Core Muscles

nhc: My guess is the psoas major/minor are equally important to all strokes, no more or less important. They are your furnace of power. Now if someone else might know something about this, it does seem somewhat intuitively at this ungodly hour of 1:43 a.m. that for breaststroke and butterfly, the psoas might be more of a fast-twitch muscle, in that it is engaged more quickly, is my guess, like, ka-boom! for each pulse forward of these strokes, whereas for back and free, it is lengthening and providing stability, still the furnace of power, allowing lower, less central muscles to do less work, but perhaps the speed of its contractions are slower for the longer axis strokes. I am speaking out of the coma of insomnia. Is there someone on this bulletin board who might know more about (a) whether the psoas can be trained to be fast-twitch, (b) if it is used in different ways for the more powerful contractions required for fly and breaststroke and (c) if you can call on it to be both fast-twich and slow-twitch.? It's such a deep muscle that consciously I don't know if you can have any control over how you are using it as you swim. I think you have to train it in everyday activities, and strengthen it on its own, and then I don't know exactly how it translates into swimming. In dance class, as I said, we both trained it specifically, but we also used many many images as a way for the "conscious" mind's way (inefficient) to get out of the way of the body's natural way (very efficient) to stack all those bones up in alignment so that gravity was minimized in destabilizing you. Since it is late, here are a few images for daily life: Walk as if you are Alice in Wonderland, feel your head and neck grow taller and taller. Imagine you are a doll and your arms are falling out of their sockets (releases tension in arm sockets). Imagine you are walking supported by one of those baby swings, so the baby swing is holding your pelvis and your legs just follow along. Imagine you have a long tail that is dragging behind you as you walk (lengthens your back). Imagine there is an ice cream cone between your ribs and your abdomen (this does address the psoas); see that the cone is tipped forward (the ice cream part); bring the ice cream part up so that it is straight and in line with the cone part, thus connecting your upper body to your lower body. A million images we used to help us get our bones into alignment as nature intended, and get gravity out of the way. As I said, how this translates into swimming, I haven't figured out. Certainly the more you derive your power from the center of your body, the less you will be relying on your arms and legs for strength. So rotation certainly would require solid strong psoas muscles, which would allow perhaps your legs and arms to be more relaxed and stay stronger longer. Look at a lot of the Paralympians: some with no legs, or shortened legs, or no arms, or shortened arms, yet at the Paralympics at Beijing, some very fast times. They clearly are using central trunk muscles like the psoas. OK. Enough. A new career: Pilates swimming... zzzzzzzz

nhc: My guess is the psoas major/minor are equally important to all strokes, no more or less important. They are your furnace of power. Now if someone else might know something about this, it does seem somewhat intuitively at this ungodly hour of 1:43 a.m. that for breaststroke and butterfly, the psoas might be more of a fast-twitch muscle, in that it is engaged more quickly, is my guess, like, ka-boom! for each pulse forward of these strokes, whereas for back and free, it is lengthening and providing stability, still the furnace of power, allowing lower, less central muscles to do less work, but perhaps the speed of its contractions are slower for the longer axis strokes. I am speaking out of the coma of insomnia. Is there someone on this bulletin board who might know more about (a) whether the psoas can be trained to be fast-twitch, (b) if it is used in different ways for the more powerful contractions required for fly and breaststroke and (c) if you can call on it to be both fast-twich and slow-twitch.? It's such a deep muscle that consciously I don't know if you can have any control over how you are using it as you swim. I think you have to train it in everyday activities, and strengthen it on its own, and then I don't know exactly how it translates into swimming. In dance class, as I said, we both trained it specifically, but we also used many many images as a way for the "conscious" mind's way (inefficient) to get out of the way of the body's natural way (very efficient) to stack all those bones up in alignment so that gravity was minimized in destabilizing you. Since it is late, here are a few images for daily life: Walk as if you are Alice in Wonderland, feel your head and neck grow taller and taller. Imagine you are a doll and your arms are falling out of their sockets (releases tension in arm sockets). Imagine you are walking supported by one of those baby swings, so the baby swing is holding your pelvis and your legs just follow along. Imagine you have a long tail that is dragging behind you as you walk (lengthens your back). Imagine there is an ice cream cone between your ribs and your abdomen (this does address the psoas); see that the cone is tipped forward (the ice cream part); bring the ice cream part up so that it is straight and in line with the cone part, thus connecting your upper body to your lower body. A million images we used to help us get our bones into alignment as nature intended, and get gravity out of the way. As I said, how this translates into swimming, I haven't figured out. Certainly the more you derive your power from the center of your body, the less you will be relying on your arms and legs for strength. So rotation certainly would require solid strong psoas muscles, which would allow perhaps your legs and arms to be more relaxed and stay stronger longer. Look at a lot of the Paralympians: some with no legs, or shortened legs, or no arms, or shortened arms, yet at the Paralympics at Beijing, some very fast times. They clearly are using central trunk muscles like the psoas. OK. Enough. A new career: Pilates swimming... zzzzzzzz