- So, there's some footage here that I want to show you
to explain what I mean about tautness.
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Everything is stretched out basically as long as it can be.
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- I am piece by piece teaching on how to hold
different portions of your body properly.
- Morning, trainiacs.
It is currently minus 13, five 46 in the morning,
and we are locked out of the Pan Am Pool.
It's a tundra out there.
I joke about being on the frozen tundra,
but we are on the frozen tundra.
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Alright, I'm going out there.
Wish me luck.
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So later today, we are doing a podcast interview
with Jerry Rodriguez,
and doing research yesterday,
I gleaned a couple of really good tips
about tautness, tautness.
We'll talk about that after I swim.
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So there's some footage here that I want to show you
to explain what I mean about tautness
before we get into what Jerry Rodriguez is talking about.
Here we've got footage of Trevor from our swim group,
who is around, I think, just under a five minute,
30 second per 400 meter time trial.
I, on the bottom, am about a six minute, nine second.
Seems like that 39 seconds is not a huge deal,
but when you get into a race,
he's going to be somewhere around a minute
to two minutes faster than I am,
even in a wetsuit.
Take out a wetsuit and just do a non wetsuit swim,
he's going to be like well into that two minutes,
because he's just a better swimmer.
He's constantly going past me.
And what we can look at here is we've got
a side on angle.
If you look at Trevor from the foot to the fingertips,
everything is stretched out basically as long
as it could be.
His leg is almost straight here,
his body is really stretched out.
His arm is way in front of him,
whereas my leg, even though I'm kicking here,
you can see that it's not like
I'm really trying to be long and lean.
My body has this V shape,
so I'm not stretched out as long as he is.
My arm, same thing.
I'm kind of tucking it in,
and he's, I want to say, three or four inches taller
than I am, but from foot to fingertips,
his vessel, like the entire length of his body,
is probably stretched out more than a foot longer,
and we can see it from the other angle too here,
where my feet are just a little bit cut off,
so I wouldn't be quite so far in behind him,
but you can see that there's probably a difference
of 12 to 14 inches,
and in real life, what this means is,
let's say you had, in a water,
on one side of you, a long, stiff, straight log
that was floating in the water.
On the other side of you is a pool noodle.
Even though the pool noodle weighs so much less,
if you try to push the log, it flies.
You try to push the pool noodle,
it basically doesn't go anywhere
because something that is all wiggly
creates a ton of drag,
so what Jerry Rodriguez talks about
is having tautness in your body,
strengthening your core so you can get long and limber
and stretch out, and how hydrodynamics works,
basically the drag of our body interacts with the water.
It's like aerodynamics, but in the water.
The longer a vessel is, the faster it's going to be
in the water, so the two drills that Jerry recommends
to improve your tautness is one,
vertical kicking, and you can start out
with as little as 15 seconds,
and what that does is you'll feel it instantly,
is you'll feel your body elongate
and you'll feel tightness right here in your solar plexus
and on the side.
You'll feel your body starting to pull itself
because it's really got no choice.
What I then did was after about 15 seconds
of vertical kicking, I'd start kicking towards my stomach,
holding that feeling in my stomach and my core,
as well as I could, and it allowed me
to get the sensation of what a long, taut vessel is like.
The second thing that he recommends,
I've been talking about for the last few weeks,
but I've never thought about it in regards to this,
is kicking with a snorkel on,
now as opposed to kicking to practice your kick
and propulsion where, for most of us age groupers,
because we don't have flexible ankles,
if we developed an awesome kick,
it might amount to 10 to 12% of our total propulsion.
However, if we can use that kick to practice the feeling
of long tautness by having a snorkel,
stretching a kick board way out in front of us,
and keeping our body nice and elongated,
that's a way that we can practice being taut.
You know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to actually let you hear it
from the horse's mouth himself,
right from the man.
We're going to get Jerry Rodriguez on a video
after we do our podcast
and you can hear him explain tautness, taut, taut.
I like the sounds of that, tautness.
Which I think most recently,
your special project has been Lionel Sanders,
who has obviously been a.
- Name a few people might have heard.
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So we're here with Jerry.
We just did the podcast,
and as I just mentioned before,
I've been talking about tautness,
your concept about structure and posture in the water
since listening to your podcast about it yesterday.
Probably just easiest if you explain what tautness is,
and how people can work on it.
- Tautness is the body's structural integrity
and how we hold our posture in the water when swimming.
The thing is, it's difficult to do,
or more difficult to do in water than it is on land
because of the heavy subsidy of your weight.
Once in water, a person's weight is displaced quite a bit
and it's a lot easier to sort of get slouchy or scrunchy
in the water, so we have to learn
how to hold ourselves properly,
so we need to do a number of things in training,
in the swimming pool, to have the body recognize,
and the mind, especially, what you need to be thinking about
while swimming, and it starts off with that foundation,
which is tautness, how you hold yourself properly.
You know, you can have all the power in the world,
but if your structural integrity's really loose,
that power is displaced in lots of different ways.
It's not going where you want it to go.
As an example, you know those little toys that kids have,
long, skinny, torpedo.
- Okay, yeah.
- They're firm in structure, right?
And you have the little wings in the back
and you push them in the water
and they go really fast.
Remember as a little kid playing with those things?
- Yeah, yeah.
- Well there's a reason why they go really fast,
and they go fast because of how they're shaped
and the structural integrity that they have to them.
If those things were soft and pliable,
they wouldn't go very fast underwater.
- So the couple of drills that I tried out today
that you had recommended, one is the vertical kicking
and the second was kicking with a snorkel,
but not for propulsion or working on your kick,
but for body position and feeling that long,
stretched out position.
Is there anything else that swimmers should be working on?
- I believe it's in podcast number 41 or 42
where I really go into a step by step breakdown
on how to achieve tautness
because you're not going to get it in one session.
This is several weeks' time you need to progress through it,
so you'll start off with simple kicking with fins
and learning how to hold your upper body properly,
not having any rocking of the shoulders,
and it's pice by piece teaching on how to hold
different portions of your body properly,
so very progressive in nature.
- So, there you go, tautness.