Please take a look at the video of me swimming and let me know what I'm doing wrong?

Question

I'm an extremely slow swimmer. I've been doing triathlons for the past 3 years and swimming is by far my weakness. I swim about 3 times a week and have even swam with the local masters team for about 6 months. But it seems like nothing I do makes me faster. In 750 meter lake swims I average like 21 or 22 minutes (but my bike and run is in the top 10-15% range); and for a 500 yard pool swim i hit about 12 minutes.

Last night I had a nice lady video tape me in the pool. She got underwater footage, straight on, and from the side. Could you please take a look (I'm in the white cap):

1) Please let me know what are the MAJOR things I'm doing wrong

2) How to correct them

There are 6 videos in total on the playlist I posted on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5C58F2AD45340EDF

When I looked at the videos last night it seems like

1) I cross over

2) I'm swimming uphill

3) My cadence is too slow

All I want is to be an average swimmer.

- Thanks,

AJ

Answer 1

First a couple of disclaimers: I'm not a coach and I'm old school technique. I go by Doc Councilman's books.

That said, here is what I see: In the water, you are pulling through with you hands outside your shoulders. According to Councilman, you want your hand to trace an inverted question mark. As you pull through, your elbow should bend and your hand should come towards they centerline of your body. Your forearm will be parallel the the bottom of the pool mid stroke. As you pull past midway, you had will actually go across your centerline. As you finish the stroke, your hand comes back across your body towards your hip.

This video show the bent elbows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6qIhkuzT...

Answer 2

to tell you the truth, you aren't that bad. One thing i did notice is that you don't bend your elbows when you're under the water. if the arm is under, you want to push the water back with your arm, but mostly by your elbow. It should be a hard push, because that is where you get the speed from. You don't get it from your hands going out of the water fast.

Also, your kicking wasn't bad but it looked like sometimes you had too big kicks and were kicking the air a little. Try to do fast smaller kicks, because then you will only kick water. Kicking air does nothing to help.

Answer 3

Your arms are too strait throughout your stroke. They need to scoop the water on the pull and recover smoothly back into the water. Also, you're not kicking near hard enough. You need to increase your kicks. A good way to help that is to try a 6-beat drill. In that drill you kick 6 quick kicks and then take a stroke, then 6 more quick kicks and a stroke. This drill helps a lot in Freestyle and Backstroke. Other than that, you seem to be doing alright. Try picking up the pace of your practice and work on some sprinting as well. This will help to build your speed, and then you can work on the endurance at a faster speed.

Answer 4

Your not propelling yourself through the water. Your kind of floating and slowly moving forward. Think about going forward. Push the water with your hands as hard as you can and kick, but not thrash about.

Answer 5

To start off, it's great that you provided us these videos so you can make honest improvement, that takes guts, especially when you know something's wrong. I play water polo, so I'm pretty confident that I can help you.

Here's my observations and recommendations:

1) Not kicking fast enough. From the side view, notice that your feet and legs are trailing down in the water. This incline presents more body area, and creates more drag. Try kicking more so that your feet are at the top of the water.

2) As you've observed, the crossing over. Kicking more should stabilize your body. Try thinking of your spine as a flat board, floating flat on the top.

3) Breathing every stroke. Yes, I know air is important. But try to gradually work your way to breathing every four strokes. Also, stretch your neck so your forehead is level with the water, i.e. eyes forward. This way, when you turn your head to breathe, you don't need to move your face as much, and may reduce the amount your body twists. When you do breathe, move your lower jaw just so that your open mouth is about the water, you shouldn't need to turn your head more than is necessary.

4) Reach. Each stroke, reach forward with your arm and grab a couple of extra inches. They add up. And when you reach forward, make sure that your hands slice the water at shoulder width. This should again reduce the cross over some.

5) Finally, follow through with your arm stroke. Initially, you will really feel this in the forearms. As you PULL yourself through the water (with cupped hands like a scoop), keep that hand cupped and once it's past the point where your arm makes a 90 degree angle with your body (and the water), it should be PUSHing the water (with the cupped hand, major emphasis), and all the way out. When your hand leaves the water, there should be a little splash from the water still in your hand.

I know it's a lot, and it's nearly impossible to be conscious of all these things at once whilst improving. But try to make a schedule like, work on breathing one day, stroke another, kicking another, and then slow cumulative work on another. Best of luck to you!

Answer 6

First things first I would suggest you go to http://www.goswim.tv

They have a ton of drills and videos that will help you out.  While their DVDs are great, the stuff you can get for free online is all you really need.

That said you have 2.5 MAJOR things wrong.

The first is your body balance.  As you mentioned you're swimming uphill.  To fix this you'll want to do the 'balancing on boards' drill.  Take 1-2 kickboards and place them on your chest (roughly from you nipple line to the top of your hips) and float with your arms and legs making an 'X'.  As you float try changing your head position and pressing the "T" (forehead to sternum and across your shoulders) so that your hips rise and your lower back becomes flat.  This should be a comfortable, almost relaxed position.  Once you have that down, bring the arms and legs in slowly so that you are in an "I" shape, if you're properly aligned you should be able to balance without a problem, if not you'll roll off your boards. The next step is to put away the boards and try to establish the same position in the water and just kick (using a center mount snorkel helps immensely here).  You just want to feel that good body balance, speed is not an issue here.  Once you feel comfortable, start swimming trying to maintain that good body line.  

The other things wrong have to do with your arms.  Right now at the catch (start of the pull) you're pressing down, dropping your elbow and pulling with your hand, then releasing from the water with your elbow.  You want to come in and establish an Early Vertical Forearm (EVF).  Drills to help this are fist drill (swim with a closed fist, I like to give my swimmers small bits cut off a noodle or a thin pvc pipe to hold).  This will allow you to feet the water on your forearms.  Catchup drill watching your hand enter and pull (yes I know it messes with your body line but you're working on the pull).  Watch where your hand enters and how it pulls.  Try and get it to look like the videos on the goswim site.

The last .5 thing wrong is the way your arms recover.  You have a limited body roll, which will not being ideal there is nothing too wrong about.  But what this is doing is causing you to bend the arm in a funky manor to get the hand forward.  I would suggest thinking about using a straight arm recovery.  Let the hand go all the way around the out side.  The recovery should feel completely relaxed.  The reason I called this a .5 thing wrong is it is related to your pull.  Fix one and the other should get better.

As for your cadence, and as others have mentioned your kick.  They're fine for now.  As a top level runner/biker you won't have a strong kick in swimming.  Running and biking work slightly different muscles slightly differently than required for a great swimming kick.  Also in a triathlon swim all you want the legs to do is help maintain the body line.  You don't want to rely on them for propulsion as you'll need them for the remaining two thirds of the race.

Good luck.

Answer 7

Here's what I see

1. Make sure your hands, once they hit the water, are cupped and pushing the water forcefully down to your feet. Follow straight down the middle of your body to do this. That will help you propel faster.

2.  When you take your hands out of the water, you have a good bend of the elbow, put your hands straight to prevent the airflow from pushing against your hands, then, as above, cup them just before hitting the water, this will increase your speed some.

3. Your kick. You are kicking more from your knees than from your hip. If you want that kick to go faster, kick from the hip only flexing the knees slightly (you don't lock your knees, just let them flex naturally) but make that kick come mostly from the hip, and keep kicking! Your body should be fairly straight. Hope that helps some, you are a good swimmer and must have had some lessons somewhere!

Answer 8

I'm not a coach but I'm a college swimmer and I have some of the same technique problems. you do crossover passed your shoulders as you enter, which throws off your hip rotation, also you tend to automatically retract your arm as soon as it enters the water, you should try reaching out as far as you can straight out from your shoulder when you enter, keeping your arm close to the surface of the water, this will give you a bigger pull with a longer reach, and more power per stroke when you finish the cycle. Hope this helps :)

Answer 9

I noticed a couple of things that you can fix:

1) Stretch your arms out farther in front of your head, keep them long. When you bring them down towards your waist, pull straight down, try not to cross over.

2) KICK!! Kicking strength can be improved by strengthing your butt, (seriously, im not making this up), and practicing. Try swimming more often if you can, and use a kickboard. Kick a lap as fast as you can, rest as long as you need and do it again. Work up to kicking even more laps fast.

3) Don't be afraid to get tired! When swimming a 500 in pool, build it up so that at the end, you are going as fast as you can. Don't start out slow, but start out at an easy pace.

Answer 10

u look like an average swimmer to me :]

Answer 11

I'm a triathlete, not a swimmer per say, but I've had some great coaching and underwater analysis for several years and so here are what my coaches would say:

One basic thing I would recommend to start off with is your glide. When your arm is in front, you're almost immediately pulling and you don't really have a glide. So you're working a lot, but not going as far as you could. To correct this, you can do the catch up drill. This one technique and drill improved my swimming dramatically!  Focus on keeping your extended arm--- extended---- until your other arm has "caught up" to it, then pull. Imagine you have something in your hand that you want to pass to the other hand in front of you before you're allowed to pull. At first, you may feel no glide and like you're not going anywhere, but if you continue to work on a strong pull with high elbows underwater you'll begin to glide more. Don't worry so much about your kick, it looks fine to me.

After you get the glide down a couple of other things you could work on are:

When your arm enters the water, reach out and then pull. When you pull, roll your body. Once you start reaching out further to grab more water, a strong pull will naturally cause you to roll.

1. "Pressing the buoy" ; Focus on pressing your chest down to get your legs and butt up, thus leveling your body. This is how you swim "downhill." I'm still working on this too.

2. Your elbows could be higher both in and out of the water. I would focus on high elbows in the water with your pull. High elbows until you're 90 degrees with your body and then pull and follow all the way through. You want the path with the most resistance, so you're grabbing more water and thus propelling yourself forward. Remember to pull all the way through.  I'm still working on high elbows and it takes a lot of practice. I haven't checked out that web page that the other guy suggested, but it sounds like a good idea b/c it's difficult to explain arm position.

3. This one is hard, but it helps to keep you level without any drag and that's keeping your head down when you breathe. If you have a good pull and glide, it's easier to do. So basically when you breathe, the top of your head goes down, this creates a bow wave over your cap/head and there's this perfect pocket of air for your mouth to breathe. Your head position didn't look bad at all and I wouldn't worry about this technique right now.

I hope this helps a little. Check out the swim web sites for drills to do and just focus on one thing at a time. Happy swimming!

Answer 12

WEll from above water it doesnt look too bad. Just from watching that i would say - when you do go swim- Do some sprints too, where you go down and back as fast as you can.

Just like you would do different Runs/ bikes training, some working on improving distance and some speed. You have to do the same in the pool.

BUt if you look at the first underwater one, i think i see something that will help alot.

When your hands/ arms first inter the water- they kind of flouat out straight in front of you for a 2nd. ITs jsut for a 2nd- but this is one 2nd where the only forward propultion is comming from your feet.

You look good about getting your elbows up and out of the water, but makes sure once your arms/hands go in, you are really digging, and your hands are pushing as mush water back wards, as fast as possible.

Think about a row boat, and the row dipping into the water, or the motor on the back of a speed boat, Its in constant circlular motion

When im swimming im always thinking "DIG" with my arms, really focusing on my triceps when i push back as much water as possible.

Good LUCK!!

Answer 13

well you're crossing your arms over your head definitely.  Also you don't want to breath every other stroke, try every three or four.  Also try to reach out farther in front of you your arms are going into the water right in front of your head reach out farther before letting your hand enter the water and make sure you reach all the way out and completely rotate your body to one side.

Answer 14

I swam competitively for 13 years at a national level and coached for a time.  Most everything everyone said is right on, but a few more tips that have helped most people.  

You just need some tweaks.  

The first piece I would offer is to start to think about swiming on your sides.  Meaning you want to try picture a metal poll down your back that is fusuing your neck, spine, hips, all together.  The movement for the rotation should lead from your hips  When you breath, rotate your body to breath, don't just turn your head.  To practice this, get one of the noodles and put it at your ankles (if you need it to floar add a pull bouy).  Then rotate, starting from your hips.  Over exagerate the movement from your hips when you start.  You want only the outside of your ankles to touch the noodle and only the front when you are turning.  Do this relatively slowly and get used to it.

Getting this down will allow you to balance your stroke and get your right sholder out of the water.  Right now, since you are mostly flat, it's catching water and you are throwing it forward.  By rotating you will get your shoulder out of the water and will help you extend your reach that everyone is mentioning.

This will also help you keep your arms out in front of you for longer.  Who ever said not to keep them out in front, is a bit foolish.  Most times, people aren't keeping their arms in front of them long enough and puts them off balance.  You want to keep the out there to create more surface for the water to push against and keep you balanced to propel you through the water.  This will be keep when you are on your sides and really finishing your stroke.  Which leads me to....

FINISH your stroke.  Accentuate the finish.  Keep your thumb out and make sure that it hits your mid thigh.  But don't forget to continue to lead with your elbow coming first out of the water.  You will see the greatest gains in this one activity.

Do what everyone is saying about your dropping your elbow in your under water stroke.

To help you swim down hill, think about pressing your cheek to the bottom and end of the pool.  The kick board drill will work.  Thinking about pushing your cheek while you are swimming will reinforce the kick board drill.

And as some one else said.  Do some sprints or faster paced work.  Start with 4-6 one lengthers.  then build until you can do 4-6 laps.

Also, don't worry about your kick.  You have a solid kick.  As the legs are the largest consumer of oxygen, you don't want to expend too much to them.  Nothing wrong with your kick, but this comes from a mile swimmer that barely has a two beat kick.

I can give more, but this is a good place to start.  Good luck, you aren't too far off.  

Now if some one could help me learn how to ride a bike to save my life.