The improvement in speed for many athletes can be quite significant in the beginning. For a swimmer who hasn’t had technique coaching through underwater filming and analysis like we do in our freestyle clinics and online membership, immediate changes to their stroke can help drop a number of seconds from their 100m pace. After these changes are made improvement is more gradual and comes from consistent and specific training.
The video above shows you how three key changes to a swimmer’s stroke helped her go from 52 to 49 seconds for a 50m length, all in the space of a one hour session.
For the swimmer above the three main things we focused on were a faster cadence, a deeper hand position when extending (avoiding the fingertips rising to the surface) and a deeper hand position when pulling to avoid dropping her elbow. While not perfect yet, with regular training and constantly focusing on those three keys points her new technique will start to become ‘automatic’ without requiring as much focus.
If you’re located in Australia, we regularly run freestyle stroke correction clinics around the country to help triathletes and swimmers get better results in their training and racing through underwater filming and analysis.
Athletes outside of Australia can join our online membership which offers video analysis and stroke correction online.
Because of this video I recommended the deeper hand position to a swimmer that I watch every day pounding out lap after lap of poor form. This one little tweak changed her world! Thanks 🙂
Fantastic Deb! It’s common error and the changes can be significant
As a Lifeguard I see the worst of the worst. I throw the odd nugget to swimmers I feel will be open to it. This particular nugget turned out to be gold! Even in my own swimming. Thanks again.
Deb