Deconstructing the swim

I spent the better part of an hour and a half yesterday afternoon in a coached swim session at the BEAUTIFUL Pearland Natatorium. The goal of the session was to evaluate my stroke and try to identify why, while my swimming has improved immensely, I still don't feel "right". After swimming a 50 with coach walking the deck over me, coach noticed a GLARING flaw. And fixing this thing with my kick is going to mean taking my stroke apart and starting from scratch.

As daunting as it sounds to "start from scratch", I'm really encouraged as I've never really had a grasp of what the swim stroke is. I've done drills, I've catched, pulled, kicked, breathed, balanced, all those things you do during a stroke, but I've never really understood how it all fits together. Do you know how frustrating that's been? To know you're "improving" but that you don't really know how to put it all together. Well, thanks to Gaye, I'm starting to get a glimpse of how this thing works and I KNOW I'm going to be a better swimmer come May.

According to Gaye, the stroke begins with the kick. As with nearly all sports that derive their primary power from rotation of the core body, the body roll in swimming starts in the legs. To learn this at a most basic, foundational level, I put the fins on and got Vertical. It was strange to be in the water over an hour and not swim ANY but still learn so much and make so much progress. Most of what we concentrated on was what Emmett Hines refers to as the Vertical 6-Beat Rotation Rhythm Kicking Drill. Your can read about it in the article Bottom-up Swimming Part I, subtitled "Let Your Legs Drive Your Long Axis Strokes". After getting a feel for the kick in the vertical, I went horizontal, trying to keep the that Right-flutter-flutter-Left-flutter-flutter beat going. It was like an infant learning to walk. There were only glimpses of doing it early on in the session but as we progressed, I got better and better. It's gonna take some serious time to get this down but it's foundational. It's basic to the rest of my stroke so I've GOT to learn this.

Read Emmitt's article. It's great. Like I say, I'm really excited about where I'm going with my swim.