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Of the ten points we teach at The Race Club for a better start, the kick up of the back leg is perhaps the most powerful and under-utilized technique out there. Depending on the age and size of the swimmer, the leg weighs anywhere from 20-40 pounds and can form a lot of kinetic energy with the right effort.

Most swimmers and coaches concentrate on the upper body’s motions and positions for the start, but it is with the lower body that most mistakes are being made. The back leg-kick is one of the three coupling motions that can be used on the start. The other two are the head lift and the arm motion. Of the three coupling components, the legs have the most mass, so can generate a tremendous amount of kinetic energy that will augment the force of the front foot as the swimmer leaves the block.

In this week’s Race Club webisode (available to Lanes 1-4, Lane 1 is free), you will see how Olympian Brad Tandy uses a ferocious up kick to help him reach the water over .5 meters further down the pool than the other elite athletes we tested. That is a pretty significant lead, particularly in a sprint. You will also find some of the unique drills we use at The Race Club to help teach this important coupling motion.

After just a few tries with elite sprinter, Aaron Greenberg (Yale graduate, 19.2 50 yard freestyle) and world class butterflyer, Marcus Schlesinger, both were able to improve their starts with a more aggressive kick up of the back leg. You can see how they learned this technique in the webisode this week.

For a faster start, practice kicking your back leg high into the air off the blocks. You will feel and see the difference that this important technique can make in your races.

For those of you in Lanes 3 and 4, you will find a great dryland exercise this week to help strengthen your lower back for breaststroke, another important coupling motion.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr

 

https://theraceclub.com/sc-videos/reverse-situp/

One of the most common mistakes in technique that we see in all strokes is in the pulling motion of backstroke. Part of the reason for this technical error is that to pull correctly, a swimmer needs to rotate the body significantly from one side to the other. That involves more work. To avoid that extra work, swimmers often choose to minimize the amount of body rotation. To avoid breaking the surface of the water with the hand moving backward, which reduces power, swimmers find an easier solution. Keep the arm straight on the pull.

A straight-arm pull in backstroke is worse than a deep-arm pull in freestyle. While the latter increases frontal drag, it does enable a swimmer to pull with more propulsion. In backstroke, a straight-arm pull increases frontal drag AND reduces propulsion; two good reasons to avoid this poor technique.

The key to improving your backstroke is to learn to rotate the body first. With enough body rotation, the swimmer is in a position to pull correctly and with more power. The body rotation enables a swimmer to bend the elbow enough to reduce frontal drag, while also generating important kinetic energy as a coupling motion for the pull. Our favorite swimming drill for learning this technique is the one-arm drill, with one hand held at the side. However, before the swimmer enters the water to perform this drill, we first teach them how to do the proper pulling motion on land while standing straight up. We find that once swimmers understand the biomechanics of the correct backstroke pulling motion on land, they can more easily duplicate this motion in the water. Both of these drills help the swimmers learn the important technique of rotating the body and the concept of pushing water backward, as opposed to pulling or scooping the water backward.

This week in Lanes 2-4 on our subscription service, you will find an important classroom discussion on backstroke, how this important drill is done with Race Club campers and finally, how world-class backstroker, Luca Spinazzola, uses the one-arm drill to improve his powerful backstroke pulling motion.

For those that are subscribed to Lanes 3 and 4, you will also find a beautiful webisode of world-champion backstroker, Junya Koga, simulating the correct backstroke pulling motion while standing. Junya performs this precise backstroke pulling motion gradually increasing his stroke rate, with and without using boxing mitts for the correct elbow bend.

Here’s to a faster backstroke! Hop in Lanes 2-4 today.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

 

https://theraceclub.com/sc-videos/breaststroke-pulling-motion-one-arm-drill/

 

https://theraceclub.com/sc-videos/dry-land-exercise-standing-backstroke/

I am often asked how relatively important technique is in the sport of swimming compared to training. I believe they are equally important. Without good technique, a swimmer creates a ceiling of potential improvement, in spite of how hard they work. Having good technique without training well does not work either. A swimmer will not be able to sustain the good technique for long nor the speed of fast racing without proper training. Swimmers need both technique and training.

What is important is that good technique be learned early in a swimmer’s career. Every coach should be teaching young swimmers basic fundamentals of good technique. We live in a sport that requires extraordinary attention to detail, yet few are paying attention to that. One of the best places to start teaching fundamentals is with a great streamline.

At our Race Club Camps, it is a bit startling to see how few young swimmers either know how to streamline correctly or care enough to do so. Many of our campers leave the wall with their arms spread apart and their heads looking forward, the so-called Superman position. This week, on our Race Club webisode in Lanes 2-4, you will discover what a dramatic difference a proper streamline can make with a young ten-year old swimmer. After pushing off the wall at the same speed, the difference between the Superman position and the Hyper Streamline position, the best possible streamline a swimmer can make, is dramatic with this young swimmer.

Check out this week’s webisode in Lane 2, 3 or 4….then practice the Hyper Streamline, first on land, then, most importantly, in the water. You will immediately see the difference that this fundamental detail in technique will make in your competitive times.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

 

https://theraceclub.com/sc-videos/velocity-meter-superman-vs-hyper-streamline/

This week in Lanes 2, 3, and 4 on our subscription service you can witness in slow motion one of the most impressive starts you will ever see, that of Olympian Brad Tandy. It is a thing of beauty. Brad is an Olympic finalist in the 50-meter Olympic freestyle sprint from South Africa. While he did not medal there, he was clearly ahead of the field after the start….by a lot.

While Caeleb Dressel was not in that race, he and Brad, and perhaps Ben Proud of the UK have arguably the best starts in the world today. Curiously, they each set themselves up differently on the block to position themselves for the take your mark command. Once that happens, they each take a very similar weight back position for the beep; what I call the cocked position. The backs are rounded and the heads are down. One difference is in what they do with their arms.

Caeleb uses the most common approach. After climbing onto the block at the starter’s whistle, he positions front and back feet, then bends over and grabs the front edge corners of the block loosely with his hands. His elbows are bent and his head is down. This is the safest position to reach the cocked position as it takes the least amount of time to get there.

Ben Proud is at the other end of the spectrum. He begins from a standing position. At the command of take your mark, he must bend all the way down, grab the front of the block and then lean back. While it is true that the least amount of time that the muscle is spring loaded (in the cocked position), the better for the start, there is risk in this approach.

In the 2004 Olympic Trials Men’s 100 meter free finals, my son, Gary Jr, started from a stand and did not even get his hands on the block before the beep went off. The result was he was last off the block and missed earning a spot to swim in Athens by a few hundredths of a second. In my opinion, starting from the standing position entails too much risk. You never know when you will have a fast starter.

Brad’s approach is in the middle. After positioning his front and back feet on the block, he bends down until his hands are just below his knees. From that position, he doesn’t have as far to go to grab the front of the block, nor does he take as much time as from a stand. The result is that he is in the cocked position for less time, without taking so much risk.

Brad and Ben both lock their arms straight to the front of the block, with no bend in the elbows. Caeleb bends his elbows slightly. Last week we tested an elite male swimmer from Croatia, with arms locked straight and with elbows bent slightly, to determine which way works best.

We will share the outcome of that study soon in one of our upcoming webisodes. In the meantime, on this week’s webisode, you can see Brad’s amazing start and hear his explanation of why he sets himself the way he does prior to the start. You will love this webisode.

https://theraceclub.com/sc-videos/starts-positioning-with-brad-tandy/

 

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

While technology is extremely important to the advancement and progress of swimming, we need to be very careful about how we use this new information. If the tests are not done properly, if the data is not collected accurately, or if it is misinterpreted or misunderstood, it will no longer be of any value. In fact, it can hurt us by giving us wrong information or advice.

For example, in an article written in Russia about Alex Popov in the 90’s, when he was Czar of the sprints, the author demonstrated that Alex’s velocity was greatest when one hand was out in front and the other hand was nearing the end of the pulling cycle. The author erroneously concluded that there must be more propulsion at the end of the pulling cycle than in the middle, leading coaches all over the world to teach swimmers to push the hand hard backward at the end of the freestyle pull. In fact, the increase in Popov’s velocity was not derived from increased propulsion at the end of the pull but rather from the increase in propulsion in the middle of the pull followed by a reduction of frontal drag as the arms took on a more linear position with the body.

Recently, Triton, a Canadian manufacturer of wearable technology that provides loads of information to coaches, included a Stroke Index, which they claim determines how efficient a swimmer is in a given stroke. Although this index is meant to be well intended, it may actually be misleading.

The Stroke Index (SI) is defined as a swimmer’s velocity (V = m/sec) times his/her distance per stroke (not cycle) (DPS = m/stroke). SI = V x DPS. While we understand DPS is important and V is the ultimate goal, here are the problems I have with the Triton Stroke Index.

First, the SI is not a measure of stroke efficiency. Physiological efficiency of any stroke is measured in the same way we measure efficiency of a car (miles per gallon), except we use meters/Kcalories burned. While efficiency may be important, no driver wins an auto race with great gas mileage, nor do swimmers win swimming races with the highest efficiency. They both expect to burn a lot of gas or calories in order to get the job done. The challenge of measuring efficiency of a swimmer is that it is not easy to measure the precise number of Calories expended during a race. But who really cares? We want to know who wins, not who burned the least number of calories.

Mechanical efficiency is based on having the lowest fluctuation in velocity, which may have little to do with the SI. It has more to do with law of inertia.

When we analyze the Stroke Index further, this is what we find. A swimmer’s velocity (V) is equal to the DPS (m/stoke) times the Stroke Rate (SR) (strokes/sec). Therefore, SI = DPS x DPS x SR or DPS ² x SR.

What the SI does is give more weight to DPS than to SR. Yet, when determining V, the ultimate goal of a swimmer, the SR and DPS have equal weight. V = SR x DPS.

As an example, let’s say Sun Yang is battling against Ryan Cochrane in a 1500 m freestyle race. Sun uses a hip driven freestyle and has a stroke rate of 60, while Ryan uses shoulder driven technique with a SR of 86. If we assume they are swimming at the same speed, that means Sun Yang’s DPS is significantly greater than Ryan’s. The reason may be because of the longer wing span resulting in more arm propulsion, the two strong surge kicks that he uses in each stroke cycle, more energy on his coupling motions (body rotation and arm recovery), lower frontal drag, or some combination of all of those. The point is that since the SI is derived from the square of DPS only, Sun Yang will have a higher SI value than Ryan. Yet they are swimming at about the same speed. If one were to compare the SI value between Sun Yang and Gregorio Paltrinieri, who swims the 1500 at around a 96 stroke rate, the difference would be even greater.

Without being able to measure calories burned, it is not clear to me which of these three different freestyle techniques is more efficient, since the stroke rates and the kicking rates and intensities are quite different. The differences in SI values does not necessarily reflect efficiency.

The SI places an unfair advantage on DPS, which will be higher in hip driven or hybrid freestyle technique than with shoulder driven technique. No elite swimmer uses hip driven freestyle in the 50 m sprint nor the 100 m and nearly all elite women use shoulder driven freestyle for all distances.

If one wanted to use the SI as a means to exaggerate the differences between good and poor technique, then a better idea would be the following equation: SI = V x DPS x SR or SI = DPS ² x SR ² or SI = V ². I’m not certain that this is necessary nor helpful, but would hopefully help prevent coaches from trying to convert their swimmers to hip driven freestyle or slow stroke rate backstroke or long, gliding breaststroke or butterfly, which they might do with the SI as currently defined. I would say that Caeleb Dressel, Adam Peaty, Lilly King and virtually all elite backstrokers that generally use fast stroke rates would not be happy with the current SI.

Yours in Swimming,

Gary Sr.

Kelsi Worrell has a very fast dolphin kick. After studying her Velocity Meter recently, I now understand why. While kicking on the stomach, poor dolphin kickers will have just one moment of significant acceleration during the dolphin kick cycle, which occurs at the beginning of the strong down kick. Most good dolphin kickers typically have two moments of acceleration during the dolphin kick cycle; one at the beginning of the down kick and the other at the beginning of the up kick. Kelsi has four points of acceleration; two at the beginnings of the up and down kicks, and two more as her feet pass through the body’s vortex or slipstream on the way up and on the way down.

The flow dynamics behind the swimmer are very different than in front of the swimmer, due to the vortices (wakes) or slipstreams that form behind the body and feet. Talented swimmers like Kelsi have learned to use these vortices to their advantage. Because the human body has a non-streamlined shape, a swimmer will form a vortex, or a small stream of water that flows behind him or her in the direction he or she is swimming. If you have ever left 2 seconds behind a swimmer in a lane and remain close to his or her feet, you certainly understand the concept of drafting, or riding the slipstream. The bigger the swimmer’s body and the faster he or she is moving, the bigger and stronger the vortex or slipstream becomes.

There is second vortex that occurs during the dolphin kick and that is from the motion of the feet as they move up, down, or forward through the water from one side of the body to the other. Since the feet are smaller than the body, this second vortex is also smaller, yet it is extremely important in the acceleration that occurs at the beginnings of the down kick and the up kick.

During the down and up kicks, the feet are moving mostly straight down or straight up. There is almost no movement backward of the feet relative to a stationary point in the pool. Because of the two vortices of the feet and body creating a forward-moving stream, the feet are able to create propulsion as they traverse the slipstreams caused by both of them. The amount of the swimmer’s acceleration and ultimately, his or her velocity, depends very much on the speed and surface area when the feet move through these vortices. By moving the feet quickly and aggressively through these vortices, a swimmer can actually speed up, rather than slow down, and keep his or her speed more constant.

Here are two really important ways you can improve the speed of your dolphin kick:

• On the initiation of the down kick, snap the feet down very aggressively, but don’t stop there. Continue the force and speed of the feet until they pass through the body vortex (horizontal line behind the swimmer)
• On the initiation of the up kick, pull the feet and legs up aggressively, but don’t stop pulling until the feet pass through the body vortex (horizontal line behind the swimmer)

Once the feet pass through the body’s slipstream, and the legs extend beyond the horizontal position in either direction, bad things begin to happen. You will start to slow down. In the next article, we will tell you how to minimize the damage from deceleration at that point.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

A fast swim by either male or female swimmers will nearly always result in a big smile. It should. A tremendous amount of work, thought, and time went into that swim. It is clearly a time to celebrate and enjoy the moment. But which came first, the good swim or the smile?

At The Race Club camps, we spend quite a bit of time on mental training. Arguably, mental training is the most under-utilized type of training in swimming. Yet it is so vitally important in determining outcomes. We outline five important processes that should occur during the course of the season in order for the swimmer to be in the mentally toughest state of mind at the championship meet. We call that climbing the killer instinct scale.

Perhaps the most important step in that process happens upon wakening for the first day of competition. Those first few moments of that first day will set the tone for the swimming performances on the first day. Those performances then often set the tone for the swimming performances throughout the remainder of the meet.

What we tell each Race Club swimmer to do on that first morning is to look into the mirror and smile. I am not talking about that fake or plasticky smile. I am talking about the real thing. Along with that genuine smile, we ask the swimmers to make a promise to themselves that they will have fun. That’s right. Make a pact with yourself that you will enjoy the competition. You will embrace it.

Of all the years that I watched my son, Gary Jr, perform in championship meets, I only offered him two words of advice, have fun. And he did. I could see the smile on his face as he would walk out to the starting block for the race; a look of supreme confidence. I could tell then that he was going to enjoy this moment, and swim fast.

Way too often, sadly, we see a look of terror on the athlete’s face. The Olympic Trials is known for making that look happen. Warming up in the lane next to Katie Ledecky or Caeleb Dressel in one of the biggest meets of your life can do that to you. Once you allow that fear to enter the mind, the meet goes from being fun to…..well, not so fun. The swim performances go from great…to not so great.

I believe that one of the biggest reasons that Team USA performed so well in the 2012 Olympic Games of London is because they created a fun, lip-synched version of the hit song, Call me Maybe. It seemed to lighten up the entire moment. It put the event back into the proper perspective…a swim meet, not life and death. Even the Olympic Games can be fun if you make it that way.

I say start with the smile. Embrace the competition with all of its challenges. Enjoy the moment. After all, you’ve worked really hard for it. You might as well swim fast, not slow. So just tell yourself to have fun and smile. If you do, chances are good that after your swim, you’ll be smiling again.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

It is an exciting time in the sport of swimming with respect to technology advancement. Many new companies providing hardware (devices) and software have emerged to help coaches improve. Companies like CoachCam, Swim Hero, Firebelly, and Triton just to name a few. They have developed really great tools to help us and provide more important data than ever before. BMW is working with USA Swimming in Colorado Springs to develop new video/analytical software. That is all good news.

The bad news is who has the time to compile all of the new data, analyze it, and perhaps most challenging, interpret how this information should improve a swimmer’s technique or performance? Unless there is a full time IT person on the staff, most coaches simply don’t have the time to coach, administer, and do all of that analysis for every swimmer’s races in each meet. That is a huge burden.

For this reason, we believe there will be an increasing demand for technical coaches or assistants, those that make it a point to analyze and understand data and in turn, provide meaningful and helpful recommendations for a swimmer’s improvement. That is what we do at The Race Club, particularly when it comes to technique.

At The Race Club, we go well beyond simply analyzing a swimmer’s race, including: stroke rates, distance per stroke, breakout times, breathing patterns, splits, turn times etc. We have invested in some new and exciting technology from Italy (AP Labs), called Velocity Meter (VM), that measures a swimmer’s velocity, acceleration, and deceleration at each .02 seconds during the stroke cycle. Synchronized to a swimmer’s video, we can then determine peak and trough velocities, differences between peak and trough velocities for both arms (delta PT) or for pull and kick, and peak and trough accelerations and decelerations. Since most of this data is new to our sport, it has taken months to understand what data is normal or expected for a given swimmer, depending on gender, age, stroke, and technique. More important than a visual interpretation of what we believe is right or wrong through video analysis, the VM quantitates the severity of mistakes (frontal drag) with trough deceleration points, and gives us an idea of the magnitude of propulsion forces with peak acceleration levels.

Another technology that we are using at The Race Club from AP Labs is called Ben Hur, or what we refer to as the Drag/Propulsion Meter. This technology enables us to quantitate propulsive forces, active drag coefficients, and passive drag forces at each .04 seconds of the stroke cycle, synchronized to video. Most of these measurements have rarely been done, other than in research, but are now available to any swimmer at our Florida Keys location.

This month we will start using another new technology from AP Labs called a Pressure Meter, which measures the pressure (force per unit area) on the front and back of the hand throughout the pulling motion. This will enable us to determine how well a swimmer can really hold water with the pulling motion. Using a gyroscope, it can also measure the swimmer’s body acceleration in all directions and the angular or rotational velocity. Rotational velocity is a strong coupling motion, so we look forward to quantitating this important technique. This is also new information to the sport, so we will learn as we go.

Many of the new articles and videos that we feature in our new subscription service in Lanes 2, 3, and 4 have their basis in the information we derive from this new technology. We are excited to offer these to you.

Next week I am honored to be speaking for 5 hours at the ASCA World Clinic on some of the new technology of swimming and how it can help us become better coaches and produce faster swimmers. I look forward to the opportunity to share what I have learned and hope to see you in Anaheim!

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

Part IV: Inertia

Newton’s law of inertia, which was originally defined by Galileo, is also important for swimmers to understand. Basically, inertia simply means that objects (swimmers) that are at rest tend to stay at rest and objects (swimmers) that are moving tend to stay moving, unless they are acted on by external forces.

In order for a swimmer to go from the rest state (taking your mark on the starting block or getting ready to push off the wall) to the moving state (gliding or swimming down the pool), external forces must be applied. Whether that force comes from our legs (feet) pushing us off the starting block or wall or our hands and feet propelling us down the pool, once we start moving, unless we are in a vacuum or outer space, frontal drag forces will start to slow us down. That means in order to keep moving, we must continue applying propulsion.

If the propulsion and drag forces are equal, our speed will remain constant. If the propulsion is greater than the drag forces, we will accelerate. If the drag forces are greater than the propulsion, we will decelerate. As difficult as it is for us to maintain a constant speed in swimming, it requires more work or energy for us to reach our maximum speed from a rested position (dead stop) than it does to maintain that speed. Consider when you completely miss the wall on a flip turn in a race and come to a dead stop. The amount of energy required to get back up to race speed is overwhelming. The race is probably over. Similar to the difference in gas mileage we get in our car while driving in town (stop and go) compared to on the freeway (constant speed), the swimmer will use less energy maintaining a more constant speed than he or she will by repeatedly slowing down or stopping and then speeding up again. Swimming at a more constant speed is simply a more efficient way to swim.

The challenge of swimmers conforming to the law of inertia is that with the nature of our propulsion, coming from the hands and feet and at certain intervals of time, we cannot provide a constant propulsion. Only two of the four stroke, freestyle and backstroke, allow us to come close to maintaining constant speed. Breaststroke and butterfly, due to the longer down time (time between propulsion efforts) and the higher drag coefficients we must create at certain times in the stroke cycle, are fraught with a considerable variation in speed. Therefore, these two strokes are either slower (breaststroke) or require more energy to sustain a higher average speed (butterfly).

How do we conform more to the law of inertia while swimming and maintain a more constant speed? There are only three ways that I know of, regardless of the stroke. First, we can sustain a more constant kicking speed. Since the kick provides potentially more propulsive moments than the pull, using a six-beat kick, emphasizing both the down and up kicks, and creating a shorter kicking cycle time will help.

Second, we can increase our pulling stroke rate. In freestyle, fly, and backstroke, each hand spends about .35 seconds during the propulsion phase of the pull. If our stroke rate is 60 (cycle rate of 30 and cycle time 2.0 seconds), then in free and back, 35% of the cycle time is spent in propulsion (.70/2.0). The remaining time of the pull is either spent in lift, release, or recovery, so called down time. In fly, at a 2.0 second cycle time, only 18% of that time would be spent in propulsion. The propulsion is greater, however, since we are pulling with both hands simultaneously. At a stroke rate of 120 (60 cycle rate or 1.0 second cycle time), 70% of the time would be spent in propulsion. In fly at that cycle rate, 35% of the time is spent in propulsion. The higher the stroke rate, the more percentage of time is spent in propulsion. The less down time there is in the pull, the less time there is for the swimmer’s speed to drop. However, if the stroke rate becomes too fast, other factors may change, such as lower propulsion achieved with the pulling arm, increased frontal drag or diminished coupling motions, any of which can lead to lower velocity of the swimmer. Faster stroke rate is not always better.

Third, we can avoid any of the technical errors that lead to dramatically increased drag coefficients. The frontal drag of the human body at race speed is extremely sensitive to minute changes in our shape. Even the smallest mistakes can lead to significant drops in speed. For example, lifting the head too high, pulling too deep, overbending the knees on the kick, leaving a thumb out on the streamline off the wall, etc. can all lead to precipitous drops in speed.

In summary, by paying attention to the techniques that enable our speed to remain more constant, we will swim more efficiently in all four strokes. We will conform better to the law of inertia.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

Which way is right? The controversy over this subject has been ongoing for a long time. In elite competition we see both heads tilted forward and heads down in freestyle…yet they both can’t be right. So which one is better?

Finally, a study we did with Olympic champion Jimmy Feigen sheds some significant light on the answer to this ongoing controversy. Jimmy was tested with a velocity meter while swimming at 100-meter race pace for about 20 meters distance, first with the head down. Then again, with the head tilted slightly forward. Here is what we found.

The head down position resulted in an average velocity of .02 m/sec faster than with the head tilted forward. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but over a 50 second hundred-meter race, that is one meter further behind with the head tilted forward than with the head down. That is enough to win or lose a race.

There is more to the story, however. There is a significant amount of additional work involved with one of these techniques. To find out, you will need to go to Lanes 2, 3 or 4 on our new subscription service and check out the video which was just released. There you will find out which technique generates more propulsion and which technique causes more frontal drag.

As far as I am concerned, the debate is over. I hope you will enjoy this new webisode featuring Olympian Jimmy Feigen.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.