- Morning Trainiacs.
That old bent elbow swimming that I'm working on here
in the off season is starting to feel a little bit better.
But you know what?
I was looking at some video the other day
about Daniela Ryf with her bent elbow.
Oh oh, that is a sight to behold.
We are going to look at Daniela Ryf's swim stroke.
(upbeat music)
Trainiacs, while I was in Kona,
obviously Daniela Ryf did not have a very good swim
in the Ironman World Championship race
and I was standing next to some people,
by the way, if you're wondering about those bike racks,
they're called DaHANGER.
I was standing next to some people
and Daniel Ryf got stung by a jellyfish during the swim,
we didn't know that at the time,
but she was taking a long, long time to come into transition
and somebody next to me was like,
hmm, Daniela Ryf isn't a very good swimmer,
this isn't a surprise that she's
so far back from Lucy Charles.
Well, A, she is an amazing swimmer,
B, she's always gonna be in behind Lucy Charles
because Lucy's awesome.
That got me thinking.
People need to understand how good a swimmer Daniela Ryf is
and it's not like she's just this uber biker.
She has to be fresh coming out of the swim
to be able to unleash that bike.
So, we're gonna show her swim technique
and why I believe she's one of the better swimmers.
I want you to take a look at some of the footage
that we've got here from Daniela Ryf.
There's a couple of things that I really want to point out
with regards to that.
So number one here,
that bent elbow is what you might hear
as being an early vertical forearm.
People might refer it to that.
And what we're looking to do is from
the shoulder to the elbow
and the elbow to the hand be fairly bent.
You don't want it straight like me
because that puts a lot of pressure on your shoulder.
You want it out to the side
and you want that 90 degree bend
basically to be straight across your shoulders,
straight across into the elbow and down.
And why you do that is because it takes pressure
off the shoulder and it also gives you this
nice, big surface area
to push water back with.
The biggest thing that she's really good with here
that we should all emulate
is there should never be a time
where your fingertips are higher than your elbow.
And that's the case with Daniela.
So it's always below,
but it takes her until she's almost at shoulder height there
to get that forearm even close to vertical
and that's what we want to try to do.
Unless you are like Gumby
and you have the flexibility
and the body awareness to get that hand
way over top of you
and the shoulder flexibility to push water down
with strong force over top of your head,
which uh newsflash, none of us really do,
a vertical forearm is enough.
Okay, the next thing that I want to show off
is Daniela Ryf's kick.
Take a look at her back leg.
It's not like it's kicking madly.
There's just a small little whipkick to get her
to turn her body over,
but it's not like she's just kicking furiously.
Take a look at just how gentle that kick is.
It's just enough to get her moving.
The reason that this is important for triathletes is
A, we don't have very flexible ankles,
so we can't develop a really big strong kick.
What we're looking to do is kick as little as possible,
to conserve as much oxygen as possible,
so we're not feeling out of breath
and so that we get out of the swim,
it's not crushing it.
So just have as small a kick as possible,
straighten those toes out
so that they aren't dipping into the water
and just dragging.
Kick as little as you possibly can from the hip,
not really big scissor whipkicks like this.
Just kind of nice, straight fluid legs
and tap your toes together.
Just have those toes pass each other
and this will keep your body from going like that
and creating drag with big, wide legs.
Just tiny little kicks.
Now, the next thing that I want to look at here and show you
is the position of Daniela Ryf's head.
As she starts breathing,
you can see that one goggle is always in the water.
You don't ever, ever, ever, ever
want to lift your head out
or both goggles are in the water
as you're taking a breath off to the side.
You can lift them both out when you're sighting,
but when, look at Daniela here,
she is still very much under the water
with a very straight line coming across
her body line like that.
If she were to lift her head out of the water,
her legs are gonna sink down like that.
Our fulcrum of like the seesaw of our body is our lungs
because those are the buoyant parts in our bodies.
So that's gonna be basically where our body pivots off of.
So keep that one goggle in the water.
While we are at this spot here in the video,
I want to show you how she breathes
and take note, I'm gonna play this through really slowly,
there you go, bam.
Immediately as her face gets in the water,
she's blowing out bubbles.
And you can see bubbles
are coming from her face, right there.
So as soon as she gets her face in the water,
she's blowing out bubbles.
Right there, you can see bubbles are
starting to come out of her nose
and while some coaches will say
you have to blow out of your mouth
so they can be stronger.
Well, look at Daniela here.
Nose, nose, nose.
So whether it's your nose, whether it's your mouth,
whatever hole you want to get the air out of,
just start blowing bubbles as soon as you get
your face in the water.
Alright, the last aspect of Daniela Ryf's stroke
that I want to touch on is right here
and you can see two things.
So, right over top of the black line here
is also Daniela Ryf's body line.
And the one thing that a lot of age groupers
really struggle with is crossing over their center line.
So they swim, enter, and then their hand
goes across the center line of their body.
We want it basically to enter just outside
of our shoulder and stay in the track the entire way.
So take a look at where Daniela Ryf's hand enters,
right in line with her shoulder
and it stays outside of her body line the entire way.
It goes in, outside of that body line
and stays out there even further.
Enters right in front of her shoulder, boom.
There's a tiny little bit of a crossover,
actually more than I would probably recommend
for any of you.
It enters right in front of her shoulder
and it just stays there.
And the final thing that I want to show
is Daniela Ryf's long
taught like a tiger,
body line.
That's about as extended as you can be.
Her body is about as long as it can possibly be
and one of the laws of fluid dynamics,
that's how your body moves through the water,
is that a longer vessel will move through quicker.
Now, if you're scrunchie and you're curled up like a ball
and you're one of those people that you see in the pool
where like on land, they're six feet tall
and then they get in the pool
and like, how did you turn to four feet tall?
That's because they're swimming all crunched up,
where you want to be long and extended
with your feet a long in behind you like Daniela has here.
So there you go Trainiacs,
I hope that that helps even pull some of like these
super human abilities that Daniela Ryf has
down to the level that most of us age groupers
can apply to our swimming
because swimming, it's not complicated here,
we've just gotta take a lot of the aspects
of what good swimmers do,
try to apply it to us,
with the context that we aren't true swimmers.
So it's gonna be hard for us to do some of these things,
but if we get the basics right,
we are going to be quite fast.
I think that anyone can get under 40 minutes
for a Half Ironman,
probably under an 1:20 for a full Ironman,
and if that's the case,
you're probably in the top 15%,
20% of most of the swimmers out there.
Now, if you want a little bit of help with this,
how to walk through all of this
and you're struggling with the swim,
go to triathlontaren.com/swimdrillprogram
and that's the full series of drills,
start to finish,
that I recommend anyone.
If you can't swim 400 yards or meters continuously,
without taking a break
and without being out of breath at the end of it,
you need to go through those drills
and build the foundation to get fast.
Alright Trainiacs, go check that out
and I guess thanks to Talbot Cox for taking this video.