#improving swimming

It seems an unlikely culprit but fixing a late breather in butterfly stems from the thumbs. Many swimmers take their breath late in their stroke. This causes, what I call, a ‘hitch’. This makes the wave undulation uneven by lifting the head up late. Your head is going up when it needs to be started on its down wave. A wave needs to be smooth and follow an equal up-down pattern. Like a sine…

The most common issue I see in breaststroke is a style of stroke that can only be called  Granny  Breaststroke.  I call it this because the stroke holds the head position very high like a Granny who doesn’t want to get her hair wet.  It causes a huge amount of resistance and is very difficult to do even if you have a good kick.  It is important to know what the different styles of breaststroke…

Butterfly needs to have a dolphin action to swim it correctly.  The basis for the stroke is a correct dolphin action, NOT a dolphin kick.  An undulation starting from the upper part of the body is a natural body movement that I have often seen in children.  Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be taught in swimming lessons leaving most swimmers who are graduating from their lesson programme into a…

Children take what adults say literally.  It is one of the reasons I often discourage coaches from being sarcastic in a training session when they attempt to be funny sarcastically.  Swimmers don’t get it.  They think that coaches and adults mean what they say.  Children are influenced by their teachers and the words they use are important.  So why do we call the underwater part of our arm stroke…

How fast would this guy swim! Huge hands and huge feet… This sculpture can be found at the Glasgow Science Centre The information attached says: SENSORY HOMUNCULUS: Different patches of your skin have different touch sensors.When you touch something, signals travel from those sensors to your brain. Your brain analyses the signals to produce your sense of touch. On the sculpture, the size of each…

A combination of a genius coach and an unconventional swimmer, resulted in a fistful of gold medals in the 1972 Munich Games. Mark Spitz became an icon as the first person to win seven golds at one Olympic Games. People might think that Spitz was simply godlike swimmer and that was it. His story is a bit more colourful than that. Without James ‘Doc’ Counsilman, there would not have been a seven…

If you have been taught how to swim correctly but constantly swim without thought, then the nuances of your stroke can change unknowingly back to your ‘normal’ and lazy stroke. A swimmer will be lost in a type of nose blindness. They may unintentionally swim poorly without feeling their error by being blind to how it feels. On a pig farm, you will immediately notice the horrid smell. Most farms…

The words we use are important. They carry a lot of baggage though. Your awareness of your words must be thorough because some words mean a different thing than what you think they do. Try the word ‘kick’. If I told a toddler to kick a pillow, I imagine every one would wind up and kick the pillow just like they would kick a ball. So if you tell any age of person, to kick, they would wind up and…