Long-time lurker, first-time poster. I've been watching the videos of the Montreal World Championships from swim.ee, a great web site. At the start of the second semi-final of the men's 50 freestyle, I saw something quite shocking. In the first underwater shot, right after the dive, Salim Iles is very clearly doing a two-beat crossover kick. It's an eye-catching technique at sprint speed, because he appears to be "squirming" through the water. Look at it yourself. Slow motion will help you see it better. Also watch the segment at 1:16 in, where Iles is in the background, still on the shoulder of Roland Schoeman, still using a classic non-overt kicking style. His time for the race was 22.14, a personal best.
What do we make of this? Could Iles go faster with a six-beat kick? Should we slower swimmers, especially those with inflexible ankles and/or small feet, consider this style of sprinting?
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Former Member
On the page I linked to, under the "Freestyle" heading, the third video ("Men 50m SF II") has the clearest shots of Salim Iles. After the swimmers dive in, you can see him under water on the left. I think that Iles' squirming is the same torso tension that you see in Michael Phelps.
So I think that you are on to something important by twisting your torso to pivot your body past your arm. Another good website where you can see this technique is swimfastest.net, which unfortunately has bandwidth restrictions and often goes down near the end of each month. In the butterfly videos the swimmers arch their backs as they catch the water. That seems like a two-armed version of what you are talking about. It's like a wind-up for a strong pull.
On the page I linked to, under the "Freestyle" heading, the third video ("Men 50m SF II") has the clearest shots of Salim Iles. After the swimmers dive in, you can see him under water on the left. I think that Iles' squirming is the same torso tension that you see in Michael Phelps.
So I think that you are on to something important by twisting your torso to pivot your body past your arm. Another good website where you can see this technique is swimfastest.net, which unfortunately has bandwidth restrictions and often goes down near the end of each month. In the butterfly videos the swimmers arch their backs as they catch the water. That seems like a two-armed version of what you are talking about. It's like a wind-up for a strong pull.
