Why This Triathlete Can't Break 2:00/100m | Feedback Friday

a really good way to make a change in your stroke is to exaggerate the thing you're trying to make because you can always bring it back from there but often people don't do enough of the thing that they're trying to change so it just never changes in their stroke [Music] hey brenton here from effortless swimming welcome to feedback friday in today's episode we are looking at a triathlete who's training for a half distance iron man and his pace is around two minutes per hundred so he said he's come down from around 2 minutes 50 per 100 over the last year and doesn't come from a swing background so he's kindly sent through his videos for us to have a look at and we'll see what he can do to swim faster now if you're in the same boat if you'd like to have your own video analyzed then i'll put the link below where you can submit your videos for feedback friday if you'd like to skip the queue and just get an analysis done then i'll put a link to our one-time analysis as well if you prefer to do that where you can submit your video and i'll provide an analysis for you pretty similar to this now in today's video we're going to have a look at a couple things particularly related to timing and how that can impact your catch so one of the things that really stands out here is that if we look at um the body position the legs are dropping down a bit and joe mentioned this in his comments that he can feel his legs dragging quite a bit and one of the things that really can cause that is if the lead hand doesn't stay out in front long enough so if the timing of the stroke is is out so if we look at the side view here you'll see that the lead hand here on that breathing stroke goes down to the bottom of the pool quite early so you'll notice that this hand is just exiting the water but this hand is already down there and if we continue along a little bit further you'll see that by the time this hand enters this one is well past the shoulder now with some elite swimmers you'll see that timing but very few and with most swimmers that we work with who people are doing triathlon and open water swimming they're not elite swimmers what we typically want to try and maintain is a front quadrant stroke so always keeping something out in front of the head there and usually we want to have this hand entering while the other arm is somewhere around here to about there so somewhere in that sort of range is where a lot of swimmers are best off so we call that basically front quadrant timing so what's happening is on his breathing strokes the hand comes in and it goes down to the bottom of the pool pretty early on and in this moment there's nothing out in front of his his head there and in terms of his balance it causes the legs to drop down because the weight of the legs kind of takes over whereas if he's able to keep this lead arm reaching forwards for a little bit longer before he starts the catch then it's going to change the balance of his of his body because with the with the arm out here he's essentially going to be this long in the water whereas if this arm is is down here right now he's he's this long in the water and so that's when the weight of the legs can kind of take over a little bit and it's one of the things that can cause the legs to drop down so the one of the first things that we may look to to work on here is just keeping that lead arm reaching forwards at shoulder height for a little bit longer before starting the catch but particularly the the left arm is the main one that we'd want to want to do that because he's not getting much propulsion from that lead arm so if we look from the front view here we'll have a look and see what's what's happening so the answer's there yeah just going straight down one of the things that i look for is are they over rotating because often we see swimmers when that same thing is happening that their shoulders goes they go so far on the side that their shoulders were 90 degrees which is too far but the rotation there seems fine he looks to be about about 40 degrees and there's no need to change that so what how could he change that we i work with this quite a bit in our stroke analysis membership so that's where people work with me on a regular basis and i was working with a swimmer only a couple weeks ago and she's taken off five seconds per 50 and for her like her 50 sprint time and so far two seconds for 100 sprint um just by adjusting the timing of her stroke so the way that we got her to keep her lead arm out in front for longer is we've just really got her to feel like she's gliding on that arm so as she enters and she reaches forwards we're getting her to really exaggerate that what we call the glide now we don't want to stop and pause but we're just going to really sort of slow it down give yourself a bit more time and then start pulling through so a really good way to make a change in your stroke is to exaggerate the thing you're trying to make because you can always bring it back from there but often people don't do enough of the thing that they're trying to change so it just never changes in their stroke so that would probably be one of the first things we would look to do now what that will help him with is obviously it should improve his body position by bringing the legs up a little bit just by improving the balance and then the other thing that we we could look to do is in terms of the catch in the pool so if we want to get a bit more out of that one of the things that will help there is yeah we want to work on a high elbow catch but one of the aspects of that is the path of the hand now you may have seen my video yesterday on mikael roman chuck who's one of the best distance swimmers in the world i'll link to that below if you haven't seen that analysis one of the things you'll notice with him and with all the best swimmers in the world is as they move through the catch they move through the pool and the press the fingers continue to point down so what we could work on here is keeping that position so if we have a look at i'm going to get a better view here this one here if you have a look at where the fingers are facing through the through the catch and the pull right you'll notice this this here so right there the fingers have come off to the side and the sort of hand is moving around quite a bit so it comes from over here and then comes under and then goes back the path that we want to take is it's kind it's kind of like a long s if you're looking at it sort of from the front so it'll come away from the center a little bit and then come in next to the hip so it's like a really long s you don't necessarily want to pull straight through there will be a little bit of a curve to it but we don't want to overdo that sort of s shape it's you don't you don't need to overdo it but that whole time the fingers should be facing downwards so in this position he's there if he could just adjust it and he could have say the fingers still pointing down in that phase of the stroke and through this part of the stroke here a little bit earlier on if he was say in this position here that's going to allow him to basically get a high elbow catch keep the hand and forearm facing behind him and just get a lot more out of it so at the moment what's happening it's coming in coming under too far and then sort of coming out at there so he's the direction of that force is just off to the side too much so we just want to try and keep it a little bit smoother a little bit straighter there so that would be one of the things and then if we have a look at this arm too they're similar sort of thing just coming under the body a little bit a little bit too much with it that's going to change anyway once we fix that what that lead arm is is doing but that is where we can really get um you know make a make a big difference there so i would um i would probably focus mostly on that the other thing i want to mention here is if we have a look at the exit of the stroke and you know sometimes um sometimes this is one of those things where where you can sort of get a lot more out of the stroke there is that with the exit of the stroke you can see what's happening on on some of these these strokes here is he's sort of there we go there's not that much propulsion through the back end so we want to try and just keep that palm facing behind you until about here then it can turn into the body when you exit so you'll notice that the hand sort of turns in a bit early it doesn't get much propulsion out of that back end so it's kind of like he loses loses that propulsion here which is going to make that lead arm a little bit harder to keep out the front so just keep that palm facing behind you all the way through until the very end when the hand can can turn in and you've probably seen that in some of our feedback friday videos anyway but i would um yeah i would look to to sort of start with with those two things in terms of drills you know what could you do with with drills um i would most likely i'd start him with 616 drill which is the drill that you can see here in order to help with his timing because in that 616 drill what most people do who are pulling through too early is that they'll do the six kicks on the side and then as this arm comes over the top the lead arm pulls through when that one's leaving and so they never really get that sort of three quarter catch up but if you can do the 616 drill keep the lead arm in front until this one gets in front of your head and then swap it through that's the timing that majority of swimmers are best off with so um focus on that with the 616 drill and it is easy if you wear fins and a snorkel for it the other drills that he could do to kind of work on the catch and the path of the hand the ymca drill that you that you may have seen in this channel before that's one of our go-to drills to keep the catch and pull as simple as possible so the ymca drill is a really good one for that as well he could also do other drills like even like a single arm freestyle drill some pretty basic drills as long as the focus is on keeping the fingers facing down to the bottom of the pool and then just some of the regular um sort of catch drills that we've got in the membership so if you are a member core principle number four is where we've got all of those catch and pull drills and the ideal sequence to go through those and how much to do in your workout so go and check that out there

Channel: Effortless Swimming

Views: 32,336

Rating: 4.9797978 out of 5

Keywords: feedback friday, feedback friday effortless swimming, effortless swimming, half ironman swim, triathlon swimming, tri swim, triathlon

Id: j0JsLpG0f_o

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020