Please critique

if you sidearm your overarm recovery, the curvilinear path that your arm takes will take longer to follow, theoretically, than the more straight path followed by a bent-arm recovery. I'm not sure why you say the straight arm recovery is theoretically slower. The upper arm will follow essentially the same path. Your hand follows a longer path but it is just along for the ride on the upper arm so it follows that longer path at a faster speed ending up in the same place at the same time. Stroke rate has never been limited by recovery time anyway, the pull and body roll are always the limiting factors. If anything the straight arm pull may require slightly more energy to accelerate, but again, that's not usually a limiting factor. Taruky: on the discrepancy between what coaches say to do and what swimmers actually do Jonty Skinner wrote an interesting article on the effect of scy training on technique, including this quote: Granted there might be a number of different ways to describe this process, but without a doubt the majority of coaches in world would agree on one fact. That the anchor or catch mechanics should involve an elbow position that is higher than the wrist/hand position. Looking at figure 1, coaches might argue as to the specific angles of the joints, but I believe all might agree that the upper and lower arm components would be on distinctly different planes. However, after reviewing underwater footage of hundreds of swimmers, I find that the majority don’t employ this kind of technique at all. After continuing to ask coaches to describe their opinion of the catch or anchor position I continued to find a huge discrepancy between what coaches were describing, and what was actually occurring in the water. www.usaswimming.org/.../ViewMiscArticle.aspx (emphasis added by me) The article does explain why the bent elbow is better for lcm and why swimmers tend to use the straighter arm technique when training scy.

if you sidearm your overarm recovery, the curvilinear path that your arm takes will take longer to follow, theoretically, than the more straight path followed by a bent-arm recovery. I'm not sure why you say the straight arm recovery is theoretically slower. The upper arm will follow essentially the same path. Your hand follows a longer path but it is just along for the ride on the upper arm so it follows that longer path at a faster speed ending up in the same place at the same time. Stroke rate has never been limited by recovery time anyway, the pull and body roll are always the limiting factors. If anything the straight arm pull may require slightly more energy to accelerate, but again, that's not usually a limiting factor. Taruky: on the discrepancy between what coaches say to do and what swimmers actually do Jonty Skinner wrote an interesting article on the effect of scy training on technique, including this quote: Granted there might be a number of different ways to describe this process, but without a doubt the majority of coaches in world would agree on one fact. That the anchor or catch mechanics should involve an elbow position that is higher than the wrist/hand position. Looking at figure 1, coaches might argue as to the specific angles of the joints, but I believe all might agree that the upper and lower arm components would be on distinctly different planes. However, after reviewing underwater footage of hundreds of swimmers, I find that the majority don’t employ this kind of technique at all. After continuing to ask coaches to describe their opinion of the catch or anchor position I continued to find a huge discrepancy between what coaches were describing, and what was actually occurring in the water. www.usaswimming.org/.../ViewMiscArticle.aspx (emphasis added by me) The article does explain why the bent elbow is better for lcm and why swimmers tend to use the straighter arm technique when training scy.