Videos

I watched The Race Club "3 styles of Freestyle" video yesterday. It's 45 minutes long, with probably 1/2 of it showing trippy interludes of people swimming and hanging out underwater. There's even a small fishing segment near the end where some of the members are hunting fish with spear guns. I thought it was great. It reminded me how much of a visual learner I really am.

I felt like I got a lot out of it just from the 15 minute discussion from Mike Bottom on his 3 styles of freestyle coupled with the excellent footage of swimmers working those 3 styles. I thought everything else was just them screwing around. But today I find myself thinking about some of those musical interlude scenes and I realize that they were showing swimmers doing different drills and exercises that they use. It was purely visual instruction, no talking or text involved. They actually managed to get a ton of information crammed into 45 minutes, much of which was purely visual.

One thing that helped me trim up my stroke a bit was thinking about keeping my upper arm closer to my head. I have a tendency, especially on the right arm pull, to let my hand and arm surf outward some. If I'm thinking about keeping my upper arm in tighter toward my head, it helps to prevent some of that. (It seems that my hand still wants to pitch out and feel around sometimes though, instead of going fingers down into the catch. Always something.) They didn't discuss the upper arms at all, I just noticed that every one of the swimmers in the video was doing it.