One of my teammates gets private lessons from another coach, and he said they have been working on a "deep catch" for his freestyle. At a recent meet, I heard another guy talking about the same thing. What exactly does this mean? I want to know if I already do it or if it is something to work on. Thanks!
I guess I don't know for sure. Just speculation. I would think a deep catch means immediately driving your arm down and pulling straight back rather than leaving it out front and then pulling while keeping your elbow high.
I don't see this as pushing down at the entry, but rather driving the hand down or "slicing" through the water and then initiating the pull with a straighter arm.
Every swimmer needs to extend their arms and at that point of extension an EVF comes sooner with a bent arm and later with a straight arm but neither world class swimmer drops their elbow (the opposite of an EVF).
Right. The bottom line is you want your fingers pointed at the bottom of the pool for as long in the pull cycle as possible. I think the main reason sprinters like Bernard prefer a straighter arm pull as opposed to the style seen in the video of Hackett is they don't want to slow their arms down. They want to keep the momentum going.They might be sacrificing some pulling power in the front part of the stroke, but they are making up for this in increased turnover rate.
You hit the nail on the head - When swimmers understand what they need to do, coaches and swimmers can experiment until they get the results they're looking for. It's like life "An experiment". Have a great summer!
Thanks for the video clips Tom!
Good stuff for swimmers to understand - and experiment with their coaches and or team mates in workouts.
