Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 03:19:31 GMT

@__steve__ I replied to you PM regarding my shoulder surgery but for some reason I'm not seeing that in my 'Sent Items'. I actually tried twice. I'm wondering if you got the reply?

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 12:18:59 GMT

Even counting for the yds-m difference, my kick is 20-25% less effecient than yours in terms of DPS. Good data point for me. I haven't tried anything regarding the body position yet. Hopefully this weekend. When I clicked on the Swimmer Magazine through my USMS link, it seems I needed Adobe Flash to read it. I'm wondering if there is any other way to read it without having to download that buggy Flash software.

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

flystorms — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 09:45:51 GMT

There was a good article in Swimmer mag this month about stretching to streamline against a wall. That could certainly help you out with getting the feel of a good streamline and body position.

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

Windrath — Sun, 06 Jan 2019 09:34:34 GMT

I have never seen stats on the number of kicks that swimmers taken, but I have counted mine in the past. For flutter kick, I usually take 65-70 (each downkick counts as one), dolphin was +/- 25. This is for a 25 yard pool with a kickboard with times around 20 -22 secs/25 yds. What are other forumites finding? ps - did you try doing the superman yoga pose - just getting off the ground a little?

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Sun, 06 Jan 2019 06:48:25 GMT

Thanks Paul. I tried reducing the amplitude and went 23.4 today. :) Maybe there is potential for even more improvement here. I'll shoot another video next week to check. I found a bunch of youtube videos on how to fix "anterior pelvic tilt". I'll look into them. Thanks again for the detailed feedback. I dont like kicking with a board as I used to have shoulder issues and had surgery on my right shoulder due to persistant dislocations. Just for kicks, I measured the kick tempo (number of times the left foot came down) and it was 2.42 per second. Assuming I glide for 3 seconds, I need 50 kicks (left + right counted as one kick) to go 25m. I wonder if there are any stats available for comparison with others.

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

Windrath — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 09:52:40 GMT

Good Morning One-Eyed-King, Thanks for the video. Head/upper body position is more streamline. Now, to my eye anyway, there are three more things to work on: a) Body alignment (most important): I see too much pelvic tilt (aka "anterior pelvic tilt") that can be caused by a number of things. In my experience, triathletes often have this because their hip flexors are tight from their running and biking position. Your pelvic orientation is limiting power and increasing drag. Thought many will disagree, I like kicking with a board (looking straight ahead) because it "encourages" a more superman (yoga) orientation. Of course, this assumes no back, neck, or shoulder issues. This might take some dryland and stretching routines to change your pelvic tilt. b) Kick Amplitude:The distance from the top to bottom of your kick is pretty large. At the top, it looks like your calf/knee is out of the water and at the bottom, your foot is about 12" below your body. This creates alot of drag (bottom of your kick) and wastes effort (leg coming out of the water). This is due in part to your pelvic orientation in "a" above. Try kicking "silently" meaning your feet do not break the surface of the water and your amplitude will decrease which reduces drag and does not waste energy. c) Ankle Flexation: If you can improve your ankle flexation (higher degree of toe point) throughout the kick, you will reduce drag and increase speed. This may be out of your control or, with stretching, a longer term "project" to fix. Your current kick speed is pretty good. Kicking 25 m in under 20 secs is very good. Your tempo looks good to me. Kicking faster and swimming faster are not mutually exclusive. They are not equally correlated either. IMO, the kicking drills you are doing will not help you incorporate kicking into your pulling because of your specific situation, it is possible the anterior pelvic tilt keeps you from optimal body alignment. Good body alignment is the single most important technique to master in swimming. My suggestion is to focus on altering your pelvic tilt (if possible) to get closer to a small superman (yoga) alignment position. If you can achieve this, it will change alot of what you do. Good Luck. Good Luck

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

__steve__ — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 08:00:47 GMT

Nice improvements in freestyle and kick! Keep working at it

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 05:25:06 GMT

Probably, the primary reason your feet are coming out of the water so much is because your upper body is submerged enough to cause you to be out-of-balance. When streamline kicking, like in your video, the back part of your head (some coaches call it the monkey bump) should be slightly breaking the surface of the water and your shoulders should at the surface as well. Paul Paul - Thanks for this tip about my head. I had a coaching session recently and he also pointed out my head is too low in the water and moving too much. I changed my head position and it helped with the kick speed and also my swimming speed. In the last two months I went from kick sprint (25m) time of 31s to 24.2s. Of this, 2 seconds came from the change to the head position. The rest came from (1) practice (2) no breathing and (2) kicking harder during the last 10m, though I feel like dying, lol. www.dropbox.com/.../Dec 21-2018-Kick.mp4 This is the video of my current kick. Initially I improved at the rate of 1-2s per week but in the last 3 weeks I've stagnated at ~ 24sec. I really want to get below 20sec. How do I do that? Is something wrong with my kick technique or am I not kicking fast enough? You should decide what is more important: kicking faster or swimming faster? Your swimming is being held back by your two beat kick. No amount of kicking and kick sets will help you swim faster if you stay with the two beat kick technique. Paul I imagine they're not mutually exclusive? But definetely swimming faster is my primary goal. I've started doing drills like 4 (or 6) kicks 1 stoke, where I try to I kick continously. This has been helping my swimming speed. For example I'm 0.5-1 sec faster with this continous kick compared to my previous 2-beat kick for 25m. At this point I dont know if my continous kick is a 4-beat or 6-beat kick. May be it doesn't matter. I'll keep practicing these drills for now and report back later. But I would certainly like to know what other drills I can do to better integrate a continous kick into my stroke.

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

Windrath — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 12:23:19 GMT

One_Eyed-King, Probably, the primary reason your feet are coming out of the water so much is because your upper body is submerged enough to cause you to be out-of-balance. When streamline kicking, like in your video, the back part of your head (some coaches call it the monkey bump) should be slightly breaking the surface of the water and your shoulders should at the surface as well. You should decide what is more important: kicking faster or swimming faster? Your swimming is being held back by your two beat kick. No amount of kicking and kick sets will help you swim faster if you stay with the two beat kick technique. Paul

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

Swimspire — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 06:50:23 GMT

Hi there - very glad to see you have been working on improving your kick! Judging from the previous videos you have posted, your kicking is much improved - both in terms of strength/conditioning and in terms of technique, especially given the fact that you are relatively new to swimming. I can see that you are trying to emphasize the finish portion of the kick. I would not be too concerned about ankle flexibility at this time - the more you kick, the better it will get. Be sure to continue to maintain patience in this process - it takes persistent effort to improve the kick, and progress does not happen in a day. One of the issues that I see is that your feet are coming out of the water and catching some air (you can see this in the video), which reduces the efficiency of your kick. You need to practice keeping the feet slightly under the water - and you can do this by incorporating variety in your kicking drills. For example, practice side kick, and kick on your back in addition to streamline kicking on your stomach. Try to continue practicing the single arm drill with the same kicking amount and speed - this will allow you to practice incorporating the kick with the upper body movements, which in turn will transfer to your fullstroke. Best of luck and looking forward to seeing your fullstroke video as well!

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 02:03:17 GMT

Looks to me your feet and ankles are very stiff. They are like brakes When you say my ankles are stiff, do you mean I'm not bending them enough? Also, what does it mean that my feet are stiff? Lastly, are the amplitudes of my up and down kick ok?

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 10:28:19 GMT

After the feedback from @Swimspire, I really wanted to improve my kick and started doing kicking drills. Thankfully, I found out that I can avoid cramps during kick drills if I have a banana and an electrolyte drink before swimming. My 25m all-out speed with absolutely no kick is only 1 second slower thanthe one with my current "2-beat" kick. I'm really curious to know how this matches with others. So I'm on a mission to find out what a good kick can do to my 25m all-out speed. I am finding kick sets (8 x 25m) to be quite tiring and I need atleast 1 min rest after each 25m. My typical times are around 35s per 25m and my fastest so far was 31s. I read that good swimmers are only 2-3s slower with kick only compared to full-stroke. I'm a full 11+ seconds slower now. I would really like to know what I'm doing wrong and how I can improve. My kick video and the same video at 0.25x speed.

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

__steve__ — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 10:22:32 GMT

Looks to me your feet and ankles are very stiff. They are like brakes

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 02:18:12 GMT

Thanks, Swimspire. I'll try these ideas for a few weeks and report back.

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

Swimspire — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 01:50:42 GMT

I'm glad the feedback on crossing over was helpful for you! When we talk about catching air, we mean that you are driving a certain amount of air into the water (you can see this in your video on the right arm as compared to the left arm). The angle of the hand entry is key to avoid catching air. You'll want to keep watching videos of your swim and adjust the angle of your right arm/hand entry such that you are no longer seeing those air bubbles. In the previous video that you posted, you had a wide kick that came mainly from the knees. In the latest video, you have a very small, inconsistent kick - so you have developed a good upper body, but it is not tied to a strong, efficient kick. If you work on side kicking, kicking on your back, or streamline kick and incorporate kicking into your daily swimming routine along with single arm drills, you will develop a better, more consistent kick overall. Using these kicking drills (side and back for example) will allow you to isolate your kick and develop it better than simply trying to focus on the kick during the fullstroke. Hope this helps - good luck!

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Sun, 21 Oct 2018 05:13:20 GMT

@swimspire, I didn't understand what you meant by "catch some air on the right arm". Also, I tried focusing on legs while doing the single arm drills. But I just wasnt sure what I should focus on. Moreover, I find it hard to visualize my leg's position since I cant see it. Often times I think my leg is in place X while swimming but after looking at the video I realize it was wider or farther than where I had imagined it was. One of the reasons I started doing single-arm drills is to pay more attention to my hand position. And that did help to fix my hand position. Also, thanks for the feedback on the right hand cross-over. I'm paying more attention to it now and it got better in the last 2 weeks. Previously I moved towards my left when I did single-arm right hand drill rapidly but now I'm going straighter. @Steve, I had tried 6-beat kick but feel completely uncoordinated and go slower than my 2-beat kick pace. May be I need to try it slower?

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

Swimspire — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 11:31:01 GMT

At this point, I think the best thing for you would be to continue what you are familiar with - ie practicing the single arm drill - which has, as you have seen, already helped you improve quite a bit. You can put a twist on the single arm by slowing down the recovery and emphasizing more of the kicking part of the drill. This way, you will get a lot more out of the drill and work your kick more. You can also combine this with kicking on your side (on both sides, similar to single arm). Another aspect I noticed that you can think about is making sure that your right hand doesn't cross over during the extension of the arm Be sure to place your hand in front of the shoulder. You also have the tendency to catch some air on the right arm, as well. Once again, you're doing a great job so far by improving your swimming on your own. Keep up the great work!

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

__steve__ — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 09:40:13 GMT

You have made tremendous improvements. Your stroke is more fluid and streamlined. When your hands enter the water they are crossing the imaginary center line (especially the right) What happens is the body follows and you’re not swimming in straight line. It also may be excessive on the shoulders. Try entering hands outside the center line in more of a “Y” fashion. Kicking: try very tight 6 beat kicks to maintain momentum that is being lost between stroke propulsion Once again, your form has a very solid foundation which will allow continued improvements.

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

One-Eyed-King — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 12:48:13 GMT

@swimspire, thanks for the feedback. Do you have any suggestions for kicking drills? I had originally learned freestyle using the Total immersion technique. Although I'm not religious about the TI technique, I think my kick mostly comes from that style. I had also tried the rapid flutter kick drill. But that gives me foot cramps. Also, were you suggesting my head's unstable position is caused due to my legs' position? I try to look downwards after breathing and I thought this caused the head bobbing.

RE: Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

Swimspire — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 10:35:51 GMT

Hi there, compared to the last video you posted, I would say your stroke technique has improved quite a lot! Especially in terms of the strength and also the technique of the pull (early vertical forearm), high elbow recovery, and the technique of the kick (it isn't as wide). You can keep working on maintaining a consistent kick during the entire stroke cycle which will help your head to remain stable. Keep working on the single arm drill that you are doing and try to include a greater variety of kicking drills in order to improve the lower body. Great job and good luck!