Posts Member

It's hard to say without seeing your stroke. I'll guess that you're rotating your body too much--I mean, that seems obvious, right?--but it's tough to offer any intelligent advise without seeing more of your mechanics. Still, it sounds like maybe you're not quite ready to pull; probably you ought to stick to straight swimming drills until you get your stroke a bit more under control.

My standard advice lately has been to suggest "catch up" drill. I continue to think that that's the most useful drill for fixing most stroke problems. If you can do it with a decent kick, breathing every 3rd stroke, you'll help yourself a lot.

That said, you might try "fingertip drag" here. Essentially, all you want to do is drag your fingertips through the water as you recover your arms. You want to drag your fingertips right up along your ribcage and past your shoulders. This forces your elbows high, shortening the length of time and effort it takes to recover each stroke, and in your case, it may keep your body from rotating so damn much. "Fingertip drag" is also a good drill to work for hand placement. You want to slide your hand into the water maybe 6"-8" short of your full stroke extension with your hand canted 45-degrees to the side. You want your hand to slide into the water, and then push to full extension before taking your stroke. Then pull underwater down the centerline of your body, and repeat.

Heh. Let's hope that makes some sense. It's probably going to be a lot to think about the first few times you do it.

Posts Member

It could be that you balance in the water is off, I see this a lot with swimmers that are new to the sport. Here is a good link with drills to improve your balance and streamline position

http://www.slb-coaching.com/trainingInformation.asp?Id=56

Best of success!

Posts Member

Unless a coach told you that you need to rotate more, you almost certainly need to rotate less. With backstroke, shoulder-roll is a big part of the stroke. The same is definitely NOT true of freestyle.

Keep the water at about mid-forehead, pull down the center-line of your body (maybe six inches off of your chest), and keep your elbows high. Shoulder/hip roll is actually slight with freestyle, and definitely not something you should have to work on.

Also, if you're rotating a lot, I have to wonder if maybe you're reaching too far across at the top of your stroke. If you think of the space in front of you like a clock, you want to put your hands in at 12 o'clock, i.e. straight in front of you. You definitely DO NOT want to reach across your body so that your right hand goes in at 11 o'clock and your left hand goes in at 1 o'clock. That's kind of disastrous. You'll be waggling in the water and twisting all over the place.

Have someone look at your stroke. If you're reaching too far across, then think about pulling wider. I personally had to make this adjustment to my stroke when I was in college. It's common enough, but it's also necessary.

Posts Member

But Natalie is a sprinter. Her extreme amount of kicking helps keep her from over-rotating. As distance swimmers, there's no way we should be kicking that much - look at her kick in the non-slow-mo segments - WAY higher kick turnover than you'll see on a distance swimmer. Distance swimmers have to be careful not to over-rotate their hips the way Natalie is doing here because we don't have that strong driving 6-beat kick to keep the power going, especially if we're going to bike and run afterwards as Olympic swimmers don't have to do.

Watch Grant Hackett's hips in this video, not nearly the rotation you'll see on Natalie.

This is all just my .02 of course, but for distance swimming you want plenty of torso rotation, not so much in the hips, plus a good 2-beat kick that keeps your hips stable but doesn't hog up oxygen like a 6-beat kick does.