Discover your life aquatic

A really simple way to swim faster without increasing your effort is to swim be long and tall in the water.

But what does that mean and how can you achieve this?  First, you'll want to know what to avoid!  Swimming with a gollum-like posture slows you down, plain and simple, and leaves you craving precious shiny objects at the bottom of the pool.

See Exhibit A:

When coaches refer to swimming tall or with a long body line, it generally refers to two things:

• Posture: good posture through the head, hips and spine
• Joints: finishing each stroke with arms straight and making sure the legs stay compact and under the hips

A lot to think about, but if you start from the center of your body and work your way out, you'll see results right away.

Step 1: Check your head.

If you've taken a Sea Hiker course or private lessons, you'll have likely experienced first hand the time we spend on checking head position relative to the spine. Lifting the head too high sinks the hips and pushing it too low makes you submarine underwater. Do either of these during your breath and you sink even more, plus you get the extra bonus of a sore neck. 

Solution: Experiment with tensing and relaxing your neck. If you neck is relaxed, your whole upper body, neck, shoulders and arms will have less tension. Also, try tucking in your chin slightly so that you have a longer upper spine (back of the neck), being careful not to force anything. Keep in mind that for some swimmers, looking straight down will not be the best "neutral" head position. Experiment.

Step 2: Flatten your lower back.

If you've done any yoga, pilates, dance, physiotherapy or ergonomics at work, you've probably encountered how to do a subtle pelvic tilt towards the front (pulling your tailbone down and up underneath you) to flatten the lower back a little more. Your lower spine should have some curvature in the lumbar region, but generally, we arch our lower backs too much.

Why is this a problem? If you arch your back, your hips will be lower in the water and this will increase drag, even if you head position and posture is good overall.

Solution: Try gentle amounts of pelvic tilt and lower back extension to see what effect this has on your legs. You should feel your legs dragging less behind you.

Step 3: Extend through the hip joint.

Kicking can be a complicated and unintuitive skill. Often, especially if you're a beginner with kicking, you will bend at the hip in order to find power and productivity from your kicking motion. Unfortunately, this means your legs will drop much lower behind you and slow you down.

Solution: Extend through your hip by contracting your glutes and lower back muscles gently. Throw on some fins to feel this, especially if you keep your kick to a minimal level or try not kicking at all.

Feel this on dry land: lie on your stomach and tense your glutes, lower back and legs slightly to lift your knees an inch off the ground. Now try for the same feeling in the water while swimming.

Step 4: Extend fully through the elbow at both ends of the stroke.

Our instinctive swimming mechanics, which generally are inefficent and just add tension to our swimming, tend to favour a choppy bent arm stroke mechanic. This compromises your streamline postion on each stroke, adds strain to the shoulders and generally limits your abilty to catch and hold water on each stroke.

Solution: Aim to fully extend your lead arm gently as your stroke begins and then complete the underwater stroke with your elbow still underwater and your hand brushing the inside of your thigh. At the end of each stroke, your hands should be as far apart as possible without straining. Keep the shoulders relaxed when trying this.

This will slow down your stroke rhythm and ensure that you get the best propulsion and streamline combination.

Step 5: Keep the ankles floppy.

If you are a runner or cyclist, you face a significant challenge in building more awareness about how your legs and feet need to move for the freestyle kick, whether you're doing a full flutter kick or a six beat kick. The swimming kick is not intuitive at all!

The kick starts from pressing down with the hip and thigh bone and then whips through a relaxed knee and ankle with a momentary contraction of the quads.

Whew. Sounds tricky.

To simplify things, your biggest opportunity lies in keeping your ankles as loose and your feets as floppy as possible. When you swim with fins, everything feels easier. This is because the fins are rubber and bend for you. You are trying to get the same feeling with your bare feet.

Solution: Swim with fins and without and try to zero in on the floopy ankle feeling with both. Try kicking in all positions (side, back, front and vertically, if your pool is deep enough). A floppy ankle is more likely to finish each kick with the foot in a generally more pointed streamline position, than if your ankle is tense.

Trying different kicking rhythms, fast to slow and different amplitudes, will also really help you figure out what works best.

It is challenging to relax the ankle and knee to some extent while kicking with some intent from the upper leg and hip.  But the pay off is huge, as you'll be able to get propulsion, stability and leverage for your freestyle stroke without a huge amplitude, high drag, energy consuming kick.

Final Words

Overall, if you are swimming with a choppy stroke and not spending time on drills and slow swimming, you're going to find it different to develop body awareness of your posture and joint extension.

Swimming long and tall in the water can make a HUGE difference in your speed. Imagine swimming with fins all the time - that could be you without fins. Seriously.

Slow things down, experiment with range of motion and posture and you'll start to see results, sometimes right away.

Next time, we'll look at some photo examples and exercises you can do to improve your posture in the water.