Posted by heathweaver

After a second very frustrating week I finally made some serious progress back towards my record time. I chopped a second off my previous time and am now only one second more than my previous record. grr.

At some point while I was swimming my feel for the water came back. It is strange, because I have been working to get rotate my body strongly in the water as I stroke, but when I swim at my fastest my torso actually rotates very little. It’s the same when I am swimming a shark stroke. As my head is out of the water it is very difficult to rotate the torso, but it is still a very fast stroke.

Well no interesting break through’s to report until I can get up to speed again.

Posted by heathweaver

Being sick is seriously not fun. I had a week of vacation and I thought I would rest my arms as I had strained my tendons. But then I went and got sick. Ouch, out of the pool for two weeks.

After jumping back in this week I have made a massive un-improvement. In fact, my 25 m swim time is so bad that I have apparently lost 11 weeks of training. I really hope that I will get back to setting records much faster.

We’ll see I guess.

I am going to take this as an opportunity to re-learn a couple of things. The first being my breathing technique. I am going to need to study this one a bit, because I don’t even know where to start. What I do know is that it isn’t my strength keeping me from going, rather I get so out of breath.

The other issue I want to re-learn is my kicking. When I started I told myself that I would learn how to kick after I learned how to use my arms. I think this was a mistake. I should have done both even if it would have taken longer. Kicking correctly is challenging, but it is important and shouldn’t be neglected.

Well, back to it.

Posted by heathweaver

This frame by frame analysis was originally on limmatsharks.com. The sequence shown is taken from the 800 m freestyle final in Fukuoka 2001. I won’t repeat the analysis as I think it is enough to see the images and make your own judgements.

The only two points to highlight are: 1) Notice how high their elbows are. Amazing! 2) Notice the lack of bubbles on the insweep, which means they really do anchor in the water and not slide through.

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Posted by heathweaver

I am really happy with the progress I am making. The week before last (week 39) was frustrating for me, but I learned an important lesson that made a big difference for me. I figured out that if you want to swim fast, you need to practice swimming fast EVERY DAY. Most of my practice sessions were spent trying to work out different problems with my stroke, but at the end of the day I was swimming slower (see week 39). In week 40 I pushed myself every single day and I saw new personal bests across the board.

This morning I had another person best that I am especially happy with. Not only did I beat my previous 35 meter time, but I beat my best 25 meter meters per second while swimming 35 meters. I often worry that my 25 meter times won’t translate into 35-50 meter times and I promised myself that after I break 15 seconds on 25 m. that I would permanently switch 50 meter sprints. I’ll still stick to that promise, but with the break through of this morning it is encouraging to think that my 50 meter times might not be so bad (on 25 it would have been faster than 16.586). I could really feel a huge slow down around 25 meters and wouldn’t doubt that I would have swam somewhere around 16.

I will try and get some video up next week to show a few things I am working on, but one thing I have noticed is that a very fast swimming time is largely in the way you hold your shoulders. I am no coach, but I feel that shoulder position is the key to freestyle swimming. After doing some filming I was happy to see that my stroke looked okay with very high elbows. Underwater, I feel like my elbows are staying high as well and I am getting a lot of reach. However, what I noticed is that I stay submerged except my arms as they come around. When comparing that to other swimmers it is a very big difference. Coaches often call this ‘staying high in the water’, but I think that it is more easily explained as using counter-balance to keep your shoulders inline with the surface of the water.

Take a look at my shoulders.

These two images aren’t easy to see, but if you look close to the image on the left I am almost completely submerged and on the right you can see my arm out of the water, but everything else is underwater.

Now, compare that to Olympic Gold Medalist Bill Kirby. Our arms have a similar angle, but he is a few centimeters higher in the water than I am. You can see that clearly as his head is out of the water and mine is not. Also Alexander Popov (on the left), current 50 meter world record holder shows the same thing. If you watch videos of Popov you can see that when he moves faster he really comes out of the water.

Having the right shoulder position is the base to swimming fast. It is important in so many ways: It keeps your legs in line, it keeps your head from dragging, it facilitates the movement of your arms, it helps connect the movement with your hips, the list goes on. I don’t have years of experience or million dollar computer analysis software, but I think if you want to learn to swim fast, figure out where your torso should be and everything else will follow.

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.

Posted by heathweaver

Yes. I am a geek. Oh well. Breaking personal goals is always fun, but if you see that my 50 meter time is double the current world record time it helps me keep things in perspective.

The chart below is for sprints on 25 meters

The chart below is for sprints on 50 meters

Posted by heathweaver

Here is a graph of my fastest times in the last four trips to the pool. 

I recently purchased the SportCount timer and so I can record the time on each lap that I make. I have been recording the times in an Excel worksheet and then looking at the progress. Unfortunately, I have two different sheets of times on two different computers. Oops. I’ll upload the workbook when I have some time.

Here is an overview by workout type.

Looking at the Regular – Crawl it strikes me that my average time is not really improving. That is a bit striking as I have made a nice improvement in my 25 meter sprints, but apparently my technique isn’t improving.

However, if you look at the fastest times I can see improvement in my regular crawl. My Dolphin kicks are coming right along and it really shocks me. I can swim as fast that way as I can doing a regular crawl.

In the end I have to think I am quite a geek. Oh well, it’s fun. 

Posted by heathweaver

My usual swim partner finally came back from his vacation in Thailand and decided to get back to regular swimming. So I benefited in having someone to do a proper timing of my sprints. It was interesting to try to explain what I am learning about vortexes and swimming, I don’t think I did a very good job of it.

I find it very difficult to do a proper training in the hour to an hour and a half that I have at lunch. My current routine is 100 meters  of dolphin kicks, 200 meters of slow roll-overs, 200 meters of closing my eyes and really feeling my technique, 200-400 meters of other things, 50-100 meters of sprints. My roll-overs are usually around 30 seconds per 25 meters and my dolphin kicks are around 38 seconds. My meters per second is 1.443.

I have the feeling right now that my next major improvement is going to come from my sculling technique and I am going to try and post more on that in the coming days, for now I am really happy that my next target is in sight. 16 seconds here I come.

Posted by heathweaver

Although not my fastest time it is nice to be able to stay under 18 seconds. Today, after swimming, one of the very nice life guards asked me what I was training for.  I was a bit surprised, but told him that I wasn’t training for anything but just to be able to swim as fast as I could. He was under the impression that I was either training for a competition or for a triathlon.

I was thinking about his question and wondering why I push myself so hard to improve my time. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to that question. I love swimming and I want to see what I am capable of, so I learn what I can about technique and swim as hard as I can, that’s all.

Why do you swim?

Posted by heathweaver

My routine started out with 140 meters of font-quarter sculling. After some practice this type of sculling gets very interesting. I was able to really get a feel for the water and as my momentum built up my speed increased more and more. However, in order to do this effectively some kind of snorkel is necessary. The reason being that every time you take a breath you loose the vortexes? that you have created. I really like it, but the issue is that after I went back to my freestyle stroke everything was all messed up because I could tell that my technique was wrong. I think it is important to follow through the exercises proposed by coach Emmett Hines.

From the few number of times I have done this I have the feeling that it will have a very big impact on my speed. It really does give you a very good feel for the water and your ability to grip it.

Besides the initial sculling set I tried some dolphin kicks, but I couldn’t keep my balance and I kept swallowing water. Then I went to practice my roll-overs but I wasn’t very focused and my breathing was all wrong. I was very distracted as there were a lot of people in every lane.

I sprinted twice the first time in 26.86 and the second was over 28. Oh well.

(1.303 m/sec, about 19.18 on 25 meters)