All I know about Swimming - Part 2

In Part 1 of my post about swimming, I explained why I enjoy it and how technical it can be if you want to take it to a higher level. I also recommended getting a coach if you wanted to swim in amateur events.

If you don’t get a coach and want instead to take advice from amateurs like me who knows nothing about it, here’s the things I think about when swimming front crawl (freestyle in the US and on YouTube).

Be Efficient

Swimming should be about efficiency. Some people, especially runners who have trained themselves to run faster, start applying the same principles to swimming, that is you want to go faster, run (swim) faster. This works when running through air, not when you have water pushing back against you.

With swimming, your focus should be on efficiency. Swimming is a fight against the force of water, but you cannot win this fight, for this reason, you need to focus on fighting less, which makes swimming easier, which makes you more able to use the force in your muscles to go faster, or swim for longer.

This converts into a stroke count. If you take 45 strokes to swim 100 meters, try and swim as many 100 meters as you can with 44 strokes. This is an improvements in efficiency, and this should be your goal.

Get Hydrodynamic

Swimming is about hydrodynamics. We are animals designed to pass through air using our muscles. We find that relatively easy to do. When we’re in water, it’s more difficult. You cannot develop muscles that can fight back sufficiently hard enough against the water to make you swim faster.

Water will always push you back harder than you can push yourself forward through it. So the first thing you need to do is to minimise the amount of surface area you have that directly pushes against the water. This is called minimising your drag.

There are a number of ways to imagine this. Think of a seal or a penguin you see in a zoo or on TV. as soon as they jump into the water they turn into a bullet like tube, almost gliding through the water. The tip of their nose breaks water which flows over their body without a single surface pushing back against it.

The biggest mistake an amateur swimmer makes is allowing their lower body to sink in comparison to their head. This effectively creates an anchor that you have to drag behind you, like a parachute sopping an aircraft, it fills with water that you have to drag behind you. This is impossible. The greatest difference a beginner can make to their swimming is to get their legs up so that their head, body, hips legs and feet are aligned as much as possible and flat to the surface.

Unless you work on your balance in the water, your legs and hips will naturally sink in comparison to your chest and lungs because your lungs are your buoyancy aid. So the very first thing you need to work on is pressing down, or resting on your lungs, and pulling your legs up behind you, this will help get you flat and hydrodynamic.

One training tool to help with this is using a pull buoy like this:

It helps keep your lower half from sinking.

We aren’t built like seals, we will still have blunt surfaces pushing back against the water like our heads, and shoulders, but once you can swim flat there is no end to the obsession of trying to swim hydrodynamically.

Its all about reducing your drag.

Hand Entry

Your hand enters the water above your head. As mentioned above, it has to enter with minimal push against the water. I think of it a bit like an aeroplane wing which is curved allowing the airflow to move smoothly over it. Once forward it will be sitting ahead of you, slightly under the surface of the water.

If you look at swimming videos on YouTube you can see how difficult it is to actually create a hydrodynamic curve, over which water will smoothly flow. More commonly, hands bend against the water, and increase drag.

To help, I sometimes wear these paddles.

They do two things. One is that it shapes your hands correctly And you can use this to create muscle memory as to how your hand should feel. Secondly, it exaggerates any drag you create from an incorrect technique when your hand enters the water. You can feel the push of the water and the paddle starts to move incorrectly until you correct it and allow the water to flow smoothly over it.

Reach, Stretch and Pause

At this point, from your fingertips down to your toes, your body should be as aligned, line a pencil, or rolling pin level with the surface of the water. As my hand pushes forward, I stretch my arm and fingers forward feeling it pull into my shoulder and back muscles.

Some books describe this feeling as reaching forward to touch the end of the pool you are moving towards.

At this point you are gliding forward with whatever momentum you have. No real energy is being expended so you should give this time by pausing for a split second longer than you may otherwise might.

The Catch

This next point is arguably one of the most important aspects of the stroke. Forward movement comes from the laws of physics, a reaction to an equal but opposite force. That force is the pushing of water by your arm towards your feet.

One easy mistake to make at this point it to helicopter your arms, your hand has entered the water from above it and it continues moving towards the bottom of the pool. If the force of your hand sweeps towards the bottom of the pool, it will not translate into forward movement.

Instead, you need to have a high shoulder, a high bicep (high as in close to the surface), and the front part of your hand should start to get close to pointing towards the bottom of the pool, almost 90 degrees.

Some books describe this feeling as “reaching around the barrel”. If you were hovering horizontal and there was a round barrel in front of you and you wanted to push it backwards, you would reach over it, and once your arm had caught it, you could force the barrel backwards, moving it towards your toes underneath you. This is the feeling you are recreating.

A swimming coach said to me once that at this point, behind your forearm is a pillar of water, or a block of water, and you now need to maintain the maximum surface area possible with your hand and arm and force that block of water towards the side of the pool behind you. That is your only chance at maximising the rules of physics to create forward movement.

It is the force of this push backwards, that gives you your movement forward, minus the drag caused by the shape of your body in the water, and all the surfaces that you cannot refine and hide from the water.

Maximise this push back for the full length of your body and arm before pulling it out of the water. Removing yourself hand too soon wastes the opportunity for the stroke.

Pull Out and High Elbow

Your hand will at this point be close to your thigh and be ready to be taken out of the water (no drag). When this happens, your elbow (out of the water) will be pointed and high with your arm folded at an acute angle.

Finger Tip Drag

Your hand has to move back from this position to the Hand Entry at the start. The perfect way of doing this is with your finger tips close to the surface of the pool, hand relaxed until the point at which you drive it into the water again.

Body Twist

I mentioned above in the Reach, Stretch and Pause that from your fingertips down to your toes, your body should be as aligned as possible, like a pencil, or rolling pin on the surface of the water. Then one arm sweeps back to pull you forward. Its at the point of the stretch your left hand is forward, you will be on your left side, and your right elbow will be in the Pull Out and High Elbow stage. As you pull your right arm back your body will twist from the left side to the right side. People often think of backstroke as being on your back and front crawl as being on your front. But you can see from this, that front crawl, you are mostly swimming on your side. The whole time you are doing this you need to minimise the hydrodynamic resistance you get from the water you are pulling through.

Legs

Another mistake runners who take up swimming make is using their legs to create a hard kick when you swim. Swimming is an upper body sport. You pull yourself through the water with your arms, combined with a hydrodynamic shape to minimise water resistance.

So firstly, on land, your foot is normally at a right angle to your leg which would be awful in the water as this would act as a break. So get your ballet feet on and point your toes.

Your feet and legs do flap, but the main purpose of this is to help keep your legs up and behind your torso. If you kick like mad, you will start to lose some of your hydrodynamic shape, plus it will become an exhausting cardio workout without very much return in forward movement.

One way to test this is to get an swimming float, one of the flat ones they used to use in school swimming lessons, hold it out in front of you and swim a few lengths using just your legs. Then a couple more, even faster. See how that goes for you. You should conclude that swimming, and fast forward movement in swimming, comes from your upper body.

Breathing

Just as Derek Zoolander is an ambiturner and cannot turn left on the catwalk, I cannot breath on both sides, I only ever breath to my left.

Purists and professional swimmers would criticise me for this, but I don’t find it a big deal for the swimming I do. If I were sea swimming it could be a problem if I needed to switch sides to avoid incoming waves, but thats not a problem for me, so I don’t do anything to change the side on which I breath.

To state the obvious, you breath out underwater, then turn to breath in. It doesn't bother me how often I do this and in most cases its every stroke.

Turning

When you reach the end of the pool you need to turn. Obviously, Olympic swimmers do a racing turn, and you will also find amateur club swimmers doing to same when they race.

For me, the only time I swim competitively, is during an amateur triathlon, and often those triathlons are nothing more than 400m or 800m swims. In a 400m swim I would be completing it in under 8 minutes, so turning quickly may save me 10 seconds, if that, assuming I also turn perfectly. Whereas the whole triathlon could be an hour and a half, with differences of 15 or 20 minutes between an average cyclist like me and the fastest cyclist in the event. So for me, an investment in time in learning to turn to gain 10 seconds seems pointless. Plus, instead of turning I can draw breath easier at the end of the pool by not turning, which for me makes the event easier and more enjoyable than 10 seconds.

Train for Your Event

If you are going to swim in events, my advice is train for your event. I have learnt many lessons about this the hard way.

One lesson is that I consider myself to be an averagely good pool swimmer so I automatically assumed that I would notice no difference in a wet suit. This was wrong. I don't enjoy being in a wet suit. Its claustrophobic and restrictive.

Another lesson I learnt the hard way is that sea swimming is far more challenging than swimming in flat water. I swam around Burgh Island in Devon. An island that Agatha Christie used as inspiration in some of her novels.

One lesson learnt here was that unless you put lubrication or protection between yourself and your wetsuit, salt will act as an abrasive as you twist, as can be seen here on my neck.

I also found out that swimming in a swell of 1 to 2 meters, with a visibility downwards of 3 or 4 meters, is really disorientating and can increase any nausea you feel from swallowing too much salt water.

On another occasion I made the move from pool swimming to open water swimming, without thinking there to be any difference. I swam in an ice cold quarry. All was fine, until I reached the shore again and experienced the effect of ice cold water in my inner ear experiencing a form of vertigo which meant I could not stand upright for over 30 minutes.

And finally, when I swim, even when not in an event, I wear a swimming cap. I have found that by not doing this, as soon as I swim in an event with a cap, I cannot think of anything else other than the difference in how water feels on my head when wearing a cap.

So train for your event so that you can focus on the event.

Get Zen

For me, swimming is very Zen, because every stroke, and every movement I make, I am analysing it and thinking through each of the about parts. I can feel every stroke that felt imperfect, I can feel the start of my swim where my stroke feels easy and smooth, when I am fatigued, I can feel my stroke failing and getting more difficult. This makes it a great way to have a break from the other things normally going through my head.

Thats it. Thats my view of swimming and all I know!