head position. balance reaction simplified

[Zenturtle]

Imagine a swimmer walks into your pool. A freak of nature.
His neck is 15 inch long.
He ask you if he should lift his head to get his legs up or put it down in the water. He says his neck is strong as an anaconda.
What would be the answer?

[s.sciame]

Originally Posted by Zenturtle

Imagine a swimmer walks into your pool. A freak of nature.
His neck is 15 inch long.
He ask you if he should lift his head to get his legs up or put it down in the water. He says his neck is strong as an anaconda.
What would be the answer?

Does he also have a very flexible spine which doesn't pull his hips down if he arches his neck to lift his head? If so, probably I'd suggest high head like a duck to press the buoy the most. If not, like most humans, I'd say neutral spine.

This freak of nature could be simulated (in a static way though) by holding a dumbbell or whatever weight (a filled bottle?) with the recovery arm/hand: the arm is the neck and the dumbbell the head. Is it better to hold the dumbbell high over the lungs (ie dumbbell and arm apply the max pressure on the buoy) or extended forward (dumbbell in the water) or somewhere in between and within the front quadrant?

In Superman Glide position, raising the arms above the water helps balance (more pressure on the buoy). When swimming slowly, if I recover with a straight vertical arm and I stop it right above the lungs I could glide forever without kicking, it's the most buoyant position I experience.
However when swimming at decent pace it's a different scenario, keeping the legs up is easier and is more a matter of not pressing water down, keeping the core engaged etc., and your freak of nature could probably hold a good balance either with head up or with a neutral spine.

Salvo

[Zenturtle]

having such a big weight on a long lever in front of the lungs makes it very easy to sinke the front while pivoting the back end up.
First priority should be to get everything aligned first.
So legs waving behind the torso with restricted amplitude and moving almost symmetricly around the front/back plane.
THat head on a stick should be an extension of the spine too so there is one straight line from head to toes.
If this teether totter was to sink at the legs and kept straight, the head on a stick would be rasied above the surface and the above water part downward force would increase 10 times, so only a litle part of the head above water is sufficient to keep the legs up.

So far everything is in line with the simplified logic of the wooden prop builder from where this whole thread started.
So at what neck length does the logic suddenly reverse in keeping the head low to keep the legs up?
Something has to work differently in humans compared to simplified models...

[Danny]

Originally Posted by Zenturtle

So far everything is in line with the simplified logic of the wooden prop builder from where this whole thread started.
So at what neck length does the logic suddenly reverse in keeping the head low to keep the legs up?
Something has to work differently in humans compared to simplified models...

At the beginning of this thread, it was pointed out that it would make a lot more sense to pick your head up, if your mouth was in your forehead, but it isn't. This is one main problem with the logic of the wooden plank. How are you going to fix that?

[Zenturtle]

yeah, if your neck is very short, tilting the head takes the top of the head out of the water while the mouth is still hardly elevated. (if you have an anoconda neck, you could make an S bend in it to bring the mouth up)
The lifting of the top of the head out of the water does make it want to sink, so if you dont counteract that sinking by pushing water down (which you dont want to do), you end up with a mouth that is actually lower than it was before .
If you only rotate the head you can get the strange sensation that there seems to be a gap of air you didnt expect there to be, even if you didnt lift the head.

I read about a mental imaging tip that seems to work with kids.
Imagine you are a whale and have a blowhole at the back of your head.
You want to swim with the head in the position that this blowhole is as close to the surface as possible, or a little above the surface.
Quite like this image. Makes you swim with a straighter aligned neck. If you turn the head from this position you automatically turm to a position with a high mouth and a lowish top of the head.
So the blowhole is at the height of your mouth, only 180 degrees rotated.
You turn your mouth toward the position of that imaginary blowhole.