[music] Heather Fell: Rotation is key when swimming
front crawl. We talk about it all the time, but exactly how much rotation do you need?
What happens when you add breathing into the mix or change the speed of your stroke? Well,
today we're going to be digging deep into how rotation affects our overall swimming
stroke and helping you to find that perfect amount of movement for you.
[music] Heather: Some of us need more, some of us
need less. Finding that perfect balance of rotation can have a significant impact on
the efficiency of your swimming stroke. If you don't rotate enough, then you're basically
going to be missing out on engaging all of those large muscles in your back and your
lats. As a result, you'll be putting more pressure onto your shoulders and the smaller
muscles and tendons, which could even lead to an injury.
If you're at the other end of the spectrum and you're over-rotating, well, then you're
going to likely to have a very deep pulse, you're not going to be able to be so strong.
It's going to be very slow because the amount of movement your hand has to do from one side
to the other. You could even end up snaking if you're reaching past the midline. In the
ideal scenario, you want to be rotating somewhere between 35 and 45 degrees. You're naturally
going to be closer to 45 degrees when you turn to breathe. It's hard to know how much
you're rotating already. As you know, what you feel in the water is
quite often very different to what you actually look, especially when it comes to body position.
It's time for a bit of visualization. If you imagine that 90 degrees is a quarter turn,
that would be if you were swimming parallel to the side of the pool or the lane rope.
You want to try to think about being somewhere between being flat in water and up to a maximum
of halfway to that 90 degrees. There's a great drill to do to just practice and get this
in your head. If you've got some fins, it's a good idea to pop them on now.
You're going to start by kicking in that 90-degree position, with your lower arm extended out
in front of you, your upper arm is going to be resting on your hip, and you're going to
keep your body parallel to the wall all the way up. Once you've done that on both sides,
then I want you to push off the wall on your front, face down, still with one arm in front,
one arm by your side, and you're going to stay face down until you need to breathe,
and when it comes to that breathing, I want you to think about doing less than half of
that movement or up to half of that movement, turning to the side, bring your head back
down, and coming back to the middle. That should hopefully get you to start to
get an idea of the amount of rotation that is ideal. You might realize that when you're
swimming your full stroke, you have a natural tendency to turn more than 45 degrees when
you're breathing because it feels like a natural reaction to get your head out of the water,
but when you're swimming with momentum, you'll naturally have a bit of a bow wave that drops
the water surface slightly down next to your face, so you don't actually need to turn your
head very far. Of course your neck can move more than your body anyway if you need to,
so really try and focus on reducing that amount when you do breathe.
[music] Speaker: All right, it's time for a bit of
an experiment. I've actually got a tool to try out today that can measure the amount
of rotation on my left compared to my right, and with that it can give me a reading of
how efficient my stroke is from side to side. I'm intrigued to find out if the fact I have
a dominant side for breathing can have a dramatic effect on the amount of rotation I do, but
also on my overall stroke efficiency. To keep it simple today, I'm going to do three lots
of 100 meters at a steady tempo pace. The first 100 meters, I'm going to breathe
on my natural side, on my right-hand side, I'm going to take a rest, then the next 100
I'm going to breathe solely on the left. I'm going to finish up by breathing bilaterally.
[music] Speaker: I naturally find it easier breathing
to the right, so I expect that I rotate more to that side whether breathing or not. I know
I choose to be bilaterally most of the time, so I'll expect that 100 meters to be my most
balanced, but will it be my most efficient? It's time to go and grab a coffee and analyze
the difference between the three. [music]
Heather: All right, I've had my coffee and I've got the analytics back from Incus
and we're going to be focusing on velocity gain compared left and the right arm which
is the efficiency of your stroke. It's measured in percentage with 50% basically being neutral,
so anything over 50% is good. It means you're gaining velocity, you're gaining speed. If
it's under 50%, you are losing that velocity. We're also going to be comparing the amount
of rotation from left to right. Let's take a look at these numbers. I got three reps.
The first rep I was purely breathing on the right-hand side.
Now, my velocity gain on the left was 75%, on the right arm, it was 59%. Both were good,
but higher on the left. The rotation was 37 degrees to the left, 75 to the right. The
second rep, I breathe purely on the left-hand side. Here, my velocity gain was only 40%
on the left-hand side, 56% when on the right-hand side. Then the rotation on the left was 46
degrees, on the right was 64 degrees, and then the final rep, I breathed bilaterally,
so breathing on both sides. Now, my velocity gain here was the most even. On the left-hand
side it was 50%, on the right-hand side it was 60%.
The rotation to the left was 42 degrees, rotation to the right was 70 degrees. Okay, there is
a lot of data there, but let's start by looking at rotation. Obviously, I rotate more to the
right than I do to the left. This is mostly because it's been ingrained in me over years
and years of swimming of always breathing on that side. You might have noticed that
when I was breathing on the left-hand side, that actually evened out my amount of rotation
the most. When I was breathing on the right, I rotated up to 75 degrees in that direction,
which is way over the recommended amount. Well, pause there because you might think,
"Well, I simply need to breathe on the left to even things out", but we need to add in
the velocity gain here to actually look at my stroke efficiency. Now, I was most even
left to right with my velocity gain, my stroke efficiency, when I breathe bilaterally, which
sounds logical. However, when I breathed to the right solely, I was actually more efficient.
I had a higher velocity gain overall, so, I had a more efficient stroke, which then
kind of throws a spanner in the works doesn't it, because basically meaning that I am a
more efficient swimmer even though I'm rotating over the recommended amount to that right-hand
side, which I find really interesting. It obviously just shows that I've swam like
that for so long, but just correcting something isn't quite as simple and it's not going to
reflect straightaway in an improvement in your time. It's something to consider when
you're going about looking at what to change in your stroke.
[music] Speaker: Finding the correct amount of rotation
for you will reduce time and energy wasted, but you still need to work out what is most
efficient for your stroke. For me, I need to actually work on the velocity gain on my
right-hand side, which probably means I need to actually reduce the amount of rotation
and the time I'm wasting on that right. Now, I know not all of you are going to have analytics
like this available to you, but even if you can just get a coach or a friend to film you,
that's still going to give you some considerable feedback which you can then put into practice
when you're next swimming. Well, hopefully, you found it interesting
and not too mind-boggling at the end there. I find it really interesting myself. Give
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