I'm absolutely amazed at the amount of misinformation on swimming, especially on the internet. One website I saw instructing the specifics of the backstroke advocated a completely illegal turn.
A bodybuilder site said that depleting your stores of Glycogen by starving your body of it actually helped the body move faster. I'm not buying that. You can't swim without it.
Other sites like USA Swimming, have a lot of kids with a lot of questions who for some reason don't ask their coaches or parents. Lots of ear infection questions - which are fairly preventable by wearing a swim cap.
Early on in my learning I suffered a severe injury by practicing a drill recommended by one of the so-called experts in swimming technique, who shall remain nameless. That's led me to pay closer attention to sports medicine specialists and surgeons who swim.
Everybody's body is different and has specific limitations. For example, the Neer Test for your shoulders. The entire approach to pitch, catch, pull, etc... is highly individual. I trust top athletic coaches and top swimmers and doctors.
One site on backstroke listed something very technical which actually made sense and works wonders but after running a search a dozen ways through Google I found no one knew of it or spoke of it other than that 1 site!
Who do you trust? What are your thoughts on this?
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Former Member
Originally posted by gull80
.... But I think you have to put in the yardage, some (a lot?) of it very fast.
I didn’t mean to imply that fitness is not important. My point was just that it is more important in the beginning to master the basic skills before working on fitness. I know from experience that fitness alone will not significantly improve your times if your technique is bad. It just enables you to swim slowly and badly for longer distances. And it is certainly not a good idea to try and work on fitness and technique at the same time using the same activity. Your body does not imprint new muscle memory when you are tired. Instead, it reverts to old patterns. So if you work on fitness before technique, you are just imprinting bad habits that will become more and more difficult to correct the longer you do them.
In other disciplines, this is not so much a problem because you can work on skill and fitness at the same time using different activities (cross training). A tennis player, for example, can get fit by running or cycling without having to get fit by playing lots of games of tennis. Swimming seems to be an exception, though, because general aerobic fitness does not seem to translate very well to swimming. When I started swimming, I could cycle hard or power walk in the mountains for hours with no problem. Yet when I first got in the pool, I was exhausted after a couple of hundred meters. Perhaps it’s the different breathing pattern that causes this, I don’t know. But so far I haven’t discovered any effective cross training that helps with my swimming endurance. Maybe this is one reason why there is so much emphasis in swimming on doing lots of laps.
TI offers the opinion that as a beginner, technique is probably 90% responsible for your success and fitness 10%. For an experienced competitive swimmer, that ratio drops to more like 70/30, so the better you get the more of a differentiator fitness becomes. I know this has proven pretty accurate in my case. When I was following the swimming CW of just getting in as many laps as possible I barely made any improvements in my times. But when I began focusing on technique at the expense of fitness, my times improved drastically.
I just think a lot more people would enjoy swimming and be a lot better at it if they were taught deep imprinting of the basic skills (like balance, streamlining, body rotation, etc.) before starting to put in the big yardage.
Originally posted by gull80
.... But I think you have to put in the yardage, some (a lot?) of it very fast.
I didn’t mean to imply that fitness is not important. My point was just that it is more important in the beginning to master the basic skills before working on fitness. I know from experience that fitness alone will not significantly improve your times if your technique is bad. It just enables you to swim slowly and badly for longer distances. And it is certainly not a good idea to try and work on fitness and technique at the same time using the same activity. Your body does not imprint new muscle memory when you are tired. Instead, it reverts to old patterns. So if you work on fitness before technique, you are just imprinting bad habits that will become more and more difficult to correct the longer you do them.
In other disciplines, this is not so much a problem because you can work on skill and fitness at the same time using different activities (cross training). A tennis player, for example, can get fit by running or cycling without having to get fit by playing lots of games of tennis. Swimming seems to be an exception, though, because general aerobic fitness does not seem to translate very well to swimming. When I started swimming, I could cycle hard or power walk in the mountains for hours with no problem. Yet when I first got in the pool, I was exhausted after a couple of hundred meters. Perhaps it’s the different breathing pattern that causes this, I don’t know. But so far I haven’t discovered any effective cross training that helps with my swimming endurance. Maybe this is one reason why there is so much emphasis in swimming on doing lots of laps.
TI offers the opinion that as a beginner, technique is probably 90% responsible for your success and fitness 10%. For an experienced competitive swimmer, that ratio drops to more like 70/30, so the better you get the more of a differentiator fitness becomes. I know this has proven pretty accurate in my case. When I was following the swimming CW of just getting in as many laps as possible I barely made any improvements in my times. But when I began focusing on technique at the expense of fitness, my times improved drastically.
I just think a lot more people would enjoy swimming and be a lot better at it if they were taught deep imprinting of the basic skills (like balance, streamlining, body rotation, etc.) before starting to put in the big yardage.
