One of my regular swimmers, I’ll call her Sophie,  is a beautifully minded 64 year old woman who drives 90 minutes every other week to take a lesson.  I think it’s like therapy for both of us. She simply LOVES swimming, and is happy as long as she is in the water.   In the summer, after she swims with me, she drives home and then swims with her tri club (mostly 30 years younger than her) in their open water swims in Cheat Lake, WV.  

Our first half dozen lessons or so were all about refining the drills, balance, streamline, glide, superman, skate, etc,etc.

Well as we continue to swim together ,the lessons get both more challenging and more intersesting . More challenging in that I have to look harder for what needs help.  More interesting in that it’s so much fun for both of us to spend an hour on a simple body movement, like how the shoulderblades shift while she swims.   (She loved that lesson).

Today Sophie was feeling a little bit blue.  You see last week she brought her iPad to the pool (for no good reason, it was just in her bag), and since she had it, I used it to film her swimming and some drills.

She watched and was terribly disappointed in herself. I’ll need to resend  her the videos from last spring to remind her how much she has improved.  When I asked her what bothered her the most, she said, "I don’t look like Shinji when I swim!"  Well that was  a tall order, but we were up for it.

The biggest flaw in her current swimming was a dropped left elbow in the left skate position.  It was almost like her elbow was parked as far down below her as she could get it, with the forearm meekly reaching forward nearly a full arms length below her shoulder.

I’ve noticed this in the past and assumed that it was due to some arthritis, limitations in her neck & shoulder mobility and never spent excessive time on the position.  But today, i notcied that she was fully capable of a good skating arm on the right.  Furthermore when she stood up, she had full range of motion of her shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck…there was no good excuse for her arm to be hanging so low!

The process of correcting it included 2 basic parts. The first one was just developing an awareness of where the elbow was pointed.   Initially, the elbow was "pointed" at the bottom of the pool so that in order to stroke, she had to reposition the entire arm, including the hand and palm to get any purchase on the water for stroking…it looked like she was dribbling an underwater basketball in her hand.  

So step one involved letting her extend her arm, and while looking at it (under the water), she gently bent then straightend the arm to be sure that the point of the elbow was facing the outside of her body (ie towards the wall) rather than the bottom of the pool.   This helped to place her arm higher in the water, creating less drag and allowing her to be in a better stroking position without having to readjust the pitch of the arm first.

This helped but her old arm pattern was so ingrained that at the first lapse of focus, or introducing swimming as opposed to switching, the elbow was hanging there nearly all the way to the bottom of the pool, upper arm angling down and forearm parallel to the bottom.

I decided that radical measures were needed to shock this out of her system…so I taught her the silky magic.   

Part 2 coming up ….