If Power Comes From the Core, What Comes From the Arms?
Because swimmers sense that their biggest job in the water is using their hands to push water back, they give that motion most of their attention. Working on "technique" therefore means tweaking the armstroke, and "power" means putting more muscle, force, and acceleration into the motion — the better to push your body forward. Between what instinct suggests, and instruction tells you, the arms and hands do seem to be 90% of swimming. So let's examine how the arms and hands can be used more effectively, making optimal use of the power generated by the kinetic chain.
The first thing to do is to ignore most of the advice found in the kinds of swimming books (weighty texts by all the authoritative sources) that fill the shelf above the desk where I write. True, they offer thousands of pages of minutely detailed information about swimming technique, and all share a keen fascination with what the hands do: angle of attack, sweeps, pitches, vectors and vortices, lift forces, etc. But that's just the trouble. The hands of extraordinarily gifted swimmers unquestionably do move in highly efficient and intricate paths, which researchers film and analyze in staggering detail and breathlessly report on in papers, articles, and books. But as any practical coach knows, the only sensible reaction to all that minutiae is, "So what?"
How can I say that? Well, take the debate that heated up in the mid 1990s over the role of the hands in propulsion. One of the central doctrines handed down by researchers for the previous 20 years, that swimming propulsion results primarily from lift forces (hand-sculling actions) rather than drag forces (pushing-back actions), was suddenly challenged by dissenting scholars. Point and counterpoint studies and papers filled hundreds of pages in journals. Besieged coaches understandably began to conclude, "This stuff must be really important!"
Why would it be important, I found myself almost alone in asking? It seemed obvious to me then, as it does now, that this welter of detail might be academically interesting, but realistically useless. I don't care if it's lift- or drag propelled, the action they're talking about happens so quickly that no swimmer could possibly control the fine adjustments needed to transform one to the other. And the most accomplished swimmers don't really give this stuff a second thought anyway. Their wonderful technique comes not from dogma cited in a study, but from intuition and perception. In the end, they just do what feels best.
Case in point: While preparing an article on backstroke technique in July 1999,1 interviewed Lenny Krayzelburg just weeks before he set world records in both the 100-meter and 200-meter backstroke. As we talked about what he liked to feel while swimming, he related that one of the leading coach/scientists had been urging him to adopt an "exciting new technique" that involved adding an extra scull at the finish of his stroke to enhance its "lift." So Lenny practiced it diligently for weeks. And you know what? Research or no, he summarily decided to give it up. All the science in the world couldn't overcome the fact that "It felt all wrong." What looks good in theory or in the lab often feels distracting to the swimmer in the water.
Besides, even if swimmers did have the concentration and precise muscular control to make the fine adjustments needed to use more lift (or drag), it would barely make a difference. No matter how assiduously you may tweak your hand movements, at the end of the day it's still just a little hand pushing against water...trying to propel a big body through a resistant medium.
Learn to "Anchor" Your Hands
My mentor Bill Boomer said, "The hips are your engine; your hands are just the propeller. Always keep your hands connected to their power source." And one of the surest ways to disconnect your propeller from your engine is overly aggressive arm-stroking. A "controlled" stroke, one that stays connected to its power source through its full length, is one that begins with an "anchored" hand.
That power-producing kinetic chain, you see, must always start from a fixed (or "anchored") point. When you're on land, that anchor point is usually your feet, planted on the ground. The initiating action twists the body away from the intended direction of the movement. With the feet fixed in place, you get an effect known as elastic loading, similar to storing energy in a rubber band by stretching it. The cocked hip then acts like a whip handle, throwing energy upward through torso, shoulders, and arms, with increasing speed and power.
Swimmers, of course, have no foot-to-ground anchor, so the hips cannot act as a whip handle. But though the hips can't magnify power, they can deliver the power they already have by moving as a unit with the entire torso. Still, the process must start with an anchoring point to enable that fingers-to- toes band of engaged muscle we used to such dynamic effect on the playground swing. In fishlike swimming that power linkage starts with an "anchored hand." While your instincts tell you to grab water and push it back bard, you can actually tap far more effortless power by reaching your hands to their full extension, and then just holding on to your place in the water. Rather than immediately pushing back, try to make your hands stand still as if grasping a ladder rung. Then let the kinetic chain kick in to roll you past the spot where your hands are anchored.
This isn't some kind of New Age theory. It's fact. In 1970, famed Indiana University swim coach Doc Counsilman filmed with an underwater camera swimming legend Mark Spitz, the world's greatest swimmer at the time. Attaching tiny lights to Spitz's hands to highlight their movements, Counsilman shot him from the side against a grid-like backdrop. When he developed the film, Counsilman was startled to see that Spitz's hands apparently exited the water/onward of where they had entered. Spitz could not possibly be pushing his hands back, if they came out ahead of their entry point.
Nor could Joao Gloria, a 10-year-old from Portugal who attended one of our TI kids' camps and who quickly developed one of the most fishlike strokes we've ever seen. Despite his youth and small size, he was easily able to swim 25 yards of freestyle in 11 strokes. How could he possibly do this? Watching from the side on underwater video, it was easy to see that his hands entered and exited at the same place, while has body slid sleekly past their anchoring point on each stroke.
Accomplished short-axis swimmers can achieve exactly the same thing. Watching world-champion breaststroker Kristi Kowal on underwater video I took at a National Team training camp, I saw her stretch her hands far forward, sweep them outside her shoulders to her "catch," then use her abdominal muscles to bring her hips forward to where her hands were anchored, very much as if she were doing a stomach crunch. Even as her hands swept inward toward her chin, they stayed abreast of the same lane marker where they began the stroke.
Develop "Feel" of the Water
Easy to describe, but perhaps not so easy to learn? Training yourself to make your hand stand still rather than pushing it back does seem a very odd notion. How can your body go in one direction unless your hand goes in the other?
No, the water is not a ladder. And no, you're not pulling yourself along it, rung by rung. But when you develop an acute "feel of the water," you can actually swim like that. Instead of slipping past you, your hand is "fastened" in place, and you can use your grip on the water to move yourself very nearly as a rock climber uses his hold on the rock.
But that seems to be a well-kept secret. Coaches, after all, tend to describe "feel of the water" as a prize with a staggering price. They can't define it exactly, but they seem to suggest you must either have been born with a mystical gift for controlling elusive water molecules, like herding fireflies, or must spend millions of yards somehow acquiring this special knack.
There is no doubt that most elite swimmers have a variety of gifts that help them perform on a higher plane, and "feel of the water" is probably the most important of them all. But it's not a hard gift to explain. It is, simply, a heightened kinesthetic awareness, an ability to sense minute differences in water pressure, and to seek more of that pressure with the body's propelling surfaces and less of it with the rest of the body. Maximum power, minimum drag.
There is also no doubt that any motivated and att
entive student can learn to greatly increase his or her own feel for the best way to work with the water. Feel of the water, in other words, can be an acquired skill. And it needn't take years to acquire. Here are the key ways you can get a better grip on the ability to hold the water:
1. Get the catch right. Swimmers usually give about 90 percent of their technique attention to the armstroke, and by now you know I think that's a waste of time. Instead, I recommend you pay far more attention to drag because that brings faster, better results. But, when you do devote some time to learning to propel more effectively (for the most part after you are balanced, tall, slippery, and moving with some degree of fluency) give 90% of that attention to the moment when you make the "catch." Focus on your hands while they're in front of your head (you'll find guidance below on what to focus on), and once they've passed your shoulders, just let them fall off your mental radar screen. Once properly initiated, a stroke doesn't really need much further guidance.
2. Start each stroke by making your hands stand still. Your instincts tell you to grab the water and push back. Ignore your instincts. Teach yourself instead to make your hands stay right where they entered the water. Bring your body over them. Try to begin each stroke as if there was a rung or something else solid to hold on to. But more than anything, resist the urge to muscle the water back.
3. Drill, drill, drill. Learning a skill as elusive and refined as this one takes a lot of concentration and focus. You get the most intensive focus in drills, where you repeat simple movements with full attention instead of trying to "read" something that happens in a millisecond while swimming whole stroke. For the long-axis strokes, the Easy Anchors drills (see pages 126 and 146) are the simplest way to train yourself to connect your hands to your core body, and move them in perfect coordination. For freestyle, the Switch drills (see pages 130-144) then give you a dynamic way to learn to anchor your hands and bring your body over them. For backstroke, the drills Slide and Glide (page 148) and Single-Arm Backstroke (see page 151) allow you to put great focus on the moment when your hands "trap and wrap" the water. For both short-axis strokes, the Find Your Corners drill (page 166) is specifically designed to teach the anchoring skill that links the hands to the hips. To multiply the effect of any drills — particularly drills used to teach anchoring — do them with fistgloves (see box on pages 67-68).
4. Swim super slowly. Drills will teach you how things feel when they're "right." When you then begin to apply what you've learned in drills, you'll hold on to far more of what you need to feel if you swim verrry slowly. The more slowly you swim, the more "concentration space" you give yourself to cultivate a finer sense of water pressure on the catch. Just be very patient. Leave your hand out in front of you. S-t-r-e-t-c-h that moment, pressing gently on the water until you feel the water return some of that pressure to your hands. And while you're swimming slowly...
5. Count your strokes. A very low stroke count is one of the simpler and more reliable indicators that you're not pulling back. If you've whittled your count in a 25-yard pool down to, say, 12 or fewer strokes in freestyle, one of the things you're likely to be doing well is holding on to the water. As you go faster (and your stroke count increases) stay hyper-alert to any sense of water slippage on your hands. That's like a car spinning its wheels, and just as undesirable.
6. Try to have slow hands. Compare the speed at which you sense your hands moving back, with how fast your body is moving forward. Try to have "slow hands and a faster body" or at the very least match the speed of your hands to the speed of your body. This is a great corrective any time you feel your stroke getting too rough and ragged.
"anchoring" Tools: Should It Be Fistgloves Or Paddles?
No suspense about this one: fistgloves are unquestionably the way to quickly learn how to anchor your hands. They turn any swimmer into a problem solver, and when the problem the fistgloves create is solved, the ungloved hand will be much more solidly anchored.
One of my favorite coaching techniques is to present swimmers with a well-designed challenge, e.g., figuring out how to make forward progress in the water without the use of an open hand. It never fails.. .swimmers will experiment with different solutions and intuitively discover the one that works best (and it won't necessarily be the same solution for every swimmer). Then, through practice, they'll come to "own" the improved technique that results, and they'll remember the lesson because they discovered the answer all by themselves. In my experience, self-discovered technique is invariably more natural to the swimmer than one imposed by a coach or teacher
The problem presented to the swimmer by the fistglove® stroke trainer is: How do you hold on to the water when you have nothing to hold on with? By squeezing the hands into a tight, latex-wrapped fist, fistgloves turn a broad, flat surface into a rubber nub. On the first few lengths, your hands slip helplessly through the water. But, gradually, you figure out how to gain a little control, partly by using the forearm for purchase, partly by increasing the rotation of your body, and partly by simply learning to be more patient. By making the catch with exquisite patience and attention, you will eventually learn to get the water to resist the gloved hand/;/s/ a little bit. With practice you can learn to do remarkable things with the slight amount of resistance. So much so that by continuing to stroke patiently, the gloved-swimming sensation will gradually come to feel almost "normal." After a while, you may even wonder if you're wearing a glove. Measure how much control you're gaining by counting strokes per length. If your experience is similar to my own and that of my TI swimming colleagues, you'll find that when you first start wearing fistgloves, your stroke count per 25 yards may be 3 to 4 strokes higher than without the gloves. But, after regular and attentive practice with the gloves, our gloved count is now only 1 or 2 or 0 counts higher than our ungloved count. We've learned to balance and rotate and find the best path through the water with our arms.
The real magic, of course, happens when you peel off the gloves. Suddenly, the previously ordinary-feeling hand seems huge, as if you had a dinner-plate-sized paddle at the end of your arm. And with that broad, flat, bladelike implement to work with, holding on to the water—anchoring your han - turns out to be a piece of cake.
Why are fistgloves better than paddles for teaching feel of the water? cause paddles teach the opposite lesson from fistgloves. Swimmers figure that paddles will teach them how it feels to have "big hands," and that once the paddles come off they'll remember the sensation they're aiming for. While the paddles are on, you do of course feel much more able to hold the water, But when the paddles come off? You feel like someone rowing with a popsicle stick. Your hands seem dumb, ineffectual. We have taken to calling fistgloves the "unpaddles," because after using fistgloves your hands seem smarter, not dumber.
Chapter 8
Developing an Effective Kick: Less Is Usually More
Most swimmers, down deep, really do suspect their legs don't help them out much in the speed department. But because the kick obviously pushes them forward to some degree, they don't dare gamble on not doing kicking sets. Besides, the fastest swimmers in any group or on any team usually also seem to be the fastest when the kickboards are handed out. So they must know something, right?
In fact, your kick does contribute something to propulsion, but not in the way most of us imagine. My sense is that most people vaguely think they need a good kick because either:
1. If my arms can propel my body at 4 feet per second and my legs can propel it at 2 feet per second, maybe together they can propel it at 6 feet per second.
2. If I really work hard at those kickboard training sets, I'll get a more powerful "outboard motor," say a 40-horsepower Evinrude instead of the 20hp model I have when I don't train hard with a kickboard.
But it doesn't pan out quite that way. Yes, a swimmer kicking on a board creates propulsion, sometimes even really fast propulsion. The best kickers in the world can go one minute or faster for 100 yards on a kickboard, faster than most of us can swim. But tha
t tells us nothing about how much a stronger kick adds to whole-stroke swimming, nor the energy cost of whatever good it does do.
More than 50 years ago Doc Counsilman, the legendary Indiana University swim coach, designed an experiment to actually measure what kicking adds to propulsion. He devised an apparatus to tow swimmers in a glide position at various speeds, both with kicking and without kicking. Tension on the line was measured to see if it was greater, less, or the same when kicking as it was when just gliding along.
The only instance in which kicking decreased tension on the line (ie., added propulsion) was at slow towing speeds, with the swimmer kicking at maximum effort. But at any speed over 5 feet per second (1:00 per 100 yards) the kick contributed nothing and, in some instances, actually increased drag!
Counsilman interpreted these results using an automotive metaphor. Imagine, he suggested, a car with separate front- and rear-wheel drive. If the front wheels turn at 30 mph, but the rear wheels turn at 20 mph, the car's total speed will be not 50 but less than 30 mph, because the rear wheels create drag. The same thing happens, he contended, when a swimmer with a reasonably fast upper body persists in emphasizing a less-efficient kick. The kick consumes energy and creates drag. More work, less speed.
How much energy the kick costs has also been measured. Several different studies over the past 30 years have gauged the oxygen consumption of competitive swimmers while pulling only, kicking only, and swimming whole stroke. Each study found that hard kicking greatly increases the energy cost of moving at a given speed. In one study, kicking at a speed of about 60 seconds for 50 yards — a rather moderate speed for any competitive swimmer— used four times as much oxygen as pulling at the same speed.
Swimming made easy Page 8