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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Historically, some of the greatest coaches in the sport of swimming were also the most inquisitive. They never stopped questioning. Understanding that they were far from having all of the answers to get swimmers faster, they constantly challenged the hierarchy, the establishment. Often they would try out new ideas, whether on technique or training, experimenting, […]

The head position in backstroke should change throughout the stroke cycle. There are two reasons most swimmers are more comfortable swimming backstroke with their heads held too high, a position I often refer to as ‘reading in bed’. First, a backstroker with the head held high has more awareness of where he/she is in the […]

Butterfly is a challenging stroke. It is the most difficult to perform and sustain over any moderate distance. The reason is that it doesn’t conform well to the law of inertia, and, therefore, requires more energy. Nearly all of the propulsion in butterfly comes at two key points in the stroke cycle coinciding with the […]

In every event over the 50 meter sprint, virtually every elite distance freestyler in the world is pulling with the elbows held very close to the surface, as the hand pushes backward in the water. This motion is neither natural nor easy to accomplish, yet for any event longer than 50 meters, this is the […]

The fundamentals of backstroke are the same as for freestyle. However, the priority of those fundamentals differ for backstroke and there are certain nuances of backstroke that differ from freestyle. Of all four strokes, backstroke is not the fastest stroke, but it is the most efficient stroke. That means that there is less change of […]

I continue to learn more about this fascinating motion in the water and what makes it work well….or not so well for swimmers. Like all other swimming techniques, fast dolphin kick requires certain tools in order to do well. The three most notable tools for dolphin kick are extreme plantar ankle flexibility, leg and lower […]

Outside of the starts and turns, the propulsion forces of a swimmer are derived purely from the kick and the pull. More specifically, except for the up kick, where the entire lower leg and foot can create propulsion, nearly all of the other propulsive forces (down kick and pull) occur at the feet and hands. […]