Mad Manatees Mentor Group - VERY CLOSED!!! Sorry! (Page 25)

Skrat, you've become a very fine swim coach and that is good advice ...

I echo that fundamentally, you have a nice streamlined body position and both your form and speed are excellent as an adult-onset swimmer.

I encourage everyone to watch their videos frame-by-frame. You will self-observe many points of both achievement and for improvement.

Here's what I saw to work on. (see attached pics for reference)

1. When you breathe, you over-rotate your head AND lift it up out of the water. Your body has to compensate somehow for the de-balancing (your head should be nicely in line with your body rotation to breathe; the head moves by itself very little or not at all) ... we tend to see this either in the opposite arm pushing water down (instead of back) in order to support or make the head pop up OR ---> what you do, which is take a bigger kick with the leg. If you look at shot 1 carefully, you can make out that your legs are quite far apart. There are many ways to try to achieve imprinting this. If I were you, I'd carefully read and try to implement everything in the Beginner and Intermediate KICK sections of swimsmooth.com. I would FIRST try to keep your head in rotation with your body (and try to be mindful of what your legs are doing when you breathe); secondarily I'd work on the kick, especially keeping in mind two things: extend your feet (like a point, but relaxed--comes from the ankle, not by pointing toes, but that is the effect) and turn your big toes slightly inward, and pretend you are holding a coin in between your butt cheeks. For some reason those images sometimes help people to originate the kick from the hips.

***2. most important is what your arm is doing UNDER the water. The analogy of being on the edge of the pool helps; I also think of folding my arm in a 90-degreeish angle over the top of a square package, then pulling that package straight backward. Think of breaststroke (the beginning of the pull there and in freestyle are nearly identical): you can't do it if your arms are straight. You have to bend them to pull. Same in freestyle: having the arm straight-ish in the water is not an efficient/effective pull for distance swimming.

3/4. Your R arm tends to cross over the midline, and this seems to lead more to the straight-arm pulling as above. Try to think of your hands entering the water at 10am and 2pm on a clock; that’s an overexaggeration, but will probably effect just the right angle for entry.

paddles--did you ask about paddles? What kind did you get? Use them VERY sparingly at first, and definitely without the wrist loop--just looped onto your middle finger. If your pull is good, solid and well-formed, the paddles will stay on.

Skrat, you've become a very fine swim coach and that is good advice ...

I echo that fundamentally, you have a nice streamlined body position and both your form and speed are excellent as an adult-onset swimmer.

I encourage everyone to watch their videos frame-by-frame. You will self-observe many points of both achievement and for improvement.

Here's what I saw to work on. (see attached pics for reference)

1. When you breathe, you over-rotate your head AND lift it up out of the water. Your body has to compensate somehow for the de-balancing (your head should be nicely in line with your body rotation to breathe; the head moves by itself very little or not at all) ... we tend to see this either in the opposite arm pushing water down (instead of back) in order to support or make the head pop up OR ---> what you do, which is take a bigger kick with the leg. If you look at shot 1 carefully, you can make out that your legs are quite far apart. There are many ways to try to achieve imprinting this. If I were you, I'd carefully read and try to implement everything in the Beginner and Intermediate KICK sections of swimsmooth.com. I would FIRST try to keep your head in rotation with your body (and try to be mindful of what your legs are doing when you breathe); secondarily I'd work on the kick, especially keeping in mind two things: extend your feet (like a point, but relaxed--comes from the ankle, not by pointing toes, but that is the effect) and turn your big toes slightly inward, and pretend you are holding a coin in between your butt cheeks. For some reason those images sometimes help people to originate the kick from the hips.

***2. most important is what your arm is doing UNDER the water. The analogy of being on the edge of the pool helps; I also think of folding my arm in a 90-degreeish angle over the top of a square package, then pulling that package straight backward. Think of breaststroke (the beginning of the pull there and in freestyle are nearly identical): you can't do it if your arms are straight. You have to bend them to pull. Same in freestyle: having the arm straight-ish in the water is not an efficient/effective pull for distance swimming.

3/4. Your R arm tends to cross over the midline, and this seems to lead more to the straight-arm pulling as above. Try to think of your hands entering the water at 10am and 2pm on a clock; that’s an overexaggeration, but will probably effect just the right angle for entry.

paddles--did you ask about paddles? What kind did you get? Use them VERY sparingly at first, and definitely without the wrist loop--just looped onto your middle finger. If your pull is good, solid and well-formed, the paddles will stay on.