triathlonphil.com

‘If you don’t start swimming when you’re young, you’ll never be a great swimmer’.

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How many people have read or heard that line before? If I line up in an olympic tri against someone who has swam competitively since he was 10,  and I’m 25 and only started learning a couple of years ago, no prizes for guessing who will be fastest. But saying that I can never be as fast as him?  To say ‘never’ has a both a defeatist and a retreatist ring to it; the ‘destiny’ of being a good swimmer was not bestowed on us didn’t-train-when-we-were-adolescents swimmers; nature vs nurture – you can’t polish a (now matured) turd! On the basis that this is a load of old bullshit rubbish – but, like most things, to get there it will take some blood, sweat and tears – I shall continue.

Heard it all before

From a purely technical perspective (and leaving strength training for another day), in terms of literature there’s a sea of info out there to drown in: Total Immersion by Terry Laughlin, Joe Friel’s ‘Triathlete’s Training Bible’ & Blog, Maglischo’s ‘Swimming Fastest’, regular triathlon rag reports, great swimmers give their advice … (sometimes they’re one and the same)… and that’s not to mention training with the local swim club with a coach.

It’s all great info. So what does it teach us?

1) Drills – skating, advanced skating, sculling, high elbow, zipperskate, catch up, finger drag, single arm, etc. etc.

2) Common (novice) mistakes – dropped elbow, a low elbow, over-reaching, under-reaching, bad head position, crossing the ‘middle line’, snaking, lack of a glide/reach phase, etc. etc.

3) Quasi-philosophies – ‘feel for the water’, ‘be fish-like’, ‘be slippery’, ‘don’t fight the water’, etc. etc.  

4) Stroke Dynamics: catch phase with high elbow, question-mark/s-shaped stroke pattern, body rotation, relaxed recovery, etc. etc.

Most of that sound pretty familiar to you? Yup. Has it been useful? Well, yeah, I’ve got faster. Do you feel a bit lost with so much to take in? Sometimes. Have you ever asked yourself, ‘So, now I’ve tried to put all of this in to action, why am I not now ridiculously fast?’ Certainly.

HOW and WHEN, not more WHAT

One possible reason is that it’s because we don’t know how to put all of this together in our stroke. We have the jigsaw pieces – swimming being a technical sport means it’s a complicated jigsaw - but no-one has ever told us the best way of putting them all together. This explains why all those oddly-shaped, out-of-shape bastards other swimmers at the swim club or lined up at the start of a tri can still swim faster than you: they’ve got the technique mastered, you haven’t.

Rather than me offer you MORE of 1 to 4 above, how about we talk about just point 4, and specifically HOW to implement the stroke elements already discussed?

It’s called Phase Classification. If you want to see if this is already old news, Google ’Phase Classification Swimming’ and nothing comes up. Nada. None in any of the triathlon-related articles I have read have ever contemplated these phases, even surprisingly under its wider-know colloquialised ‘Popov Phases’ name, eponymous of the great(est ever?) sprint swimmer Aleksandr Popov.

Why could it be valuable? Its aim is to classify the stroke in 4 separate phases based on movement requirements which, and more importantly, coordinate your body and arm movements in relation to those phases and thus in relation to each other.

It doesn’t, as with everything else you read, offer a dumper-truck load of drills, endless lists of mistakes and countless philosophies. We’ve already got more than enough of that, thanks! In fact, it isn’t telling you to use anything you haven’t already read or been told before; it tells you how and when to use what you’ve already learnt.

Phase Classification / Popov Phases Basics

This is taken from the following video which you can see on Youtube:

I have used the left arm (LA) as the stroking arm, and the right arm (RA) as the recovery arm, as in the video.

Phase 1: Catch & Exit

- LA:  is starting out the outsweep/catch phase. Wrist slightly bent, focus on not dropping the elbow

- RA: simultaneously, the turning motion of the shoulders (body rotation upwards on the right side) initiates arm recovery, with elbow appearing first above the water

- Action: there is a rigid transfer of forces through the back from the exit hand to the catch hand

- Goal of Phase 1: to support the body and not lose speed

Phase 2: Outsweep & Recovery

- LA: catch hand moves from an outward & backward sweep to an inward & backward sweep.

- RA: simultaneously with the LA, the recovery hand continues the ballistic movement forward

- Action: back muscles are stretched. This is the pivotal point, where the shoulders are at maximum rotation, and the elbow at its highest point.

- Goal: create optimum propulsion & not lose speed

Phase 3: Push back & entry

- LA: sweeping arm pushes back, achieving maximum hand velocity and propulsion

- RA: simultaneously, the recovery arm accelerates and drives forward in to the water

- Action: the right hip is forced down/the body moves back on to a horizontal plane, maximising the use of the strong back muscles in the LA’s sweeping phase

- Goal: reach & maintain maximum speed

Phase 4: Push back & reach

- LA: releases ‘hold’ on the water as the fingers brush the thigh

- RA: simultaneously it now fully extends now under the water

- Action: lasts only until the catch hand (here the RA) starts an active outsweep and the propulsive/now recovery arm is about to exit the water (elbow first). This would be the glide phase.

- Goal: maintain maximum velocity

The results of Phase Classification, & debunking myths

You will start to be able to feel where you should be, almost mechanically, during the stroke phases.  This shouldn’t be confused as a rigid/roboti stroke – if you look at Popov his stroke is extremely relaxed.

For anyone who is scared that it looks or sounds much more thrashy than Total Immersion, there are a couple of things worth mentioning. All three start from this basic fact: Popov in the video is sprinting; he’s swimming a 22 second 50m, not a 35 second one (corresponds to a 17:30 1500m time, what a pro triathlete might do).

Firstly, then, of course he will forego efficiency for outright speed. You can see what he might look like as he slows down when he does what is very similar to a TI drill (see video below). Secondly, in the video it mentions how Popov minimises the fourth, glide phase. This is again down to the fact that he is sprinting – the glide might be longer as you swim slower. That said, I don’t think you’ll ever see a TI stroke swimming as fast as any more ‘thrashy’ sprinting stroke would. Thirdly, the over-emphasis of the glide in TI is perhaps to its detriment and all its readers. As above, Phase 4’s aim is ‘to maintain maximum velocity’. However, even the most hydroefficient swimmer will within a few tenths of a second slow significantly given negative drag, and more importantly no pressure is being applied by either arm to accelerate the body. For that reason, remembering whilst you don’t/mustn’t ignore this phase, Popov mimimises it.

Armed not with new information but how to put the information together that you already learnt, the position of each part of our body reflects what each phase attempts to achieve. It also reflects what the other parts of the body are doing at that moment, and how those positions change over time; there is a balance of movement throughout the stroke process. This should help to put the stroke jigsaw together.