Swimming Stroke Improvement

My lucky streak of getting gift certificates from Absolute Endurance through our triathlon club is on a roll: a few weeks ago, I got one for 30mins of a one-on-one swim stroke improvement session with Coach Kyle. Since he's been helping out with our regular pool classes, he's been privy to my gross incompetence in the water, and insisted I use up the gift cert. post-haste, prior to the next club pool session. So I upgraded to 1hr and hit AE's endless pool.

The pool is lined with mirrors, so you can observe your failures from all sides! Kyle set the warm-up swim to what he thought was a slow current, but I could barely keep from getting washed away to the back. I was going into this very demoralized from the last swim night, and I had low hopes for incorporating the master's teachings.

The most dismal part of my technique is my kick:
- my hips wobble from side to side
- I kick from my hips rather than from my hip flexors and quads
- I kick too deep
- my legs are too far apart
- I miss a beat when I breathe! LOL 

Kick Drills:
- wall kick with hands downward on a ledge: identified the problems
- wall kick with hands hanging onto the edge: I managed to bring my legs closer and make my kick more shallow, still hard to stop the hips from doing a hula dance (I'm not kidding, he showed me video)
- wall kick with palms flat against wall: really forced me to continue kicking while looking up for a breath, otherwise, I'd fall away from the wall; Kyle asked me to tighten my core to stabilize the hips, and that helped to be able to actually do it; my hip flexors and upper quads started to burn, so I must have gotten it right!
- swim against current with arms overhead: I managed to keep my core and consequently my hips pretty tight together

The next thing we worked on was the rhythm or timing of my stroke cycle. Using the catch-up drill to illustrate his point, he called that drill a 100% catch-up, where the gliding arm waits for the other arm to go through 100% of its stroke cycle before starting its own pull. Most people do a 50% catch-up, where the gliding arm starts to pull when the other arm has finished the push and is about to come out for recovery. What Kyle wanted to see wast 80% catch-up, where you let the lead arm glide until the recovering arm is already up at the head. This helps to rotate the body and swim over top of your gliding arm, cutting through the water.

Aside: I have read in the past on various sites that this is a controversial technique - some call it over-gliding, which can lead to dead spots in your stroke when you're not doing anything to move forward. However, an interesting analysis of the various stroke timings can be found in Break Down Your Freestyle to Boost Efficiency, under heading  Arm Cycle. They describe 80% catch-up as the Front-Quadrant rhythm and suggest it for endurance swimmers such as triathletes as a great way to boost efficiency and save energy. Great! I guess the key is not to glide forever without any motion.

It took me a few tries against the current, but I managed to do this new stroke rhythm, mostly. My movement through the water immediately seemed smoother and easier, like I wasn't fighting the current. I felt myself rotating my body more, especially from my hips rather than from my torso. I'd lose the rhythm here and there, but it wasn't that difficult.

The problem with smoothing out my stroke was that without thrashing about like I usually do, I was breathing less frequently, and I have a very hard time with breath control - I'm always out of breath. Which brought us to Kyle's last point:

Breathing technique!
He had already seen how much trouble I have with his hypoxic drills - where most people can do 1 or 0 breaths along 25m, I would need 3 or at least 2. He knew that I breathe out slowly but continuously throughout my triple stroke (which looks really crazy in the underwater mirror - you look like a catfish!) He wanted me to switch to holding my breath, and then doing a quick out-breath right before turning to take in the next breath. I was very suspicious of this because I thought I'd panic if I had to hold my breath. But I tried it, and surprisingly, I was more relaxed!

Ladder Breathing Drill:
3/3 - 5/5 - 7/7 - 5/5 - 3/3 (You can take it to 9/9 or beyond based on your ability)
The first time around, I was still breathing out continuously, and I couldn't really get through the 7s. But when I switched to the short out-breath, my lungs seemed to relax, and I calmly went through the whole set. Another win!

Finally, Kyle had me just swim for a few minutes to put it all together, and I have to say it was much easier to cut through the water, as he calls it. When I was done, I was surprised to learn that he had jacked up the current a bit from where I'd started. And it was still much easier. Hurray! Now to hang on to these skills for the swim class!!

Apparently my temporary coach Eric was hanging around and saw me do part of the session, which prompted him to deliver the all-time highest compliment on my athletic technique I've ever received:

"You didn't seem that bad in the pool this morning..."