Most of my work in helping people unlearn the habits of a stroke that’s all arms and legs is about building balance and awareness starting from the core. Swimmers need to think of the arms and legs as simply connections to a certain point on the body, but the primary corrections in any stroke need to start between the shoulders and the hips.
Still, there are often opportunities that come from working with swimmers across the body. A client tonight kept thinking at one end of her body or the other. She kept her core balanced, but she would try to rotate with a stab of her arm or a kick to move the hips. Because she wasn’t connecting them, she was doing both of them wrong.
Cross-body connections are most relevant in freestyle. The correct timing of the arm spearing motion AND hip drive complements the diagonal opposite motion. Someone who is working too hard on the arm spear should drive the hip earlier or stronger, and vice versa. Any motion that is sourced only from one end of the body is destined to cause lateral crossing, inefficiency, and the potential for injury. We focused tonight on letting the rotation be a cross-body connection of the hip driving the arm through the spearing motion. As soon as that diagonal line was established, my swimmer was using that simpler full-body focus to get better results than separate thoughts about arm strike or hip drive.