I was swimming laps yesterday and I overheard the swim coach tell the high school swim team that they should be swimming flat with no rotation of the hips. He told them that at no point they should not be kicking on their sides and that swimming flat decreases drag.
I've had one other person tell me the same thing when I first started swimming and I ended up with severe shoulder (rotator cuff) pain. It wasn't until I learned how to rotate from side to side that the pain resolved.
Former Member
unless he was talking about fly/*** or idk....you should ALWAYS be rotating your hips/body during the freestyle and backstroke stroke cycle.
Not necessarily. Many sprinters tend to keep a flatter position on the water in order to generate a higher stroke rate.
Bernard 50m free underwater 0.25 speed - YouTube
Alexander Popov Freestyle Stroke Technique - YouTube
My high school coach was a good example of that. At the final meet of my senior year, we beat our rivals; something we had not been able to do the previous two years. So, we threw our coach into the pool during the celebration- and found out our coach didn't know how to swim! :worms: She panicked and burst into tears as she clawed her way to the edge of the pool. We had no idea she was a gym teacher who got stuck with the swim team when nobody else wanted it. (No wonder I never learned strokes from her; I learned by watching the other breaststroker in my lane!)
Unbelievable! SHOCK!!! :bolt:
Speaking of Thorpe, a less than stellar comeback today, but he didn't really swim a freestyle race to the best of my knowledge, just an IM. He will do the fly interestingly enough also.
Keep in mind that Thorpe hasn't raced since 2006. He only officially started his comeback 9 months ago. 9 months of training won't erase 4 1/2 years of not training.
I think too many people are being too hard on him for a 100 im preformance that was his first race in a meet in years.
I was swimming laps yesterday and I overheard the swim coach tell the high school swim team that they should be swimming flat with no rotation of the hips. He told them that at no point they should not be kicking on their sides and that swimming flat decreases drag.
I've had one other person tell me the same thing when I first started swimming and I ended up with severe shoulder (rotator cuff) pain. It wasn't until I learned how to rotate from side to side that the pain resolved. No worries here.. well. No worries... I reckon it could be worrisome.
Here's the full story.
Not that long ago (at least I believe), some paper got published on swimming. Some researchers found out that the fastest swimmers in this study happened to be the ones that were rotating less. That's all.
Now where things are starting to drift is, well twofold:
1. They found out that the faster swimmers (in this study) were the ones rotating less, but that doesn't mean they're not rotating or avoiding rotating or even trying to rotate as little as possible.
2. (more importantly). I believe that this observation is probably due to the fact that faster swimmers did have the higher stroke rate (bare in mind that they studied Sprinters, not distance swimmers) and that logically, the higher the rate, the less time to rotate, which probably explains that the fastest folks, displaying the fastest stroke rate, were as a result of this rotating less.
I think that some new swimmers learning through these coaches that are always keen to apply new theories at large, regardless of the level, will suffer a bit from bad advising for a whilst. That's unfortunate, they will be asked to rotate as little as possible. Other coaches will certainly understand how this principle should be applied, but not all will do.
I think it's worth remembering at this point that body rotation in FreeStyle should be sufficient for allowing the arms to recover over water with a high elbow, but not any higher (especially applied to Pool swimming). The best possible drill I can think of to define a fair individual rotation level is certainly the finger trailing drill. It is often used to teach relaxed high elbow recovery (and it performs well at this task), but it can (and should) also be used to shape a symmetrical recovery with just enough rotation (not more) to allow for arms to recover above surface.
Anyway, my :2cents:
And of course, my ref: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.../18981935
Not so funny!! We had 2 H S coaches who could not swim. One of my team swimmers had to pull a drowning kid out of the pool when one of them could not go in after the kid. We then had H S swimmers get paid to be life guards during the lunch hour to have some safety.
