To swim faster you need to create a stronger support.
In our swimming camps, some people have a good swimming technique but cannot accelerate,
they just have one constant speed. After careful analysis we noticed that there are two
very subtle skills you can improve that will make you swim faster!
The first thing is the shoulder shrug. A shoulder shrug is basically pulling your shoulder closer
to your ear. In swimming when you pull up your arm you do an upward rotation of the scapula.
As you move your arm “down”, you release the shrug. The problem is that this is
not a linear movement. You don’t just shrug and un-shurg if you want to swim
faster. You need to keep your scapula up as you anchor your hand and forearm down.
Let me explain that again. As your hand moves from above your head to out and down,
your shoulder should be close to your ear. If by the time your hand is pointing down, your
scapula is downward rotated, you will have a very weak support in the power phase of the stroke.
I feel like that wasn’t clear enough.
I’ll use another method to explain this further.
Aaron is no longer a beginner swimmer. He knows how to keep balance, use his legs correctly,
hold the rotation, bend the elbows, breathe quickly,
and do the S shape pull. But when he is swimming next to Belake, he cannot keep up.
They are both doing almost the same movements but Belake knows something
Aaron doesn’t. He knows how to set an early vertical forearm before pulling back quickly.
Aaron just pulls his hands back as quickly as he can. If we slow things down we can see that Belake
slowly puts his forearm in place first and then
accelerates the movement of the arm. Aaron just pulls the arm at the same speed.
Out of all the most common swimming mistakes, this is probably one of the most difficult ones to
correct. This drill called sculling helps. It will make Aaron feel the initial part of the stroke
instead of rushing it. It also helps to improve the feel of the water
while maintaining a shoulder shrug.
Swimming butterfly would be a great exercise to help him accelerate the arm
once it is properly set up. But his ironman competition
is in 2 month and he doesn’t have time to learn and perfect the butterfly swim.
So we recommend swimming with paddles like in a past video,
but focusing on the diagonal power phase of the stroke.
Outside of the water, we advice doing pull ups.
And strengthening the scapular muscles with this dryland video by Skills NT.
The other skill that can make you swim a lot faster is streamlining the lower
body. As you know, most of the propulsion in long distance freestyle swimming comes from the arms.
The legs play a mayor role in slowing people down. We talked about how difficult it is
when they are sinking. But it is equally important that they remain in line with the
torso. Otherwise they will be creating a lot of resistance from both sides.
To keep the legs in line you need to slightly tight your core muscles. Make yourself long
like we talked in the beginning of this series.
Now that Aaron started to pull more effectively with a shoulder shrug,
his body will use his hand as a pivot point. If his core is not tight,
the body will simply wrap around the pivot point. Aaron is basically a cooked spaghetti.
If the core is tight specially on the opposite side of the arm pulling, the legs become the
keel that will help you move fast! The keel is this fin that extends downward from the boat.
It helps maintain the direction of the boat when the wind is pushing it in diagonal.
You didn’t need to know that, but it might help you visualize the function of the legs and
core when pulling. You need to keep the hips straight from this angle. Remember
that they do rotate on the X axis but they should not move from one side to the other.
It took Aaron a couple of tries but once he got it, he moved faster than
ever. He kept up with Belake’s speed! Although Belake was just cooling down.
As you can see, Aaron looks good underwater. Above the water his arms
need a lot of improvement still. Click on the next video here to learn how to do a clean entry.
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See you there! SWIM FAST!