this week we're going to take a look at the breaststroke and butterfly turn and a trend
that we've been seeing in our evaluations we've done some recent new series online that talked
about the turn and especially the engagement with the turning hand or in this case the left
hand and what we've been noticing on some of the evaluations is that there's more coaches that are
starting to teach the staggered hand touch or the lower hand touch so we want to take a look at this
because there's been some things that we've seen in the evaluations that do make a difference and
are important for swimmers now the first thing is that the engagement of the left hand making
sure that you're not in connection with the wall too long is going to make a big difference both on
the speed of the turn in the direction that you go off the wall if the hand is connected to the
wall for too long then inevitably the swimmers body will go up and the Tuck is not as tight as
it can be and so the turn is a little slower so while this hand is engaged with the wall he does
get the hand off fairly quickly and so the hand does slide off fairly quickly we maybe like to
see that even a little bit faster with a little bit less engagement but for the most part it's
a pretty solid turn so with the staggered hand lower the thought process here is that with no
engagement with the left hand on the wall there would be very limited very little chance that the
body's going to go upward and at the same time the hand is already down and partially through
the recovery of the of the turn so the hand comes in and gets off right away so now here's where it
gets tricky if we look at even at this turn if we played at full speed whether it's actually half
speed but if we play it what you'll notice is that it looks pretty good but when we go for a complete
stop we notice that when this hand touches the wall when we look up at the other hand it is not
touch the wall yet or it has not touched the wall yet so in this particular instance when
it goes fast we're going to show it full speed a little bit later when it goes fast there's no way
an official is gonna be able to see this however it is an illegal turn this is a non simultaneous
touch so when we asked our athlete to pick up the pace a little bit the faster he went the further
away or the less consistent the hand touch got and so we really started to see the non simultaneous
touch and this is something that an official is definitely in a catch and the athlete is going
to be disqualified then we had to go a fast turn and we did notice that it gets further and further
away so you have to be very careful of not doing a non simultaneous touch and so we're going to look
at these one more time if we let these there's four turns if we let them play through on their
own you're going to notice that there's it's going to be very tough to tell in the first two that it
was in the legal touch on the third in the fourth one it definitely is an illegal touch so we want
to look at the fastest two turns which was the fourth one which this one is completely illegal
and the first one that we showed which is also completely legal but coaches may not want that
so we're going to compare the two of them and see which one's faster and and this is what we
talked about in a whole nother series that we put together that once the hands make connection on
the wall once the hands are on the wall these sorts of things don't make any difference the
connection with the wall the leverage that the athlete gets from the wall will mean that the body
is going to spend just as fast no matter no matter what you do with these hands no matter if you go
straight over if you go around the engagement with the wall is is very important and the the turning
hand has to get off the wall as fast as possible so we tried to get it on first touch here as close
as we can and when we look through the turn you notice that the hand release on both of these
instances are pretty much exactly the same and then the foot touch to the wall is pretty darn
close and then the push off or leaving the wall is what we said before is pretty much exactly the
same so the question here is really is the risk of a non simultaneous touch worth the worth the
advantage that you think you're getting and from what we're seeing there's no advantage anyway so
there's certainly no sense in taking the risk of what would be a non simultaneous touch that's just
what we see and so this is the way we teach is to make sure that people are as legal as
possible but everybody can do what they think is best which is what makes everything great