are minor and simple to correct once some of the other stuff is addressed.

Clear as mud right? Got questions? Let me have it.

Oh and Sheri, don’t worry, you’re next

Since it was a kicking question that started this whole discussion, I thought that’s where I would start.  From what I can observe from the above water shot the flutter kick looks pretty good. Ankles need to flex a little more in order to create a more effective kick, but the fundamentals are there. No scissor kicks, no kicking in circles, etc. The reason Mike is kicking so much is because he is using his kick to fight his body position. If he were to stop kicking altogether his legs would sink immediately and he would end up vertical in the water.

The main reason for the body position being too upright is the position of the head, which is riding too high in the water. He is wanting to see where he’s going which is common, but more importantly, it looks like he is having a little trouble seeing the world from a horizontal perspective. Both of which are very common in newer swimmers.  Your mind wants to see everything in a vertical orientation, like in everything else you do. It’s common and will take a little time to adjust. So, the first thing he needs to do is lower his head in the water. How much? Just as you would when you’re standing straight and looking forward. Head stays in line with your body. Now, this means that you’ll be looking straight down, and that’s OK (that’s what the lines and crosses at the bottom of the pool are for). Once you get used to that then you can crane your neck (or stick your chin out) and then look up slightly to see ahead of you. The neck crane will lower your head further into the water so that when you shift your eyes/head to see ahead, they will cancel each other out. Make sense?

Let’s discuss the pull…

I can see that with both of Mike’s arms that he is dropping his elbow as he pulls (see my article on this topic). Doing this drastically reduces the efficiency of the pull. Part of the reason is that the bend in the elbow is too great. As your arm begins to fatigue it becomes very easy to drop your elbow without noticing that your form is falling apart when your arm is bent this much.  So once the head and body position are adjusted, I would suggest that he tries to pull MUCH deeper. The bend in the  elbow should be more like 10 degrees than 90 degrees. This should give you some more power, further reducing the big need to kick.

Finally, the body rotation. Once he gets the hang of the other stuff, it’s time to start focusing on rotating his body from one side to the other. (Swimming flat in the water also can cause a shift in body position like he is experiencing, as the beginning of the pull creates lift) This will help your pull, make your recovery easier and start to get you more streamlined. While focusing on the deep pull, take that same deep pull but this time roll your shoulders into it so that the pull is deeper than before. You ultimately want to feel like you are rolling all the way from one side of you body to the other, but it’s gonna feel strange at first, so ease into it. I know this just hitting the highlights of body rotation, but I’ll drill into that another day.

After those skills are improved upon, another review should be done to work on the next set of skills.

Questions? Let me have it. Have a video of your stroke that you would like me to breakdown? Let me know. You know where to find me.

Let’s start at the point in your stroke I refer to as the ‘glide’. Your hand has just entered the water and extended out in front of you. The next step is to begin your pull, or in swimming slang, the catch. The pull begins with your hand pulling downward while your shoulder/upper arm remain right where there are. This creates a pivot point at your elbow and creates an ‘early vertical forearm’. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all,  by pulling with your elbow high and your forearm vertical, you’re using your hand AND forearm to pull through the water. Using both creates a much larger paddle to pull with than just your hand alone. Secondly, by keeping your elbow high throughout your pull, you are using your larger back muscles.  If you swim with your elbow dropped, or leading the rest of your arm through the pull, you use smaller tricep muscles to pull.  Finally, with your elbow leading, it creates a slipstream for your hand to follow, which makes it hard for you to get a strong pull.

Like I mentioned before, this is seen in all levels of swimming. Beginners tend to start this as a bad habit. Experienced swimmers start to drop their elbow as they fatigue because they are trying to keep up the same stroke rate.

Here’s an example of a good swimmer who drops her elbow as she pulls.

As you can see, it’s very subtle. Overall it’s a great stroke, but if you focus you attention on her pull, you can see that elbow down and her stroke slipping a little.

By contrast, take a look at the next video.  You can see that the elbow is higher in the water and the pull is more effective.

Can’t see any difference? Let me put them side by side.

The swimmer at the top of the picture has a ‘high elbow’ (or early vertical forearm as some call it).  If you look at the superimposed line I put over the arm you can see that the forearm and the hand are acting as one and leading the sweeping motion of the pull. Looking and the swimmer at the bottom of the picture, you can see that the elbow is dropped slightly and is leading the hand and forearm through the water. This doesn’t allow the hand and forearm to ‘grab’ the water, or get an effective pull.

So how do you prevent this from happening? First of all a deeper pull tends to help things. People who pull with their elbows bent at a high degree tend to be more prone to letting that elbow slip. Second, there are a few drills that you can do to work on it. Catch up freestyle (letting one arm do a complete swim stroke and “catch up” to the other arm before the other arm begins its stroke) will isolate each arm allowing you to make some focused adjustments.  Using hand paddles can help as well. The paddles (be sure they’re sized right and not too small) will exaggerate your stroke and make it easier to find and adjust the problems. The bottom line though is that you need to pay attention to your stroke. If you have someone like a coach or training partner that can watch your swim, get their input as well.