I own quite a few swim volumes - Maglischo's "Swimming Fastest", Colwin's "Breakthrough Swimming",
Freas' "Sprinting - a Coach's Challenge", and of course Laughlin's "Swimming Made Easy" (is any
library complete without that volume 🙂
I also have a gigabyte worth of swim clips on my PC thanks to Donal and Donald.
But I gotta tell 'ya, my swim today convinced me that I don't even have the fundamentals down.
I have been trying to do a high elbow catch. After all, avoiding a "dropped elbow" has got to be the
stroke flaw most drummed into swimmer's heads. So I go for broke - upper-arm parallel to the water
surface, 90 degree downsweep to catch. With my arm outstretched above my head, I had a mental image
of just my forearm "folding" over and down. If you go to the link below and scroll down to the
paragraphs numbered 6 and 7 you will see what I was shooting for. The swimmer in the foreground is
Grant Hackett.
Well I was getting my butt kicked in the pool as usual today. So I "went to school" on three guys
that were faster - one kind of faster, one definitely faster, and one way faster. And you know what?
they don't have the insanely high elbow of Hackett. Not even close.
Instead, they have a much deeper downsweep to catch, arm much straighter than what I was shooting
for, elbow bent at a full 145 degrees. So I tried it, and it works great. It has the dramatic affect
of making it much easier to use your body rotation to deliver force to your propelling arm. And the
reason for that is simply that as your body rotates from one side to the other, the easiest force
for it to deliver is UPWARD. So clearly, if your catch is much lower in the water, it's easier to
use core body rotation to assist in the power phase of the pull.
That's what the good swimmers in the pool were doing. I could almost feel the power being delivered
from their bodies to the "paddle" (arm) as they rotated from a deep catch, and drove their arm up
and back. And they would bend their elbow to about 90 degrees during the power phase to translate as
much of the body assisted upward force into force going backwards. And then finally drive out hard
past their hip.
So that's how you do it!
So if I'm right, and a deeper catch allows more assist from body rotation, then one would expect
little assist during a real high elbow catch. And this is born out by the video. For example, both
Tom Dolan and Grant Hackett have very high elbow catches. I mean their upper arm is nearly parallel
to the surface, and their hand is moving basically backwards during the power phase of the pull. And
they, in fact, do NOT rotate their body much to their dominant (right) side.
So I looked back at Maglischo's book. And it's all there, but I didn't catch it, so to speak. The
average hand position after downsweep and catch is 24 inches below the surface. That's two feet -
pretty damn deep! I got two twelve inch rulers out and held them against my chest. My hand seemed
pretty far away.
I don't know what the elites are doing. Either the video is misleading because it's shot from the
side, and not the front, or they are simply "elites", and immitate their technique at your own risk.
I realize there are plently of potential pitfalls with a deep catch. For example, increased "Miller
Torque" which will sink your legs, and more slow down in speed because it takes more time to get
your hand deeper in the water. But as I said, there are plently of swimmers using this technique to
good advantage in my Masters group. And it isn't because they're all a bunch of losers. Our swimming
pool is deep, and so is the "gene pool" - some of these folks can really swim.
Does this make sense to anybody?
-Eric