- Right, If I asked you to think of one of the fastest
swimmers in the sport of triathlon,
I'm pretty sure most of you would think
of Lucy Charles-Barclay.
Yeah, she has brought a whole new dynamic
to the long-distance racing scene.
She basically just attacks from the off during the swim
and tries to lead from gun to tape.
And correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure she has ever
been beaten out of the water.
Now, Lucy is a great friend of the channel here at GTN,
so we've filmed loads of her over the past couple of years
and conveniently, we've got loads of swim footage of her.
So I thought I'd have a bit of fun here today.
I thought we could analyze Lucy's swim technique
and see why she's such a great swimmer,
and you never know, maybe give her some pointers, too.
(logo humming)
(relaxed trap music)
Okay, so I'm going to be running through a number of clips
that are going to be appearing here on screen,
but before we head below water,
I'm actually going to start off above water first,
just quite good practice,
to see what's going on above water with the recovery,
so if we hit play here, so Lucy has a lovely technique,
really powerful technique,
but considering she comes from a pool swimming background,
I'm actually quite surprised to see
just how straight her arm recovery is,
that you see coming over here now,
and then also how much splash she makes
as that hand enters the water,
and I'll pause that there for a second.
I have actually spoken to Lucy about this in the past
because since she's come into triathlon,
she's actually started changing her stroke ever so slightly,
so one of the things she's been working on
is her arm rate and increasing that, and basically,
how quickly her arms come over and into the water.
With that, obviously a slightly less emphasis
on that nice clean hand entry
that you might see in pool swimming.
We actually see this quite a lot with some
of the top level swimmers within triathlon,
and I guess you can call it
almost like a windmill arm effect.
I do the same, it doesn't look pretty,
but the emphasis is more on just getting that hand in,
getting that catch and getting that pull.
And the idea is that in the open water,
the water's more choppy.
Obviously that clean hand entry isn't important
but also if you're getting knocked around by other swimmers
or the water's moving underneath you and you lose a catch,
then you want that next arm to be coming over
really quickly, so Lucy's been working on that
and you can see that it's reflecting
in her technique right there.
If we press play again, of course,
there, see, she's got a really lovely rotation
with her strokes here, rotating over now,
the other shoulder coming out, and also,
it's just really nicely in time and in sync,
her shoulders and her hips both rotating together.
Now, this is really important,
and actually something that a lot of people fall short on,
so the rotation really helps to utilize
these much bigger muscle groups
and more muscles, actually, in the body.
So if you compare someone that's swimming
flat in the water and actually,
they're just hammering their pecs, their biceps,
maybe a couple of other smaller muscles, but that's it.
When we start rotating onto our side,
we're then also utilizing our lat muscles, our back muscles,
it stabilizes us in the water and it becomes
a much, much more powerful stroke.
Another thing also, again,
if you're swimming flat in the water,
think about that surface area in the water.
From shoulder to shoulder,
it's almost submerged in the water,
and you're almost trying to plow that through the water.
As soon as we start rotating onto our side,
we're reducing that surface area,
almost halving it every time we rotate over.
So not only are we utilizing more muscles,
we're also reducing the surface area in the water,
so it's a win-win.
I'm also noticing a few other interesting things
with Lucy's technique here,
so I think it's time we head underwater.
Okay, so now we've got Lucy
swimming at us head-on underneath the water.
We can see that our her line is pointing more or less
directly beneath her to the bottom of the pool.
She's got that great rotation that I was just talking about
but now I want to talk about how she pulls,
and also how her hand tracks underneath the water.
Now, she's got an incredibly strong pull, as we'd expect,
and a really good bend in the elbow
that allows that strong pull.
But interestingly,
her hand does not track underneath the body
quite as the textbooks would suggest you should.
So if I pause it now with her right arm,
because this is particularly bad, I guess,
as, or not as the textbook suggests, it comes really wide.
We should expect the hand to be more or less
underneath the body, but that looks particularly wide.
And what this could actually do
is force her over to the other side.
So the right arm's going to force her to the left.
However, if we keep playing it here,
her recovering arm entering sweeps ever so slightly left
and she does this every time of her stroke,
I've looked through all her footage,
and what that does is it almost automatically corrects her
and pushes her back into alignment.
And this is probably something that Lucy isn't even
aware that she's doing, it just happens.
Now for those watching this out there,
this isn't something that you should be striving to do.
You should be looking for a really nice symmetrical stroke,
but I guess it's just really refreshing to see
such a good swimmer doing these things too.
(funky music)
Right, so side-on here now, and we can really start
to see why Lucy's such a good swimmer.
So with that rotation that we were just talking about,
it allows her to enter with the hand,
scoot forward a extra fraction or so with the hand,
and then we go into the catch phase,
which she is incredibly good at.
She looks incredibly strong,
she doesn't allow her elbow to drop
and she has a really good purchase on the water,
she's applying a good, even pressure
throughout the whole stroke.
Now, this helps in a couple of ways,
so one of which is to remove any dead spots
that we might see when we analyze
a lot of other swimmers' strokes.
And what this means is that essentially
missing out that first part of the stroke,
the catch phase, the stroke would just slip through it,
and then we'd start to get traction or purchase
on the water during the pull phase.
Now I guess I kind of liken this a little bit
to if you had a really pronounced heel strike
when you're running, that heel goes out,
it's like a braking force, slows you down,
and then you've got to get it back over that
to get your speed back up,
and that's a little bit like missing that catch phase,
we start to slow down, and then into the pull phase
you're trying to get our speed back up again,
so you're very stop-start.
It's quite an inefficient way of swimming, but as with Lucy,
she's applying a nice even pressure throughout
and not having to overly exert
or try and put a lot of force down at one particular point
to get that speed back up.
Another thing it helps with,
and we'll see when Lucy pops back up on screen now,
is that it also helps sort of lift in the water,
so by applying that pressure
at the front of the stroke in the catch phase,
helps to lift her ever so slightly in the water,
which again, reduces that surface area in the water,
and I guess a little bit like a powerboat
that's trying to skim along the surface of the water,
or something like that.
Well, another thing to note also is that
Lucy really ticks that high-elbowed box
that we so often hear people talking about,
so as she goes through that catch phase
she keeps the elbow really nice and high
as she's applying pressure down through the water,
and then into that pull phase.
Now that pull phase is essentially when the hand,
or the palm of the hand, is pointing back towards your feet
or the opposite end of the pool, and for Lucy,
this seems to be around in line with her head.
Now, as she actually starts the catch,
she actually initiates the rotation and roll
back towards the other side,
so she goes through the catch phase through the pull
all the way through to pushing out at the back of the hip.
And as she's doing that,
her other hand is entering at the front, starting the catch,
and providing that continuous momentum forward,
but as she starts that,
she's already fully rotated onto the other side.
You would also notice that through all these clips today
that her fingers are actually quite relaxed.
In some cases, you might actually see
a little bit of a gap between the fingers.
Now, there is actually increasing evidence out there
to suggest that this is faster,
and that's why a lot of the top swimmers do this.
Now, just to make clear,
she has her fingers relaxed rather than being all floppy,
and it's actually just, they're just naturally open,
rather than her forcing them open,
but yeah, really interesting to see that.
Right, well now let's move on to talk about the breathing.
And I'm going to revert back to one of these original clips
because it just highlights it really well
here with Lucy's stroke.
And Lucy's actually breaking
some of the textbook rules again,
but obviously making it work for herself,
so let's hit play here.
What we would want to see is that the eye line
is pointing down towards the bottom of the pool
and when we go to take a breath,
we actually just rotate the head around with the body.
What Lucy actually does is, as she goes to take the breath,
she lifts her head up and her eye line up
so she's looking forward, and then rotating
the head around to take the breath,
so it's just a little bit surprising there,
which we can also see from a side-on angle
here too as Lucy comes into shot now.
For a lot of people, this would actually force their legs
to sink almost like a seesaw action.
As the head comes up, legs sink.
But Lucy does a fantastic job
of keeping herself flat and neutral in the water.
Now, this obviously also probably comes from the fact
that she's been doing more open water swimming,
and swimming more in triathlons and having to sight,
so being able to sight more naturally
without it impacting the stroke, the better,
which Lucy is doing superbly.
Now, what she's also doing is actually helping
by, when the hand goes in and catches,
that's applying pressure on the water
and allowing the slight lift with the head,
so the eye line comes up.
Obviously, if she was sighting,
she'd lift her eyes out a little bit higher.
And then as that recovering arm comes around,
she then snaps her head round
to side rotate and takes her breath.
So it's always sight and then breathe.
(relaxed trap music)
And finally, the leg kick.
Now, if we were to be comparing two polar opposite swimmers,
sprinter versus a long-distance 10K open water swimmer,
their leg kicks are going to be wildly different, obviously.
Now the sprinter's going to have a very fast leg kick,
something like an eight-beat leg kick,
so that means eight leg kicks for every one arm cycle,
whereas the open water long-distance swimmer
is going to have something like a two-beat leg kick,
so it's almost going to look like they're just
dragging their legs along and it's just acting
like a balance for their stroke.
Now, if we look at Lucy's kick,
now she has something in the region
of a four-beat leg kick, so it's not too over-the-top.
It's providing some propulsion,
but it's not going to be tiring her too much,
and I do know, having watched her during racing
and also doing race pace efforts in training,
it doesn't change too much from that.
And there's good reason for that, I mean,
triathlon is still a long-distance event,
it's an endurance event,
so there is an element of having to save your legs,
particularly given that we've got
a bike and run leg to come.
Now, in terms of her technique,
you can see that it comes from her hips,
and we've got a ever-so-slight flex through the knee
and then following all the way down to the feet
and flicking off at the toes.
Now, Lucy is very lucky given that she comes
from a swimming background, swum for years,
she's got really nice, supple ankles,
so you can really see that she's got a very good
flick off at the end and really providing
that extra propulsion in her kick.
Well, as I mentioned already,
it's very rare to find the perfect technique.
You'll find with most top-level swimmers,
they'll have some slight discrepancies
with their techniques or unusual bits to their technique,
as we've seen with Lucy today.
But she clearly makes it work
and it's still an absolutely incredible stroke.
It is worth pointing out obviously,
Lucy comes from an international swimming background,
she's spent countless hours in the pool,
so some of those slight micro-adjustments that she's making
are just happening subconsciously,
and that's something that will come
a lot more naturally to her than it will
for someone that maybe hasn't spent
quite as much time in the pool.
So I really would advise trying to learn
the textbook techniques first,
and really nailing the fundamentals of the stroke
before going on to adapt the stroke further.
Now, if you do like today's video and you like Lucy Charles
then please do hit that thumbs-up button,
and if you'd like to see more videos like this from GTN,
just hit that globe icon on the screen right now.
If you'd like to see a video that we shot with Lucy Charles
and some of her own swim tips,
you can see that by clicking down here,
and if you'd like to see our pool versus open water
swim technique video where we compare
the differences between the two,
then you can see that by clicking just down here.