6 Ways to Stop Swimming Like Gollum

Swimming “long and tall” is a great way to swim efficiently. The less drag you create from bad posture, the better.

But given our lifestyles, smart phone use and relative inactivity, it can be challenging to stay focused on it in the water because it is a slippery feeling to hang on to.

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. In case you’re wondering, the man sitting at the computer has already begun his metamorphosis into Gollum.

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

• Good Posture: tall posture through the head, hips and spine
• Relaxed Joints: ensuring you’re not swimming with your elbow, ankle, and wrist joints bent too much.
• Changing range of motion: the shoulder, hips and elbow joints are articulated quite a bit during swimming. Stiffness or tightness will slow you down.
  

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

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, tilting up and down, and lifting and dropping your neck. If your 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 and for others it will be essential. Experiment.

Practice: Swim with different head positions on purpose and pay attention to what effect it has on your swimming speed, breathing, and stroke mechanics. This is the most important thing to improve by far. If your head position is off, your whole body tends to get bent out of shape. This also applies to backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly.

If you’ve done any yoga, pilates, martial arts, or even physio 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, most people arch their lower backs too much in the water from lifting the head too high to breathe (the second position in the photo below).

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

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

Practice: Kicking on your back is a great way to experiment with the effect of posture on kicking. Try kicking while arching your back (bad) vs. tilting your pelvis up toward the ceiling.

Kicking can be a complicated and unintuitive skill. And as a result, especially if you’re a beginner with kicking, you will bend at the waist too much in order to find power in your kick. 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. Think of lightly pushing your feet further away from you. Throw on some fins to feel this, especially if you keep your kick to a minimal level or try not kicking at all.

Practice: Feel this on dry land: lie on your stomach and tense your glutes, lower back and legs slightly to lift your knees an half an inch off the ground. Feel how the rest of your torso has to help stabilize your legs. Now try for the same feeling in the water while swimming.

A long tall posture is essential when you swim to reduce drag. However, your body is constantly moving so it’s challenging sometimes to get a sense of that from stroke to stroke. There are two ways to feel that you’re swimming tall and slipping through the water better.

Solution: Spend time on your drills and on each push off, take those first 2 seconds off the wall and the first 2-5 strokes to really feel your posture.

Practice:

1. Practice your streamline drill often with and without fins. You want to engage your core so that your legs and hips are connected to your lungs, but you also want to resist the temptation to reach too far forward and jam your shoulder, as this will sink your lower body.

2. Push off in a flat streamline from every wall: You can gain speed and momentum and remind your body how to stand tall in the water with a great push off and streamline underwater on each turn. Just make sure you launch yourself from underwater for maximum glide.

Our instinctive swimming mechanics, which generally are inefficent and just add tension to our swimming, tend to favour a choppy bent arm stroke mechanic. When you’ve grown used to pulling as the main way to get ahead in the water, it is easy to keep the arms bent and use a choppy stroke. It feels like it should work, but it doesn’t usually.

This compromises your streamline postion on each stroke, adds strain to the shoulders and generally limits your abilty to catch and hold water.

Solution: Aim to fully extend your lead arm gently as your stroke begins (see: Zombie Arms) and then complete the underwater stroke with your elbow still underwater and your hand coming close to the inside of your thigh. At the end of each stroke, your back arm should be feathered out of the water to reduce resistance, still slightly bent. Keep the shoulders relaxed when doing this.

Instead of fully straightening your pulling arm until it is straight, think of sliding it out of the water with a small bend in the elbow.

However, if you tend to be really choppy with your arms, your coach may want to you drive your arm all the way back to your hip to help you learn how to follow through with your stroke to correct this tendency.

Practice: Swim and on each lap, try the full range of follow-through for your underwater stroke. From stopping abruptly mid-way near your ribs to full extending all the way to your hip or thigh. See how this affects your strokes and especially speed.

An ineffective kick is like standing on slippery ice. It’s much harder to push or pull with your upper body when you don’t have a solid stance. It’s very likely that you’ll start to do weird things with your upper body to compensate.

You definitely don’t want that. Chances are you’ll turn into Gollum.

Solution: Practice kicking sets in each practice with your main focus on posture as you kick. Quite often when swimmers kick on their back or do a vertical kicking set, the core is too relaxed around the waist and lower back.

Practice: Take any of the kicking sets you can do and work on intensity for short bursts such as: 6 x 10 seconds maximum kick then 20 seconds rest. Have fun with it. When it gets easier, increase the resistance.

Overall, if your posture is out of alignment and your joints are not moving like they should, you are going to swim a lot more slowly than you could be.

Swimming long and tall in the water can make a HUGE difference in your speed.

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

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