Underwater Pull or Catch ...

[seungew]

How important is "Early Vertical Arm" or "High Elbow" during the underwater pull in TI?

[AWP]

Not very, in some regard, but can be approached at a developmental stage in your process. There are far more beneficial aspects of your swimming progress that are essential in making you an effortlessly balanced, quiet, efficient and fast swimmer.

[naj]

Originally Posted by seungew

How important is "Early Vertical Arm" or "High Elbow" during the underwater pull in TI?

I posed this question not too long ago. Terry told me about the "soft hook" and it has done wonders for my process. There is a video of him doing it on youtube here.

[seungew]

Thanks Naj for that video link of Terry. Its always so inspiring watching him and Shinji swim such an effortless stroke.

The reason I'm asking about High Elbow during the underwater pull/catch phase is that I'm just trying to explore other methods of swimming techniques as well as TI. I am always open to other methods as well.

Check out this video I found on YouTube explaining the physics of pulling water. It sounds logical to me. Anyhow start the video around 2:15

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM5kxvrkPMI

[terry]

Originally Posted by seungew

How important is "Early Vertical Arm" or "High Elbow" during the underwater pull in TI?

The advice I find I can use in an incredibly wide variety of circumstances is to remember the three fundamentals: Balance. Streamline. Effortless Propulsion.

By referring back to those three fundamentals, and remembering that they're stated both in their order of importance (how much potential they have to improve your swimming) and in their logical sequence (You must be balanced to streamline. You must be balanced and stable and moving with minimal drag in order to be effective in propulsion.) you can answer nearly any question about technique.

My response to previous questions about EVF is that, in 40 yrs of coaching thousands of pretty successful competitive swimmers (i.e. independent of the 10s of 1000s of TI students) I can count on one hand the number who had the natural ability of people like Hoogie, Phelps, Thorpe, Hackett, Mellouli to effortlessly and instinctively create an EVF position.

Normal humans simply lack the range of motion in shoulder and scapular displacement to put the arm in that position. If we could, we'd all have a shot at being world-class freestylers.

Instead we teach our students a far more realistic goal:
Relax the hand so fingers tip down.
Slice arm into water through Mail Slot so forearm is 'slightly less horizontal.'
Be patient when making catch.

But we also teach them you must be balanced and stable and moving with minimal drag in order to have the body control to do even that.

The reason I'm asking about High Elbow during the underwater pull/catch phase is that I'm just trying to explore other methods of swimming techniques as well as TI. I am always open to other methods as well.

If you post questions here on what aspects of TI technique feel incomplete to you, therefore prompting you to explore non-TI methods, I'm sure you'll get a lot of input. Again, referencing my nearly 4 decades of coaching, from beginners to Olympians, I'm not aware of any aspect of technique we've neglected, but am always anxious to hear of something we could illuminate better.

[seungew]

The TI aspects of Balance. Streamline. Effortless Propulsion, make a lot of sense and you are very right about the EVF that is difficult to achieve as it does take flexibility to do effectively.

I'll keep working on my TI drills and principles as I swim as well as the good visualization -- Thanks Terry

[Janos]

Hi Seungew,

I do a lot of work on my EVF, and in my own case, I found it was not lack of flexibility that was the issue in achieving it, but having the presence of mind to apply it fully and evenly. I think it is far more important than others believe it to be. If mastery of TI is the art of rotating your body past a patient catch hand, in a smooth and efficient way, then it must follow that the more stable and patient that catch is,and the earlier it is applied, then the faster and more efficient your progress will be. Every inch that your catch hand slips back from the vertical is one inch you are not travelling forward.
If you wish to swim 25m in 12 strokes then your body must travel approximately 2m with each stroke. When your catch arm arrives at its most propulsive point, which is vertical, your range of further catch movement is the length of your arm, that is what you have to play with to send your body 2m, so it makes sense to me to maximise the amount of time you have on each stroke to get a grip on the water. Also, the deeper your arm goes, the more drag it creates. So a compact recovery should be followed by a compact catch in my opinion. If you can mimic the EVF technique in the mirror, then there should be no reason why you cannot apply it in the pool. That has been my approach in training, where a bit of rigour will free your arms from believing they hold you up in the water. Wide tracks can be a beneficial training thought, to avoid crossing them, but if you use them as stabilisers, you will never achieve an early enough catch.

Kind Regards

Janos

[aerogramma]

Very interesting Janos,
with the TI dvds the catch&pull is something a bit blurry, to me that is and I'm sure that with proper TI coaching it would be addressed.

Is nice to see someone trying to address it in the TI context.
Personally I'd benefit greatly from a more detailed explanation on the TI material available.
For example instead of just words, some graphics overlay to clearly illustrate the correct path of recovering and pulling arm.

[seungew]

thanks Janos for that thoughful response.

I frequently imitate a EVF in the mirror as well as using the railing inside my company's elevator. This is kind of a nerdy thing that my wife can account for. What I do when I'm in this empty elevator sometimes is slip my fingers behind the railing fingers pointed down and bend my forearm so that it is parallel with the wall and being mindful of a level upper arm pretend to pull the rail toward me. And I guess to me it mimicks the feeling of pulling an armfull of water. To be quite honest when I'm really RELAXED and I put thought into the EVF I can actually feel my body rotate and slide effortlessly past the point where I grabbed that armful of water.

perdy swimgeekee i know but someone who can't get enough of swimming (3-4km)/day.. I'm always looking for ways to be more relaxed and slippery.

[Janos]

Seungew, you are no different to anybody else on this forum! TI seems to bring out the inner swimgeek in all of us. The work is always ongoing, and we are all in a constant state of flux, which brings many rewards to all areas of our life.