07/23/08 SwimLabs analysis discussion

I finally went to SwimLabs and got videotaped last night and I'm sure glad I did. I now have refined my stroke models for breaststroke and freestyle and I have some concrete things to work on to make them better. No more random tinkering.

Freestyle:

One thing I picked up was that I need to enter my hand farther out in front of me, then extend with a shrug motion. I was entering my hand closer to my head and then extending through the water using a side roll. That caused me to take a lot longer to get to my catch. Mike Mann, the analyst, told me that I had a good catch, but the way in which I got to it was not so efficient.

My model of arm extension, then, was off. Instead of rolling to extend my lead arm, I needed to stay flatter and just shrug it forward. The roll comes in at the end of the stroke, where I should be using my hips to accelerate the finish. I don't roll to the catch so much as I just shrug to it. It feels more like I'm just trying to reach out to poke something in the water in front of me.

I also learned that I want to have my upper arm almost parallel to my head and then drop my forearm down as though there was something holding my elbow up. After the forearm goes vertical, then I can get a pretty long pull using my side muscles. My left arm was pretty good on this account, especially after I adjusted my mental model of arm extension. My right arm needs work, especially on a breath.

In my old way of swimming, my right arm would sweep way out when I'd breathe to my left. Apparently, this is not uncommon. It causes me to then need to use the next part of my pull to sweep back in and stabilize my body in the water. So, I'm expending my energy sideways rather than straight back. I need to focus a lot on that right arm :).

For the longest time, I had thought that my left arm was weaker because I'm generally pretty right-dominant. These last few weeks, I've suspected that my left arm is actually more efficient and stronger than my right due to how my motion in the water has felt. The video session and analysis confirmed that, so now I don't have to wonder and try to randomly adjust things.

So, to rehash freestyle, I need to get my hand entry out farther, shrug to the catch, and then drop my forearm vertically as though something were holding my elbow. Then get a nice long pull using that push-down motion.

Breaststroke:
There are two things I really need to work on in my breaststroke. The first of them is that my pull is too wide and I end up pushing down toward the bottom of the pool rather than straight back. We adjusted my pull so that it's a lot narrower. The model we used for this is to think about pulling myself forward over the lane line, so I've got my hands and forearms in a lot more and I'm just pulling straight back. Not only did it feel like I had a pull, it was a lot more comfortable and I felt like I was expending less energy.

The second thing I need to work on is really shooting my hands forward on the recovery as fast as I can. No matter what. If I'm doing easy breaststroke, the rest can come in the length of my glide. It's important to shoot those hands forward as fast as possible and get into the glide position.