Well, I know some of you are big fans of Ti appoach. I would like to read more on it. The library will not vcover the books that deal with backstroke, or breaststroke or butterfly, so I read some articles from time to time on it. Matt S use it for a summer team for kids and uses it himself and others might use some of it.
Former Member
Matt -
You are probably right about me not being a sprinter. Since I didn't really learn how to swim until I was into my 40's I probably don't have any "trained" fast twitch muscles in my body. I get a lot of compliments on how "pretty" my strokes are, but once I switch into race mode, all that goes down the tube....I have been unable to translate TI swimming into fast swimming...hence, I "fuddle" the race by rushing the strokes, and fail to reap the benefits of staying balanced, long and lean. On the other hand, my definition of "distance" events are the 100 and 200 :cool: Have never swum anything longer, nor any "open water" swims.
Also, I have read Emmit Hines' book twice. The best instruction I took away from it was about turns....valuable information broken down into an easy-to-understand, step-by-step process.
I'm not throwing in the towel yet. In fact I'm glad to be living, now, in an area where there are greater opportunities to swim with masters instead of being greatly humbled swimming against teenagers at age-group meets.
Cheers!
Well, breastroke has the same thing when you are trying to develop it. The glide is long on the kick and you have a longer arm pull. However, for the 50 and the 100 yards, you do have to speed up the kick and arm pull. Now, Terry tells people to skipped Breaststroke during their first year of masters meet. Some people have more natural ability in *** than free. And they would not get DQ anymore than they would swimming free events. Back is also easy to get DQ because of the turn-continous motion and touching and getting back on your back on the turn..
Cinc,
I am a *** stroker too from a youth swim team background. My freestyle stroke was always akward, and I wanted to revamp it as I started swimming again. TI has really helped my stroke in a ton of ways.
Gaerth,
You said: "If you don't have the range of motion of an "Elite swimmer" then you should not try to force your limbs into the same technique of the elite swimmer."
I have to disagree with you here. I had reconstructive shoulder surgery a few years back and my ROM was limited when I first started TI drills. I think if you are patient and don'tmove through the drills to quickly and don't over do it, you will be fine. I had a bit of trouble at first and just backed off a bit until I developed more flexibility and strength in the shoulder girdle.
Hook'em
Blue
My experience with shoulder pain was exactly the opposite of what some here have reported.
I went to a freestyle stroke clinic at my local YMCA in the spring of 1998, and began experiencing shoulder pain a couple of months later which eventually forced me to take a few weeks off from swimming. I eventually settled on a modified stroke in which I didn't do everything I had been taught in the stroke clinic, avoiding the movements that caused the worst pain. But I was still experiencing a little bit of pain.
Because of this, I was apprehensive when I went to a TI freestyle workshop in February of 1999, since I was afraid they were going to ask me to do something that would aggravate the shoulder pain again. But this didn't happen. In fact, during the weeks following the workshop, the slight pain I had been experiencing gradually went away.
The freestyle stroke techniques that are in use today take you very close to the movements that can cause shoulder impingement, so if you are not trained properly, it is easy to go over the edge into shoulder pain. But, for me at least, the TI training sequence guarded against this.
If the stroke you have been using is significantly different from the stroke that TI teaches, you should expect that it will be awhile before you are able to incorporate TI stroke techniques effectively at race speeds. You are engraining a whole new set of muscle memories, and may be training a somewhat different set of muscles than you've been accustomed to using. For me, it took a couple of years (but keep in mind that the stroke technique I started with was pretty crappy).
Bob
