Upping the tempo

[Talvi]

Originally Posted by Streak

Yes I have the Garmin Swim. I assume you download your data after each session? ...

When I have checked the timing against a stopwatch I have not found any significant error. Same for stroke count. What problems have you found?

I don't upload the data. I've run the course with "social netwroks" and after my experiences with Garmin's forum, their watch, and thei connection software - no thanks. I can't see it's worth the hassle. It's also all after the event and I want real-time feedback. It also infuriates me that the watch's basic arithmetic functions have been crippled so as to try and force users into their net. I sport on my wrist a state of the art micro computer than cannot even reliably multiply by two. If I take 19 strokes to complete 2 lengths I apparantly have an SPL of 9, if I take 39 strokes for 100m I still have an SPL of 9. One calculation taken at random from today, my first 50m, told me that a time of 56.59 secs for 50m was a pace of 1:50 /100m (it's actually 1:53.58 or 1:54 in old money). The watch is an example of the oxymoronic concept of Artificial ntelligence, but as long as the idiot on my wrist always does the same thing then that's fine. I only need a rough guide.

Originally Posted by Streak

.. Now that I have achieved my sub 30 goal it's back to looking at where my inefficiencies are and how I can get even better without working harder. I'll get some more video up soon....

That's right, rub it in why don't you ;) Look forward to seeing your video though.

[Zenturtle]

hey Talvi, watched your footage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjeK...ature=youtu.be
again to see where the inconsistency might come from.
I think a lot comes from a inconsistency in kicking technique.
What is the egg or the chicken is unclear, but balance and kicking technique go down together now and again.

When this combination happens I can imagine your DPS falls quite badly.
You can see where the kick is most violent to get your stroke going, its having an adverse effect on balance because the kneebend is too big.
Watch what the legs do right at a violent upkick with much kneebend.
- The upkick slows the whole body down like a recovery leg movement in breaststroke
- It also drags the upper leg and the hips down which has to be brought back up with the downkick.
This is useless stirring water up and down.

It looks a bit like the vicious circle of lifting the head to breathe, creating drag, lifting the head even more etc.
There are moments where you have a fairly relaxed kick with not too much kneebend, but at other times the kneebend cascades in a downhill circle.

In a non TI world any coach would have you work on your kick technique right away.
There is no proper swimming possible with this knee kicking instinct surfacing all the time.
You are not very buoyant, and need a lot of head rotation to get some air.
If the forward speed is low, that is even more difficult and subsequently its more difficult to keep tracking what the body is doing.
I find it already upsetting to rotate the head more than sideways, and you are almost rotating it up to the sky.
So , you dont want to get cought in the downhill speed trap.(which this kick technique is setting you up for).

The chicken and egg thing is between balance and kick. Its possible that the root cause is balance, and the reaction is inefficient hard kicking which sequence seems the most logical.
With a good kick, harder kicks give more lift and a bit of propulsion if you are lucky. In your case, you are on the tipping point between effective and ineffective leg action.
Small changes can make a substantial difference.
Changing the angle of the foot while kicking can make the difference between going backwards to going forwards. Quite a fundamental change....
The other possibility is to improve balance, so you can swim with hardly any kick.
You could extend a bit more at the front. Push a little less water down at the front, but thats about it.Your head is low enough. Breathing action ok. So I dont see a whole lot of improvement potential there.

Dont know what the standard TI recipe is for going from a knee-driven to a hip-driven kick, but that would be my nr1 priority right now.
To make it easier and more fun, I would get some fins, do a gentle 2 BK, learn how to switch between 2BK and 6BK, read all the kicking stuff from Emmet Hines,(and practise it,stretch your ankles and hipflexors.
Remember, kneebend is not an active muscle action, but an effect of the waterpressure on the lower leg when you kick the upper leg down from the hip. The acive muscle action is only to restrict too much kneebend on the downkick.
Achieving a good kick is no easy feat.It requires many hours of practice. Dont know how much hard effort is needed or if its possible to improve the skill level while taking it easy.
All I know is that all good swimmers I see have moved beyond the babylike kicking from the knee instinct, and move their legs in an aquatic way.

On the whole upping the tempo thing:
I am afraid you are only going to make your current movements more violent.Dont think it will lead to real stroke changes.
There is no harm in it , but i doubt the usefullness.

To make myself clear, I dont suggest to go kicking like a madman, only to improve your kick technique to achieve a more efficient 2BK action.

[Talvi]

I started at 1.20 TT, actually 0.40 so as to swim to a triple, waltz beat. I then dropped that by 0.2 on each 50m interval down to 0.84 TT. That was as far as I could get. I simply couldn't keep up with the beep. I then switched to single beep swimming and slowed down. I can't remember the swim in greater detail than that. I swam 15 x 50 at this pace (these paces?!) and then swam slow for another kilometre, 1x600m and he rest.

It was interesting and fun. Much better I feel than my usual relentless 2-3km attack on technique. I also found the SWOLF/Swim Efficiency Index helpful (p.s they are the same thing though the Efficiency index often/always had a decimal place shown, though the natural number never changed). The Efficiency Index confirmed what I felt. As I got tired the number drifted higher.

I'm attaching a table of the 15 intervals fwiw (I doubt anything). The first 3 columns (and the seventh) are reliable. The others need taking with some seasoning. From the the tempo pyramid pyramid you can see that Egyptian I am not. Those tempos are more a guide to the reality; half remembered half conjecture. At the time I just swam what felt good, repeating intervals rather than moving on. I never came back down to 1.20. There was no point as my performance had become a reflection of tiredness rather than anything else. It was a nice tiredness though.

I'm not sure what else can reliably be said. There was no clear relationship between tempo, speed, etc, though my interpretation of the numbers is that I got faster in the middle of the range of tempos. All in all it was a good thing ZT. The leraning was more ... fluid. There was not time to dwell on things, just to try and improve it in the next half stroke, or when that side came around again. I enjoyed it. SPL went down the drain but no more so than when I swim any sort of distance. I get down to say 16 SPL for anything less than 100m but over that it instantly shoots up. It's odd. How does my technique KNOW I'm going for a longer interval?!?!??

EDIT

Ooops, forgot to attach it. Forget the nubers on the chart. It's the shape of the curves relative to one another that contais the information.

[Zenturtle]

Glad you are getting some new sensory input and hopefully get something out of them.
Upping the strokerate can make everything feel more fluid.
Its good for your upperbody endurance and swimfittnes too, but I stick with my second opinion on this that nr 1 priority is your kick now.
You can do both offcourse.
No harm in getting good upperbody fitness and a good kick...

[Danny]

Hi Talvi,

As if you haven't gotten enough feedback already, I thought I'd throw in my own 2 cents. This is an argument for filming often, which maybe you will be able to do, once you work out your social problems down at the pool.

So here's my story. I started filming once a week a while ago. I noticed a problem that I seem to have all the time--dropping elbow on one side, the side where I separated my shoulder years ago. So I worked on correcting this problem, and my times got better, although I still wasn't happy with what I saw on film. Then I got a cold and had to take a week off. When I got back in the pool, my times were terrible and I couldn't figure out why. Just a little bit of film explained a lot. I was back to my old dropped elbow!

So what I am finding with the film is that it may be effective in improving my stroke, but where it really helps is to catch my old bad habits creaping back in over and over again. And how will I ever make progress unless I can catch this bad stuff as soon as it starts to creep in again?

Film often is a great solution to this dilemma.

[Talvi]

Originally Posted by Zenturtle

..I stick with my second opinion on this that nr 1 priority is your kick now.
You can do both offcourse.
No harm in getting good upperbody fitness and a good kick...

Thanks ZT. And I did try and exercise better control over my legs, though not in getting any power from them. I don't know how it came about. It was just the result of trying to make my legs extensions of the stroke and keeping them together, but I found that, after it had fired, I sort of tucked the kicking leg back over the passive leg. It felt like I was swimming with my ankles lying the top of each other a lot of the stroke.

The main focus that came out of the sessions was my shoulders. I felt that my recovery, something I was aware of a lot, when elbow first was a shoulder driven motion. That led to my using that as the barometer of the metronome. It was neat. My primary focus in walking has now become the rotation of my hips, and it seemed somehow fitting to be focusing on my shoulders and head in swimming, instead of hips and feet as in walking.

I also found that the snaking in my body was far easier to feel and try to correct.

Anyway, I'm sure the novelty will wear off after a few sessions and I'll be back at square one, but hey, it felt good!

[Talvi]

Danny

I'll print out your post and show it to the pool manager when I get there!! He seems amenable, but strangely seemingly not to understand the functionality of filming, maybe because coaches seldom seem to do it. Better that here in Finland anyway, where they are adamant and imovable. Just to say again, that I am totally sold on the utility of video feedback. I have been for over 35 years. The problem is simply getting permission to film.

[Streak]

Talvi, I just watched your video.
Others more qualified that I have given good advice.
However if I was to make an observation it's as follows.
Your spear seems fine but there is no stretch after that, your elbows are remaining quite bent. That's exactly what I was guilty of until a few weeks ago.

Slow down the tempo and give you arms a chance to stretch lengthening your stroke. Then pull from out there all the way back to your hip with as high an elbow as possible.

For me, that single thing made the biggest difference.

By the way, Garmin now have Garmin Express that makes downloading the information from your watch very easy.

Good luck and let us know your progress.

[Talvi]

Thanks Streak, but slow down the tempo any more and I'll start going backwards! Thanks, it's an interesting idea, and I'll surely think about it next time out My goal is to get to something metronomic and efficient going. I sometimes get a feeling of concrete in the water that I find uncomfortable. ZT made a comment above that made me think it came from extension so it all fits. I've attached a still that seems to show a reasonable stretch but still room for more. At the time of that video I was trying to relax my spearing arm so that it would have no impact on my rotation/breathing and I could focus on rotation alone in getting to air.

[Zenturtle]

Believe I have said it before, but to check if the inconsistency is coming from the kick-balance combo you could try to swim with a pull buoy and see if your stroke count gets more consistent.
Its alsoo a good check to compare stroke count and times with-without a pull buoy.