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Swimming Advice:
useful articles
swimming fundamentals
Great Olympic swimmer Aleksander Popov said, “The water is your friend. Treat it kindly and it will help you move.”
In this lesson we will look at the importance of making friends with the water and learning to do nothing. This is particularly important for triathletes who tend to be very goal oriented but not so good at stopping and letting things happen. There are three basic things to work on to improve your relationship with water, before working on your strokes:
- breathing
- placement of head
- gliding and landing
Most people have an instinctive fear of water. The natural response to this is to try hard, tense up and struggle from A – B, hoping swimming will get easier. But unnecessary tension impedes coordination so we need to go right back to basics. Making friends with the water means being able to stop tr ying, breathe naturally and let the water support you. The greatest challenge in learning to swim better is getting rid of instinctive movement patterns that get in our way. These are linked to anxiety about breathing so this is the first thing we need to look at.
Breathing
Don’t…
- hold your breath
- low bubbles i.e. force the air out
- take a deep breath
First, work on breathing out into the water with your feet on the floor and shoulders submerged. Before putting the face in, sing Ah for a few seconds. How much ai r did you need to take in before doing this? Now do just the same with your face in the water. There is no need to take a deep breath before breathing out into the water for a few seconds and the fact that you are breathing out against water doesn’t mean there is any need to force air out. But what you do need to remember is that the resistance of the water slows the out breath down. So if you sing Ah into the water for a few seconds, you are not going to empty your lungs and when you come up, you don’t need to gasp for a lungful of ai r. In fact, if you can hear yourself breathing in, you may be taking in too much air. As you come out of the water continue singing through the surface, so that you are breathing out a little bit more air into the atmosphere. Stop raising your head when the sound changes, so your bottom l ip and chin remain in the water. This smooth transi tion through the surface is crucial, as the moment when the face breaks the surface is often a moment of slight panic. Avoid trying to breathe in too quickly and sucking in water, or pull ing the head away from the surfac e and gasping. Pul ling the head back and sucking in ai r go together as parts of the fear reflex. Breathing out a li ttle into the atmosphere and keeping your neck free mean that the in- breath can happen on its own, without effort. When thinking about breathing, it is important to think about your neck. Fear or apprehension will cause you to stiffen your neck. A stiff neck hinders breathing. Remembering to keep your neck free will help you in all aspects of your swimming. When fi t people ti re easily in water, it is usual ly because they are hyperventilating. If you don’t breathe out freely into the water but gasp for air between strokes, you are star ving yourself of oxygen, fail ing to get rid of the stale, deoxygenated air. For triathletes, who cover a considerable distance in water before exerting themselves on land, breathing correc tly is crucial . In later lessons, we wil l look at breathing in relation to strokes and explore how wrong, instinctive patte rns with the arms hinder free breathing.
Using your head
The second fundamental skill of swimming we all need to go back to is using the buoyancy of the head. Many people swim to stop themselves from sinking, trying to swim on the water, not in it. If you don’t let the head float, you carry the weight of i t and compress the spine. Releasing the heavy weight of your head into the water is the main way to release tension throughout the body. Your neck can then be free and your spine can lengthen as you move. Swimming teachers often teach flotation with the goal of horizontality – star shapes, etc. This can lead to a feeling that tension is needed in order to float. When swimming, momentum will take care of your legs so it doesn’t matter if they sink when you do nothing. But most of us need to remember, or find out, that the head tends to float. If you lie in the water, not trying to float, but looking at the pool floor and pretending you want the head to go there, you will probably real ise this to be impossible. Let the legs sink if they want to, let your neck be free and discover the buoyancy of your head. Whenever your face is in the water, this is the optimum place for your head: neck relaxed and eyes looking down at the floor. It is worth considering, if we are to let go of the head, where we let i t go from. The skull connects wi th the top bone of the spine higher than many of us believe. Think of the place as being up there between the ears. If your neck is free, there should be the potential for someone else to come along and move your head around in the water.
The glide
The glide is your chance to experience movement without effort, enjoy releasing tension and be free from the task of coordinating your limbs. It is also a prerequisite for swimming with good style as this always includes a non-doing, gliding phase. Let the arms float in the water in front of you. Holding them tense is like putting the brakes on. Keep them pointing forward but loose. Think of the shoulders staying soft and going away from each other. Avoid pinching the shoulder blades together. Stand tall but relaxed before starting to glide. Keeping the arms away, stay tall as you go silently into the water, breathing gently without taking a deep breath first! Let the crown of the head and the fingers point where you want to go as you look down at the floor. For momentum push into the floor or wall with your feet and keep breathing gently until you lose momentum. Don’t kick as the object is to do nothing. Allow the back to be long and wide. Think of the pelvis as part of the back. When landing avoid the tendency to pull the head out of the water first. Instead, watch the knees come forward together, counterbalance with the arms and raise the head only when the feet are planted on the floor. Think of going down to land, not getting out for air.
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