The myth of symmetric swimming, not breathing, and the glide
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a relatively mediocre swimmer, but I know a few and watch a few that are pretty good. :-)
Seems to me that the Olympics does give us an opportunity to blow off a few myths (or at least misplaced obsessions) of people giving advice to triathlon swimmers. With the Olympics, you can watch the 400/800/1500 and see how the best distance swimmers actually swim. (Plus the open water events!)
First off, almost none of them "glides", holding their arms way out for a pause. Watch, and you'll see extensions, but not glides. Glide is just you "coasting", which no one does on the bike every time their legs move around! (Maybe it's a good learning tool, but you need to stop it.)
Second is the obsession over making your stroke perfectly symmetrical. My stroke needs to be cleaner in that I wobble too much...but it's not my symmetry that I worry about. Michael Phelps isn't a distance swimmer, but watch his arms carefully, and you'll see his freestyle isn't symmetric at all. He hits left/right almost like a heartbeat pattern. thump-thump (pause) thump-thump (pause) thump-thump. OK, so there's a huge difference between doing whatever it takes to get the most power output possible for 1 minute vs swimming efficiently for an hour..so don't take MP as your example. But having seen MP, watch the 400/800/1500 swimmers, and you'll see that many of them are very symmetric, but many of them are NOT symmetric. Symmetry tends to make you smoother...but don't let someone tell you that your stroke is wrong just because your arm rotations are not quite symmetric in pace because of your breathing. Instead, make sure you get a video of what's going on under water. That is MUCH more telling.
Third...breathing. The world wants to make you feel guilty if you like to breathe when you swim, or if you breathe on one side. Learning to breathe on both sides is a good skill and can help even out your stroke for sure. But again...watch the 800/1500. How many of the world's best are breathing on alternate sides in a race? Same for the open water swimmers? And swimming is aerobic. If you have a smooth breathing motion, then whether to breathe every stroke vs every other is a delicate balance of whether getting more air is more important than avoiding disrupting your stroke. The logical conclusion here is that the better of a swimmer you are, the less breathing will cost you for long races. Club swimmers who are better than most of us will ever be breathe every stroke on the 400/500 and longer. Again, watch the Olympians, and you'll see some that breathe every stroke and some that breathe every other. Either can be the fastest for you.
Please don't misinterpret me that i am advocating an asymmetric stroke in which you breath every time as the fastest thing for everyone or even anyone. But I am quite sure that a smooth stroke with a good catch can have any of those elements in it, and we are sometimes pushed in entirely fruitless directions by articles written for the masses or by coaches who aren't really very well acquainted with swimming.
The one thing we don't get to look at in the pool swimming is sighting. I don't think there is any debate that a sighting stroke slows everyone down, particularly in non-wetsuit swims where your legs probably go down deeper. My best swims are the ones where I don't have to sight very much (maybe every 15-20 right arm cycles), but my worst swims are the ones where I go off course... So for me, I just have to make a judgment about how many people are around me, how good the buoys are, etc., and I try to strike a balance. But that is the subject of another rant.
Comments
As you stated, these are elite, shorter distance swimmers so not apples-to-apples but definitely something to be learned and applied.
Thanks for starting this. I find it amazing to see people swim FAST.
Agree. It has been fun watching the various strokes of the Olympic swimmers, from some of the really awkward-looking stuff at the slow end of the prelims to the windmilling in the 50s/100s.
As for breathing, I'm convinced that a lot of AG triathletes don't breathe often enough. We watch top pros breathe bilaterally, and we know that bilateral breathing often helps helps us swim straighter/more symmetrically (straight = huge advantage in OW), so bilateral it is. But most of the top pros are stroking at a rate above 80 spm, many of them at 85-95 spm. Sure, Jodie Swallow breathes bilaterally every three strokes, but she strokes 90-100 times per minute, which is almost unimaginable. So, she's getting at least 30 breaths per minute, taking a breath every 2 seconds. Plenty for someone with her aerobic capacity. In fact, I don't think there's any way she could breath every other stroke.
But the average AGer strokes 45-60 spm. If an athlete at the low end of that range breathes bilaterally, he (it's dumb, so it almost has to be a he) breathes 15 times per minute. William or another seasoned runner will probably remember this better, but I think a lot of running coaches recommend 180 steps per minute, with a breathing pattern of 3:3 (3 steps while breathing in, 3 steps while breathing out) for easy/WU running, which is about 30 breaths per minute. Anything faster, move to a 2:2 pattern or 45 breaths per minute. Can you imagine running at/near threshold (like we do when racing the swim leg of a tri) on 15 breaths per minute, effectively holding your breath for 4 seconds between each breath?
I can't hold above 65 spm for a long period of time in the water, so I'm definitely an every-other-stroke breather in a race setting, trying to get at least 30 every minute.
I couldn't tell you the exact transition point where my running goes from 1-in-4 entrainment to 1-in-3, but I am definitely an entrained breather while running. I did a good data self study a few years ago, and cadence of course does track with running velocity, but it's a fairly small part of the variation...meaning more of the variation in velocity comes from increased stride length (but not all) as you run harder. That correlates well with what i had read.
"...what's going on under water. That is MUCH more telling."
To me, there are two key fundamentals to swimming, First stems from the fact that water is about 1,000 x as dense as air. So anything you can do to minimize turbulence amounts to "free speed". Second, forward progress is determined by how much water you are engaging effectively with your hand/arm (let's call this the "paddle"). A book could be written on what "effectively" means, but it includes such issues as: angle of the paddle - in all three dimensions - relative to the vector of forward motion desired; speed and acceleration of the paddle through the water; pushing against "new" (static) water vs water which is already moving because the paddle is pushing against it; and many other issues which I'm sure we could dream up.
Anything you are trying to do or eliminate should be filtered thru one of these two lenses: "Is it helping me reduce my resistance in the horizontal plane?" and "Is it helping my hand/arm to use the water to move forward?"
Breathing: Speaking to you from your future, as we age, we are able to utilize less O2 - fewer mitochondria, fewer muscle cells? - and can send less O2 to the periphery - lower maximum heart rate. At some point (about 2012), I found I did not need to breathe every other stroke to get all the O2 I could use, and discovered I went no slower in the IM swim breathing every third stroke vs every other. As a matter of fact, I was faster, probably because I was swimming a bit straighter. More recently, I found that was also true in Olympic distance - in 2015 and 2016, I have the same time as the previous year, after about four years of steady decline. So, breathe as much as you need to, but not more. For OFs, that may be less often than "younger" folks.
If it were ONLY reducing drag in the horizontal plane, then distance swimmers wouldn't breathe as regularly. Even top swimmers have "better" strokes when not breathing. I am not trying to suggest that breathing is a drag-less action. I'm just saying that there is a balance, and there are far too many voices out there that Absolutely Insist on multiple stroke breathing.
I am capable of swimming almost 50 yards under water, and I can swim a few hundred yards taking two breaths per 25 yard lengths. The former of course isn't what we're talking about, but the latter is an extreme of what we are. You simply have to slow down in order to sustainably swim with less O2 at some point. Personally, I am slightly anemic, so I may be one of Those Guys who just has to breathe more than other people. Maybe that's why this is something that catches my ear. Or my eye when I see "3 tips for better triathlon swimming" on my Facebook feed. (I do get distressed-sounding breathing earlier than anyone else in a race who is going about my speed.)
Watching the Olympics this evening, I was reminded of the comments on glide. For sure, during freestyle, there is little to no gliding going on. But the breast-stroke is another story. The is a definite glide, a time when neither the arms nor the legs are providing forward propulsion. I don;t know why that is, but I do know I feel a lot better about myself after realizing that. I grew up as a breaststroker, from age 11-20, on AAU, HS, and college teams. Hardly swam any freestyle. I see now that not only did that teach me to kick with my feet dorsiflexed (toes point to the bottom, @ right angle to my shins) most of the time, but also that gliding is a legitimate part of the stroke. It's no wonder I default to a stroke rate of 48 with no kick, and find it devilishly hard to make any changes.
Oh, and one other thing. Michael Phelps. The man was CRYING on the medal stand after winning his 20th gold medal. Sort of a Star Trek moment - "Go where no one has gone before". Words fail to describe the magnitude of his achievements over FIVE Olympiads. It's damn near impossible to win ONE gold medal. To do it 21 times, especially when everyone is expecting you to, is other-worldly.
While on this topic, has anyone noticed how Ledecky breathes? No one would ever teach a new swimmer to do that. She lifts her head straight up a bit before turning. But obviously it works for her.
And while still on this topic, it was interesting to note that she (and the other leaders) breathed basically every stroke in the 200.
Great thread! Notes and some observations:
As a former swimmer, the most intriguing evolution in the sport as been attention paid to underwater actions off the turns. My last competition swim was March of 1990 and no body was dolphin-kicking off of turns. We flutter kicked to about the backstroke flags or a bit more, to get under the bow wave that's chasing you to the wall. We did a lot of work to flip crazy fast and bounce immediately off the wall, but the technique of very aggressive dolphin kicking on every turn until nearly the 15m mark is completely new to me.
Breastrokers are generally a shifty lot, not to be trusted. Just one small step above sprinters, who are 100% all lazy slackers. I mean, sprinters would get put into my lane as punishment and they also can't count laps or sets for s#!t. Distance swimmers are the idiot savants of the swimming world, able to never lose count, calculate and maintain splits in their heads, and tell you exactly how much time a set will take.
FWIW, I think a lot of the new records are based on the "innovations" in stroke and turn mechanics. People figured out that the underwater dolphin kick could be faster than surface swimming and there was no rule against it. So (mainly a couple of famous backstrokers at first) started swimming as far as they could underwater and then coming up. The Powers That Be decided that was not cool, so they instituted the 15 meter rule. Even now, I hear about people experimenting with all kinds of turn and push off variations. It wasn't that long ago that they started letting breast strokers officially take a dolphin kick under water before their pull and kick...which was done because everyone was cheating by doing it anyway, and it's hard to call for the officials. Now what you have to watch is whether some people take multiple ones. I can't recall who it was, but there was a major male swimmer who acknowledged having taken multiple dolphin kicks at an Olympics or WC in the last few years....after he walked home with gold. And, Rich, have you seen the new backstroke wedges? They look like the "runner's starting blocks" that sit on the back of the normal starting blocks, except they hang into the pool. It lets everyone start a little faster/better.
Dawn - that's interesting that TI has changed its tune. They may have been very good at teaching adults to swim, but they were the poster boys for teaching over rotation and over gliding.
I saw a quick interview with Ledecky after her 200, in which she exclusively breathed to her right. The commentator was asking about how she was handling swimming against a rival and if she saw her and Ledecky said that IN ADVANCE she knew she wasn't going to be able to see that person at all on the last 50 of the 200...when the rival would be on her left. In other words, she was willing to risk having a rival come up on her in her weakest event in order to not ever take a breath on the "wrong" side. :-)
I was a breast stroker in my former (and limited) life as a swimmer, and found the rhythm of it to be more closely associated with butterfly when I was doing it right. To become a more effective freestyler certainly has been harder as few if any of those concepts apply (at least I pointed my toes at the end of the kick).
Still, the two biggest surprises to me each time I watch these events is the high amount of breathing and the odd (to my eyes anyway) cadence that they use (the thump thump William describes above). It does always lead me to wonder if, after all this time in the pool, I am still totally clueless (and yes, I know the answer. and not, it isn't the answer I would want).
I only ask as for me I have see that swimmers who don't breathe well (maintain form, hold arm out for catch) really suffer when they breathe. They are better off breathing LESS as every breath really slows them down. As folks get more efficient at breathing, then more frequent breathing makes sense as they can use increased breath rate to match increased effort.
Side note, anyone else note that in the 800 semifinal of Women's 800 that Lidecky wasn't even kicking over the second half. Aerial shots showed her doing a great wetsuit swimmer impersonation. I guess it's possible to be that fast without the kicking....crazy to think.
(An unfortunate note: OJ broke her wrist in the CAMTRI finals and is having to spend multiple weeks of the HS spring season doing nothing but kicking in the water wearing a water proof "condom" over her cast. Hopefully, she'll come out of it with a strong kick! No running during this time either...but she is biking on a trainer and doing some other dry land stuff.)
The other half of that is of course that we average swimmers cannot keep our body positions equal and have to kick more to avoid snow plowing.
Swimmers whose breathing mechanics are bad are definitely hindered by the conundrum of how frequently to breathe more than those whose form is better. These swimmers probably benefit more from kicking (but many do not kick well, either) and certainly from buoyant wet suits.
I wonder what the coaches think about advising those swimmers to do a fair amount of work with a snorkel, so they can learn what it is like to swim without having to rotate their heads at all. And perhaps to supplement that with some swimming with a buoy to work on form of their upper bodies, so they can do some of that breathing/rotation with a bit of assistance in avoiding the snow plow.
There is another group, one which i (unfortunately) belong to: the non-floaters. Doesn't matter what I do or how I lie in the water: my legs ALWAYS sink unless I kick a little...and then I go down. I am such a non-floater, that in a wetsuit, I don't stop sinking until my head is all the way under water. I literally have to tread water while waiting for a deep water start. Folks like me definitely have n easier time working on upper body form with a buoy, but it can too easily become a crutch. We have to be able to kick some. For me, swimming with a buoy feels almost identical to swimming with a wetsuit.
So I just got back from a swim, which was actually me checking out Kandi's swimming form and giving her some pointers. She really enjoyed her IMLP experience and wants to do a sprint race in about October
.
She has all of the classics issues associated with breathing, etc:
I explained to her how her anxiety about breathing initiates a set of cascading errors that just makes it worse and worse. So I gave her a few things to think about (head down, chest down, exhale smoothly, etc) before I'll give her some drills and more basics.
One of the things I had her do was to breath every 3rd vs 2nd stroke, as the act of breathing was basically kicking her ass, as others here have noted
. Many of these tips clicked for her but most importantly she realized that she just has to swim, relax, chill out, and not be anxious about the whole thing, as the anxiety initiates a compounding list of errors that make everything worse and worse. I may hook her up with a snorkel so I can temporarily take the breathing errors out and I can get her focused on some of the other stuff that's going on.
Elsewhere from this thread:
Kicking: in my experience, once you learn a cadence of kicking, it's difficult to undo that. For example, I use a 6 beat kick...which is a lot for a distance swimmer. It's very difficult for me to kick less frequently, it just feels very strange, as the cadence of your kick is also tied into the rest of your stroke, especially the pull. However, it's usually a "trailing 6 beat," meaning there is very little power applied to the kick and it's just the swimming version of swinging your arms while you run. But I can choose to more power into the kick when I need to...which isn't very often these days
. So when you see Olympic level distance swimmers kicking a lot, think (1) it's not a big deal for even schmucks like me, back in the day, to do 1500-2000yd kick sets in the middle of an 8k workout, (2) for them, the kick is more about cadence that's tied, timing-wise, to their pull, and (3) when they need to pick up the pace they'll put more power into their kick as they need to.
I have been told to forget about my kick, and let whatever kick happens, happen. At most try to rock the hips with the pull, taking care not to let the legs sway side to side. Otherwise concentrate entirely on the pull. So the only thing I think about with respect to my legs is to try to make sure they stay together and up, in the tube. I know I am doing this correctly when I don't feel any water pressure on the fronts of my legs.
William, I think we have discussed before. but not sure I buy the sinkers versus non sinkers theory. my thinking has been that if one is not able to float with butt and feet near the surface, then there is a technique problem.
for instance, is my body type that much different than yours ? based on my length and weight distribution, one might think I would be a sinker - but I am not.
by getting head in alignment, chest into water, etc. - can't everyone be a floater ?
thoughts ?
I thought treading water in a deep water wet suit swim was normal. Are there people who don't need to tread in that scenario?
At my leanest, I've almost completely sank, legs first, in a WETSUIT!
yes, technique to floating.
Wendy Neely. Blue Wave Aquatics. best local swim coach I know. one of the basics she starts with. I think she believes that everyone should be able to float with whole body near the surface.
http://www.slowtwitch.com/Training/Swimming/A_Not_So_Secret_Swim_Weapon_j5991.html
I use that finis center snorkel...never seen those symmetric ones. An interesting thought!