Do less...to go fast | Freestyle Technique Analysis transcript

here we have ch who's doing triathlons in this 100 he does a 1 minute 30 and he's averaging 25 Strokes a lap let's take a look and see what he can do to swim faster and be a bit more efficient with the stroke often we like to start with head position and body position and you'll notice through the video here that he could certainly bring the hips and the legs up a bit and one of the first things we tend to look at there is with the head position and you will notice that his eyes are a little bit too far forwards with the chin too far forwards I'm normally looking at at where the chin is because if the chin is sticking out we sometimes get more lower back arch than what's ideal and that can lead to this disconnect through the through the body because if you've got too much of this lower back arch your core can't be switched on it can't be sort of working very well so your upper half and your lower half just don't don't work together very well so what I'd be looking to do there initially is with the eyes bring them down a little bit the range that I see the best swiers in the world in is anywhere from straight down to 45 but he's just a little bit of above that 45° range and you will notice with his chin especially there see how his chin is really forwards so if you can lengthen your neck like you're getting rid of wrinkles on the back of your neck and you tuck your chin in not where you can't breathe but just bring it in slightly he'll have this longer straighter line through his head neck and spine which is what we'd want to go for so I'd start with head position you don't want to completely submerge your head either you want to still keep the top of your head out but just put it in a better position I then go on to the breathing because with the breathing you'll see how far forward the eyes are at this point and so is the chin and then when he turns to breathe he's kind of lifting his whole head out of the water it's very high there rather than going for like he's on this skewer like you got the skewer through the head neck and spine you want to be able to get the breath by turning the skewer so you just turn and you come back you're not doing this big lift and and round movement with the head so we would start with the breathing and a simple drill that he could do would be this side breathing drill with a kickboard that you can see here just as a way to practice the right head position and practice that skewed breathing now that might seem like a really simple thing and we talk about this quite often especially when we're starting with video analysis but often more than half the people that tend to come to our clinics are looking in the wrong position either too deep or too far forwards and when they do get the head position right everything just tends to click into place a whole lot easier so that's where we start and it's good just to get some footage of yourself if you can to see whether or not you're too high with your head position now after that one of the things that you might see here is if we have a look at the catch in the pool then go through it in slow motion the catch isn't quite exactly where we want it to be in terms of it's a little bit of a dropped elbow position where we'd want to get into a high elbow catch so if we were to draw a line from his shoulder to his fingertips at this point his elbow is below that so he's dropping the elbow through the catch whereas a good catch will be have that elbow somewhere above that imaginary line there because you can see with the direction of his forearm and hand that's mostly pressing down so down down down down now it starts to press back about here where he gets a bit more from it but that whole first part the whole setup of the catch there just not not getting that much from it so let's have a look and see what he could do to get more from from the catch on his right arm and also his left you can see a very similar position here what I'd start with is actually what happens when he reaches forwards so with his entry he enters there reaches forwards and finishes in this position that's what we call the start of the the catch that's when you're about to begin the movement of the catch you'll notice that he's got his elbow below his wrist wrist about the same depth his of his fingertips so he's kind of dropping the elbow early on at that point what I'd encourage him to do is lengthen reach and reach out further forwards so that we had the fingers below the wrist wrist just below the elbow basically in this straight position to begin with and that might seem like I'm being a little bit picky with that side of things but if you start your catch with a low or dropped elbow it's really hard to make it's a lot harder to make that transition to a a good catch as you're going through it so he might just need to reach out and stretch out a bit more with that right arm to begin see the left arm as well kind of a similar position the elbow's just a bit below the wrist and fingers so he is just dropping it early on on so we'd want to start with that there's two drills that we do at Clinic to help just get this position sorted we start with front kick drill with both hands out in front as you can see here then we transition to the sidekick drill then into 616 drill with that as part of the focus making sure you've got fingers blow wrist wrist blow elbow so that's what we want to make sure we we get initially then once you set up in the right position to begin his catch as he goes through this movement from here down to here we'd want to try to get the hand and forearm moving down just a bit before the elbow pulls back so through this movement you'll notice that the elbow is moving down or through at the same time as the hand and forearm but usually to get any kind of you know good catch if we can get the hand and forearm just moving on its own even for a fraction of a second before the elbow moves back then you're going to be set up pretty well with your your catch and it just doesn't quite happen there so he'd need to get the hand and fr moving somewhat on its own while the hand and forearm stays in a a similar position up around here for just that fraction of a second before moving through now with those drills yeah there's a lot of drills you can do to practice that in the 5day catch challenge we cover those in in detail and you've probably seen some of those drills on the video on on our videos here but the other thing I want to mention here is that when you're going through the movement of your catch if your shoulder is down too low compared to your face it's going to be very hard to get that uh that c catch position and I'll show you why so if you have a look at this here what you might see is all right if I'm if I'm getting a high elbow catch which is which is here my shoulder needs to be near my cheek not on my cheek not covering my ear but near my cheek off to the side here now if I was to drop this shoulder down to where he is which is below my cheek down here it's very hard to hold that high elbow the shoulder goes down and the elbow sort of follows it as you go from up here to down down here the elbow is going to drop as a result of it so sometimes when I've seen people in a similar position as as where he is here I get them to stand up go through that thing that I just showed you there and just show the connection between where the shoulder is or the depth of the shoulder and that high elbow position now if you want to practice where keeping that shoulder up you can do uh like the 616 drill and just make sure that you keep that shoulder near the cheek and then as you swap sides as you pull through just keep that shoulder near the cheek through that first part of the the stroke so if you're rolling your shoulders around too much it's going to be hard to get that catch position so that'll be the second thing I'm going to cut to the front view just to show you what's what's happening here as well now the rotation going a little bit too far on the side just a bit so if we look at his furthest point of rotation and we've seen this across the board with a few of our most recent uh feedback videos here he's going to 52° through the shoulders that's too far 30 to 40° is all we really should be going going to it's where you see the best swimmers in the world getting to 30 to 40° if you measure that that angle front on similar thing on this right side as he goes to take a breath just much too far on the side so rotation is good but like anything if you do too much of it it's going to impact the rest of your stroke so he's going to 60° on that side so we just want to dial down that shoulder rotation because it's just causing him to uh go a little bit like to not be able to really set up the start of the catch as well so then go a little bit too deep early on and uh it then makes it hard to get a a good catch position the other thing that this kind of ties into as well is when he takes a breath so he turns the head at the right time here he begins to turn his head as this hand is pulling past his shoulder so he's pulling past his shoulder head begins to turn which is good face is out of the water there which seems pretty good but then you'll notice that his eyes don't come back down into the water until now and his hand is way back at his hip so his eyes are back down when his hand is back at his hip the latest you really want to have your eyes back down is about here when this hand is passing under the shoulder you don't really want it much later than that because otherwise your head and your shoulders are still off to the side while your arms go through gone through the complete movement of the pull and then you've just there's no connection with your catch and Pull and the rotation of your body that's got to go together for you to get much out of it so that's where he can get you know a lot a lot more from it so he might just need to adjust that breathing first of all like his head in breathing position secondly might just need to take a little bit longer through the reach phase out here before he goes down and then he should be in a better position to um to finish it but the other the other thing that he may need to just do here too is just finish the stroke a little bit better through through this back end so from this position here where we'd want to go is have the hand and forearm just sort of press back exit past the hip get out and then go over at that point you'll see from this point on if we just go through it frame by frame see how the palm of the hand turns in in and in and he's kind of just drawing the hand up and out rather than having it press back so if you have a look at uh this video of K mton have a look at her exit out the back compared to this one here so she's not drawing the hand out in that position she's pressing back and then coming back over so it's she's getting a lot more length from each stroke cuz she's finishing just past the hip so a little bit further back and just making sure that on the exit it ends up pushing backwards and then coming over rather than getting drawn out a little bit too early or too short and sometimes I find this early draw out of the hand can come from trying to recover over the water with too much of a high elbow recovery like hand close to the body elbow up up high there that's where it can often come from so while you don't want to come over too wide it's okay to let the hand be a little bit wider away from the body relax the hand as you're coming through and let it feel like the recovery is leading uh the elbow is leading the recovery as your arm comes through like that's the thing that's causing you to come come over the water there so I'd keep to those couple of things to to begin with so have a look at our five core principles uh training which I'll put below and that'll show you exactly what order to go through things in and that will give you that structure that you might need to be able to know where should I put my time into focusing because if you focus on the wrong things it's not going to move the needle with your speed and efficiency but if you focus on the right things at the right time and in the right order then it can make a big difference there