Gary Hall Sr. and the Race Club staff are here to provide you with strategies to improve your swimming – no matter what your level is. Read blogs featuring coaching tips, new staff members, important upcoming swim camp dates, techniques tailored for specific swim strokes and much more. Learn from the experts by following the Aqua Notes Blog. Swimmers throughout the United States turn to this blog as a resource for new swimming drills, increasing speed and improving overall performance. Sign up to get these detailed guides to building your technique for all 4 strokes.
There are four parts to the freestyle flip turn: the approach, the tumble, the underwater and the breakout. Mistakes in all four parts are commonly made by most swimmers. Here are three of my favorite pearls for the approach to the wall that will help you improve your freestyle flip turns.
When we step on the blocks for a fast swimming race, we are about to increase the energy demands to a very different and high level and, if we expect to swim fast, our bodies need to be capable of producing it.
Our latest butterfly swimming technique video sheds some new light on this difficult stroke. While swimming proper breaststroke may be the toughest swim technique to learn or teach, from an energy expenditure standpoint, swimming butterfly is the toughest stroke to perform. Butterfly is a difficult swim stroke technique to do well. It is even a more challenging one to keep doing well throughout a race. Butterfly is an exhausting stroke.
What is exciting is that we now have new technology that enables us to really study and understand some of the details that help make swimmers fast. The Pressure Meter is a good example.
Having a fast stroke rate in breaststroke does not necessarily equate to having speed. It is pretty easy to spin your wheels in breaststroke and waste a lot of energy without having much to show for that effort in terms of speed. Breaststroke is the most timing-sensitive of all four strokes.
Coupling motions are extremely important in swimming all four strokes and on the start to enhance power. Recently we invested in some technology at The Race Club that enables us to measure propulsion (pressure) on the hands during the pulling motion.
This technique enables the swimmer to shorten his or her diameter slightly by tucking the knees under the chest more than with the vertical turns of the past. The result is an incredibly quick turn-around.
A recap of the original 10 suggestions and an assessment of where we are today, some 22 years later, with new suggestions on how we might make swimming a bigger and better sport.
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.
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 […]
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…
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 […]
