What's up, Motivators? Karen here, if you are a new triathlete or
a swimmer who has taken up swimming later in life, odds are very good that you feel
that sinking feeling like you can't get up close to the surface of the water.
You really have to raise your head, head to breathe.
If you are that type of person, stick around, because in this video we are
going to analyze the swim technique of somebody who we've just worked really
closely with, who is a world champion and still struggles with this.
And we got through how she is going
to approach it to get to her races in just the next several months.
Really confidently, we made big progress with her, literally in just a day or two.
I am in tearing gazelle in my twentys.
I was overweight unfulfilled and couldn't even run to the end of the block.
Over the following years, I found endurance sports, lost £65,
won age groups, race world Championships, broke records and trained and learned
from some of the best athletes and coaches in the world.
You, too, can use endurance sports
to change your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system, a system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company Motive offers that system and I
want to share some of the tips from it today.
Here we have some swim footage of Joanne Courtney.
Joanne is a curling world champion. She's an Olympian.
She's just recently retired from the sport
and now she's getting into Triathlon and we're helping her do it.
She's doing it with the Motive app and she is a Motive ambassador.
So we're going to follow her through her journey and help her along.
What's really interesting about Joanne is
she didn't know how to swim, barely at all, like don't drown.
Level one is what she was capable of doing
just a couple of months ago and she had a huge amount of doubt.
She didn't believe that she could actually
do a Triathlon because of how unconfident she was in her swim.
Well, you can see right here that after
just a couple of months and a couple of days, she's doing really well.
But she is encountering one of the things
that a lot of people struggle with and it's right here.
She's doing a ton of things really well.
But what most beginner athletes experience is this feeling that Joanne has right now.
And we even kind of cheated it with the snorkel and the fins.
But you can see that there's generally
a downward trajectory to her swim and that gives people a very sinking feeling.
So even though Joanne has a lot of good things going on,
here we'll go right from the head on view, there's a lot of things going really well.
What we like to see is we like to see
a fairly straight arm pull where her hand is going in in front of her shoulder,
and then it moves along in a nice straight channel, which it does there,
and we can take those away and then show on the other side.
There's not a lot of wiggliness going on, like loose sort of movement.
Everything is really nice and straight because she's strong and she's athletic.
And no need to comment on the lack of body
rotation because we took that out of the equation with the snorkel and the fins.
We intentionally did that so we could just
see where her body line was in relation to the water.
But we can look at this really nice pull here with a slight bend in the elbow
that will develop and become a little bit greater as she goes.
And even on the left side, a little bit of a bend in the elbow
that'll get more bent and more pronounced and more powerful as she goes along.
But her hand entry right in front of her shoulder perfect.
Everything's really good.
The area that she has to improve is where a lot of people have to improve.
It's this general downward movement of creating a lot of drag.
What happens is new athletes will often
tend to keep their body line really wide, and this is where we see it.
We'd already started working on this
with Joanne, but her legs here are fairly wide.
What I like to actually see is a really
narrow kick, almost feeling like you're within about a twelve inch bucket and a
gentle point to the feet, but you want the legs to almost be side by side.
If you ever go in behind a really elite swimmer, you'll see that their legs are
basically dead in behind them and their toes are gently pointed.
Those legs being dead in behind them and gently pointed is going to make sure
the legs are right in behind the body mass.
So it's not creating drag out in behind your body, pulling you down.
That sinking feeling is often just from a lot of drag that your legs are creating.
So as we go forward to what Joanne is
experiencing, it almost all got eliminated by the end
of the session as we made those legs really work together,
and it's going to feel like they have to be pressed together.
And when she was able to do that,
instantly what we saw was what we want to see with a new athlete.
We don't want to see this.
We want to see a body being basically horizontal where the back of head,
the butt cheeks and the heels are just kissing out of the surface of the water.
And as I got Joanne to just focus
on kicking in a nice narrow channel, she was able to do that.
So the drills that we gave her before she left were to focus as she's
swimming on keeping those feet really tight, almost feeling like the inside
of the thighs were brushing against each other.
The knees were brushing against each other.
The ankles were brushing against each other.
Point the toes just really gently and have that feeling when she's swimming.
And then the drill that we worked
on with her was I said, I just want you to push off the wall and float.
Just work on floating.
Have your arms over top of your head.
And you can all do this, too,
because this will give you the sensation that you need.
Put your arms over your head and just float without kicking.
And she couldn't do it, but we started working on it.
So push off the wall a little bit of a pencil dive.
And the key is to activate your core a little bit.
Kick very, very gently if you need to,
but feel that sensation of pushing your chest into the water,
activating your core slightly, which is going to seesaw your legs up.
And then as you feel yourself slowly
starting to sink, gently kick a little bit more and a little bit more.
And then focus on that narrow kick
with the feet together, the feet gently pointed,
the inside of the thighs brushing against each other very gently.
And that sensation of teaching your body how to float and then gradually going
into swimming is going to bring that feeling of floating and not sinking
closer and closer into your actual swimming.
So this was Joanne on a Sunday.
Well, on a Monday, we're going to fast forward to this.
And this is her very first time in open water.
And this should be really encouraging to you.
This is her first stroke in open water.
And take a look at this.
We have a couple of strokes.
Just head down and look at what is kicking out of the water there.
And behind her.
It's her feet.
So she said that she really wanted to focus on those narrow feet.
And instantly her butt and her heels came up to the surface of the water.
And this is a really, really good swim technique.
So if you are struggling with the feeling of sinking and you're worried about what's
going to happen in your races, there's a couple of things to keep in mind.
First, well, with just a swim or two, you can make really big improvements
by focusing on that narrowness of the feet, a gentle kick,
and learning how to float and do that dead man's float in the water.
Second thing is trust that if you get a good wetsuit.
We set her up with the new Roka Maverick, which is just $270 on the Roka website,
that it has a lot of benefits to help you be a lot more buoyant.
So the combination of her legs being
a little bit closer together, her feet being gently pointed,
and the added buoyancy of the legs having more flotation than the upper body
with that Roca suit allows her to boom instantly.
First time in open water have an excellent
open water swim stroke join is a motivated ambassador and she is using our app
to train for her first couple of races this year.
She's documenting it all on Instagram
and it's really interesting to follow her because she's a world champion.
She knows how to be good athletically
but she's starting at almost square one and watching her development is frankly,
really interesting and inspiring to me so you should go check her out on Instagram.
There's a link in the description below
to her profile at Joanne Courtney 89 and check it out super fun.
Thank you for watching Motivators.
If you're looking for a training plan
that incorporates these methods that is as good as a one on one coach but as
inexpensive as doing it yourself, check out our Motive training app
that covers triathlons, running races, do athletes swim runs and cycling events.
The link in the description below where
you can check out your customized training plan for free.
Also, if you rather listen to these tips,
we also publish these videos in podcast format on the Terrain's Motive Method
podcast so you can check that out and if you don't want to do either of those
things but you found this video helpful hit us up with a virtual high five
by smashing like button below later motivators.