Hi Everyone,
I have one question. I have a swimmer who I have tried to help speed up her rotation. She cannot seem to get into the sprinting habit (She is not a long distance swimmer, but she very well could be with this stroke). She is in high school and it affects all her strokes where she enters the water and holds her glide too long. I have tried to get her to "skip over" reaching as fast as she can to try and have her feel a totally different stroke.
Does anyone have any dryland or stroke techniques that they utilize to work on faster arm repetition?
Thanks!
Her kick is pretty fast, she can keep up with my 18yr olds during kick sets.
when she reaches out in front, she waves her hand around before pulling. This was one area I am trying to have her focus on. She just started high school and her favorite stroke is backstroke but her freestyle arm speed has started to affect her backstroke pull now it seems. I will try the head up drill with her.
Have you tried one of these? I use one when training long course or when I feel like I'm moving too slow. I set it to a pace I know is just a bit faster than what I'm use to and try to keep up. As the season goes on, I make adjustments when I feel like my tempo has improved and my stroke is holding up. Just having the beep might motivate her to move her arms faster. You can get them for $35 normally.
www.finisinc.com/
My thought would be to try fist drills. Swim with closed fists. She won't be able to fish around for a catch at the top. Nothing to catch there. With less resistance, she can pull through faster.
First of all, you have to work together with the swimmer on what her goals and preferences are. There are some swimmers who are geared more towards sprints and others towards longer distance races. If she is able to maintain a good distance per stroke, why not encourage her to compete in some longer distance races to see if that might be a better path for her?
If this is not an option, then the question above is a good one - how is her kick? She may be maintaining a good pace, but needs to work on speeding up her kick. Also, the intervals you have her do could condition her more towards the sprints. As coaches, we need to encourage distance per stroke. It is true that there is a different cadence to the sprints, but you shouldn't try to change her stroke to adapt to the sprints. Rather, you should give her more sprint-based workouts to condition her for those races.
At age 56 this is exactly my struggle. How do I speed up the tempo? For the last several months I have been without a coach. (I'm in the ME.) But his words have echoed in my mind, "Stop thinking and just swim!" Easier said then done! To help me overcome this I have started replacing the mechanics of swimming in my head with the counting of a beat 1-2, 1-2 when swimming a fast set. I have seen improvement in all my strokes and plan to purchase a tempo trainer when I get back to the states. Maybe give her a beat and ask her to focus on that when you want her to swim a fast set.
All of these are great ideas! Thank you everyone, I will try to report back when I see improvements in her stroke.
I am going with:
Tempo Trainer, Fist Drill, Head-up freestyle Drill, and maybe some leg work if legs are the problem.
I would advise caution with the Tempo Trainer. Sure, it may force the swimmer to speed up the stroke rate , but at the potential expense of the foundation of her technique. The swimmer may move her arms faster, but how is the strength and efficiency of the pull? Where is the hand entering the water? How is her recovery?, etc. What is important to understand is that "turning over faster" is not necessarily going to guarantee a faster swim. There are many more parts to the technique that need to be fine-tuned in order to increase the speed of the stroke. Water is 800 times denser than air, and the swimmer is going to struggle if she is windmilling through the water but not gaining distance for the strokes that she is taking. You mentioned that she waves her hand before she pulls - which points to a balance/core strength/kick strength issue. That is not going to be resolved with the Tempo trainer. You may want to try working on single arm in order to effectively eliminate that habit, under supervision.
When my granddaughter's coach was tweeking her freestyle, he had her hold a dowel (about 4 feet long, 3/4 inch diameter) with her hands the distance apart he wanted them to enter the water. She saw significant drop in all of the frees shortly after she started doing this drill. She said drill was HECK. Coach said, "It isn't easy if its hard."
I don't know if that will help with turn over rate but it might help with the waving her hand around thing.
