Swimming critique (video included)

Considering your time and experience in the pool so far, your form is looking pretty good! Keep up the practice and good work Two problems I noticed is that

1: You fish-tail. It probably feels like there's a slight detachment between your legs and your upper body. I like the fact you're 6-beat kicking pretty efficiently, but your hips aren't staying tight and you're not moving as a single unit.

2: It's not major but you slip your elbows when you pull just a little bit

The fix

1: You have a slight crossover. Try to imagine a straight line from the center of your forehead that goes vertically down your body. When you pull, don't cross it. Try to keep your pull straight with no S-like motion. Your arms should enter at 11 and 1 and pull straight down. A drill that helped me when I was swimming in high school was sticking a kickboard 'tween my legs and swimming like that (without kicking) for a little while, then back to normal. Then with the kickboard, then without. It takes a LOT of mental focus to take out a crossover from your stroke because you don't really feel it when you don't think about it.

2: Keep your elbows high at all points in the stroke. Just takes focus. You've got a pretty good anchor in the water as is, but could use a little tuning. I'm attaching a link to Sun Yang's (1500m world record holder and gold medalist in London Olympics) stroke loop. Its just a continuous feed of his technique from several angles. Look at the middle video and look how perfectly perpendicular his arm is. That's the goal. Hard to do, but that's effectively the goal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uncOBURz-6o

I will 100% disagree with the other reply.  Your catch and your pull are close to being non-existent.

Some things I noticed:

First off, i agree with a slight cross over. Extend your arms straight in front of you.

You're placing your hand into the water too early. Extend it farther out in front of you and drop your arm in when it's extended.

Looks pretty good!

I'm counting 17 strokes per length. If this is a 25-meter pool, you have some slippage, I think, but not a ton. And 45 seconds for 50 meters is pretty good, since you didn't seem to be swimming all out.

As others have noted, you have a crossover, but I only noticed it with the right hand. It crosses over the imaginary center line when you breathe to your left. You are doing this probably because it is the only way you can maintain balance in the water.

When you breathe, I think your lift your head a bit, and both goggles come out of the water. This tends to push your hips downward, which is why (I think) you need to cross over. 

When you breathe, keep one goggle in the water. The drill I use is to swim with one eye closed - the eye that remains in the water. Alternatively, I will leave both eyes open and try to see the bottom of the lane line with the eye remaining in the water.

Anyhow, keeping the head low will prevent the hips from sinking, which in turn will obviate the need for the crossover.

BTW, I think you are doing really well for eight months' training.

Thanks for the replies everyone! I saw the crossover too when watching, so weird that I don't notice this while swimming. 

Looking at myself swimming it looks like I get most of the propulsion from my legs, my arm catch "turnover" if you will looks very slow. But ironically when I use a pull-buoy I am not much slower, but of course I am much better able to feel the catch and pull. 

I agree that you have a crossover but I see it on both sides.  More on the right side than the left for sure.  The correct way to begin is to allow your hands to enter the water directly over your shoulders. 

You also seem to be disconnected from your hips.  One of the keys is to be able to rotate your shoulders and then your hips as you catch, pull and recover through entire stroke.  The shoulders should rotate slightly more than the hips and they should remain  aligned through the full stroke cycle.  Looking at the video you should notice that your hips look like they aren't part of the stroke at all.  As you look at the video it should be easy to see that your hips all of a sudden look strange, like they aren't fluid with the rest of your body.

One of the ways to correct this would be to reach a little farther in front of your shoulders.  You should feel a good stretch along your lats and rear delts.  This may also cause your shoulders to rotate slightly more, which isn't particularly bad.  Here is a link to Mr Swim Smooth.  It is a really good look at what your stroke should look like. 

I am also providing 2 more videos that hopefully will show the lack of hip disconnect that it appears you have.  It should also show a better picture of what your hand entry should look like (directly over your shoulders).  (This video is a year old and there are some obvious flaws in my stroke that I have been working on since this video was recorded.)

End swim (notice my left hand crosses over slightly but my right hand stay closer to over top of my shoulder.)

Side swim (Notice the lack of a hard kick too.  It's not necessary to kick hard.  Your kick is used more for balance in triathlon than for propulsion.)