Dear Team,
It was a session of techniques and stretching... boring as hell I supposed for those looking to burn some calories from new year.. somehow, I'd prefer to look at the big picture of racing well in the near future.
Stretching was fairly straight forward. I shall leave it to the pool work each time you come. But as mentioned, the flexibility in that shoulder and pec areas are crucial in swim performance due to the fact that loosened muscles relax much more easily than tight constantly tensed up ones. And relaxing while holding a position is Key in swim success.
Technique wise, we revisited 3 fundamental concepts of swimming.
1) Keeping the hip and the legs afloat.
2) The Pull.
3) The Recovery.
KEEPING THE HIP AND LEGS AFLOAT:
To keep the hips up, we've been through MANY solutions and fortunately, they are all very simple and easy to do by themselves..
The unfortunate part is in order to swim well, you have to do every single part all at the same time as you apply force and still control your breathing rhythm... Sounds complicated? I Think So Too.
Solutions:
1) Swimming downhill
Everybody is into this because it is like you don't need to do anything and just bury your chest deeper into the water while keeping the head aligned with the body's plane and you can apparently keep your hip afloat.
The one thing that coaches are not sharing very publicly is that you have to activate at least 3 more muscle groups in isometric contraction to keep the body in a horizontal plane. (Maybe they don't know how to talk about this too since coaches are not necessarily fitness instructor/physio/osteopath who knows all about neuro-muscular activation, I don't know.).
The three muscles are your basic core muscles that allow you to stand tall and erected with a proud chest-up posture:
i) Erector Spinae
ii) Glutes
iii) Hamstrings
iv) Calves (Auto activated through the plantar flexion in the freestyle kick)
Muscle groups i, ii and iii are the basic muscle groups that swimmers of every swim stroke have to be strong at. Because when activated correctly, they help you maintain the high (relative to water surface) hip position that you obtained from swimming downhill (pressing the chest deeper) and also keeps your legs from dropping.
There are many swimmers who were trying too hard to apply the press-the-damn-chest-down method and while it kept the hip up, the head was dropping and also the legs, this position looks more like the mouth of a unhappy smiley :(.
The concept is this: if you don't consciously straighten your body and walk tall, you'll always hunch because of gravity.
As a bonus, if you're activating all those muscle groups together with the obliques and you are also rotating from your hips, then your body will most likely have very minimal lateral crunching/swaying movements in the water.
For those who can't follow me:
Reason why activating those three muscle groups work: Glutes and hamstrings are hip extensor muscles and they move the heavy buttock up towards the surface. Your erector spinae is your trunk extensor, which means it pulls your core to your head area up to the surface. Voila, the whole thing is hugging the surface!
THE PULL:
The easy part - It is just Catch (Slow) - Pull (Hug it in) - Push (Faster).
Now, to do the catch...
After recovery, with your arm extended weightlessly/effortlessly in the water, start by pitch your hand slightly downwards and bring your wrist above your hand WHILE flexing your elbow with the fingers gradually pointing towards the floor.
Imagine you're swimming over a beer barrel, your hand goes over the barrel, the wrist flexes to conform to the barrel's shape.. Let your arm continue going over the barrel but keep the wrist above the hand and finger tips pointing down and the palm and wrist in contact with the barrel at all time. As you keep going down, your elbow has to flex slightly to conform to the barrel to keep the contact on the barrel.
That is your catch position.
To do the pull...
After the catch position, imagine hugging the barrel close under your armpit and chest...
To do the push...
Once the barrel is in contact with your chest, push it backwards at a speed faster than your catch. IMAGINE: The result of that push should make the barrel ROLL BACKWARDS and not fly.
***Make sure you push it backwards and not upwards out of water.
For those who can't follow me:
Attend my swim class.
THE RECOVERY:
The recovery phase is SO important because every push should be so powerful that it'll tear the houses down with the wave you create backwards with your propulsion, don't you deserve a rest in each stroke to get ready for the next one?
Yes you do because only with this rest phase when you consciously "soften"/loosen/relax your rear delt, lats and triceps and every shoulder stabilizer muscles that you get to have a short but considerable amount of Relief from the tension created from your powerful output.
The confusing thing is the recovery doesn't occur because you did the recovery phase.. It occur only when you use your brain to tell your muscle to stop contracting and relax at the most extended elbow position (end of push phase).
Another important thing about recovery is that a properly placed arm from the recovery phase allow you to continue smoothly to the next stroke's catch phase --- This point, I shan't illustrate here because it is too visual for me to put into words.
Start of recovery of arm is when the push phase has ended. While the whole arm is still submerged in the water by your hips.
Step 1: Consciously relax the whole arm (THIS IS HARD IF YOU REALLY DID PUSH BACK HARD and you don't have a good sense of body control/awareness.)
Step 2: Flex the elbow and bring the ELBOW out of water, keep the hands close to your body (If you extend your thumb, you'd touch your body)
Step 3: Once the elbow is out of water and the fingers clear the surface, rotate your shoulder joint forward and bring your ELBOW forward. Until the elbow reaches the forehead (or ear, depending on how flexible you are), the elbow must be in front of the hands. Feel the slight stretch at the lats.
Step 4: Drop the thumb and index finger into the water surface in front of your forehead and gradually extend your arm into the water. DO NOT EXTEND BEFORE YOUR ARM ENTER.
Step 5: Fully extend the arm, including the shoulder area.
***TAKE NOTE: Elbow should be the highest point throughout the recovery. The hands should be as close to the body as possible as the shoulder rotate. Do not turn the palm outwards while recovering the elbow forward (exaggerated finger tip entry) as it will cause the deltoids to tense up.
For those who can't follow me:
Attend my swim class.
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Thank you all for your patience. All of you who came for the class, you have no idea how beautifully you guys and girls swam on the last lap getting comments from the lifeguards and coach fred himself saying that your recovery looks beautiful.
Now, its time to work on the catch so that it doesn't just look beautiful, it should be GODDAMN FAST too.. :)
Cheers
KK
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