Gettin' Slippery

Vanessa asked me last night what I've been doing to get slippery in the water on my swims. I think I gave her some smartass answer like "I wear less clothes." Which is partially true. Both Keith and I recently made the mistake of going back to non-skin-tight swim trunks for a session. Really felt the drag.

But, no, that's not the main way to get slippery. The main way is to slather yourself in Crisco(tm) just prior to swimming.

I've been working on a few key form areas that seem to help my efficiency/slippery factor:

1) Butt high: It's not generally a good idea for a dude to advertise that he keeps his butt high. But that's the goal when swimming. I use two techniques and one feedback mechanism. The first technique is to keep my head more down than forward. This brings my neck in alignment with my body and makes it easier to keep my butt high. (Venessa doesn't seem to have a problem with this from what I've seen in the pool.) The next thing I do is visualize pushing my chest down into the water. It's tough to describe but I guess I tighten my stomach muscles a bit and act like I'm doing a bit of a crunch. Nothing drastic... just a few inches. The feedback mechanism I watch for is the feeling of my butt at the surface of the water. If I can feel the burble of water on my butt then I'm relatively comfortable that it's near the surface. My natural tendency is to drop the butt and create massive drag. This is a problem of low core strength so I've been trying to work on it.

2) The Catch: The catch is the part of the stroke when you start pulling backwards. My long goofy arms had a tendency to make a very deep stroke in the water. Imagine that I was trying to touch the bottom of the pool with straight arms throughout the stroke. After some reading I realized that I needed to bend the arms a lot more. Something called the Elbow High ideal. I started to work on keeping the arm bent. And then I started getting aggressive about it. I'm still not sure which of my two catch forms is the best but I sometimes try to keep my hand very close to the surface and close to my body on the entire stroke. When I do this it feels like I'm using the big muscles in my back more than the smaller muscles in my shoulder. And I feel like I'm going faster. The only problem I have with this is that I somehow don't feel like I'm doing as much work. I naturally gravitate to the (possibly) less effective catch with my hands lower. I play back and forth with these two throughout swim sessions. What I really need to do is get the video camera out to a deep pool and time/video a few laps with each stroke to see which one truly is better. From what I read everybody's catch is different... and a very important part of the stroke. Even elite swimmers spend countless hours working on the catch.

3) Mirror, mirror on the Wall: I try to imagine the two halves of my body acting like mirror opposites of each other. When I really get into the zone I'm not thinking mirror as much as I'm doing it, but getting it going takes a mental investment. The key is that I hit the proper balance between left/right and front/back. When I'm out of form I push my hand back really hard and then find myself waiting for the next stroke (my other arm) to get into the water. I'm out of sync. This is not effective. My big push gets acceleration but the waiting slows me down. When I'm mirroring well I speed up the whole stroke, including the parts that happen out of the water. It's kind of like the pedal mashing. If you mash your pedals on the downstroke too much you become ineffective. Same sort of thing in swimming. If you focus all of your effort on the big pull from where your hand is in front of your body to when it's at the torso you lose everything else. The mirror mental image helps me keep the timing of all elements of the stroke going at the same cadence. I've had to work hard to think of going faster in the water not as pushing harder with the arms, but as turning over the entire stroke more frequently. More frequently can mean with the same effort per stroke.

Those are the three main things that I work on throughout my workouts. And I'm really just learning. Certainly not an authority on the subject. A real swimming coach somewhere on the internet is now saying "poor sap." Swimming is the toughest discipline to apply book smarts to because it doesn't make sense to me. The stroke is very complex. Lots of angles. Variations. Possibilities. Arms and legs all over the place.

One thing that has helped a good bit is interval work. When I'm doing an interval I'm just going all out trying to get down to the other end of the pool and back. I don't think about form at all. I focus on speed. What I've found is that my limbs are probably a lot smarter than I give them credit for. They generally find a more efficient way of doing things. And then it's a matter of paying attention to it without interrupting it.

Swimming is tough. It's not natural to me. I'm definitely improving but without proper coaching I think that I may be teaching myself bad habits.