Posted by heathweaver

Doing a bit of analysis I had a realization. Here are the basics: My fastest time is a little above 17 seconds on 25 meters. That time is dependent on using the starting block. My natural sprint stroke (meaning the speed I go when I want to go fast, but that doesn’t really wind me) is around 21 seconds. After doing a few checks I go around 10 meters underwater from the blocks and it takes me around 5 seconds. That means I swim the remaining 15 meters in 12 seconds. The table below shows the stats.

 

Distance  Time  Meters/second

10 meters - 5.22 seconds - 1.916

15 meters - 12.04 seconds - 1.246

25 meters - 21.06 seconds - 1.187

 

What strikes me is that if you take the out of water portion of my sprint and figure I could keep that speed up for 25 meters it works out to be 20.067. I’ve certainly swam faster than that without using the starting blocks so it is a bit surprising.

What I am thinking is that even though I have continually broken my own record my approach to sprint needs some work. It would make more sense to get as much distance and speed as possible off the blocks, but then I should just swim with natural sprint.

To understand the mechanics of it my current sprint stroke is quite flat and causes quite a bit os splashing. I don’t really rotate that much and I only breath two or three times. My natural sprint stroke has a great deal of rotation as I really reach forward as far as I can and use my lateral muscles and I breath on every stroke. I try as much as possible to emulate Alexander Popov in my natural sprint and my current sprint is just going as fast as I possibly can. Below are a couple of videos that are good for understanding what I am getting at. The first is Ian Thorpe off the blocks.

You can see that he begins his stroke around 3.200 seconds. It’s hard to say how far he goes in that much time. The first movie I count 5 and a half and 6 and a half dolphin kicks on the second movie. Referring to a study on dolphin kicks by a top swimmer you can guess Thorpe goes about 2.4 m/s per cycle (feet being up then going down and going back up). So 5.5 kicks would propel him about 13.2 meters. Also, swimming rules don’t allow you to be underwater for more than 15 meters, so this seems reasonable.

Let’s say that Thorpe swims 50 meters in around 22 seconds, that makes the rest of his trip about 1.957 meters per second. The 50 meter world record is still held by Alexander Popov in June of 2000 of 21.64 seconds. This averages out to be 2.311 meters per second.

Anyway, all of that is just to say that my start time can definitely be improved, but it isn’t terrible, but my stroke work is really horrid and I have a really long way to go.