- What's up, Trainiacs?
Today, very quick video to talk about
how you can use something like a TRX band
and the infamous
stretchy cords to help fix
what is probably one of the single biggest impediments
to age group triathletes swimming fast.
(techno music)
So if any of you been around for a while
and watched any of the swim analysis videos,
you know that I have a shameful straight arm pull.
And what that is, is as you're swimming,
what you want is to have a nice
90-degree bend here
and you want that bend to allow your forearm
to basically be vertical and your bicep
to also catch water.
What ends up happening is as you're pushing back,
you got a really big surface area here.
What most triathletes end up doing
is they end up letting that elbow drop
sliding back like this, and because they're doing that,
they are not grabbing nearly as much water.
This is a very natural for a lot of people to do,
because our body tends to gravitate towards
the path of least resistance,
so, this, a lot of resistance,
but you're going to go very fast,
because you've got a lot to grab onto.
This, not a lot of resistance, easier on your body,
because you don't have a lot that you're actually
grabbing onto.
What people also do is
they might also turn their hand in
like this,
and have their palm
pointing basically across their body
and slicing through the water.
Instead of like this where you're grabbing
a whole lot of surface area.
Now, "Why do people do this?" You might ask.
Number one, what you hear a lot is
that you want that early vertical forearm from swim coaches.
You want that forearm as vertical as possible,
as early as possible.
I'm gonna credit a lot of this
to Ger Rodrigues from Tower 26
who says, "That most age group swimmers
"don't have a swim background
"and we run in triathlon
"which is very corrosive
"on the flexibility of our body.
"We just literally don't have the flexibility
"to make our arm do that."
Totally fine.
But we still wanna get our arm in
that nice 90-degree position because
think of it this way,
you've got your arm in a nice 90-degree position,
there,
and
there,
You can engage those lats,
those really nice big muscles, and you can push
with a lot more resistance and force
launching yourself forward.
If you're straight, go like this, where's all the pressure?
It's gonna be on your little muscles in the shoulder
which is why your boy triathlon Taren ends up having
a fairly sore shoulder and I have to hang a lot.
So how do we fix these issues?
For starters, fixing the flexibility
that's holding you back from being able
to have that nice catch is a much harder thing
to do than you might think.
To end up actually lengthening
your muscle fibers and making them longer
and more flexible, you have to stretch
somewhere around two to four minutes
every single day for about three months.
Most people aren't gonna do that.
However, one of the big things that I just realized,
that is going to hold specifically me back
is because I have a history, like most triathletes do,
of sitting at a desk and not being very active
from side to side, my lats have actually gone to sleep.
You can test this on yourself by going like this
and seeing if you can flex your lat muscle
and make it actually protrude and firm up.
In a lot of people's cases, in mine especially,
I had MTK put her hand there and I literally
was not budging it with all my might.
So here are the two things that you can do
to end up reawakening those lats.
Just like we have to reawaken our gluts
with things like clamshell movement
just to get that glut firing again,
we can fix that lat with these two movements.
If you have access to a TRX machine
or really anything that'll end up anchoring a hand here,
you can go like this.
Put your feet in a little bit
and have a straight line from the rope
through your forearm and keep that line straight,
and then pull that elbow in,
and the key of this is
to make sure there's a straight line
through your forearm all the way through
Oooh, yeah,
to the rope.
If you end up going like this, where that line
from the forearm ends up breaking from the line
of the rope, you're then working the bicep and your deltoid.
So you wanna keep that nice straight line,
there, you see, how that works?
Still straight and that's gonna activate your lat.
If you don't have access to that,
you can use stretch cords or just some Theraband,
as I'm gonna show you right now.
Start by anchoring the stretch cords at about head height
a long way out and then step back quite a bit.
You wanna load up a fair bit of resistance
on these stretch cords, so that it's heavy
and resistant enough that you can't use your little muscles,
that you need the bigger muscles of your lats
to end up doing this movement.
What you end up doing is you just very slowly rotate
your hips like you are doing a swim stroke
and then start the swim stroke
and because there's enough resistance,
you're gonna have to force yourself
to use those lats,
and I can feel it right now,
and you can see that to be able to move
that resistant band, I gotta access those lats.
Push down and access the triceps at the end.
You wanna pop, see how that tricep is engaged at the end?
Then, do almost like a swim stroke
and do the same thing with the other hand
and just do it very, very slowly,
and the entire time that you're doing it, focus,
Oooh,
on loading up the resistance onto the lat
right underneath the armpit.
As you're doing that and focusing on your lats,
think about keeping your fingertips lower than your elbow.
Think about keeping those fingertips
pointed straight down, also, not pointed in,
not pointed out, but pointed straight back,
and then push back,
breaking the wrist,
so that the hand is still pointing straight back,
generating power.
Do the same thing on both sides.
Oh, yeah, oh yeah.
Here's the thing.
The difference between this and doing three minutes
of stretching every single day for three months
or going in the gym and actually building strength
is all we're trying to do is reconnect
the neuromuscular patterns that allow our brain
to fire a specific muscle group.
If you do this maybe eight times on each side
twice a day, at most, ideally right before a swim,
to re-engage the feeling of "Alright, I'm gonna pull back,"
and activate that, you're gonna be able to access
those muscles.
All of a sudden, instead of your body forcing itself
to have a straight arm, because you literally can't even
access those lats, you're gonna be able to feel those lats,
and gradually,
you will be
a better swimmer.
So there you go, Trainiacs!
Work on your lats.
Work on your bent elbow catch.
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Actually, that would be a cool thing to do.
Later.