dry land core exercising

When you retract your shoulders, you're engaging your trapezius muscles, which help stabilize your shoulders by engaging the little muscles. (I came across an article with citations for this but I don't feel like going through my history right now, if you're curious reply to this and I"ll dig out the citation.) Food for thought... when you pull just from your shoulder, you've got a second class lever (fulcrum is at the glenohumeral joint = where your upper arm attaches to your torso; effort= muscles around that joint)... but note in Silvia's description the "inertial" parts. (Shoulder girdle elevation and rounding off the end of the stroke). I have reason to believe that what you get when you retract your shoulders is that you strengthen the connectivity between the two upper arms, such that you get a 1st class lever, which is much more efficient (so some of the downward rotation from the hand dropping down into the entry transfers to the finish of the other arm... Jonty Skinner went over this in closer detail in the goswim.tv forums a while back with his "angular momentum" theorizing. You can get angular momentum to help you out if you use a straightarm recovery, and tightening the traps by retracting the shoulders serves to enable that. Regarding the core... Todd Sayce ran an excellent series about core work for swimmers. Start with "sit up saga". saycoperformance.com/.../ Think about what the core encompasses. It's not just the "abs" (colloquially, the 6 back, aka the rectus abdominus)... think about what you want your core do be doing. Do you want to be flexing (curling forward)while you swim? Or do you want to be keeping a straight and stiff body line? Core work for short and axis long axis strokes is different. (So what helps your butterfly undulation may not DIRECTLY (at least neurally) help your core stability in freestyle. I have some other notes about core work, but I would suggest poking around saycoperformance, swimmingscience.net, some of Mike Robertson and Eric Cressey's articles about core strength. I think the biggest thing with any exercise is to understand WHY you're doing the exercises (rotation? .Flexion? Extension), exactly HOW the exercise should be done, as well as what BAD FORM looks like because you don't want to injure your spinal disks. Have someone watch you. It's easy to "cheat"... doing russian twists by moving your arms a lot so you touch the ground, but you don't really end up rotating your core... or when doing situps, bending at a bad part of your spine (lumbar, neck... not sure myself whether you want to be flexing your t spine) Wrote this quickly, hope it makes sense, feel free to ask for clarification.

When you retract your shoulders, you're engaging your trapezius muscles, which help stabilize your shoulders by engaging the little muscles. (I came across an article with citations for this but I don't feel like going through my history right now, if you're curious reply to this and I"ll dig out the citation.) Food for thought... when you pull just from your shoulder, you've got a second class lever (fulcrum is at the glenohumeral joint = where your upper arm attaches to your torso; effort= muscles around that joint)... but note in Silvia's description the "inertial" parts. (Shoulder girdle elevation and rounding off the end of the stroke). I have reason to believe that what you get when you retract your shoulders is that you strengthen the connectivity between the two upper arms, such that you get a 1st class lever, which is much more efficient (so some of the downward rotation from the hand dropping down into the entry transfers to the finish of the other arm... Jonty Skinner went over this in closer detail in the goswim.tv forums a while back with his "angular momentum" theorizing. You can get angular momentum to help you out if you use a straightarm recovery, and tightening the traps by retracting the shoulders serves to enable that. Regarding the core... Todd Sayce ran an excellent series about core work for swimmers. Start with "sit up saga". saycoperformance.com/.../ Think about what the core encompasses. It's not just the "abs" (colloquially, the 6 back, aka the rectus abdominus)... think about what you want your core do be doing. Do you want to be flexing (curling forward)while you swim? Or do you want to be keeping a straight and stiff body line? Core work for short and axis long axis strokes is different. (So what helps your butterfly undulation may not DIRECTLY (at least neurally) help your core stability in freestyle. I have some other notes about core work, but I would suggest poking around saycoperformance, swimmingscience.net, some of Mike Robertson and Eric Cressey's articles about core strength. I think the biggest thing with any exercise is to understand WHY you're doing the exercises (rotation? .Flexion? Extension), exactly HOW the exercise should be done, as well as what BAD FORM looks like because you don't want to injure your spinal disks. Have someone watch you. It's easy to "cheat"... doing russian twists by moving your arms a lot so you touch the ground, but you don't really end up rotating your core... or when doing situps, bending at a bad part of your spine (lumbar, neck... not sure myself whether you want to be flexing your t spine) Wrote this quickly, hope it makes sense, feel free to ask for clarification.