For those new to swimming or unfamiliar with the term, bilateral breathing means to breathe to both the right and left side while you swim. Simple enough concept. Sorta like dribbling with your right and left hand when you play basketball. The problem is that quite a few new swimmers (and let’s face it, a lot of swimmers who’ve been at it for a while) shy away from it because it feels awkward and can take a while to adjust to. Added to that that, if you’re struggling with swimming to begin with, and then you must hold your breath for 2 strokes (if you’re breathing every 3) then you’re going to get winded in a hurry. But just because it’s difficult shouldn’t mean you gloss over the idea. The benefits associated with it are many. In fact, as you might have guessed, I’m going to go over a few of them here.

Sighting – For triathletes this is the most obvious argument that is made, and perhaps, one of the least important. In any given open water swim, you are bound to get the sun in your face at some point. So if you are breathing to your right side and the sun is in your face, then the ability to breathe to your left is a great help in navigating your way through the course. The reason I say that this might be the least important is that you can also just close your eyes when you breathe and lift your head to sight in front of you to get around this problem. Not a great solution, but it will do the trick.

Symmetrical Technique – This one’s a biggie. Almost without exception, swimmers will have a strong side and a weak side. Right handed? Then your right arm/pull is typically stronger than your left. To make matters worse, swimmers will cater to the strong side by breathing to the strong side. A the domino effect begins..In order to breathe just to one side (we’ll use the right for this discussion)  they start swimming with the left shoulder lower in the water to make for an easier breath.  This makes one arm pull deeper than the other. To compensate for that they begin to reach a little further with the right arm to get a bigger pull with the strong arm. This soon turns into an overreach, and now there is a slight wiggle in their stroke. In order to compensate for the wiggle, the swimmer adds one really large kick with his right foot to get the body to rotate back over. Now he has a scissor kick and can’t swim in a straight line. What started out as favoring one side of breathing a little has turned into a bit of a messy stroke. This isn’t an exaggeration either. I have corrected a stroke just like this on numerous occasions by simply forcing them to breathe every 3rd stroke to make the pull symmetrically. There are other examples I could give such as dropping the elbow and breaking form when you breathe, but this is a blog, not a book.
Notice the asymmetrical strokes in the following videos. Strong swimmers, but the uneven stroke is costing them efficiency.

Rotation – Good body rotation is a big focus in learning how to swim well. Grab any book on the subject of swimming and rotation is mentioned early and often. When you choose to breathe on just one side though, you only develop half of that rotation. Because you’re favoring (as I mentioned above) one side, you will not rotate fully back to the other side. This is also at trap when people breathe just to the right for a length and then just to the left for a length. It’s a typical workaround for those who just hate breathing every 3rd stroke. So by favoring one side you rotate well in one direction and then finish rotating on the other side completely flat on their stomach. By not continually alternating your breathing you don’t learn proper rotation, you just learn how to drop a shoulder.

Swimming Straight – This is also a play off of the technique issue (isn’t everything a play off of technique with swimming?). An imbalance in your stroke leads to swimming crooked. It’s quite simple really. If one arm has a bigger reach/stroke than another, even if by a tiny amount, then the stronger arm/bigger stroke will control the direction. Never an issue in the pool as you have a black line and your hands naturally adjust pitch to steer in a straight line. Get in open water however, and you you’ll find yourself swimming all over the place. Happens to everyone. When I breathe to my left I tend to steer right just a little. Still working on that.

Now, I know the first thing some of you are thinking. “Well I watched (Insert Name Here) race in the Olympics/Ironman/World Cup, and they breathed to the same side the whole race. If they don’t do it why should I think it’s important? Answer is pretty simple really. When you race, technique needs to almost be automatic and getting enough air needs to be the focus. In training, you are focusing on technique so that it becomes automatic, so that needs to be the focus. In other words, when the effort is big (training or racing) get your air, but the rest of the time dial in that stroke.

If nothing else, watch the best swimmers do it. If you think it’s tough and they make it look easy…maybe, just maybe, there’s something to it.

Now go breathe right…..and left.

So why is it met with such resistance? Beats me. The good cyclists all know how to ride in a pace line. No one says “don’t learn how to ride in a group because you don’t draft in a triathlon”. Riding in a group teaches handling skills, pace, and often can push you beyond what you would normally do by yourself in an effort to keep up with those faster. While the skill set learned by doing a flipturn varies a great deal from that of riding in a paceline, the indirect benefits of learning to flip are just as important. So let your guard down for a minute and let’s go over a few perks that come with an effective flipturn.

1. Uninterrupted swimming. I figure I would start with the most obvious benefit. For those who swim in an 25 yard pool (most of us) and do an open turn (meaning you put your hand on the wall to turn around), you are interrupting the pace and rhythm of your swim at least a couple times a minute. Better swimmers who have dialed in the open turn a little are also getting a little extra rest and an added breath.  Hey, wait a minute…you don’t get to grab a wall and take an extra breath every 25 yards in an open water swim! Why the heck are you doing it then? Because it’s easier.

Quick side story. Every year I do a swim clinic for a local sprint race here where I live for first timers or those unsure about open water swimming. We go through a number of things regarding anxiety, sighting positioning, etc. When it’s time to swim, without fail I have a few people who swim 30 to 40 yards, roll over on their back and paddle to the shore (see where this is going?). They almost always get out and tell me how they regularly swim lap after lap in the pool without a problem and they can’t figure out what happened. I will tell you that there are a number of things that go wrong in the first minute of a lake swim, but the lack of a wall to grab to get an extra breath is a large contributor to their problems.

By doing an effective turn, you eliminate breaktime every 25 and create a more continuous workout. It’s going to make you tired faster, but it will also make you faster faster.

2. Breath control. I don’t want to turn this into a long winded (get it? man I crack myself up) discussion on hypoxic training, but I will say this. Trying to simulate altitude training simply by holding your breath is ridiculous, but in swimming there is still a need (and some benefits and adaptations) to learn how to control your breathing while you swim. Swimming is one of the only sports that you don’t have free access to oxygen at all times. Because of this, you need to be able to manage and time your breathing to match your effort. Flip turns are a great way to get better at all of this. If you do, say, a race pace 500 in a workout you will notice that towards the end of the 500 that you have more and more trouble finishing your turns as the need for oxygen becomes overwhelming. Yet over time, your body will adapt by increasing lung capacity, alveolar number and pulmonary diffusing capacity making those turns easier. The nice carryover that you get is that you can manage your breathing in-between turns better because of this. So that desperate gasp for air late in a hard swim becomes lessened. Now apply this to open water. At the start, we have all been or will be hit, kicked or run over at that start and thereby disrupting our breathing. Same goes for wavy or rough conditions. Your ability to adapt easily and not get panicked or out of breath will allow you to maintain form and speed, even you missed some air.

3. Better Technique. In the swimming world, it’s referred to as “feel for the water”. I would also call it better awareness in the water. As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, very small adjustments in swimming can lead to very large improvements. I mostly discuss the larger aspects of swimming here so as not to muddy the waters (get it? man I’m on a roll here. tip your waitress), but there are lots of smaller items that add up as well. Did you know some of the best swimmers glide with their hand at a 25 degree angle and not flat? You get the idea. So with flip turns, the motion of your hands, arms, head, torso, legs, etc will all effect what happens as you turn. Learning that awareness, and applying it to the rest of your swimming will give you tools you didn’t have before in your attempt to get better. The little things add up.

4. Pool Swim Triathlons – Obvious, but worth mentioning. As you can see in this clip of me flipping under a lane rope, if you can swim a snake in a pool and use turns, you can make some serious time on your competition.

5. And of course …Street Cred: Let’s face facts, if you are doing flip turns in your workout, your street cred goes up. You look like you know what you are doing. We’ve all seen (or in my case been) the guy who wore tennis shoes and a tshirt to his first club bike ride. Not a thing wrong with it, but you knew right away that this guy was new to the sport. Compare that to the day you saw the tshirt guy show up on a new rig and had cycling shoes and cycling clothes. Looked like he knew what the heck he was doing didn’t he?

There are other perks to learning how to do a flipturn, but really now, if you aren’t interested in seeing the light then there aren’t any examples I could give that are going to change your mind. And that’s ok. I am quite aware that there are many out there that deep down aren’t that interested in getting much better at swimming, which is perfectly fine. Sports are about having fun, not torture. Get out there and enjoy yourself. Plus, the less you want to do flipturns, the further down the road I will be before you climb out of the water. And I have no problem with that at all.

Happy flipping.

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.

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.

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.

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

“The biggest problem I think I am having is with rotation of my hips. I swim really flat and despite conscious effort to roll the hips, I’m only able to muster maybe a 10-15 degree deflection from a horizontal plane. When I look around, I see swim team kids rolling their hips (and torsos) at 30-40 and more degrees. There have been times when I felt I was getting it, and could feel the speed improve and effort diminish, so I know it’s the right thing to do, but no sooner do I get there than I’m at a wall and have to start all over. I watch your two-beat kick video once a week but I just can’t put it all together. Now that I’m doing actual workouts, I am learning that my pull bouy splits are about the same as a regular swim split, so my kick is not doing much. In fact, when I first started doing kickboard, I could barely propel myself the length of the pool! I can now do 50′s without dying, so I think that is also a factor.

I’m sure there are a hundred other flaws with my stroke, and would eventually like to get bi-lateral breathing down, but I think if I can figure out the rotation thing I will be able to make some progress. I am open to any suggestions or coach recommendations you may be able to offer.”

Lots of people talk about generating the rotation from the hips, but I don’t think the hips are the starting point. stand up, put your hands in a streamlined position, and rotate from your hips like you would in a pool (no arm movement). Basically a twisting motion. Now hop in the water, streamlined position and try and rotate your hips. It’s impossible. The reason is that on land your feet are planted on the ground and your hips can leverage off of that. in the water your feet are not planted to anything, making it impossible to twist. So you need to be able to plant your feet..aka.. have a good kick. A good kick allows your hips to have something to leverage off of. So the fact that you say you have trouble rotating and you have a poor kick are not independant of each other. One is the reason for the other. 

My best advice without seeing you swim is to work your kick. Get some simple, rubber fins (not zoomers) and spend some time flexing your ankles. As you become a better kicker, it will become easier to rotate.

…..

“How do you do your swim training? I am a former swimmer myself and so I really don’t need to work on my swimming  as much as the bike/run. I’ve tried just swimming 2-3 days a week and that makes me lose my feel for the water. Currently I am swimming A LOT and I feel amazing in the water just about every day. I don’t think swimming 4-6 times a week is ideal since swimming is my strongest point by far, but I don’t like losing my feel for the water. How do you balance that out?”

I used to be the same way, but changed the way I do my workouts now. Because I’ve been swimming since the 70′s and have a pretty good stroke, I have almost completely eliminated drills. I also give myself only about 500 yards to warm up, whereas when I was just swimming, it would take me 1500 yards or so to warm up. The main reason I changed was because of the short amount of time we are given to warm up at the races, so I thought I would try and adjust my habits. So now basically I get right down to business. Might not be for everyone, but seems to work for me.
 
……

“How do you keep your elbow from dropping during extension?”

Closed fist drill can help. Close your fist and try and swim with your forearms as your paddles. Getting a deeper pull also helps. bend your elbow only about 10 degrees in your initial pull. Other than that, make sure that after your arm enters and extends, that your hand/forearm is the first thing to start pulling and not your entire arm. There are also some gadgets out there that claim to help, but I’ve never tried them so won’t comment.
….

“How do you eliminate bubbles during entry and pull?”

Think of your hand as a person. You want that person to dive into the water (i.e. fingertips first) just above your head and then extend underwater to shake any remaining bubbles. Don’t let your hand slap the water!

…..

“You seem to have great flexibility during your extension and pull, is this from years of swimming or do you do additional stretching?”

 Both. All the swimming helps but I still stretch the shoulders before every workout. Doesn’t take long, but could be the easiest way to get faster in the water. This  is key for someone like yourself. certainly a top 3 in importance.

…..

“What would be some good main sets for a Half Ironman?”

One of the keys to swimming is consistant pace. Newer swimmers especially tend to be all over the place when it comes to pacing. Swimming 2000 yards without stopping is fine if you are needing to build some confidence, but you won’t learn pace. Repeat efforts with short rest and a tight leash on pace will make you a better swimmer in a hurry.  I would say that repeat 200′s up to repeat 500′s are great. A set I may do to get in shape would be 5X200′s with a 2:30 interval. That means I am pushing off the wall at 2:30. There is no set rest. As you get tired you get less rest. It really forces pace. 5X200′s with 20 sec rest isn’t nearly as hard or focused as you will get the same rest no matter what your pace is. Athlete’s with a running background have a real hard time with this as they grew up with a goal time and a set amount of rest in their track workouts.

“I’ve got a few questions to ask.  If you hadn’t noticed this is my first season, and while it’s too late to improve my stroke for now, I’d like to put in some good time over the winter.  I admittedly haven’t been doing much stroke work since I don’t want to teach myself a drill incorrectly from reading it over the internet.  Right now it seems like getting some paddles and either a pull buoy, ankle lock or both would be a good idea since they seem to be a bit more self-explanatory.  Any advice here for a newbie?  I’m not a complete beginner swimmer, but my experience is very limited.  Also, last workout I was able to get in some good times doing a 2-beat kick, close to my previous times using a 6 beat.  Not quite as fast, but within a minute per 500 yards. ”

Generally speaking, when someone starts swimming, they tend to have their head and shoulders riding very high in the water with the hips and legs dragging behind (poor balance). Poor rotation and a horrible streamline are also pretty standard. To compensate for this, the swimmer will kick a little harder to bring the hips up and to try and generate a little more propulsion. My experience is that this comes in the form of the 4 beat kick (2 kicks for every stroke). As the swimmer gets better, the body position improves and the streamline gets better, but the kick doesn’t seem to change. Why? well my experience has been that its the rhythm that’s so hard to break. Its just a classic bad habit, and it makes it very difficult to change up your tempo on the fly once the habit is formed.

So what’s the big deal? Who cares how many times you kick? Well, there are a couple of big reasons, so let me explain the function of the kick first.

The purpose of the your kick, at least in distance swimming, is primarily rotation and a little for balance. There’s not much in the way of propulsion. When you rotate to one side, the leg kicks to start the rotation in the other direction. The better the kick, the better the rotation. (People are often told to rotate from the hips, and I have no issue with that. I think it’s more of a mental image that anything. Try and rotate your hips without using your feet or arms and you will see that it’s impossible, which brings me back to the kick. ) That same downward thrust will also raise the legs and hips if needed, however, the better you get in the pool, the less that is needed.

With a 2 beat kick, your bottom leg (leg closest to the bottom of the pool) kicks shortly after the arm begins its pull. So your right arm enters the water and right after it begins its pull, the right leg applies one swift kick. That one, powerful, well placed kick is all you need to begin rotating to the left side. If you have a 4 beat kick, that means that your bottom legs kicks to start the rotation and the top leg immediately follows and COUNTERS that kick, slowing or hindering the rotation. People with a 4 beat tend to struggle more with a good rotation as their kick isn’t helping as much as it should. The 6 beat kick allows for two kicks toward rotation, and one to counter, so you are netting out a solid rotation. Anything more than that and you are swimming from a shark in an all out sprint.
Trying to get a good visual of that kick? Think of kicking a soccer ball with your bottom leg. Swift deliberate and powerful. Of course the flexibility of your ankles come into play as well.

Now we all know that the quads are some pretty large muscles, and while they can generate some pretty powerful movements, they also burn up a serious amount of oxygen. So, if you are generating a lot of power and burning a ton of oxygen, but aren’t getting much benefit from it (propulsion) why wear yourself and your legs out? This, in my opinion, why the 2 beat kick is so important to learn if you are doing triathlons or swimming long distances.

Alright, so lets take a look at the two types of kick. First off, take a look at Michelle’s freestyle. She has a great stroke and has really improved over the last 2 seasons.  In the video, she is swimming a little faster than 1:20 per hundred yards and quite comfortable. Clearly no slouch. Pay attention to the kick.

 Now, take a look at a two beat kick. In this clip I am swimming about 1:12 per hundred yards.

The differences are pretty subtle between the two strokes top to bottom, but Michelle has a 4 beat and I have a 2 beat. Who looks like they’re spending more energy?

This goes back to another point I tend to talk about. A more efficient swim will not only make you a faster swimmer, but make you a faster cyclist because you are much fresher coming out of the water.

A lot to think about here, but hop in the pool and give it a try. So, at what level of a swimmer should you try to work on getting into a 2 beat kick?  I think you should learn it from the start. It seems like breaking the habit of the 4 beat kick is like quitting smoking, based on the swimmers I help.

Good Luck and let me know if I can help.

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.