Myth #2: Aside from shaving, wearing a cap and a high tech suit or wetsuit, the only way to reduce drag is by streamlining off the start and turns.
Of the 3 fundamental laws that govern swimming technique, drag, motion and inertia, drag is by far the most important. Drag is the number one enemy of the swimmer...something we learned 250 world records after changing suit fabric from lycra to polyurethane. What most swimmers fail to realize is that there are three common mistakes made by far too many swimmers that add significant drag to their swim (more than the suits reduced) and they make them through every stroke cycle...over and over again. The first is head position. Most swimmers hold their head position way too high, looking forward. I call it defensive swimming, because after getting smacked in the head by someone veering over into your side of the lane, you will start to swim like Tarzan. Problem is lifting the head causes the hips to sink and the surface (wave) drag on your head to increase. Swimming through the water like a hammock, or if you have no legs, at an angle of 5 to 10 degrees from head to toe, creates a huge increase in drag.
If you have your head in alignment with your body, you should be looking down and you haven't a clue where you are going. So if you are swimming in open water, don't swim for 200 strokes out in the lake or ocean without looking up (briefly) and charting your course...or you may be swimming faster, but out to sea. Otherwise, lead the lane, go ten seconds behind, stay way to the right and pray a lot….but keep your head down.
Second is the underwater arm position. Keep your elbows high (also called early vertical forearm) as this position of the arm as you pull through the water reduces the frontal drag significantly over pulling with the arm deep with a dropped elbow. Holding this high elbow position, particularly during a breath or with good body rotation, is challenging and requires good extension (negative angle) of the shoulder. Finally, if you insist on kicking hard, do so with tight narrow kicks. The act of bending the knee too much to get that big forceful kick increases the drag way more than the benefit of the extra power.
Gary Sr.
Great discussion!
I'd like to add that minimizing lateral movement will reduce drag.
As discussed, lifting the head up increases drag. Similarly excessive hip sway increases the surface area and induces drag forces.
The key teaching point is to swim within the smallest possible tube and avoid excessive lateral or vertical motion while maximizing propulsive motions.
I would add that keeping the head inline with the body is just as important (maybe more important) during the streamline. The tendency when on your front is to lift the head up, just like in swimming. One reason is that it is hard to know when to break out otherwise; it takes practice.
But I see many people also have their arms way behind their heads, so that during the streamline your head is just sticking out there acting as a brake. (I wonder if this is a legacy of teaching streamlining to small kids -- with their comparatively big heads and short arms.)
Your head should be between your arms, your shoulders should be at, or very slightly behind, your ears in the streamline.
Try using big fins while doing long streamlines and adjust your head position. If you are kicking fast enough, you can really feel the effects of slight changes in head position.
Is there an angle that you can still be looking ahead and yet be in perfect alignment?
I do not think so. I think that if you want to race freestyle as fast as you can, you need to let go of being able to see where you are going, and rely on the black line and T and maybe also on stroke-counting. If you need to look around in practice because of the conditions, that's a shame, because getting your head down will speed you up; and I know from bitter experience that it takes a lot of practice to break the looking-ahead habit.
As an aside, do most competition pools have the black line?
Do any competition pools lack the black line?
Here, i tried illustrating what Gary is talking about. Sounds a lot like what we teach at our clinics.
In oversimplified terms (I usually work with beginners) I tell them, keep your head (for pool swimming, not including the open water sighting) and kick within the tunnel that your shoulders make as you rotate through the water.
Gary, if I got something wrong, please correct me, and I'll redo the pics :)
Here are a few pics:
These pictures pretty well sum it up, Connie. If you want to see how it is done on video (and by world class swimmers) you can see the proper head position on both of our DVDs The Three Styles of Freestyle and Fundamentals of Fast Swimming....available on the Race Club website.
Gary
In backstroke, the head also needs to be flat, looking straight up. Again, a smaller body tube is desirable, and if the head is lifted even a tiny bit, the hips are going to tend downward creating drag across your back.
I tell my swimmers that your face is supposed to get wet in backstroke!
Great discussions!
Good advice! In backstroke, arriving at the proper head position is a bit easier to define as there should be a very small stream of water (not a river) flowing over the face with each arm stroke. The same stream that would have banged into your head and slowed you down if you had your head too high.
Having your head in the proper position (in alignment with the body) in both freestyle and backstroke creates the similar problem in that it makes it more difficult to see and know where you are or where you are going...but do it anyway.
Gary
I would add that keeping the head inline with the body is just as important (maybe more important) during the streamline. The tendency when on your front is to lift the head up, just like in swimming. One reason is that it is hard to know when to break out otherwise; it takes practice.
But I see many people also have their arms way behind their heads, so that during the streamline your head is just sticking out there acting as a brake. (I wonder if this is a legacy of teaching streamlining to small kids -- with their comparatively big heads and short arms.)
Your head should be between your arms, your shoulders should be at, or very slightly behind, your ears in the streamline.
Try using big fins while doing long streamlines and adjust your head position. If you are kicking fast enough, you can really feel the effects of slight changes in head position.
I agree with you on the first point; far too many swimmers (like nearly all) lift their heads just before the breakout and going into turns, both of which cause a huge increase in drag and slows them down.
I respectfully disagree on the second point. On both the dive and turn, the most streamlined position one can attain is with the two elbows nearly touching and the shoulders and hyperextended in the direction of motion (I call this hyperstreamline). This can only occur behind the head and requires the chin nearly on the chest. This does not make the head stick out, as you suggest, and can be proven on countless underwater videos. Michael Phelps looks like a unicorn coming off the walls, with arms behind his head and elbows almost touching. Two arms turn into one. The hyperextension of the shoulder joint tightens the entire body and sucks in the abdomen, again reducing drag.
Sadly, it is difficult if not impossible for many of us masters swimmers, including me, to achieve this position...but we can try...and that helps.
Gary
Great discussion!
I'd like to add that minimizing lateral movement will reduce drag.
As discussed, lifting the head up increases drag. Similarly excessive hip sway increases the surface area and induces drag forces.
The key teaching point is to swim within the smallest possible tube and avoid excessive lateral or vertical motion while maximizing propulsive motions.
I agree, Phillip! A strong core helps keep the spine straight and reduces drag.
Gary
These pictures pretty well sum it up, Connie. If you want to see how it is done on video (and by world class swimmers) you can see the proper head position on both of our DVDs The Three Styles of Freestyle and Fundamentals of Fast Swimming....available on the Race Club website.
Gary
Awesome!
Yes, we have quite a bit of that here at Nadadores too, just not in a form available for public just yet :)
This is you guys, right?
http://www.theraceclub.net/
We're having Dr. Genadijus from http://www.swimetrics.com/ come to Nadadores during out october SCM meet, to work with swimmers.
Sounds like you and Team Termin are doing similar kind of a thing. Very cool!
Too bad you guys aren't closer here to the west coast. When you came to our LCM Nationals in 2005, people loved it.
In oversimplified terms (I usually work with beginners) I tell them, keep your head (for pool swimming, not including the open water sighting) and kick within the tunnel that your shoulders make as you rotate through the water.
There's a lot of leeway there though, one could still lift the head and be within the "tunnel". Would this kind of lifted head position, but still in the tunnel lead to increased drag as Gary desribes? I guess that's the real question I have. Typically my head position falls within this tunnel, but it's not flat as he describes.
I'm fairly certain I am tilting my head up and looking forward. Not sure if this came from years of dodging people at the Y, but it seems natural to me now. The problem is, I find looking down to be very frustrating to the point I might almost accept the slight reduction in speed to be able to see where I am going. Or am I off track here? How far ahead are you guys looking? Is there an angle that you can still be looking ahead and yet be in perfect alignment?
As an aside, do most competition pools have the black line? I swam the 1500 last weekend and the black line was driving me absolutely insane. I was swimming right next to the lane line breathing into it, closing my eyes, doing anything to avoid looking at it for more than a few seconds at a time. I never thought about it, but the pool(s) I workout in must not have them. The pools in the meets I have done I never noticed whether they had them but my events were always 200 or less. :confused:
