Image and reality?

[WFEGb]

Hello Talvi,

I doubt my Russian "student" will become an olympian but then nor will I!

Well, question is, what will your Russian student and you become?

The reason, that his cross-entry is important part of his stroke does not mean, that your insights are not helpful for even easier or faster CSS... And you know, just changing one thing has impact to many others too and the (interesting) puzzle starts again... :-)

But if he is happy with his stroke (and you too) what shall happen? Although both of you should not forget the fun and enjoyment of playing around with some ideas, experiments and finding improvements here and there, even if they don't seem to be firsttime...

Best regards,
Werner

[Danny]

As I become older, my focus has shifted somewhat from simply swimming faster to include being able to swim for as many years into the future as possible. There seem to be two weak links in my body that I have to respect, and these are my shoulders and my elbows. Prioritizing these joints may involve some compromises from olympian style swimming. On the other hand, as I grow older my posture deteriorates and it becomes more and more important to strengthen the muscles in my back and stomach that are needed to keep my spine straight and my shoulders back. Doing this all the time is hard to accomplish in the rush of daily life, but concentrating on it for an hour while swimming is definitely in reach. And it seems that really all I need is to wake up these muscles and become aware of them for a while and the carry-over into the rest of my life becomes much easier.

[fooboo]

Talvi!
What you describe is well known to me. I used early vertical forearm pre-
viously. It was injury prone and made me a lot of troubles.
Here is what I think might help you. Imagine you have left leading arm and
on left side. I keep arm in inner rotation, with hand parallel to the bottom.
After a bit of gliding, I drop a hand and get hold of the water. I feel how
dense it is. Leading arm stays extended. I recover, with the kick, and start
to rotate. As I rotate, I start bending leading arm. Inner rotation keeps an
elbow up. More I bend an elbow, more water I hold. No pull. Nothing, just
get hold of the water, feeling how tick it is. Someone called it "pudding".
When elbow is at 90 degrees, I hold enough water, without a pull. Just hold.
Then, then, then I lean on that water, keeping vertical forearm in place,
opposite arm becoming a leading arm. Then I use whole body to jump over
that place.
What I say cannot work if one is not balanced and not streamlined.
To repeat: you have to inner rotate whole arm, or it won't work.
Best regards.

[Talvi]

Originally Posted by Zenturtle

You can buy some stretch cords. Attach them high so you can use them in a straight, normal swim posture, only standing instead of lying. You can even stand on one leg and combine a kick with a pull movement to get your core also involved in a more swimlike manner.
Watch how elite swimmers move when seen from pool bottom to watersurface and mimic that movement, using a mirror....

Funnily I have set up something similar - from the headboard of my bed, but I have not used the pain-indicator method. I must take some care not to damage myself as although I do heal still it's a slow process. And I'm not sure if it has been so useful. The approximation of self-directed dryland movements is a source of significant error to the extent that I sledom find they carry over into the pool in a helpful manner. I think that getting the feeling for the water is the important thing but as Werner noted, it is a puzzle with each piece dependent upon and changed by every other piece. I have been getting a feel for the water at the extended reach by a sort of sculling, I think that "fear" is the main barrier to swimming development. It's not a conscious fear but something at the level of "muscle memory" - it's our bodies saying "Hang on a b*y minute you're going to do us in if I don't keep an eye on things here!". We can't micro-manage every single one of the hundreds of muscles in our body. We can only focus on a few at a time. That leaves 99% of them to pretty much get on with it unsupervised, so they tend to revert to habit, even if in only very subtle ways. It's extremely hard to feel this at the time. I like to become tired and rest and catch my breath by relaxing in the water and feeling myself lying on it, more than swimming in in.

[Talvi]

Originally Posted by fooboo

Talvi!
What you describe is well known to me. I used early vertical forearm pre-
viously. It was injury prone and made me a lot of troubles....

I can't see the different of that to your description. Could you clarify? Lovely description though and what I strive for. I'm finding that giving a little scull at the maximum reach gets me a feel of the water. That's a start. Now it's a question of controlling that durimng th rest of the UW stroke feel so as not to slip.

I rotate my hand to face down as I rotate my body down. Any earlier and I injure my shoulder socket joint. (I would call it an outward rather than inward rotation of the spearing arm.)

[Talvi]

Originally Posted by WFEGb

.. Although both of you should not forget the fun and enjoyment of playing around with some ideas, experiments and finding improvements here and there, even if they don't seem to be firsttime...

Very true my friend :) And thanks. I did feel a little ridiculous.

[fooboo]

Originally Posted by Talvi

I can't see the different of that to your description. Could you clarify?

OK. On left flank, left leading arm. Left forearm goes EVF. That way swimmer
early grabs water and tries to early pull and push. We don't pull or push. We
wait till we are on the opposite flank, the right one, and then make vertical
forearm. Personally, I feel how water is tick. It is something one might lean on.
Takes time to stay with leading arm extended prolonged and do nothing.
So, recovery connected to the hip, the kick to help it, late anchor to give
an... anchor. Has to be correctly paced, all parts to come together.
I finally found the proper head position during breathing. The culprit was pre-
viously injured shoulder, which did not move at needed place to open an
armpit fully and keep low drag. Solved. I work on it.

[Talvi]

Thanks for clarifying Fooboo.

Originally Posted by fooboo

OK. On left flank, left leading arm. Left forearm goes EVF. That way swimmer early grabs water and tries to early pull and push. We don't pull or push. We wait till we are on the opposite flank, the right one, and then make vertical forearm.

You are right, but the main problem swimmers like me have (not having previously been "swimmers") is grabbing/catching the water. If we grab at the water it disappears. If we are too relaxed the water ignores us. I believe we need to "feel" the water VERY early, perhaps as the fingertips reach the last part of the spear, but I think as soon as any movement away from spear begins. But I agree that applying too much force too early is a recipe for disaster in the stroke and physically.

So, NOT saying we should "grab" and pull but that we should find and feel the water as something thick, exactly as you say I think.

Originally Posted by fooboo

Personally, I feel how water is tick. It is something one might lean on. Takes time to stay with leading arm extended prolonged and do nothing.

Time is not enough as timing is what's critical. Although it's possible to reduce stroke rate by extending the spearing time this tends to just result in the "overglider" thing. I have spemt over a years (!?!) going down this path, and sometimes I got my SPL right down to 12. But I never managed to find a way to sustain that (even assuming sustaining it would be good). I wanted to have a TT set faster than 1.6, the sort of rate I was swimming at, but lowering it brought the impact of bad timing back.

Working with the TT settings ( pyramids etc) did not help as swimming so slowly does not give a full enough experience of the water so I was learning littler about the timing - the critical ingredient of it all.

Originally Posted by fooboo

So, recovery connected to the hip, the kick to help it, late anchor to give an... anchor. Has to be correctly paced, all parts to come together. I finally found the proper head position during breathing. The culprit was pre-viously injured shoulder, which did not move at needed place to open an armpit fully and keep low drag. Solved. I work on it.

I can really identify with that. I've been finding the "open armpit thing" key in finding an overall shape and feel for the stroke. But I needed to find a way to truly relax in the extended spear position AND still breathe before it yielded results. I found it is more complex that simple execution though, as both forward momentum is required and the recovery cannot have got going. Otherwise the recovering arm pushes you back down into the water

What seems to be helping me most at the moment is using the TT to focus on spear and kick co-ordination. It shifts my awareness away from the other half of the stroke. I've tried focusing on spear-kick co-ordination before but with patchy results (a standard issue in my learning). The foundational things that have changed to make it effective now are:

• getting the feel for the water at the beginning of the catch (early not during the acceleration phase)
• getting early/easy/full/good breath by lying on a relaxed spear ("open armpit")

Two other thing that have come into focus during all this are:

• kick timing (not too late not too early)
• swimming downhill (a feeling produced by being horizontal during/after breath)

The second is tied/follows the first. The kick brings/keeps the legs at the surface.

Apologies for the length of this. It's good to talk! Gets things clear and helps fix them in memory I think.

[fooboo]

Originally Posted by Talvi

You are right, but the main problem swimmers like me have (not having previously been "swimmers") is grabbing/catching the water.

I start to catch, with extended arm by dropping a hand. Arm is in inner
rotation, to say again.

The kick brings/keeps the legs at the surface.

Better not. Balance does. Kick helps recovery, I think.
Yep, balance is crucial. All starts from that. It was counter intuitive
to me to let leading arm stay extended and not catch early. The brain
says opposite. So, it was a battle to solve out. When it stays extended,
I rotate and bend an elbow during it. Forearm of mine becomes vertical
when I'm on opposite flank. Then I lean on the anchor. That late.
Kick becomes hard, when body rotates a lot. Something to work on!

[Talvi]

Hi fooboo, somehow I missed your reply. Thanks.

I think we may actually be saying the same things. At least it seems so to me. But I think you are a swimmer from long before TI ?

Anyway, what I have learned is that it is for instance about NEITHER keeping the spear extended NOR catching early that's THE key. It's neither. It's both. It is just as easy to learn to catch late as to catch early.

Balance is just that, and it includes everything.

In the same way as with the catch/spear timing the kick/hip timing is also key, not whether the knee bends or not or whether it adds to drive or propulsion or not. Learning not to bend my knees in the kick PLUS learning a decent timing of the kick has led me to perceive what I FEEL as the "slap-kick". More than that it has led me to begin to get the feel of swimming downhill.

The slap-kick may be a misperception i.e video might show something different. The point is that it FEELS like a slap-kick not a "drive-kick" (though incidentally it also feels like a better drive!). By feeling my legs right up at the surface I feel my horizontality more strongly and with that the spearing feels like me diving down, but then - MAGIC HAPPENS - I feel the buoyancy of "total immersion" bring me not deeper down into the water but up to the surface - breathing becomes easier. Who would guess that?! It's counter intuitive.

BTW another learning point for me last week has been to focus on the non-kicking leg - to keep it extended in the line of body and head.

Locomotive bio-mechanical movement is extremely complex. There is an infinite variety of ways the myriad individual movements can be combined and yet still result in, for instance, walking. We cannot micro-manage the thousands of micro-decisions being made while we move, just the big things, the simple basics. The rest comes down to *"feel". In swimming the problem is that this feel, the efficiency/timing, provides 70% or more of propulsion whereas in walking it's 10% or less. We're built to walk, not to swim!

In this thread I'm NOT actually saying anything new or contradictory just offering a different perception. I'm doing so because for me the standard descriptions no longer helped. I felt I WAS doing what they described and felt myself to be doing what they described.

Change involves feeling something different. The different "feelings" I am discovering and offering here are for those who find themselves in need of them. Fooboo you are most definitely not one of those, and I envy you that.

Yesterday I met a young man who had not been able to swim more than 25m freestyle continuously, 50m max in a pool. With a coach (not TI) he learned to swim a continuous 1 km - 1.5 km in THREE WEEKS. I am sure he learned EXACTLY the same things as we are all learning here. He just leanred them a different way and would describe them in different terms.

There are many languages. That's all.

While I'm here, I ought add another recent learning point for me: to ensure the lead arm/spear does not begin to catch during the breath. It's a big one, and I find it tough, "scary", but the result is forced development of better head position, greater relaxation, and better feel for streamlining, as well as feeding into improved timing.

FWIW