How Your Strokes Should Feel
"That's nice," you say. "My body is constantly reporting in to me, as I swim, what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong. But how am I supposed to know what it's telling me?" Glad you asked. Here's how to sort out the important messages, and what you want to be hearing from that "internal compass" of yours:
Fishlike Freestyle
Start with a long, sleek, balanced bodyline. Slice through the water with a shape that is as close to needle-like as possible at all times, even while stroking. Use your hands to make your needle shape longer and to hold on to your place in the water. Move faster by rolling that long, slippery vessel back and forth faster.
How to Know if You've Got It Right
Body/Head Position
• Feel as if a thin film of water could wash over the back of your head at any time.
• Lead with the top of your head, not your nose. Watch the bottom directly under you and not in front of you.
• Swim "downhill" by leaning on your chest, shifting that pressure from side to side with your body roll.
• Slip a long, clean bodyline through the smallest possible "hole" in the water.
• Use rhythmic weight shifts to provide rhythm, tempo, and power.
Arms
• Lengthen your body with "weightless arms."
• Slide your arm into the water as if into a sleeve, Continue extending until your shoulder touches your jaw, just below your ear.
• "Switch" your hands in front of your head with the same timing as in the "switch" drills.
• Anchor your hand and hold on to the water as if you were pulling your body past a rung on a ladder. (Use fistgloves ® frequently to heighten your ability to feel this sensation without the gloves on.)
• Avoid arm churning; let body rhythm drive your stroke. Try to make the speed of your hands match the speed of your body.
Legs
• Kick with a long, supple line; keep legs inside your body's wake or "shadow."
• Do not let your kick become too vigorous or overt - unless you are sprinting.
Fishlike Backstroke
A fishlike backstroke, just as in freestyle, is swum mainly on the side. But because power and leverage are limited when you're "upside down and going backwards," it's even more important to be slippery. To swim faster, roll your long, slippery vessel back and forth faster ("Move your bellybutton faster.") rather than churning your arms faster. Keep your body position stable by keeping your head completely still. You can reinforce this by occasionally drilling or swimming with a half-filled water bottle on your forehead.
How to Know if You 've Got It Right
Body/Head Position
• To stay slippery and balanced, lean on your upper back as you rotate from side to side.
• If you are balanced, each rotation will bring a "dry patch of thigh" clear of the water.
• Hide your bead, keeping it slightly tucked and fixed.
• Roll both shoulders clear of the water on every stroke cycle to maximize body roll.
Legs
• Kick with a long, supple leg, with no knee bend and with feet toed-in slightly.
• Remember that your kick rotates as your body rolls, and the beat is generally more steady than in freestyle.
• Keep your legs inside your body's "shadow."
Arms
• Keep the recovering arm straight but relaxed. ("Extend your fingertips toward the ceiling.")
• Emphasize a long bodyline as your hand slices cleanly and deeply into the water.
• Hold the water with your hand, then throw water toward your feet. (The fistglove® stroke trainers can be more valuable in backstroke than in any other stroke.)
• Keep arms exactly opposite each other and linked to body-roll rhythms.
Fishlike Butterfly
Think long, low, and relaxed. The secret of efficient, effortless butterfly is to stay close to the surface at all times; don't fight gravity! Keep your head, hands, and shoulders as close to the surface as possible on the stroke and recovery. Imagine you are swimming under a very low ceiling. Breatheybrward, not up, keeping your head in a neutral position. Sweep the arms on recovery, and land forward after recovery. The deeper you dive on re-entry, the shorter will be your bodyline and the steeper your climb back out.
Next in importance is to keep your head aligned with your spine and to look down slightly throughout the stroke. Breathe without raising or jutting your chin; breathe inside the line of the stroke. Drill and swim with little or no overt kick. Your legs should be driven by body movement — chest pulses — not by thigh muscles. Bottom line: Swim butterfly with your body, not with your arms and legs.
How to Know if You've Got It Right
Body/Head Position
• Maintain a long, balanced, supple bodyline.
• Swim as close to the surface - both above and below - as possible; channel your energy forward, not up and down.
• Keep your head as close as possible to a neutral position at all times; use "sneaky breaths."
Legs
• Minimize overt kicking and leg bend; let the legs follow core-body undulation.
Arms
• Landforward on entry; don't hammer down or dive down after the recovery.
• Anchor hands at corners, then move your body over your hands.
• Sweep the hands in high on your chin, then immediately flare them out for a "karate-chop" exit.
• Recover the arms in a relaxed, sweeping motion.
Breathing
• Breathe early in the pull, without raising or jutting the chin.
• Look down slightly (take a "sneaky breath").
Fishlike Breaststroke
Stay long and streamlined The single most important thing you can do to maximize stroke efficiency is to streamline your entire body as you finish each stroke. Use your arms to lengthen your body, whether for just a split second in a sprint, or slightly longer when swimming a longer distance. The second-most-critical key to efficient breaststroke is a neutral head position. Keep your head aligned with your spine during and after each breath; if you raise or jut your chin during the breath or thrust it down after the breath, you'll compromise your bodyline, stroke length, and power.
Always think forward as you swim breaststroke. Pull forward, breathe forward, land forward, and kick forward. Lead the forward thrust with your fingertips. Where they go, your body will follow. Except during the underwater pull, your hands never push water toward your feet. The breast pull is exclusively out-and-in sweeps leading to a strong forward-attacking drive.
How to Know if You 've Got It Right
Body/Head Position
• Maintain a long, streamlined, balanced bodyline.
• Look down slightly as you breathe, and keep your head in line with your spine.
• Breathe with body lift (on the insweep), not by lifting your chin. (It helps to imagine you're wearing a neck brace.)
• Keep a constant short-axis body-rocking rhythm—slower when swimming slowly, and speeding up by undulating your chest and hips faster.
Legs
• "Sneak" the legs up inside the "hole" made by your core body, on recovery.
• Turn your heels in, toes out, and "grab" as much water as possible at the beginning of the kick, then push the water back with a somewhat ovoid motion.
• At the finish, point your toes, "clap" your feet, and squeeze all the water out from between your legs.
Arms
• Keep your pull compact and quick; better too small than too big.
• Always keep hands where you can see them. Keep them as far forward as possible during every phase of the pull.
• Sweep your hands to the corners, then spin them directly back to meet in front.
Timing
• Reach full extension in every stroke.
• Help your recovery timing by kicking your hands forward
• Try to have your hands
reach full extension at the same moment your face is back in the water.
• Adjust your rhythm in the core, not in your arms and legs.
It may have surprised you to find this book makes next to no use of a word you'd normally expect to see all over a publication about improving your swimming. The word, of course, is "training." And its absence is intentional. In everything we've covered here, I've wanted to draw a clear distinction between the two parts of preparation to swim better. The first — and most critical — step is to learn to move with coordination, control, and fluency, and to polish those movements into instinctive habits. The second part — and the one that will ultimately have much less impact on how well you swim—is to build the fitness, endurance, and strength to be able to move like that for longer periods, at higher speeds.
So let me suggest in closing a new definition of swimming endurance. Because you can waste far more energy through inefficient movement than you could ever provide through workouts, think of swimming endurance as "the ability to repeat highly efficient swimming movements for a duration of your choosing, at a range of speeds, stroke rates, and heart rates." Notice that "strength" or "power" would be only pan of that definition, and the smaller part at that, taking a distant back seat to technique.
Still, there's no question that training helps. And just as there are right ways and wrong ways to work on technique, there's good and not-so-good training. Before long, I plan to write a separate book that will offer comprehensive advice on how to train intelligently and in a very practical way. But in the meantime, it's the technique work in this book that will help you hit the improvement jackpot faster than any conditioning program ever could.
So for now, as I like to say to all my campers, I wish you "Happy Laps."
Index
Swimming made easy Page 17