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Looking for swim drills

deedlit's picture
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801 days
started by deedlit on April 24, 2007

My husband filmed a small part of my performance during the 5000m charity swim on Sunday. So now I know a couple of things that need to be improved, but I'm not sure what drills could help.

1-My hands seem to cross over the half of my body. This certainly slows me down.

2-Every 6 kicks or so, I give a bigger kick. I don't know why, and I don't know if it's always the same leg. I'll need a bit more filming to find out more.

The good news is that I can keep the pace throughout the entire swim, and my arms move in a regular motion, both arms are synchronized, and my gliding seems pretty good. My breathing is also good, and I don't precipitate the recovery, meaning that the amount of time that my arms are in the air when I breathe is the same than the other strokes.

I'm pretty happy overall, especially since I haven't had swimming lessons in over 10 years and was afraid I would just be reinforcing bad habits. I will have to ask my husband to film me from time to time to make sure I'm improving!

Meanwhile, do you guys know of any drills to improve my problems?
Thanks!

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Caroline
http://aquabike.blogspot.com/

kylie's picture
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kylie posted 1 year ago.

To get rid of crossover I was told to swim really wide... like making a big Y with your arms during the stroke. Exaggerate it. Then during "regular swimming" try to get wider than you think you need to, and your body will pick the right spot.

That is mostly for getting entry to the water in the right place, but I found it helped me a lot with crossover since they were related for me.

Ironmom's picture
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Ironmom posted 1 year ago.

Some of the time crossover is caused by bringing the arms around in an arc during the recovery phase instead of picking up each arm by the elbow and tracking the elbow forwards. If your hand isn't hanging from the elbow but instead is swinging wide, the momentum will carry your hand across your center line once the hand enters the water. You can fix this by doing drills like Fingertip drag (drag your fingertips forward through the water during the recovery phase of each stroke), the Shark drill (picture your elbow rising up out of the water like a shark's fin in Jaws), or the Zipper (bring your thumb up the side of your body during the recovery phase of each stroke). I tell my swimmers to picture themselves like marionette puppets. At the end of each stroke, your puppeteer picks up your elbow by a string and moves it forward in a straight line past your head. Your wrist and hand merely dangle from this elbow until they enter the water in a clean straight line in front of your shoulder.

For the kicking, do you mean a bigger kick as in straight up and down, or are your legs scissoring to the side? Are you kicking using a 6-beat or 2-beat kick? (2-beat is one kick to each arm stroke, 6-beat is 3 kicks to each arm stroke). I'm guessing a 6-beat kick if you're giving a stronger kick once every 6. As long as you're not overbending your knees or scissoring out your legs wide, it's probably not too big of a deal to have one strong kick, but personally I try not to kick much at all in distance swimming and use a pretty gentle 2-beat kick. Anything extra you're putting into your legs uses up a lot of oxygen, so you might try kicking less in general if you find that's an issue.

Blue Skies, -Robin-
http://ironmom.blogspot.com/

deedlit's picture
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801 days
deedlit posted 1 year ago.

Hi! Thanks for the ideas, I will try these drills for sure. I used to do fingertip drags, but didn't do any lately, so I'll start again.

As for the kicks, I do 6-beat, I suppose it's coming from my (long-gone) competitive sprint swimming background. It didn't seem to affect my endurance and I was still able to breathe every 3 strokes, and had some energy left at the end of my 5000m, so I suppose it's not that bad.

The stronger kick is not scissoring, that's the good news! :) I will need another look (and a new video) to find out if I bend the knees too much. I guess the best thing would be to post the next video to get trifuelers' insight! I'm not posting this one, as it was from a cell phone and the quality is not that great...
Thanks again!

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Caroline
http://aquabike.blogspot.com/