This month’s newsletter goes out this weekend, and it’s including a range of workouts, ideas, and my discount offer on the Total Immersion open water camp. Stay tuned, and if you’re not on our e-mail list, click below!
Tonight, we are having our open Minnesota Masters pacing workout. Please remember- tempo trainers are recommended (but optional). Pure Blue will be there, along with Minneapolis Swims!
7:15-8:15. pizza afterwards.
630 East 66th Street; Richfield, MN 55423
I’m getting ready more discussion on high elbow catch and setting up powerful moment of the stroke, but I wanted to throw out a little warning list first. Most clients coming in who have comfort in the water have put power far too high on their priority list. They’ve made sacrifices to good form to access more power, but they power gained is not worth the increase in resistance or effort that came along with it.
In setting your priorities, think of the humble hobbit Frodo. I know this one is a bit of a stretch, but even if you’ve just seen the Lord of the Rings movies, you will understand. When someone to bear the ring of power is sought, almost everyone steps forward. But it’s quickly obvious that the only one who should bear great power is the one who least seeks it out. Are you stroking for power, or are you allowing your other efficiency priorities to open new doors for you?
Here are a few examples of places where attention should be given to whether the power is worth the cost:
Kicking- Fast swimmers are capable of fast 6-beat kicks (3 per stroke), but they don’t demand as much as most slower swimmers’ kicks. Why? The amplitude of the kick stays within the body shadow. Bigger kicks are more tiring, tougher to keep at a high rate, and are almost impossible to do in a way where there is more power than added resistance. If you’re balanced enough to strategize your kick, keep it tight and quick.
Turnover Power
I get a lot of swimmers who have seen terms like “overgliding” thrown around. Usually, the swimmers bringing it up are the ones who should be least concerned with gliding. The idea of cutting gliding down is attractive to them because they solve problems in other sports with harder and faster efforts, but their crazy tempos come at a high resistance cost. Also, by trying to pull or push right after entry, they use their arm as a long (weak) lever and access the weakest muscles of the shoulder. Tempo isn’t solving problems- it’s making them worse on these swimmers.
See if you can glide with more of an emphasis of opening the armpit and leaning through the pec on that side, without arching the back or losing posture. Time any trigger for anchoring to the hip drive and strike of the recovering arm, and don’t look at the timing as “permission” for your arm to pull. That arm should avoid rapid tempo because it does more good as an anchor for the streamline and a posture link to downhill balance.
Pulling vs Pushing
If you visualize pulling something towards you, right away you drop your elbow and draw it in. This is exactly what we want to avoid in swimming! Pulling the elbow back or going with maximum power even from the right starting position sets you up for high-effort failure. The goal is to have good traction on the water while applying force, and if you push beyond your wrist strength (you have more strength at your elbow than at your wrist), you might push around plenty of H20, but that doesn’t mean that you’re moving it in the right direction. How long can you maintain a perpendicular forearm after rotation has been triggered? Don’t work beyond the level of power you can use in the arm
Broken posture force
Big kicks, big pulls and big pushes look the same on developing swimmers. The swimmer bobs and shakes because they are putting so much emphasis into the force but not enough into maintaining a clean line in the water through balanced posture. Sure- a big push might lift you higher up for a moment, reducing resistance temporarily. But what comes up….
If someone sees your hips wiggling off a kick or your torso or head bobbing off pulling or pushing, slow down the rate and see how much you can apply before you start to shake things up.
