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

One of the areas of drag that isn’t discussed much, or at least not in this context, is in the water. If you climb on a bike and burn 100 calories, 95 of those calories are used to move forward and 5 calories are lost in fighting the wind, rolling resistance, chain friction, etc. On the other hand, if you jump in the water and burn 100 calories swimming, anywhere from 1 to 10 calories are used to move you forward and 90-99 calories are lost to fighting the resistance of the water. So we spend thousands of dollars to minimize the effects of that 5% on the bike, but it seems to me that we can get more bang for our buck by trying to minmize the 90% in the swim. Problem is, you can’t buy anything to fix bad form.

Swimming is very much like cycling in the sense that any adjustment in our position can potentially save us time. For instance, a better streamline through the water can take minutes off your time in even a sprint race, but to get a better streamline you need to be flexible. In my discussions and clinics  I put on I often demonstrate how good flexibility can overcome a host of  issues like streamlining. When I tell them that they need to stretch regularly in order to do this, I’m often looked at like I’m speaking Spanish. 

The great thing about reducing drag and swimming more effectively is that is will benefit you in a couple of ways. As an efficient swimmer, not only am I swimming faster, but I’m also using less energy doing it. I’ll use the Ironman distance as the example. Say I get out around 50 min, but I do it without spending much energy per stroke because I’ve reduced the drag. If a non swimmer gets out in 1:10, not only do I have a 20 min lead, but I’ve burned fewer calories in the water simply because it took me less time AND my effort level is lower to achieve those results, so I spent even less energy in the water. I am fresh on the bike and know I have a 20 min cushion. The poorer swimmer is tired out of the water and down 20 minutes.

Since 95% of your effort on a bike moves you forward and therefore very small gains are made in reducing drag, the same thing cannot be said on the bike or run.  Cycling and running don’t have the same technique factor. It’s more of a 1 to 1 relationship with cycling and running(or .95 to 1 to be more accurate). Put in X effort and you get X time. So the cyclist has 5 hours to make up the 20 minutes. Assuming he can average a full 1.5 mph faster, it will take him 100 miles to make up the time, but the effort level would be the same for both.  The swimming equation is more like X effort + X technique = X time. So the bad swimmer has to put in more effort to achieve a lesser result because of drag/technique. The good swimmer can lean on the good technique and ease off the effort to achieve the desired result.

So what’s the moral to this story? There’s alot of free speed in the water if you spend some time on the little things to reduce drag. It’s not as fun as buying a new cycling toy, but remember this: while wearing an aero helmet can save you up to 30 seconds during a 1 hour ride, making some key adjustments in the pool can save you upwards of 30 seconds per 100 yards. So in a sprint, you can gain 15 seconds on the bike, but over 2 minutes in the swim.

I’ll take the 2 minutes everytime.