Videos: please see technique

OK, this would have kept me up all night, so I took a shower, as I do some of my best thinking in the water, I think. So, in reviewing my own stroke stylings, my thought on flat entry vs thumb down is (now) this: Thumb entry does not presume the hand will enter perpendicular to the water, a position which would present pretty much the greatest chance (aside from 90+ degrees) of shoulder impingement over extreme repetition. You can enter thumbs down at 45 degrees, reducing impingement risk to nearly nothing, while still maintaining the benefit of splitting the water. Plus, it has the added benefit of reducing the necessary hand rotation required to position oneself for the catch. Don't loose sleep over it, just use the method most fast swimmers use - non-thumb first entry, as well as "I" stroke, and avoiding scissor kicking.

on what do you base that, steve? non-thumb entry certainly mitigates the chance of shoulder impingement, as discussed above and in numerous recent articles, but there are benefits to thumb-entry which still makes it beneficial for a fast stroke, which is why it was put into practice in the first place. What I was bothered by was that I had lost track of the swimmer's shoulder concerns when conceptualizing stroke technique, an am concerned that the only available alternative many see is a flat entry, which I don't think is ideal for streamlining. As I teach quite a bit of swimming and have for years, I don't want to counsel my swimmers to do something that will over-rotate their shoulders over the long-term, but I don't feel comfortable with a flat entry. In the past, I've generally told my swimmers to go thumb-entry, but very relaxed posture and at an angle, to avoid cross-over, overly-mechanical stroke, and possible injury for pushing your body to repeat an unnatural position. However, I don't traditionally address the shoulder impingement specifically, and it seems like I should going forward. So, I needed to reconcile what I teach with what I should teach. In reflecting upon it, I think the relaxed posture with which I have my swimmers perform the thumb-entry amounts to a 45 degree or less entry, and I don't think that really creates any shoulder trauma, though I'm no doctor, as the internal rotation, to the degree there is any, is minimal and I've never heard shoulder complaints from my swimmers over the years. It preserves the splitting of the water effect of the out-of-favor 90 degree thumb-entry while gearing up the hand for the catch. Although, I'd be inclined to cease such instruction should I see a study that established that any angular entry of the hand into the water, to any degree, is harmful. I've not seen such, though. I think the majority of the work in opposition to thumb-entry focuses on a 90 degree entry. As for pull types, hand path should never be taken into account outside of discussion of body rotation (the rotation of the shoulders around the body), as the rotation of the body while performing an I-Pull can, essentially, create an S-Pull path. So, Counsilman's S-Pull can now largely considered more of an observation of I-Pull in the context of the modern, not flat, swimming style. So, neither pull is really wrong, when taken in the context of the modern stroke, provided that the swimmer isn't exaggerating the effects of the natural outsweep due to the body rotation. Ohhhh, scissor-kicking, the bane of every young swim-teamer... that and no-kicking, that is. --Sean