Taking steps to improve your swimming
Here’s a little exercise for you. If you’re having swim coaching or considering it you may find it useful. If you aren’t maybe it might persuade you that you should! If you’re a swim coach this might be a good thing to ask your clients to do – as well as doing it yourself of course.
It’s very simple. Get a pen and paper and write down all the things you need to do to swim Freestyle. Imagine you have someone who has never seen a human swim before and has absolutely no idea what to do. (assume they have no injuries or physical handicaps preventing a full range of movement). Make it as detailed as you can. Describe everything.
OK. Now do the same for describing how to walk. An even more unlikely scenario this one, but imagine someone standing upright with feet slightly apart, wanting to walk but having no clue as to how this might be done. We won’t complicate things by starting from a sitting position and, again, let’s disregard illness or injury. Just give them a list of instructions, in the order they need to be carried out so that they can walk for two paces. Start using the left leg.
I know there is a temptation to read on at this point without completing these tasks. You can do it if you like but, honestly, you’ll get more out of this if you don’t. It’s OK, I’ve got a bit of time. I’m happy to wait.
Done that? Good. Right, let’s take the walking one first shall we? Did you at any point stand up and try walking yourself to feel what you do? Maybe some of you did. I suspect not everyone. Why should you? You know how to walk right? After all, you probably begin this process hundreds of times a day without ever thinking about it. But if you did go for a short wander you probably will have noticed more stuff and ended up with a more complete list. No matter, let’s press on.
Obviously, I don’t know exactly what you have put but if I guess there’s a good chance you may have something like this:
Bend your left knee
Take your left foot off the ground
Swing your left leg forward for about eighteen inches
Land your left foot firmly on the ground and swing your right leg forward until it is about eighteen inches ahead of the new position of your left foot
Land your right foot firmly in the mirror position where you landed your left foot.
There. Does that sound reasonable? Oh, hang on, I forgot to bend my right knee. I’ll need to add that in somewhere. Done that? Great. So that’s how a human walks is it? All there is to it. Simple.
Hmmm, well it’s some of it certainly. But it’s far from being all of it. If you haven’t done so already, try the action yourself now. Do it as slowly as you possibly can. Take about thirty seconds for those two paces if you can. Follow your instructions to the letter (or use my list above if you didn’t make one). See what else you can notice.
So, anything? You may have noticed that the walking doesn’t start with the knees or the legs at all. It’s initiated by a weight shift. Don’t believe me? Try keeping rigidly upright and then moving that left leg. It doesn’t work, you will fall slightly backwards in fact. So the weight shift is crucial and it goes slightly forward onto your right foot. A quick experiment shifting your weight to your left will prove this, you need to swing the non-standing leg forward like a pendulum and you can’t do that if it’s supporting your weight.
So moving the centre of your body mass, and moving it in the right direction, is actually the fundamental action involved in walking. Everything else is just compensating for that shift and stopping you falling on your face. And, just think for a minute exactly how you performed that weight shift. Did you suddenly bend at the waist so that you were looking directly at the ground? (Please send me a video if you did, it would be hilarious). Or did you remain relatively connected and upright, pelvis above legs, chest above the pelvis, eyes looking forward etc? Of course, you did. Obvious really and maybe you put all that down. Have a gold star.
What else? Let’s think of the bottom of your feet. Take that first pace forward again and freeze. Now look at your right foot. The ankle has flexed and the heel has come up off the floor, yes? How did that happen? Try taking the left pace and keeping the right heel on the ground. You can do it but it feels all wrong doesn’t it? And now you can’t take the second pace without lifting the right heel and launching off your toes. But did you deliberately lift that heel? Was it in your instructions? Even if it was, that lift is probably an unconscious action, one that just happens if you let it and you don’t have to think about it.
So that’s basically it, is it? If you’re trained in anatomy you might be able to add more things but broadly that seems to be complete.
Doesn’t it? Well, what about your shoulders?
Huh?
How are your shoulders involved in walking? Well obviously they aren’t really but they’re still part of your body. You didn’t leave them behind. So you must have done something with them right? So try this. Hunch your shoulders so that they are practically touching your ears. Now try walking but this time take six paces not two. (Again, video please, I need a good laugh). Repeat that with your shoulders relaxed. What have we discovered?
My guess is that on that first walk, your attention was now taken completely to your shoulders and away from your legs. And also that hunching the shoulders like that prevented you from moving your arms which remained pinned by your sides with your upper body swinging from side to side far more than normal. And, hey, that felt wrong, yes? Suddenly we realise that although we can take a couple of paces keeping the arms still, pretty soon we need them as a counter-balance. You could well have identified that from the get-go when you did your instructions but did you also state that for this counter-balance from the arms to be effective you need relaxed shoulders?
So from this simple non-scientific experiment, what have we learnt? Different folks will take away different things but it’s possible we might have observed the following:
A physical task that we think we know how to do actually has more elements to it than we realise. What we think we’re doing and what we’re doing in reality might be very different
Some of those elements are by now so ingrained that they are unconscious movements but nonetheless vital
If you’re moving the entire body then the entire body is involved in some way albeit that involvement might be just to relax and enjoy it and go along for the ride
Actions in one part of the body will have consequences in other parts of the body which may prevent or impede actions vital to the overall performance
So let’s bring all this back to that first list, how to swim. If you’re a swimmer, do you still think your instructions are a comprehensive description? Could there be things you’re not doing which should be taking your focus? Are you doing things which you shouldn’t perhaps? And what is the impact of the things you don’t even realise that you’re doing? Are they helping or hindering?
And if you’re a coach this exercise could give you an additional weapon in your armoury. It’s a quick way of finding out what swimmers think they should be doing. And that may shed light on why they’re doing what you observe that they’re actually doing. And all that knowledge can help you coach them to what they should be doing.
For folks who think they can already swim it might be a little sobering to realise they don’t even really understand how to walk! But with coaching and practice, this can be changed. One step at a time