We've done so much work on breaststroke underwater pulls, so it's always great seeing someone that does it so well.
And in doing some work with Brendan McHugh's video this week,
we noticed a couple of little things that he does on his stroke.
But it was on his underwater pull that we really just wanted to point out.
The first thing is that you can see the intensity of his line.
We talk to young swimmers about this all the time, about making sure that that initial streamline is incredibly tight.
And you notice how he carries that line pretty far off the wall.
The kick!
Although it seems big,
you got to remember, this is one of the... he's he's a large man.
Ah... He's very tall. He's very muscular.
So we've seen young swimmers have much more movement or undulation in their body at this point.
So this size of his, of his amplitude or the or the way he sets up the kick is actually very small for what we'd expect.
And we notice that he does this dolphin kick long before the hands separate.
The dolphin kick is completely done.
And the hands now just initiate the separation.
But you do see that the timing is very close together.
So, as soon as that kick finishes, then the hands separate to start with a fairly straight pull down.
The arms don't go too wide and he gets into a power phase very early in the pull down.
Now this is where I really like some of the things he does.
The head is tucked a little bit, but not too much.
And the hands are very close against the the legs.
The feet are absolutely pointed right there.
So he has not forgotten to clean up the back then.
Now what we've seen all over the country is that the recovery of the arms and legs again are still too overlapping.
And so, when we watch these great swimmers,
watch how far his hands are forward before the feet start to break it all,
which is a suggestion that we've made to so many swimmers that it's typically right about the shoulders or the chin before the feet start to recover.
If you recover the arms and legs at the same time, you will stop without a doubt.
So look at how tight Brendan is keeping his hands close to his ears and his head,
and he's actually... his hands are a little bit higher than his face.
So he's trying to clean up as much as possible.
The kick doesn't come up off... near too far.
It comes up pretty far. But it's not exposing the knees in comparison to the rest of the body.
Ah... too much more than what we've seen on so many other swimmers.
And the hands are really piercing forward with the head still down, as he initiates that last part of the breakout.
His eyes are up a little bit.
But the important thing is that we can see his eyes under his arms.
And that could be the angle of the camera.
But again this line is beautiful as he initiates the out sweep for the breakout.
So the hands are just coming in.
The head is above the surface of the water making the bow wave that it needs to.
And he starts his first stroke,
and then moves forward.
So beautiful example of great timing on an underwater pull.
And something that you we can refer to many other videos on the site are to talk about.