OK this sounds like a stupid question but someone at the pool told me that my hand needs to be open with my fingers apart when I swim. i normally cup it which is what I thought was the best way. Today I tried my fingers together and my thumb out a little bit from the hand.
The cupped hand seemed best but what do the experts say?
I can't think of a more complex problem to look at then the motion of the hand and arm in swimming.
The complexity makes it all very difficult. As an engineer I would try to isolate one aspect from another in order to study it. But in this case doing so overlook sbig problems.
Purely contrained to the propulsion aspect, I think many of the issues came out of an improper understanding of how the hands move both relative to the body and relative to the water. In particular in my experience, although your hands may move laterally to a great deal relative to your trunk, relative to the water the paths are much straighter due to trunk rotation. I think that sent us down a 10 year trip down the wrong road.
The latest copy of Swimming Fastest has Coach Maglisco saying that drag forces create propulsion - sculling is dead. On the other hand we all know you can propel ourselves forward by sculling - log live the scull. I think we have lots more work to do in trying to understand swim propulsion.
To be quite clear coach Maglischo recommends stright diagonal pulling motions that would involve an aspect of sculling.
Now to throw the spaner in the works we can say, but what about biomecahnics? Just because in terms of fluid mechanics we can say a movement is optimal (not that we can right now) it is a big leap to say that we should make that move or make that move thousands of times a day.
A good example someone else referenced is the thumb first entry recommended by Doc Counsilman. The fuid mechanics of it are solid - less reistsance. The biomechanics of it are solid in one aspect - gets hand i ngood postition for pull. But in another aspect it is biomechanically improper - exposure to injury. So in this case we have gone away from a technically solid technique purely because it exposes us to injury.
The topic of swim propulsion is wide open I believe, we have seen some aspects that don't apply eg Bernoulli's law but others that quite probably do Newtonian fluid flow and some that just might, quasi steady state motion.
I can't think of a more complex problem to look at then the motion of the hand and arm in swimming.
The complexity makes it all very difficult. As an engineer I would try to isolate one aspect from another in order to study it. But in this case doing so overlook sbig problems.
Purely contrained to the propulsion aspect, I think many of the issues came out of an improper understanding of how the hands move both relative to the body and relative to the water. In particular in my experience, although your hands may move laterally to a great deal relative to your trunk, relative to the water the paths are much straighter due to trunk rotation. I think that sent us down a 10 year trip down the wrong road.
The latest copy of Swimming Fastest has Coach Maglisco saying that drag forces create propulsion - sculling is dead. On the other hand we all know you can propel ourselves forward by sculling - log live the scull. I think we have lots more work to do in trying to understand swim propulsion.
To be quite clear coach Maglischo recommends stright diagonal pulling motions that would involve an aspect of sculling.
Now to throw the spaner in the works we can say, but what about biomecahnics? Just because in terms of fluid mechanics we can say a movement is optimal (not that we can right now) it is a big leap to say that we should make that move or make that move thousands of times a day.
A good example someone else referenced is the thumb first entry recommended by Doc Counsilman. The fuid mechanics of it are solid - less reistsance. The biomechanics of it are solid in one aspect - gets hand i ngood postition for pull. But in another aspect it is biomechanically improper - exposure to injury. So in this case we have gone away from a technically solid technique purely because it exposes us to injury.
The topic of swim propulsion is wide open I believe, we have seen some aspects that don't apply eg Bernoulli's law but others that quite probably do Newtonian fluid flow and some that just might, quasi steady state motion.
