[Feedback Friday] How To Break 2:00/100m

It's not just the position. It's not just getting a good high elbow catch. There's a few other factors that help move you forward. Welcome to Feedback Friday. In these videos, we have someone who watches the channel, send in a video of their swimming, and I look at what they can do to improve. How can they get faster? How can they become more efficient in the water? My name's Brenton Ford. I'm a swim coach based in Australia. I've had six national titles as a master's coach. I've been master's coach of the year, and I hold the New Zealand Ironman swim course record for the 25 to 29 year age group. What I do is help people from around the world become better swimmers, particularly in freestyle. That's what we focus on here. Now, in this video, I've had a look through the different angles, and there's a couple of things that I could see that Leon could do here to get faster. And he said he's been back swimming for six months. He's averaging around two minutes, 10 per hundred. And in this video, he swims around a 150. So he's going a little bit quicker than his average pace. Now, the first thing we always want to look at is what can we do to be more streamlined in the water? Because it doesn't matter how fit and how strong you are. If you have poor body position, or you're creating a lot of additional drag, then that is going to cause, you'd have to work a lot harder to generate speed. So we always want to look at what can we do to be more streamlined? Now, the first thing we look at is how is your head and your body position? If we have a look at his head position, he looks great. He's looking slightly forwards. The top of his head is out of the water. That ticks the box with head position. So I really like where his head is there. Now, if we have a look at the hips, you'll see that they're sitting a bit below the surface. And then if we go on down to the legs, you might notice that the knees are bending quite a bit. So if we had some underwater footage, we'd likely see that the hips are dropping, the legs are dropping a bit. So he's not quite horizontal in the water. There's a bit of a drop there. And the other thing with that too is with his kick, he's likely just bending at the knees, he's kicking from the knees a little bit too much there. So what I'd suggest doing is adjusting the way that he's kicking. A couple of ways that we can think about that kick is we wanna make sure we're kicking the right size. So I like to picture this bucket out behind you, and you wanna picture like you're just keeping your feet in the bucket. Now, he's almost doing that, but we do see at times, there's moments like this here, where his knee is just bending a little bit too much. And that's gonna give him more propulsion because it's gonna be a bigger kick, but that is outweighed by more drag. So I'd encourage him to keep his legs just a little bit longer and straighter. And I almost wanna like picture the kick like a streamer attached to a fan, where you see that streamer just sort of going up and down and up and down. It's a little bit like that. Now we certainly do bend the knee a little bit on the down kicks, but I'd be looking to keep it slightly straighter. And it will feel a lot easier. He'll sit a bit higher because he's creating less drag, and that should take a good amount of the effort out of it. Now I do find that when people are relatively new to swimming or they're just getting back into swimming, quite often they're kicking a little bit bigger and a little bit harder than what they actually need to in order to keep their speed going and try and keep their hips and legs up. Because if they feel like if they stop that, then they feel like they're just gonna stop or slow down or their body's going to sink. But you have to trust that if you have a lighter, narrower kick, it's going to be easier, and it's actually going to help with your body position. So we don't want most of our propulsion coming from the kick. Ideally, most of our propulsion will be coming from what our arms are doing in the water. So if you feel like your kick is the thing that is driving you forwards, you might need to back it off a little bit, because most of that propulsion should be coming from the arms. And sometimes if we're kicking too hard, it makes it hard to transition to getting that propulsion from the arms. So that would be the first thing there. Now, the other thing we will look at here is his breathing. He's breathing pretty well, but he does certainly lose a little bit of balance and stability in the stroke when he takes that breath. So if we look at where he's looking when he breathes, he's in quite a good spot, but you will notice that right here, it looks like a couple of things are happening. He's looking up a little bit too high. Now, the best place to look is to the side, trying to keep part of that bottom goggle in the water. We generally want to try and keep part of that bottom goggle in. Now, if you're swimming open water and it's choppy and there's waves, these rules kind of go out the window because you've got to do what you got to do to get the breath in. But certainly if it's flat and you're in the pool, try and look directly to the side and just not turn up quite so high. But you'll also notice he looks like he might be gasping for air a bit. He's got his mouth quite open. He's going, trying to take a big breath of air in. Now, that can often indicate that he is either breathing out too much too early, or he's just maybe not breathing in the right way, as in more through the mouth than through the nose. Now, what we want to aim for is when we take our breath, we then go back in the water. Now, you don't want to hold onto your air completely. We want to have a very light exhale through the mouth and through the nose is fine, but very light exhale. And it's only when we turn our head to breathe here on the next stroke that then we want to dump the air. We want to get rid of it fairly quickly. So we don't want to hold onto the air the whole time, but just a gradual exhale. And then we just clear the lungs. We dump it just as we're turning our head to the side. So when you go to breathe in, it shouldn't feel like you're having to take this big breath in and it's a big gasp of air. If you exhale correctly, if you get that right and you focus on the exhale, then you'll find that the breath in just comes naturally. It's like a vacuum, just goes in naturally. You don't need to think about it. So often we're better to think about the exhale rather than the inhale. So that should help with his breathing because it does look like there's a few too many bubbles coming out where his mouth and his nose are early on. So he might just be exhaling a little bit too soon. And just meaning he's sort of not making the most of that air intake that he's getting. So that'd be another thing. Now, what we also see is that on some of these strokes, he does lose a bit of balance and stability when he turns to breathe. So quite often we'll see that people will over-rotate through their shoulders and through their hips when they turn to take a breath. And over-rotation to me is past about 45 degrees. So if we're looking front on, the shoulders, the hips are going past about 45 degrees, it's probably too much. We can see here, if we were looking front on, that's likely gonna be 90 degrees. And the result of that is a few things. You can see this arm drops straight down. And at this point, there's nothing in front of his head. Now, good freestyle typically has something always in front of the head. We call that front quadrant timing. So if we were to split the body into four quarters like this here, we'd say that the front quadrant is this one here. And most of the time, we wanna always have something in front of the head. An arm should always be out there. And on those strokes where he takes the breath, he's not in the front quadrant. So right there, he's got his arm in front. That's great timing. Here, when he takes that breath, yeah, that arm's pulled through or dropped down because he's rolling the shoulders too far. Now, quite often that just comes from losing balance, losing control in that part of the stroke. So that, for a lot of people, is a real challenge. So then the question is, well, yeah, what can you do to stop it, right? There's a couple things that can help you there. The first one is we need to make sure we look in the right direction. So keeping that bottom goggle a bit more in the water will help. The second thing, try and stay a bit flatter, maybe through the hips, but certainly through the shoulders, just trying to stay a little bit flatter so he's not rolling to 90 degrees. He's more at 45. Now, what you have to do to be able to control that is you've got to feel like there's a little bit of tautness or tension on the underside of your body. You've got to control this reach in front as well. So if we let this arm just push down on the water and drop straight down, this one's actually pretty good, but on some of these other strokes there, it just drops down. So you have to control that reach. Just take that little bit of time to extend out as you're rotating on the side, but not going too far. But you certainly need to have this little bit of tension and control on the underside through here and a little bit through that shoulder. The other part of that, and this is a real key one for a lot of people, and I was running clinics yesterday in Melbourne, and one of the things we saw with quite a few swimmers was actually, it's how you finish the stroke. So if you don't exit the water correctly, then you might be missing out on the last 10 to 15, 20% of your propulsion. Now you don't get a lot of propulsion necessarily out of the last part of your stroke, but you get enough to make a difference with how easy it is to keep this arm extending out before you roll into the catch. Now, if we have a look at what's happening here with Leon is he sometimes comes out, it's not too short, like he's finishing past the hip, which is good. We want to finish past the hip. But the main thing that I noticed here is the direction that his big paddle, so his hand and his forearm is his big paddle, that's what's gonna help drive you forwards. You'll notice from here through to the end that the palm's mostly facing upwards. So he's not really pushing backwards on the water. So a lot of that force is actually going in an upwards direction. And you can see how his palm right there is actually facing in an upwards direction. Now, a similar thing happens on his left side as well. So he's here, but right now that hand is angled in that direction. And he keeps going, keeps going. And the whole way through, it's pretty much pushing up. So he's missing out on a decent percentage of that propulsion that he could be getting. Now, what's the impact of that? Well, when he takes a breath, so when he takes a breath on this side here, if this hand is pushing upwards, it pushes the hips down because you've got the equal opposite reaction. That pushes up, the hips go down. And because he's not getting that last 10 to 20% of that propulsion on that side, it's very hard to keep this arm extending forwards and being balanced and being controlled because he's lost that last bit. So that's the thing that we see as a result of it. So he may need to do a couple of things there to practice staying balanced and keeping that arm in front. It's not necessarily just about breathing lower. It's not just about rotating less. Sometimes you've just got to actually finish the stroke a little bit better. So he's keeping the palm facing back, exiting better. Sometimes it's a combination of things and that can take time, that can take practice. Even very, very good swimmers, when they take a breath, that's often when the stroke can start to fall apart a little bit. So it does take time and practice to be able to do that. So that's Leon's exit there. Now, the other thing we'll see here is that he actually recovers over the water really well. He's got this nice open recovery, elbow lead, open as in, we can see his underarm there. So as a coach, one thing I look for is we want to have quite an open recovery. So this underarm should be showing to the side of the pool. Nothing crazy, you don't think you need to come over really close to the body in this ridiculous high elbow recovery over the top. No, just open, show that underarm a little bit. Good to have that elbow pointing up to the side. And this is called your recovery because the hands should be somewhat relaxed. We want to put effort into the underwater phase of the stroke, but the recovery phase of the stroke, that should be pretty relaxed because that is not where you're gonna get your propulsion from. And he's doing those things really well. Nice with his entry, nice with his reach. I think he's doing a really good job with that. And we can even see some parts of his catch are going quite well, particularly on some of these strokes where he's not breathing. So if you look at his left arm here, going from there, setting the catch. This is actually quite good. Now, he's almost in this high elbow catch. Now, a high elbow catch is if we go from shoulder to fingertips, if that elbow is above it, then I'd consider that a high elbow catch. Better to see from under the water, but looking at this, that's not too bad at all. He may just be a little bit wide. His hand looks like it's probably wider than his elbow. So if we're looking front on, rather than having this hand narrower than the elbow, his hand would be wider than the elbow. And typically we lose a little bit of power out there. And quite often as well, if you're having to come out that wide, where you're probably pushing in that outwards direction. And if you push outwards, that's not gonna help move you forwards. We need to try and keep most of those forces pressing back towards our feet, because that's what's gonna move us forwards. So it looks like he's going quite wide here. And then maybe as a result of that, that's where that hand then pushes up at the back. So in order for him to get more out of it, we'd wanna work on the path of the hand. So starting line with the shoulder, as you pull through, we almost wanna trace the outside line of the body. So it's like a skinny S path that that hand will follow. It will go out a little bit, come in a little bit, and that's the path we wanna go. He's probably going a bit like a, maybe a wider S, probably a little bit like this here, I reckon, if we were looking front on. So we'd wanna work on the path of the hand and making sure that we keep the palm and the forearm facing backwards. So we wanna keep a big paddle all the way through. And he's just losing some of that paddle because he's going upwards at the back there. So that will help him in terms of that propulsion and speed. Now, the other thing that, what generates that propulsion, what helps you move forwards is mostly what the arms are doing, but it's a combination of a few things. So it's not just the position. It's not just getting a good high elbow catch that we were looking at there. There's a few other factors that help move you forwards. And this is why you might actually see some average looking swimmers who can actually go quite fast. It's because of these few things right here. And that is, okay, we've got our, we need to have a big paddle to work with. That's number one. Secondly, we need to apply power. You need to have some force as you're pulling through the water, but we don't wanna overpower it. Think of it like being in a car. If you put the accelerator down straight away, you're probably gonna spin the wheels. We wanna have just a little bit of a gradual build up there. So we don't force it too much in this part. We wanna just sort of gradually build it up and you'll likely be most powerful underneath here because this is where you're strongest. So we'll have the most power through here, but we wanna make sure we've got some power and pressure on the water underneath there. And the third thing is you need to accelerate through the stroke. If your arms are moving at a constant speed, you never really get that momentum and that propulsion from the stroke. So a good catch and pull, we have a big paddle over a long period of time and we've got some power and some force with it and we accelerate through the stroke. So I'd say he could work on probably each of those things just to find a little bit of additional speed. That's what I'd be looking at there. And how does he do it? The best way to really improve your catch and pull is by picking one or two or three drills that's specific to what you need to work on. Now for him, a drill that I think would be really good would be long dog paddle drill. In long dog paddle drill, where it's like underwater recovery freestyle. It's normal freestyle, but instead of going over the water, we're recovering underneath. And what I'd encourage him to try and keep pressure on the hand and on the forearm all the way through, keep the hand and forearm facing backwards rather than upwards through that back part and just make sure he's finishing past the hip. And he will probably be able to feel that propulsion and that acceleration if he does that drill really well. So I think that'd be a good one. And another one I really like is what we call YMCA drill. It's where you're kicking in these four positions, which you'll see in this video here. And in that drill, you can really just isolate each of the main positions that we wanna do. And that way you can practice making sure you're not going too wide with the hands. You can practice your high elbow catch. You can practice what we call the power diamond, which is when your hands are under the water and they should look like half a diamond. And you can practice the four key positions that we would often teach in freestyle. And that's a great way just to get your head around where you need to be in those different parts of the stroke. So there's a number of drills you could do. And what I've seen work really well for people is doing a few drills in your warmup every session that starts to change those movement patterns that you've got. That starts to improve your technique. And that's typically after five, six, seven weeks time, you start to really see the benefits of doing that. So that's what I would suggest for Leon here. Now, if you wanna improve your own technique, the best way to do that with us is in the Effortless Swim Membership. I'll put a link to that below. You can send videos of your stroke for me to take a look at and analyze on our monthly members call. And you can also get access to all of our technique courses, our five-day catch challenge, our eight-week faster freestyle course, as well as all of our workouts. If you're not sure what to do in training, then we've got all that there as well. So I'll put the link below. If you'd like to continue learning about the freestyle stroke, watch this video right here.