Swim Training
THREE SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON SWIM TECHNIQUE
By Courtney Baird
If you’re a triathlete, chances are pretty high that your least favorite discipline is the swim. Given this, here are three swimming experts and a few pieces of wisdom. They don’t necessarily agree on what’s most important when it comes to swimming, but they’ve all had plenty of success in teaching triathletes.
1 Dr. Genadijus Sokolovas, Olympic swimming expert and inventor of the GST Swim Power Test, which has been used by more than 70 Olympic medalists.
Speak with Dr. Sokolovas, or “Dr. G,” for a while, and you’ll quickly discover that when it comes to swim technique, he stresses swimming with your core and not your arms and keeping a rigid body — as if you were a canoe.
“Core strength is the most important in swimming,” said Dr. G. “Look at the fastest creatures in the water — fish, dolphins, whales. All those creatures don’t have arms and swim from the core, and if swimmers have strong core muscles, they can generate propulsion not only from the arms, but also from the core. Rigidness is also important, because a rigid object creates less frontal drag than a soft object.”
Dr. G, who regularly works with professional triathletes at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., also stresses drag reduction. In other words, if the body isn’t streamlined, it’s impossible to overcome this poor body position — no matter how strong you are.
One method of ensuring that your body is streamlined is to always remember to keep your head down. “Sometimes it helps to imagine that you are swimming in a downhill river,” said Dr. G.
Other drills that Dr. G recommends include swimming with a pull buoy between your ankles, and to kick with fins while your arms rest against the small of your back. (Advanced swimmers can practice this drill with 2-to 3-pound weights resting against the smalls of their backs.)
The pull buoy drill “engages the legs and lower abdominal muscles,” Dr. G said, preventing swimmers from keeping their legs too relaxed and moving from side to side and sinking, which creates unwanted frontal drag.
Kicking with your arms against the small of your back “engages more body muscles and makes them stronger — it also forces swimmers to use their center of mass to balance the body in the water,” he said.
Swimmers looking to get a live lesson in swim technique can also contact Dr. G to be tested with his GST Swim Power Test, which measures the force, velocity, power and acceleration of each phase of a swimmer’s stroke and synchronizes it with live video, allowing Dr. G to give real-time feedback about a person’s stroke.
2 Sheila Taormina, four-time Olympian (swimming, triathlon, modern pentathlon), famous for her passionate study of swim technique.
Known for her “high-elbow catch,” Taormina likes to focus on helping swimmers who have plateaued and are looking to get faster. She does this by focusing on propulsion.
“I’m more into propulsion in general,” said Taormina. “If there was one particular theme, I’d call it propulsion, and the high-elbow catch is just the first moment in the propulsive stroke cycle.” (When Taormina talks about the “high elbows,” she’s talking about the beginning of the catch cycle, not the recovery cycle above the water.)
To understand how to generate propulsion in the water, Taormina studies the two propulsive forces in aerodynamics, “lift” and “drag.” The only way that swimmers can wield and manipulate these forces is with their arms and legs, Taormina said.
So how do swimmers know what their strokes should look like to be generating the most propulsion? One of the best ways is to look at photos and videos of the world’s best swimmers and then attempt to replicate the stroke techniques seen there, Taormina said.
20 USA TRIATHLON SPRING 2014
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