Video - Have you seen you swim?

Lindsay: First, I feel qualified to post comments on your technique only because I am working through a lot of the same issues, so take my stuff from whence it comes. I played your clips at home last night, and thought I counted 20 strokes. That's not too bad for SCM, given your short push off the wall. I'm sure you can drop one or two strokes easily with better streamlining and staying down past the flags. I shoot for 15 or 16 SPL for meters in the 200 until the final 50 when I try to crank it up a bit. So I think you're in the ballpark there, and your pull/kick isn't as bad as you think. Not to say we can't all always be working on stroke. Kerry O'Brien did a stroke clinic with my team one weekend, and worked wonders with one of our guy's choppy stroke by making him do true catchup by passing a pencil back and forth between hands as he swam. You can drill the same thing by touching hands, but having to pass that damn pencil ensures that you do a full catchup. Full catchup feels awkward for me, but it helps me stretch my stroke out when I go back to regular swim. I count strokes on every lap. Even in a race. Good, free, immediate feedback on where your stroke technique is in a race. It gets to be a habit pretty quickly, and you just have a constant count running in the back of your head while you swim. I'm amazed when I ask other swimmers what their stroke count is and they don't know. That's important information that is too easy to have at your fingertips to ignore. I tried varying numbers of dolphin kicks for a while, but have dropped them of late in favor of concentrating on streamlining. My dolphin is a work in progress, and I felt like it was costing me more in oxygen debt and negative effect on my streamline than I was gaining. Plus I read something about some elite swimmer (Eric Vendt, maybe?) not doing them for those same reasons. I still do them in the 50 and 100, but not currently in the 200. The best training thing I've done in a while is just to practice streamline pushes off the wall. Mentally mark where you end up, then really concentrate on tightening up and see if you can glide further. I don't kick, or do a breakout, just glide smoothly along. You can easily do 5 - 10 of these in a couple of minutes at the end of a workout, and I feel it has really helped me with muscle memory and flexibility. The avatar is an old, dead giant squid, which is about what I feel like today.

Lindsay: First, I feel qualified to post comments on your technique only because I am working through a lot of the same issues, so take my stuff from whence it comes. I played your clips at home last night, and thought I counted 20 strokes. That's not too bad for SCM, given your short push off the wall. I'm sure you can drop one or two strokes easily with better streamlining and staying down past the flags. I shoot for 15 or 16 SPL for meters in the 200 until the final 50 when I try to crank it up a bit. So I think you're in the ballpark there, and your pull/kick isn't as bad as you think. Not to say we can't all always be working on stroke. Kerry O'Brien did a stroke clinic with my team one weekend, and worked wonders with one of our guy's choppy stroke by making him do true catchup by passing a pencil back and forth between hands as he swam. You can drill the same thing by touching hands, but having to pass that damn pencil ensures that you do a full catchup. Full catchup feels awkward for me, but it helps me stretch my stroke out when I go back to regular swim. I count strokes on every lap. Even in a race. Good, free, immediate feedback on where your stroke technique is in a race. It gets to be a habit pretty quickly, and you just have a constant count running in the back of your head while you swim. I'm amazed when I ask other swimmers what their stroke count is and they don't know. That's important information that is too easy to have at your fingertips to ignore. I tried varying numbers of dolphin kicks for a while, but have dropped them of late in favor of concentrating on streamlining. My dolphin is a work in progress, and I felt like it was costing me more in oxygen debt and negative effect on my streamline than I was gaining. Plus I read something about some elite swimmer (Eric Vendt, maybe?) not doing them for those same reasons. I still do them in the 50 and 100, but not currently in the 200. The best training thing I've done in a while is just to practice streamline pushes off the wall. Mentally mark where you end up, then really concentrate on tightening up and see if you can glide further. I don't kick, or do a breakout, just glide smoothly along. You can easily do 5 - 10 of these in a couple of minutes at the end of a workout, and I feel it has really helped me with muscle memory and flexibility. The avatar is an old, dead giant squid, which is about what I feel like today.