by Matthew on April 3, 2012
I’ve been struck by a fair bit of confirmation bias recently as it relates to some new thoughts I’ve had on swim mechanics for open water swimming. Coincidentally or not, improvements in my own swimming recently have come at a time where I spent more time than usual on the pool deck in January and February between Dynamo Masters workouts and the AIMP Spring Tucson Camp. I enjoy these deck moments because it forces me to think about how to best communicate specifics in stroke technique across a variety of skill levels and learning types.
In trying to put together the traditional consultant 3-bullet point summary for good freestyle open water technique, I boiled the nuances of the dynamic movements in freestyle to the below concepts:
1. Balance the Line: Achieved primarily through head position but complimented by #2 below. The purpose of balancing the line is to minimize frontal drag by keeping the hips hidden behind the shoulders and head which MUST cut through the water.
2. Load the Lats: Established by the delta in shoulder rotation (more) versus hip rotation (less), this creates the coiling/uncoiling dynamic that allows the swimmer to apply force in the propulsive phase of the pull.
3. High Elbows / Paint the Bottom: Acts as the final component to a lat-driven (as opposed to leg-driven) propulsive framework. Maintaining a high elbow position assisted by pointing the finger tips down allows us to transfer force.
Be sure these components consist of a fair amount of moving parts, but the concepts will point you in the right direction. In layman’s terms, Point #1 allows efficiency (minimize drag) while points #2 & #3 focus on the creation and transfer of force, respectively. If anything, an athlete should master point #1 first and foremost, even if #2 & #3 are a close second. Assuming the mastery of point #1, I wanted to go into more detail about the “Load the Lats” (LTL) concept.
The concept relates to creating tension in a prime mover – the lats – so that there’s stored energy in stretching out the muscle and associated soft tissue. At the highest level, the coiling of muscle and tendons creates the load. The shoulder rotation allows the lead hand on entry to extend forward and anchor or “catch” the water at a far point in front of the swimmer. Coupled with a slight rotation of the hips in the same direction as the shoulders and the lead hand anchors/ “catches” out in front, we create the tension in the lats (stored energy) that we can uncoil (transfer energy -> apply force) as the hip drives downward and we maintain a high elbow position. That high elbow is facilitated by “painting the bottom” of the pool with your finger tips. I tell athletes to pretend their hand is a brush and the fingertips are the bristles. You want to paint the bottom of the pool with your finger tips. In order to do this, the swimmer must maintain the integrity of the elbow position. When you see an athlete whose fingers/hands are crossing their bodies (fingers pointed towards the side of the pool), you can be certain the athlete has dropped their elbows. Without that high elbow, we can’t transfer the stored energy we’ve created in loading the lats.
What does it look like? I took the liberty of taking some screen shots of Grant Hackett who dominated the 1500m freestyle for the better part of a decade to help illustrate the concepts:
Shoulder vs. Hip Angles
High Elbow / Paint the Bottom
Repeat, Wash, Rinse
LTL requires good range of motion in the shoulders to enable the proper rotation. Without the shoulder flexibility, the athlete cannot set up the delta between the shoulder and hip angles to create the coiling effect (the load!). So many triathletes come to the sport from “ball sports” and don’t have this shoulder flexibility naturally. They often compensate with hip rotation and in doing so, “snake” through the water. I recently read an interview with uber-coach Darren Smith where he talks about maniaclly working on shoulder flexibility with all his non-swim background professionals who seek out his services. This was a nice piece confirmation bias to corroborate the LTL concept.
What about execution? In terms of drill work to reinforce these concepts, the best drill I’ve used is Freestyle swimming with a two-beat butterfly kick . The dolphin kick keeps the hips from over-rotating, and the two-beat rhythm allows the athlete to appropriately rotate the shoulders and establish a nice anchor out front. Inavraibly the question of kick arises? How much? What tempo? The short, easy answer is that above all things, the kick force needs to be applied downwards (not to the side). The somewhat longer answer is that the kick for the swim leg of a triathlon should (a) not interfere with arm-driven swim mechanics – LTL and (b) act as a complimentary propulsive force to the LTL mechanics. How that looks from swimmer to swimmer depends on various interrelated conditions (e.g., ankle flexibility, stroke rate, race tactics, etc.).
Happy swimming!
by Matthew on March 27, 2012
Happy Hunger Games!
I think I’m on top of enough things to come back to writing for a bit, or at least until #3 breaks into the starting lineup soon enough. This one is way overdue, too, and mostly because I’ve been, well, afraid of how to capture my feelings towards Suzanne Collins‘ The Hunger Games Trilogy (HGT). I was first introduced to the series by beloved Mongoose and extremely well-read athlete, Haley Chura, while we were in Hawaii last year. Actually, Elizabeth, Haley and I were having lunch the Monday after the race when the topic of the book came up. Haley explained the premise and a lot of the political overtones in the book and spoke pretty passionately about the story and characters as a whole. I remember being dismissive. I gave her a hard time saying something along the lines that this was another Twilight or Harry Potter light-weight, brain candy book series. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With series is just that, but I had given it a pass because it tackled more “sophisticated” notions of societal ills. Translation -> let the Tweens read The Hunger Games, us adults will read the Girl With books. Yep, snobery only a kid raised in private schools can aspire to.
At some point in February I had just finished War Room (which I’ll address in another WIR), when I was browsing through the family collection of books on Kindle maddeningly searching for something to help me get to sleep. As I scrolled the list of options, I came across all three HG books and I think the cover art caught me. The font, the graphic, the layout, all seemed “sophisticated” – clean and contemporary, the Bauhaus feel that I always seem to fall for. The look of the book at least didn’t scream gratuitous money-grabbing sensationalist tween love/sex story. And so I took a flyer, downloaded it and began reading. Three hours later, at 1’30 in the morning, I put the book down, having devoured half of its contents as well as half of the available time I had to sleep that night. The post-apoocalyptic first-person narrative had caught me squarely in its metaphorical crosshairs. And I didn’t really know why. But it did. 5 days and many late nights later, I had finished all three books. I couldn’t stop reading. And I still didn’t know why. Worse yet, when I was done, all I wanted to do was talk about it with other people. I wanted relive it in shared experience with somebody else. I was still mesmerized by the story and the characters. And as a confession, I still am, enough that I re-read the first book prior to Friday’s movie opening.
A couple of weeks ago Haley asked me why I hadn’t written a HG WIR for the blog. I was honest with her and told her I was scared. Yeah. Simply scared. Something about those books had so moved me that I didn’t want to write something that didn’t at least partially convey why I was steamrolled by the story. Katniss, Cinna, Haymitch, Peeta, Prim and Rue all had such an impression that I didn’t want to dishonor that effect by writing something banal or trite. Crazy? This tween series had uppercut me in a silly, messy way.
And I still couldn’t put my finger on why it had. It wasn’t until I was having a conversation with my father recently that I finally had the “a-ha” moment about the books and my fascination with them as I tried to convince him to read the series himself. While we were discussing the books I told him that the series brought me back to my own formative teen years – that 6th-7th-8th grade period – where my English classes were fraught with literature steeped in very similar themes as the HGT. Those English classes were taught by some great teachers at an all-boys school in the late 80s. If you want to get the attention of a 13 year-old boy, you have to get stories that will act as a 2×4 for that wandering pubescent male consciousness. Competition, violence, oppression, unrequited love – those things usually do the trick, or at least they did for me. Following suit, the stories weaving those traits grabbed me with two hands and shook me into a tranced state of true genuine attention, an early teen attention that only works prior to a post-adaloscent puberty where your attention goes squarely in one singular direction.
And what were those works that captured me? William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies; Richard Connell’s incomparable short story “The Most Dangerous Game“; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (the novel that led me to be an English major several years later); The Orwellian classic, 1984; and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. All had elements of a post-apocalyptic world where the communal social conscience degenerates into something that is a bastardization of some of the worst traits of current society. Further strengthening the power of the those works at the time was the real wold model for them – the Cold War anti-hero Soviet Union. Being a middle-schooler at the tail end of the Reagan administration we lived through media stories that personified many of the themes we were reading about in class. Everything – fiction and reality – seemed to be real. That yin-yang of news narrative/fiction narrative had stuck with me then, and apparently, had layed dormant inside for the last 20+ years. All I needed was the story of Katniss and a post-apocalyptic rebellion to wake it up again. And I’m so thankful it did.
As I type out these words I can’t help but smile thinking about being in my 8th grade English class, talking about literature in a way that wasn’t tainted by preconceived notions of “life” or at least “adult” (sophisticated??? hah!) life. Those discussions actually resonated with me, all these years later. And I can thank the HGT for awakening that dialogue again, turning those subsconcious whispers into a full-fledged “adult” conversation between the father of three I am today and that young adult in-waiting establishing an identity of himself under the fluorescent halos of a Memphis University School English classroom. I’m a sucker for nostalgia but I feel like it also makes me appreciative of what I have had and what I have now.
I won’t ruin this update by talking specifics about plot development or deconstruct character motives. I will say my favorite of the three books was the last one, and I appreciate Suzanne Collins’ ability to deliver a superior finale to the tales. As for the movie, well, like The Lord of the Flies cellophane versions (both films) or On the Beach, the HG film was more take it or leave it than anything else. For me, it didn’t capture what I wanted it to in its execution – the complexity of the relationships Katniss has in context of her predicament. But Christopher Nolan can’t write every screenplay nor direct everything, I guess. And our imagination is always more illustrative and fertile than somebody else’s. So that will have to do here, as it should.
