I had not seen this demo from Terry at an open water camp; it seems very relevant to our discussion so far (just started watching it):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pITBtglEUGk

This week i hae managed for the first time ever to get one arm catching out front as the other exits at the back, in true opposite arm timing, what i found is as the lead arm catches it litterally pulls the exiting arm up and over, a nice continious arm action, the arms just naturally recovered back to the front in that catch hook shape Terry is demonstrating in that video,

I've heard it called "meathook" freestyle in the past.

Like you mentioned in a previous post 'Think of both arms connected through the shoulders and upper back', as of late I try to set the rhythm of my arms to start with core and shoulder movement, in other words by not thinking of the arms moving first , the arm itself stays relaxed to receive this rhythm .

Dave

Yes! I was coming to the same conclusion in the pool last night, in order to turn the arms over from the torso they have to be relaxed and "along for the ride"
i think "extent to the elbow & not the hand" is also a good tip

I'llstick this here as well as it shows kayak / opposite arm timing linked through the upperback
https://youtu.be/iOMF54wj2aA

Hello Mushroomfloat,

but you are aware, the demo is far away from TI? TI advocates coredriven strokes not shoulder-driven, and FQ-stroke not windmilling...

Best regards,
Werner

Yes of course, but we are exploring different rotation/ catch / kick variants so i thought it might be useful to those wishing to experiment with different timing.

The fellow on the other thread has a specific goal to hold a stroke for 100m to achieve a fast time so i thought it was applicable, it is unlikley anyone ever won a 100m sprint with hip driven FQS timing.

Its a high connection in the upper back not a low connection, if you extend you lose the connection in the upper back (from 1:00)

https://youtu.be/MgMCLBctsGA

Hello mushroomfloat,

But you know Alexander Popow? If I understood right, Terry saw him as "Inventor" of FQ, long and hip-driven stroke... in short distances.

Best regards,
Werner

PS: That does not mean, don't experiment with extreme timings. Remember some time ago a discussion with a netherland scientific (missing his name) had happen here. He stated windmilling as necessary for a most continues driving force after detailed measurement. But he worked with high-perfomance swimmers and did not examinate the disadvantage in balance and streamline. As everytime in swimming we have to weigh advantages and disadvantages to decide where and how we will work to reach our goals...

Granted i think Popov was hip driven but he was the king of Kayak timing so not really FQS

Tom, I listened to Terry on this link and tried to implement it when I got back in the pool. As I said previously, my SPL had increased lately as I tried to imitate Terry's timing in his TI demo, and I couldn't understand why. By paying attention to two different things he pointed out in the above thread, I got my SPL back down again. First, start the catch by using the muscles on the top of your shoulder to raise your shoulder as the hand drops, second, to concentrate on holding the ball of water you catch as your arm moves back in the stroke. When I first started doing this, my SPL dropped, but I was surprised that it seemed to require some strength and effort. Over time, I noticed that by coordinating my recovery and rotation on the other side with the motion of the ball, the effort went down considerably. So that was just one session. My times were normal for me, but my SPL dropped by 2-3. We'll see how easy it is to hold onto and improve on this change.

I've seen this a couple of times before, and I always learn something more each time I watch it again. Terry does allude to the many moving parts -- force, speed, angle, timing, stroke rate as "trading chips" that one tries to balance in the transaction, and that does make sense in retrospect.

But if you haven't actually got it yourself, that is, exactly how with exquisite balance and timing you manage to exert minimal energy to anchor and NOT move water while you move yourself forward, and he doesn't actually tell you throughout the course of the long on-shore demonstration, because no-one can, then one is likely to think it as all BS. Until you see anyone like Terry actually do it in the water with such ease and grace, or hear a personal narrative like you just described, Danny, by using a very subtle visualization superimposed on a previously learned gross motor skill which managed to get your SPL dropped by a number of 2 or 3!!

Danny,

great work--I'm glad it's working for you.

sclim,

I agree with everything you posted. Terry mentions in that video that your balance and stability has to be well established before it's even possible to refine propulsion. I think I am slowly beginning to understand how to do it.

It will be interesting to test myself with a pool and pace clock again. I certainly feel like I am swimming differently than I was two months ago, and much of the difference has to do with the water feeling thicker, and my stroke becoming more propulsive (I think!).

I really have been using Terry's "ball of molecules" visualization to help prevent slippage in my stroke. Also "opening the armpit" (I have been doing a subtle move with my scapula that I think does that). And of course, really trying to develop awareness of pressing straight back at all times, never down. I think I've even discovered why some bubbles appear sometimes during my left arm pressing motion: I have been spearing a little too shallow (I think), which sometimes causes my press to have some downward force to it.

Another discovery I made is that I have started to be able to stretch out my pelvis in a gentle, relaxed manner to lengthen my body. It feels a little like my legs are being held in gentle traction--but instead of someone pulling on my ankles to stretch them out, the stretch is coming internally, from the pelvis and hips. When I do it, it makes my legs feel lighter, more relaxed (no tendency to cramp even during long open water swims), and longer. Stretching from the inside out!

How that will show up in SPL and pace, in fresh water, I have no idea. Perhaps I'm fooling myself...

For full disclosure, my SPL had gotten up to 19 over distance in a 25 yd pool, which is pretty bad for someone who is a little over 5'10". So the improvement got me back down to 16 or 17, which is probably where I should be swimming. What I think I learned from this is that, regardless of how much care I had taken in a good catch up front, if I relax too much as my arm moves back I am dropping my elbow and losing that grip on the water. Keeping the elbow up and holding onto the ball of water turns out to be a lot easier to do when the rest of your body is coordinated with the arm pushing the ball back. There are a lot of moving parts here, and on those few strokes where all the timing matches up you can definitely tell the difference. If only every stroke could be like that!

For that high elbow:

Nothing refines your skill at holding a high elbow/vertical forearm through the stroke like swimming over a huge field of staghorn coral flats at low tide.

If you don't have a coral reef handy to try the real thing, it could be a useful visualization just to imagine it. Water so shallow that if you don't keep your elbow at the surface, you'll be scraping bottom with your fingers.

Hello Tom,

Ha! That will help to tuck the belly in, holding an aligned spine and streamlined kick too, as preventing from overrotation also. Very good Imagination.. But the fear shouldn't let tense us up...

Best regards,
Werner

Exactly!

Now to practice and concentrate until we can do it 100% of all strokes, all the time. The task of a lifetime.

Nice trick, Tom. Strong visual and emotional imagery to base the mental focus on!

All right, I managed a 30-minute pool session in my usual 25m pool. My goal was to test my normal open water stroke for SPL and time.

Results? Inconclusive.

I managed 14-15 SPL. I'd guess 15 SPL is right about my normal open water stroke, 14 was a slower SR. So I'm right where I predicted by feel, which was nice to see. Intuition and feel, for a trained swimmer (or any athlete, really) can be quite precise. I remember when I was running, I could guess my pace with a few seconds per mile consistently.

Speed was the inconclusive part. The pool was crowded, and I didn't have enough time to really test myself. But I think my default speed at 15 SPL is around :44/50m. I was able to swim :39-40/50m at 16-17 SPL.

I'd like more time to test the "downward drift of lead arm" against the patient lead arm style. Maybe that will happen later this summer.

Final conclusion: however different my stroke feels to me, it hasn't measurably changed much in the past two months. I plan to start adding pool sessions to my open water swimming in August when I am back in the Marshall Islands. Without pool sessions, I don't swim fast. And without swimming fast, I'm not going to get any faster.

Its fun to read mushroomfloats comments. He is swimming from feeling en I can really identify with his feelings during this swimming journey.
Playing with the weight of the recovering arm , the speed at hwich its thrown forward, what part of the body is the foundation of that morion and how the differnt speeds and styles all influence balance in a differnt way are very good to learn new tricks.

Its fun to go from long to the more shoulder driven variaty and back. Its different , but also so much the same at the basic level where it teaches the very essence what swimming is about in my opinion.

Mushroomfloat, do you also pay attantion to what the leg at the low side elbow sinking side is doing?
This leg should be lifted from the center of the body at the same time, that the high side arm weight is pushing the the other side into the catch, like you have described earlier.
That way the whole body is set up for the next uncoiling, slightly undulating power move. Talking 2Bk here.

For me its better to feel the weight of the recovering arm first in a less catchup timing way and then slowly go to a more catchup timing way while diving pretty deep with the low side front side of the body, and corkscrew/dolphin with long extensions forward.
Somewhere in that process you start to loose the weight of the high side arm pressing in the catch and thats where you have to back off and go a bit shorter again, or explore that style on the edge and see if you can extend with a higher elbow.
With a higher elbow you can swim a more catchup timing style and still have the weight of the recovering arm convert to traction at the low side.
Thats how the Thorpes and Phelps guys swim.
For normal guys this flex and strenght in the shoulder region has to be buitl up gradually.

In the end a very important thing is to get rid of the dryland kicking reflex and move the legs like whips from the core , fairly rigidly connected to the upperbody and the shouldr and arm movements.
You really have to become a a sort of hybrid human-fish sswimming machine, thats fishlike form the rigcage down and connect with the human back shoulder arm paddle mechanism.
You can see this conversion to human fish swimming machine in all the good swimmers. Its a pretty total body rewiring of the whole nervous system that takes years to complete, especiially for older people.

The perfect technique Thorpe video is one of my favorites,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHszSCgMkpU
but Looking at the Shelly Taylor video after a long time is also a joy.
She is sheer hydrodynamic perfection. A perfect example of the human-fish hybrid swimming machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt6_bqj_808

Its the what Thorpe and Shelly Taylor both do whats important.

Comparing Thorpes 3stage 2Bk with Shelleys kick, you can see Shelley also has tiny bit of 3Stage kick in her stroke, it just blends more to one kick because of the higher rate and lighter arms probably. Especcialy the very last finishing downkick accent can be seen in Shellys stroke.
This kickdetail also has to do with the timing of the arm at the front. Differnt arm timing, differnt kicktiming usually.
The extra downkick is when the same side arm is lifted out the water, the extra upkick when the same side low side shoulder/arm extends.
Interesting to try to exegerate these details.

You all worship Terrys swim style, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC8ZZZhabp4
but i think I now understand why he uses more kicking motion then strictly needed.
He rotates his hips too much relative to his shoulders and thats unbalancing his body in a rotational sense. His hips have a rotational overshoot that he has to overcompensate every stroke. Thats where these extra kicks come from. He needs a tighter hip control amd more upperbody flex. Hip rotation has to be transfered to shoulder rotation in a corkscrewlike manner. Hip rotation should not stay isolated and disconnected.
Nothing personal against Terry, he did a great job education a lot of people, but i personally dont see him as a perfect swimming example. (still a good example though)

Hi ZT. Good to hear from you! I take it that this means that at least you are occasionally reading the forum, even if you haven't been contributing lately.

It is hard to disagree with you concerning Terry's kick. On the other hand, I was left with the impression that Shelly Taylor might benefit from keeping her head a little lower. Not sure, but this may be why I have the feeling that she may be losing her grip on the water up front. On the other hand, Terry's grip on the water is what I find most impressive about his stroke, especially because he does it without a high elbow.

Hi Danny. I take a look here every 3 months or so. Havent been swiming much lately. No significant new discoveries done the last year or so. Its more a matter of making slight improvements.

I really have a hard time finding anything negative in Shelleys underwater footage. Its all very streamlined and very effective propulsionwise too, which makes it a very efficient stroke as far as I can tell.
Personally the straightish arm recovery doesnt seem the most efficient to me when repeated over and over, but her under water actions look great.
Legs completely behind torso over complete kickaction, and nice streamlined feet. She can hold her head wherever she likes it seems.

Yes, i have a pronounced chambering on the left side leg when breathing to the right, sometimes the foot comes out of the water due to a little more rotation to the right for breathing (left hip going down a little too far i think.

Last wed i paid a visit to an old swim coach i know who runs her own swim pools and got her to take a look at my stroke,
she pulled me up on 3 things:

1. breathing every 2 to the right (recommended every 3 bilateral) but i use the unilateral breathing as part of my body undulation in the stroke so still playing about with uni v bi
breathing.

2. My recovery arm is returning to the front way too fast, This was very helpful
I had trained it so fast that i was rushing the catch up front and slipping a ton of water
so we worked on dwelling for a moment at full extention holding a ball and bringing the recovery slower giving more time to find purchase on the water with the low side arm.
i went to the pool on thirs for 2 hrs with a pullbuoy and drilled the hell out of this until i was happy with the timing.

3. she doesnt believe in FQS and got me to swim kayak / rotary which i struggled with but it did seem more relaxed re pressure on the shoulders, i kept automatially returning to FQS due to muscle memory / imprinting.
At one point i switched to shoulder driven kayak just to demonstrate i could do it and she reckoned i was way to fast with it but then thats what its for, its not a distance stroke.

So still more to play about with for me
she said my body position was excellent.

One other thing and i had already figured this out recently is that i was burying my head too low and looking slightly forward is much better for me, gives a much better bowwave and breathing it a ton easier just a flick to the side with a pursed mouth.
i also think it creates some sort of additional breastbone press on the water adding to stability

i was also recommened to "always think of the front" ie have focus on the lead arm and setting the catch not focussing on the finish and recovery (which is where my focus had been)

All in all £60 well spent as i would never hae figured the recovery arm speed was sabotaging my catch / anchor without some outside observation.

A split second dwell at forward extention before moving slightly wide and down for the catch is very helpful for me.

We used a tennis ball to put the focus here.

"slow it down real slow and imprint and that "slow" will become very fast"
is something i took away from it which certainly seems to pan out so far.

Hi ZT, are you losing interest in swimming because you've reached a plateau, or do you continue to enjoy the time you spend doing it?

I agree with you that Shelley's legs and kick action seem quite streamlined, but I can't escape the feeling that she is losing some grip up front. This may be because her entire arm enters the water up front straight and parallel to the surface. Because of this, she seems to move her straight arm downward for quite a bit before she finally bends her elbow (even though she does eventually get that high elbow while her arm is still forward). You can see the trail of bubbles that this straight arm entry causes. It is hard for me to judge whether or not there is a connection with the raised head and the arm entry, but this is definitely not the way that I try to swim. A straight arm entry like this means that your shoulder is already much lower when the arm enters, so this means a completely different timing between the arm stroke and the body rotation.

Too much emphasis on the "get yourself pulled down the pool by your throw"
was sabotaging my catch / anchor.

When i think about it lobbing a recovery arm with a rushed semi anchored low side arm is what i was doing.

Slowing high side arm down very beneficial to allow time to set the anchor

Seems like your spending too much time thinking about the what the low side arm is doing or preparing to do. Slowing down the high side arm to give the low side arm more time to do what .... ? That’s a first, you’re kidding right?

Stu
MindBodyAndSwim.com

If the highside arm fires over like a shot you tend to snatch for the catch and slip water, you get a better anchor / hold on the water without snatching at it.

Im not talking slowing highside right down just not whipping it back to the fromt like a missile

It moves faster through the air than the underwater arm so to set the anchor without snatching at it there needs to be a balance.

i recall seeing a drill for this i will find it.

2:08 v

https://youtu.be/-tl_tBzKmsA

Hello Mushroomfloat,

Hmmm... I am again irritated, but seems you are aware, that this is a very good demonstration, of what we try to avoid in TI?

Best regards,
Werner

Hello ZT,

Experience with your former posts showed me, your sharp eagle eye is much clearer than my look of an old man. But to me it seems in this demo, Terry rotates his shoulders just a bit more and a tiny moment earler than his hips, supporting his wide forward but splashless entrypoint. May be that's in fact is the cause for his tiny "reflex-kicks". (.. to stabilize this far reach forward)

Best regards,
Werner

Is this not Terry Laughlin narrating this shark fin drill TI video then?

https://youtu.be/rwQ3l5YyloQ

Hello Mushroomfloat,

Stuart knew Terry better than I, but I don't think so. He's neither the voice nor one of the swimmers. If I'm wrong, this has to be years (at least 10?) ago...

Best regards,
Werner

PS: But all the swimmers are showing exquisit balance in this drill!

in my view the body has to wind and unwind from hips to shoulders, hip rotation proceeds shoulder rotation, shoulder rotation exceeds hip roatation in amplitude. Just the same as in all throwing movements.
Free to disagree offcourse, but thats what Thorpe is doing.
Way to many swimmers with overrotating hips and underrotating shoulders in my view, but thats no new opinion.

I see what you mean, her elbow is even touching the water before her hand.
Thorpe is even worse in this regard. look at how his right arm enters the water.
It might not be ideal , but when you try a starightish arm recovery and throw the arm forward from the body and the shoulder, you will find that the most relaxed arm landing is actually elbow hitting the water before the hand. I agree it doesnt look very nice and gives extra bubbles.How much it hurts performance. I dont know.
Ranomi krowowidjojo does it a lot too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD2cmGpw0oA.

watch right arm in slowmo. The power is in the body and shoulder rotation. the arm follows and is forced to high elbow position just in time.

And about using the mass of the recovering arm pushed forward from the low side:
Pelligrini is a champ at using that. Hard to enter gently without bubbles after swinging that mass forward, but at least she has a pretty good entering shape too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Tg8d2TmoU

I've seen, experienced myself (& pointed on on a link a few pages back) the elbow strike before the hand, i think its a by product of "delivering the arm with the hip" ie turning the arms over from the torso.

I had worked out the hip proceeds the shoulder (for hip driven anyway) but i will monitor shoulder rotation to see if its amplitude is more than hips, i just tried it dryland and its a powerful corkscew feeling.
Will try in the pool tommorow