Ian Murray
There are plenty of signs that tell you when your swim is lacking. Perhaps every lap is a struggle, or swimming faster or farther seems impossible. Maybe panic sets in during a race, or you see other swimmers glide by you easily and often. Knowing there are areas to improve is one thing; knowing how to fix them is another. Swimming is a technique sport, much like golf, tennis, alpine skiing, and many others where skill trumps strength. The density of water—nearly one thousand times thicker than air—demands a technical approach to swimming. For lower-level and intermediate swimmers, fitness is usually not what limits their swim ability. It is lack of proper technique that slows them down. Even for advanced swimmers, a small technical change brings immediate results that might take weeks or even months to acquire through mindless training. In this chapter, the focus is on reducing drag and then creating propulsion. It is vital to approach the list of skills in order so you master each skill before moving on to the next, empowering you to troubleshoot your freestyle swim.
Reducing Drag
Many triathletes wisely invest in aerodynamic technology for their cycling equipment to save seconds off their bike splits but foolishly ignore areas of drag in their swim, where minutes can be saved through simple changes. In reducing drag, the number one issue is a level body. The next priority is how the arms and hands enter the water and extend forward in front of the body. The final priority is the kick.
Level Body
The number one priority when trying to reduce drag is to have a level body position at the surface of the water. This means the back of your swim cap, the back of your suit, and your heels are all very near the surface. That level body position is obtained and maintained through balance, not through kicking harder. No amount of strength or struggle will overcome body drag. The resistance of water, as it attacks the chest, abdomen, hips, and thighs, will always be greater than any force you generate against it.
There are three tools a swimmer can use to get level: head position, lead-arm depth, and pressure on the upper torso. The head should be deep enough in the water so that only a small patch of swim cap is exposed to the air, so deep that a thin film of water washes over the back of the cap. When the head is in the correct position, there will be no wrinkles in the skin at the back of the neck, the eyes will gaze straight down at the pool bottom below, and the crown of the head will be pointing directly at the end of the lane. When the lead arm is at the proper depth at full extension, the fingers will be 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) below the surface of the water. The arm should enter the water on a trajectory that takes it straight to that depth as opposed to entering shallow, just skimming the surface of the water and settling to that depth.
The idea of pressure on the upper torso can be the most elusive and confusing. Imagine that your torso (hips to shoulders) is full of air, all hollowed out and inflated like a balloon. Your lungs provide balloon-like buoyancy in this part of the body, so by pressing down or leaning on your collarbones, the front of the body will sink deeper into the water. The hips and legs will then automatically rise up. The human body acts in water as a seesaw acts on a playground; when one end goes down, the other end goes up. By blending the three tools—head depth, arm depth, and pressure—you can find level balance at the surface of the water and reduce body drag.
Clean Entry and Extension
The points of entry and extension are the next items to assess. The entry is when the hand enters the water. The extension is when it reaches out to its longest length. In a clean entry, the hand enters the water with little splash, and the arm achieves full extension with few air bubbles. This type of entry maximizes forward thrust while also minimizing drag.
The most common problem in this area is the dreaded crossover, which occurs when a swimmer’s entry point is too close to the top of the head, and the hand and forearm travel across the center line of the body during extension. This wastes energy by sending the body side to side rather than forward. A crossover also creates drag by allowing the water to take hold of a larger area (the side of the forearm from elbow to pinkie finger) than it would if the arm entered and extended straight ahead. Crossovers are rarely symmetrical; one arm often wanders errantly to a greater degree than the other. When solving this problem, swim with the mantra of “enter wide, extend wide.” A swimmer will move a body part a millimeter and feel as if it’s been adjusted a mile, so the remedy requires an exaggerated feeling of width to approach an accurate result. The exaggeration might have you feeling as if you are entering and extending at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock. After several focused swims, that oddly wide feeling will lessen.
Another area to analyze is the position of the elbow at full extension. Confirm that the elbow is straight and locked out, with no elbow dip. One of the laws of swimming is that no matter where your arm is in the stroke cycle (recovery, entry, extension, catch, arm sweep, finish), the fingers are always below the wrist and the wrist is always below the elbow. At complete extension this law is nearly broken; the fingers are only slightly below the wrist, and the wrist is nearly even with the elbow. If the elbow dips below the wrist and the hand appears to scoop upward at full extension, a swimmer gets a double whammy. First, there is the problem of drag. An elbow that has dropped below the wrist and fingers at full extension creates drag from the enlarged surface area of the raised forearm. Much like Diana Ross and the Supremes doing “Stop! In the Name of Love,” that arm is projected forward in a fashion perfect for mid-1960s choreography but horrendous in the water. Second, there is a delay in the catch. This will be covered later in this chapter in the section on propulsion.
Also note: The wrist and fingers need to be flat and straight as they enter and extend so that no unnecessary drag is created from other joints. Swimmers often unknowingly allow the wrist to soften and fingers to bend, and all the corners created are immediately attacked by the dreaded enemy, drag. Think of your hand as a knife that will slice into and through the water. It should enter flat as if you were slipping it through the mail slot of a door.
Only the details remain, including a classic hot-button topic for new swimmers that simply has to be noted. The question of fingers—should they be spread or together? Most recent studies suggest that the best position of the fingers (in terms of spacing and cupping) is as they fall in their own natural resting posture. This speaks to an important overall element of swimming: relaxation. Great swimming can be done with little effort. Tension causes greater stress, elevated heart rate, and faster fatigue, so you must remain relaxed as you swim. Water has the ability to cradle a balanced body and hold it at the surface. Relaxation also minimizes muscle cramping. During the recovery phase of each stroke, relaxation is vital. Let the shoulder muscles lift only the elbow high into the air, and let the forearm, wrist, hand, and fingers dangle down like overcooked linguine.
Legs
Observe your legs first through the perspective of drag. Imagine there is a tube around the largest part of your body: the chest or the hips. The kick must remain small, tight, and within that tube. Anything that strays outside the tube during the swim is drag. If your kick is too wide, then your calves, shins, and feet creep outside that boundary and slow you down. Many runners and cyclists come into triathlon with the habit and mind-set of using lots of knee angle for motion. A swimmer’s kick should stem more from the hips, with only a slight amount of knee articulation. There is often a cause and effect attached to a wide kick: If the arm sweep (the pull of the arm as it moves past the chest and abdomen) crosses too far under the body, it can cause an overrotation of the entire body. A splayed kick is often a counterbalance to that overrotation.
Managing Breathing During the Swim
The obvious and immediate challenge with swimming is that you can’t simply inhale and exhale as you can on the bike or while running. The exchange of breath requires some thought, planning, and coordination with the rotation of the arms and body. A regular and steady breath will reduce anxiety and improve performance.
Swim with a steady rhythm to your breath. This will require you to exhale in the water. There isn’t time to exhale and inhale when the mouth is out of the water, so you must inhale at the surface and exhale when your face is submerged. You can choose to breathe out through your nose, your mouth, or a combination of both. With higher effort, the gas exchange rate is increased. Mouth breathing then becomes the more efficient function. Also, there is value in the ability to breathe on both the right and left sides of your body (bilateral breathing). During faster-paced swims and races, however, you will tend to breathe more often to fulfill your oxygen needs, thus on the same side (unilateral breathing).
If you recall, a level body is priority one in swimming, and like a seesaw, when one end goes up, the other end goes down. Check to make sure you are not lifting your head out of the water as you breathe; this may cause the hips and legs to sink momentarily and create drag. As you turn to breathe, think of turning the crown of the head down and lifting the chin up for air.
Creating Propulsion
Only after you have eliminated as much drag as humanly possible can you begin focusing on increasing propulsion. As with the section on reducing drag: the biggest, most valuable elements of swimming faster are stated first.
Core Power
In humans, great power never comes from the limbs alone. The body’s true power source is its center of mass: the hips. A superior golf swing and tennis forehand are not generated from just the arms; they are powered by the hips. A karate punch, fastball, and javelin throw all originate from the body’s core. This is true for swimming as well. When a swimmer lies dead flat in the water and pulls herself forward with arms alone, there is no potential for power, no possibility for speed. A powerful swim is generated from the body rolling like a log, pivoting on its long axis. The power is maximized when all parts of the torso—shoulders down to hips—move together and that core movement is timed perfectly to both the arm entry and the pull.
The degree of rotation changes slightly with the pace of the swim. A warm-up or cool-down pace involves slightly more rotation. The body tips up on its side a bit more and glides there a bit longer as a slower arm moves forward through the recovery phase. On the other hand, a 50-meter all-out sprint has far less body rotation—not flat but certainly not as much as in the warm-up. Swim speed comes from arm turnover, and, as the arm and hand exit the water and rush forward through recovery, too much rotation can actually hinder the process. Check to make sure you have some rotation in your swim in order to access the core power but not so much rotation that you are hindering your potential for faster turnover and, therefore, a faster swim.
Timing
Timing refers to the position of the arms at the moment of the body’s core rotation. When timing is at its best, the body’s core is powering both the pull and the entry to their maximum potential. There are two ways to mess this up. The more common way is to pull too early. In this scenario, the pull is happening at the same time as the recovery. The arm pulling has started too early, is moving independently, and is not connected to any of the critical core body power. To correct this, the lead arm must remain out front, in full extension for a moment longer, as it waits for the recovery arm to advance forward. Think of stretching the extension farther forward, reaching out as if you are trying to touch the pool wall at the end of your lane.
The other, less common mistake is to pull too late. In this scenario the lead arm remains out front, fully extended even after the recovery arm has entered and extended. The hip power has been completely spent by this time, and the pulling arm, moving too late, is once again detached from the core power source. In this case, make sure the lead arm gets active and begins the pull as the recovery arm passes by your ear on its way to entering the water.
Once corrected, both the arm entering the water and the arm pulling through the water will be attached to that valuable power generated from the body’s rotation. It may help to imagine your swim as a four-cylinder engine: The two primary cylinders are your hips, and they always fire together and cannot be separated. The third cylinder is your entry arm, and you want the two hip cylinders to fire at the moment the entry fingers touch the water so that the hips drive that arm forward into the water. Now, the last cylinder, the pull, needs to be attached to this engine. The pulling arm should still be out in front of you, having lowered only a few inches from where it was positioned at full extension. Then the two hip cylinders are firing in a manner that maximizes the entry arm and the greatest amount of the pull. That’s hitting on all four cylinders.
Many of the skills identified in this chapter are fairly simple elements that have one correct position and a sense of finality once fixed. That’s not the case with timing. You’ll likely find a spot where hips and arms are working well together at one pace, but then you’ll just want to swim faster. Faster swimming comes from faster arm turnover. This means timing must be learned again at the new, faster pace. This continues over and over through many different speeds until you reach an all-out sprint. Be patient with the process, and remain mentally present during your swims. Be aware of your body and head position as well as your arms and focus on your stroke so that you can be aware of how you feel while you are swimming. Keep tuned into your swim so that you can identify areas of weakness to work on that will ultimately help you become a faster swimmer. Focus will expedite your improvement. Timing is challenged by another element of the swim stroke, the catch.
Catch
The catch is the moment of the swim stroke after the lead arm obtains full extension and before the pull. Here you have the opportunity to get the best grip on the water. A swim without a catch results in a straight arm pull. When the arm pull is straight, the arm is pressing down on the water and moving the body up a bit into the air. The result is a body that bobs up and down across the pool with each stroke. When a catch is employed, the arm is moving the body forward through the water and not up and down. To activate your catch, think about lifting the elbow toward the surface of the water and letting your fingers drop down toward the bottom of the pool the instant before you pull. The old adage of “reaching over a barrel” is still a great cue to get the desired arm shape. A more modern term is evolving: EVF, or early vertical forearm. Avoid the common flaw of bending the wrist; a superior catch comes from the elbow so that you are “holding” the water with the maximum surface area: forearm, palm, and fingers.
In the section on reducing drag earlier in this chapter, I discuss the drag resulting from an elbow that dips at full extension. This error also reduces propulsion: When the elbow dips below the wrist at full extension, a high-quality catch is virtually impossible to achieve. The arm extension must be flawless so that the elbow can quickly and easily lift to gain purchase on the water for the catch. Also, in the section on timing, I mention how the catch complicates the pursuit of a well-timed stroke. If you find that both your timing and catch need work, master timing first. It is far easier to add better shape to the lead arm for an improved catch once good timing has been locked into muscle memory.
Pull
The pull is a critical aspect of the swim stroke. The priority is to maintain the widest surface area of your hand during the entire pull phase, which keeps the pull flat against the water like a paddle. If the hand rotates sideways, it begins to slip through the water with less effectiveness.
An ongoing debate in swimming centers around the best path for the pull to follow. One school of thought is that a deliberate S curve should be added to the pull so that it sweeps to the inside a bit at the beginning and then sweeps outside a bit toward the end. The basic idea is that the hand and forearm should constantly chase still water. The other school of thought is that the pull should be straight backward with no curve at all—as if you were paddling a surfboard and were restricted in your lateral motion by the rails of the bulky board. Your pull should be somewhere in the middle of these two philosophies. Adding intentional curves to your stroke isn’t necessary, nor is it necessary to deliberately resist them. Because of the body’s rotation during the stroke, a natural, moderate curve is added to the pull. Let that be your goal.
An effective catch and pull rely on a combination of muscular fitness including speed, endurance, power, and strength. One of the key principles of training is specificity: The most specific form of exercise for swimming is swimming. To enhance this activity, a small portion of your swim workouts can be done with a moderately sized paddle. Apply the principle of specificity in the gym as well: A seated pull-down exercise can be modified to become a standing swim-specific pull-down that more closely mimics the catch and pull used in the water.
Kick
Previously, in the segment on timing, the focus was on the hips and hands working together. The kinetic chain of events actually includes the legs as well. Most triathletes who enter the sport with a rich history in bike or run, but very little swim background, place too much emphasis on the kick. An overactive kick can be a problem in two possible ways: (1) If a swimmer’s kick is working too fast and too furious, it is likely out of sync with the body’s rotation and working against each stroke. (2) The muscles that power a strong kick are some of the largest muscles in the body, and they demand oxygen. An overactive kick elevates heart rate, and the return on the kicking investment is not all that great.
An athlete can swim fast with just a light kick. That kick, however, has to be timed to effectively rotate the core during each stroke. Try this progression: Start by swimming with legs that are absolutely relaxed. Let them naturally and slightly separate in response to the body’s rotation. Once the rhythm of that natural separation is established, begin to add only the slightest assistance, a “thump” to enhance the natural movement of the legs. This single beat will enhance the body’s rotation and add a dynamic quality to that stroke. Then, attach that thump to each stroke. Later, for more speed, you can add additional kicks between each of the essential thumps.
Swimming is a skill sport, and the density of the water demands precision. The quickest results will come with complete focus on the issue you’ve selected. That may mean swimming smaller distances at a slower pace with longer rest to create greater mental concentration and more accurate movements. It is said the average human requires ten thousand precise repetitions before muscle memory can “own” the motion. You can expect to reduce that number as you increase your mental presence. Swim for accuracy, and remember it’s not practice that makes perfect in swimming, it’s perfect practice that makes perfect.