My swim video for peer review

The first thing I notice is that your hand is just slipping through the water. There is no "anchoring" of your hand and/or arm position on a fixed position and moving your body from that point. One thing that might help is rotating your shoulders/hips just a bit more to get more of an extended reach.

As the first person eluded to, the pull through the water looks more straight arm. Work on a high elbow catch with a hand motion that comes under your torso but doesn't cross over your torso's mid-line.

There are topics  and videos online that discuss this and show this in videos.

You basically have no catch/pull.  Think of laying on top of monkey bars and pulling yourself across them.....that's what swimming actually is.  My guess is that you look at swimming as propelling yourself through the water......that's wrong.  What you really want to do is pull yourself through the water.  In order to do that you have to anchor your hand and "grab" the water.  Then you pull yourself like the monkey bar example.  You will hear people talk about keeping a high elbow, as the poster did above, and that is to give you more surface area to "grab" with.....you then have your entire forearm, not just your hand.  The more water you "grab" the easier you can pull yourself.  It's a very basic misunderstanding of swimming.

You need a coach, because what I just told you is a very simplistic overview.  The drills and strokes needed to learn that feel of "grabbing" are many and varied. You also have some problems with your reach, body rotation, etc........but that's all fixable.

The good news is that your balance in the water is MUCH better than most beginners.  That means your curve to faster swimming will not be nearly as steep as it is for some people.  Find a good SWIM coach.  You will likely make time improvements quite rapidly.

I agree with pretty much all of what LB is saying.  Balance is the first place to start for most beginners, but yours appears to be better than most beginners.  The catch is alluding you, though.  Here's a great video by Jonathan Caron that explains how your arm needs to move along with some instruction for practicing it out of the water:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1KReTEXiBM

ETA:  The internal shoulder rotation that he's demonstrating can be challenging, or even impossible, for some adults to achieve initially.  That's where practicing it outside of the water becomes important.  This practice can take the form of what he's demonstrating, or a custom strength training program.

Not to pile on, but I agree with the others about your lack of an effective catch & pull.

I'd suggest you check out Sheila Taormina's book Swim Speed Secrets, which is all about the catch & pull in freestyle.  She's also got some videos on YouTube. ( I have to admit to a some bias, since she's also my masters coach).

Good luck,

Mark

I must of not picked up on that point.

A couple of weeks ago on their "Real Coaching" podcast Joel Filliol and Paulo Sousa discussed many points on swimming. One thing they said was that without good strength in the water you're not going to have good form.

I don't disagree with the methods of shorter sets described above, but I disagree with the main issue that you mainly have a swim technical problem that's causing your lack of a forceful pull, and I also disagree with anyone who says you're making so much drag in the water that it's turning you from a sub 1:30 swimmer to a 2:00+ swimmer.

The big reason you're not going as fast as you like is the lack of pull power, or. swim-specific muscular endurance. A lot of folks interpret a weak pull as mainly a technical problem issue, and advise you to do more pure technique work on the catch, but what you really need is to pump up the power in your weak catch - you can have the best EVF but if your swim power stays the way it is right now, you won't be going any faster (in reality, it's a practical impossibility to have a great EVF with a weak pull.) Also note without your muscular arm endurance in the swim motion, it doesn't matter how fit you are in terms of running/cycling - you will only swim as fast as your weakest link, which in your case will be your muscular arm endurance/power.

More short sets with higher intensity, and overall added volume will help a lot, and you should improve a lot since you're a new swimmer. I'm sure some above will argue that this is 'improving your technique more than your power', but call it whatever you will - you will get a lot better from it, even if you do zero stroke correction at this point. 

 If you had a big overroll that was killing your speed, horrible fishtail, or awful head popping out of the water, the prescription would NOT to be swim more and harder sets. But in the case of a weak catch and otherwise only no speed-killing fatal technical errors, it's time to start working hard in the pool.

I see some posts in this thread falling into the old technique versus fitness argument.  They're both wrong.  The two are so intertwined they're one thing.   Let's call it technique-fitness.

Increasing volume through shorter intervals with attention to both technique and intensity will allow you to improve.  Blindly piling on volume and intensity while ignoring technique will result in a little improvement if you're lucky, and injury if you're not.  Focusing exclusively on technique at a low intensity and volume will result in only a little improvement with a performance plateau relatively quickly.

ETA:  Fitness falls into 3 basic categories:  biomechanical (how strong my muscles are, and how my body can move through the various joints), biochemical (how well my body processes energy to fuel performance.  This accounts for the greatest percentage of the three for endurance sports performance), and neuromuscular (how well my brain and nervous system can activate muscles and coordinate them into movements).  Well designed training sessions and programs will improve fitness in all three of these areas.  Your current inability to catch and pull harder is a combination of technique and all 3 of these, so approaching training with the objective of improving technique-fitness rather than just technique or fitness will reap the most improvements.

They are intertwined, but I would say you would be incorrectly advising the OP if you are saying his problem was mostly technical and only a small degree of fitness.

His problem is well over 80% a swim-fitness limitation, if not moreso. It's very clear in that super slow turnover rate and the weak pull force that you can easily see from the deck. Improving pull angles or even EVF will NOT improve his pull force nor turnover, and he will stay slow.  I guarantee that even with the best coaches in the world, if OP swims the same volume and same intensity he is doing now, he would only minimally improve in speed, like <5sec/100 despite the form fixes. Whereas with no coach, but with more volume and significantly harder short sets, he'll likely lop of 20sec/100 in a short period of time.

Even though the factors are intertwined, it is absolutely crucial to understand the main correct limiter so you don't get frustrated with lack of progress. If his was a mainly technique issue, the prescription would NOT to be swim harder and more - it would be to slow down and fix the technique error first. 

Did you even read my post?

LOL  You're not supposed to drink the bong water.

No, it isn't close to 80%.  You don't know how to swim yet. 

I took 30 seconds/100 off my swim time in the last 2 years doing the same volume...with form fixes.   What you're talking about doesn't really make sense.  Being strong is good, and helpful, but if you're pushing the water down, or sideways, or not grabbing enough in your pull, you won't be moving forwards any faster.

other observations, do you have to bilateral breathe? I know its a big fad with the triathletes, but it isn't necessary.  Along with this, increase your cadence, rotate more, and get that EVF.  It is very difficult to teach someone to swim over the internet.  Those previous vidoes are helpful, but what you really need is someone with you in the pool helping to give you feedback.

and do your dang flip turns, always

Get a coach, go to masters, swim with swimmers....

it means you're going anaerobic early in the set, and paying for it later

OP - your assumption is correct. 

Ignore all the name calling and belittling of yours and others' ability on this forum, and consider the given advice for its relevance and practical impact on your particular situation, as well as the presented evidence. I actually think there's a pretty clear consensus already on what most folks think of where to go from here. 

 Keep in mind - if you were wasting energy in your pull by pushing down, sideways, or elsewhere, it would show up as an error in body position, rotation, etc. The force that doesn't get translated to forward motion doesn't just 'disappear'. If you were truly a 1:40/100 swimmer but wasting your energy by pushing down or sideways, you would have a symptom of it and we would see it, like a big vertical bob, or big overrotation or fishtail. As is, I think people who are suggesting you already have the swim fitness for 1:40 but just need to change your stroke angles, are a bit too optimistic.  Your turnover would also be much faster if you really did have the fitness of a 1:40 swimmer. 

if the answer were power, theres no way high school girls could outswim me...but here we are, and high school girls can out swim me. 

Everyone loves using this "young girl fast swimmers have no power" as a refutation of power, and it's a simply incorrect assumption.

Power is not just sheer strength - it is force over time. Alistair brownlee and all the other top ITU guys swim hellaciously fast, and have arms/backs so small that it's unlikely that they can benchpress more than 150 lbs once. 

But ask those competitive swimmer girls how much they are swimming and how hard they swim during those swim practices. It's going to be a lot. There is no good swim program that omits either of these two factors. That translates to power. Attention to technique is there, but bottom line, volume+intensity = power, same as running and cycling and any other endurance sport.

And yes, these girls have a lot of it for swimming.  

This is flat wrong.  Running and cycling are not even close in terms of technique being a component of being faster.  That is specific to swimming.  There is no doubt that more volume and more intensity will help with swimming.  But when there are fundamental flaws in technique they must be taken care of. Nobody swims fast without a good catch......it's an absolute basic fundamental.  If you want to compare it to running it would be like not lifting your knees. You can run without doing it, but you'll never be fast.

And BTW - not a single person called the OP any names or were not helpful.  That's just silly......like your "guarantee" claim.  LOL

I would also make the argument that you can't build swimming-specific strength without good technique.  In particular, a good arm pull follows a unique curvilinear path that's hard to duplicate out of the water (though you can approximate it using stretch bands).  If you want to build a strong pull, then you have to do it correctly and recruit the muscles to move along the desired path, which they probably aren't used to doing.  It's all about specificity.  

Mark