I'm Bob Bowman. The head coach of North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Today we're going to look at freestyle swimming with two of our club's brightest stars, Michael Phelps and Katie Hoff. Both of the swimmers posseess the balance, the power, and rhythm that’s neccessary for top level freestyle swimming. We're going to look at those attributes today as we go through some video. Freestyle as you know, is the bread & butter of any swimming program, it's the stroke that you're gonna do the most training in, it's the stroke that young swimmer learn first, and it's the one that you're gonna spend the majority of your time and the largest part of the racing programm doing. So it's very important that each swimmer have the key components of that stroke down and understand the fundamentals of freestyle swimming. While there are different styles of freestyle swimming, there's more power-oriented style which emphasizes very strong kicking and powerful arm stroke and body movement. There's also a distant type of swimming where maybe there's two beat kick, less emphasis on the legs and more emphasis on tempo of the arms. All freestyle swimmers need to have the basic concept of balance, body line, and rhythm. We are going to look at those today.
Body line is critical in freestyle swimming, it's the most imporatnt thing to me, when I'm assessing a swimmer's stroke and it's the first place that I will look to make changes when we're trying to improve someone's stroke. If you notice the best swimmers in the world, they swim in a horizontal position, and they do this so that they can minimize frontover resistance on the hips and body, and so that the body can act together as a unit as they move through the water. The best swimmers in the world have a head position which is low with a very long neck. They don't look forward down the pool, they're looking at the bottom of the pool. This allows their hips to rise up near the surface and alllows them to be in the most efficient position possible when they're travelling forward. If you watch Michael's swimming freestyle, you'll notice that the water almost comes over his head as he's moving through the water, and that's the good key for you young swimmers out there. Whe you are swimming freestyle, you want the water to feel like it is coming over the top of your head, it won't be. It'll be hitting you just about in the center of your head and that's exactly where we want it. A good rule of some that I gave my swimmers when they're swimming freestyle, is that you wanna press you forehead down in the water, until you feel your hips pop up, that's how you're gonna to know that u r in the correct position. Also you can think of it, like a water polo ball. If you take a water polo ball in the water and put your hand on it, and press it down, you get pressure up against it to come up, and that's exactly how you body's gonna operate, as you press your head down, your hips will pop up, like that water polo ball. When you watch Katie swim freestyle, from above, you can see that her stroke is essentially symetrical on both sides. That's something very very important. That balance comes from two things. It comes from her front to back short-access balancing with her head and hips and also comes from being able to be in stroking position so that she's symatrical this way. It's very very important to freestyle swimming. And that rhythm is what really carries you through most of your races. So when u r swimming freestyle, we're gonna be very concer about how your head position is, in relation to your body and how your hips position are, in relation to your upper body.
Breathing. In proper freestyle swimming, the head moves with the body to take the breath, it never moves independently. You don't want any lifting of the chin to take a breath. You don't want any looking forward or to .. to side of the pool to take a breath. You want to rotate ur head in line with ur body and take the breath in the natural rotation of the body. A good key for u young swimmers, is to try to take ur breath with one goggle in the water. And I know u r gonna say that well that will only let the half of my mouth in the water, but that's not true. Because if your head is in the right position, there's a bow wave that's gonna formed on your head and you'll actually taking your breath with your full mouth inside that bow wave. Watch Michael take a breath. U'll gonna see one goggle out the water and u'll gonna see about half of his mouth, but actually he's breathing inside the bow wave. One of the things that I notice about Katie sometimes is that she'll over rotate and you'll see both goggles on the breath. So one of things we're working with her on is to be able to just have one goggle showing and to minimize the head rotation. That way, your head and body move together. If you can see your whole face on the breath, u r looking up to the ceiling, when u r taking your breath, I call it checking the wheather. U r going to be over rotating from your head and u r not going to be moving in unionism with your body. So that's something you can work on. It's very easy but very very critical to your freestyle stroke.
I’m often asked what kind of breathing pattern swimmer should use in freestyle. And my answer is they need to have a variety of options to use for different conditions. I think younger swimmers need to learn how to breathe on both sides. Bilateral breathing. I think as you get older you’re gonna be wanting to have more air, and you’re also gonna wanna have more rotation in your stroke. So it’s advantageous then to just breathe on one side, more than once. So if you watch Michael swimming, he may breathe to the left side for 25 metres in practice, and he’ll flip, when he comes back he’ll breathe on his right side, for 25 metres. So he’s getting symetry in the breathing. But he’s also breathing every stroke so he gets more air. And he’s also rotating more because when you take a breath, you’re rotating more than on the stroke where you don’t breathe. Essentially we want swimmers in freestyle to be on their side as much as possible because you’re much more streamline in that position than when you’re lying flat.
Body rotation. It’s critical that swimmers use their entire body to move through the water and that your entire body works as a unit. Don’t think of your freestyle as just pulling with you’re arms, kicking with your feet, you have to have that all together, and your core, your body core, or torso is what ties everything together. And it’s the center of everything you doing in the stroke. So when I look at someone and I wanna say, Ok, what’s the swimmer doing in freestyle, and how can I improve it, the first thing I look is that the body position and see what’s going on there because that’s the key.
If you watch Michael and Katie, you will see that they rotate their body, their hips and shoulders at the same time. They are in the same plane as they rotate. And this is very important because when they’re doing that, they’re using all the muscles in the core during that stroke. What we wanna do in swimming is to use the most muscles we can to provide propulsion during the propulsive phase of the stroke.
Watch Michael swimming freestyle here. You’ll see that as this hand, as the hand enters the water, and anchors, he’s on in a side position, he may have just taken a breath, but he’s largely on the side, and then what happens is the hand will anchor the water and he will use his whole torso to move to the other side. He’s not just staying flat and swimming with his arms. He’s making a whole body motion and that’s very very important in freestyle swimming.
Balance
One of the things we find a lot in freestyle is that swimmers tend to be asymmetrical and that usually has to do with balance issues.
Sometimes we’ll see hips that move side to side, we might see hands that stick out side way instead of moving forwards and backwards, and those are almost always related to your body, to your body position and how you’re taking the breath in freestyle. So one of the things that’s gonna be really important for you in your freestyle swimming is to manage your head and body position and maintain balance as you go down the pool. I can always tell the swimmers who are most balanced because their arms seem to be moving effortlessly. They don’t struggle, they don’t reach out to the side, they don’t have a hitch in their stroke, they have excellent balance and they’re able to control their stroke through their core body muscles. Michael and Katie are both very very good at this. If you watch Katie swimming, you can see how her body’s perfectly balanced as she goes down the pool. She doesn’t have any side to side motion, there’s no up and down, there’s just a continuous progression as she goes forward.
Kicking is very very important. It’s the basis of every stroke, it provides stability, it provides power and propulsion. And we believe that it’s a, just one of the core things that you have to have in your training programm, it should not just be a social activity that you do from time to from time, it’s one of our key training items. In freestyle, there’re many styles of kicking, there’s a 6 beat kick which is a sprinter’s power kick; and there’s a 2 beat kick which tends to be people who might swim in open water or very very long distances. A 6 beat kick is when the swimmer takes 6 kicks per arm cycle and an arm cycle is a right arm pull and a left arm pull. So the rhythm of the 6 beat kick will be 1 2 3 4 5 6… Watch Michael do a 6 beat kick and see how rhythmic it is he’s doing it. One of the things we noticed in 1998 when Michael was just a young guy, was that, there was an Australian swimmer named Ian Thorpe who won a world championship in the 400 meters, doing a 6 beat kick the whole way. And we model Michael stroke after that, we wanna him to be able to do a 6 beat power kick on all of the distances that he swims. And that’s really the way of the future in freestyle swimming. You can generate so much more speed, you have so many more options with your stroking patterns on upper body that every swimmer should be working to develop a 6 beat kick, and they should have that in their rubato skills.
Having said that I realize that distance swimmers, particularly maybe some female distance swimmer, and you see what the 2 beat kick.. What this does is that it’s sort of minimize the, eh... energy cost of the legs, because the legs take the most energy from the body when you exercise, and that allows you to have more endurance. I think what we’ve seen in women’s swimming and in men’s distance swimming, is a combination of kicks. You have a 2 beat kick, maybe for the body of a race, and then swimmers are going to a 6 beat kick at the end when they really wanna ramp up their speed. Katie’s worked on this, and she’s a very good example of someone who can swim very efficiently with a 2 beat kick, and then she can switch to a 6 beat kick when she does a 200 m, a 100 m or maybe in the last hundred of a 800 meters.
A 2 beat kick will only have 2 beats of kicking per arm cycle, essentially one kick per arm stroke. And if you watch a distance swimmer, sometimes Katie will swim the 2 beat kick, you will see 1, 2, kick, kick… It’s very balanced, it’s very efficient, but it doesn’t have the power of the 6 beat. So when you’re working on those 2 skills, you just need to understand what the benefits of each one are, and need to know how to do both. Kick to me is something that should be one of the main components of your training program. It is something that should be done long, there should be endurance kicking. And I know sometimes we do 2000-time-kick at North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Might not be one of their favorite things, but it’s one of my favorite things. Eh..it’s something that should be done fast and intensely. I do not believe in doing a lot of slow and sloppy kicking as a matter of fact I don’t believe in doing any other. We wanna our kicking to be either for skill, in which case that might be less intense, or for conditioning development, when it should be very very intense. We believe in doing short-fast kicking, we believe in doing long hard kicking, and everything in between. And the more different types of kicking you do, the better all-around swimmer you’re gonna be. If you watch Michael kicking freestyle, you’re gonna see that he has a very rapid, small kick, he doesn’t have a big, booming kick during his stroke. He has a small, shallow kick, that’s up the top of the water. And it makes the water boil over his feet. This is one of the things he does better than anyone in the world. And it is a skill that he learned when he was 12 years old. It’s not an easy thing to do. You can just ask Michael, we went through a very tough process to get him to do that. But once he did, his freestyle took off, his training move to a new level, and he was able to become the swimmer that he is today base on some of those changes.
Arm stroke
There’re as many variations of freestyle swimming as there’re swimmers. And we’ve have tremendous swimmers like Michael Phelps who swims the classic bend arm stroke. You got Katie Hoff who swims the more modified bend arm stroke, it’s a little bit straighter, and then we have great swimmers like Cesar Cielo, the recent Olympic champion in 50 free who essentially swims the straight arm stroke. Each of these has a benefit. Traditionally the longer you swim, the more bend arm you will use, because it’s a more relaxed position. There’s less, what we call angular momentum, that means the momentum of the stroke probably doesn’t carry you forward as quickly, but you’re able to conserve energy and be totally relaxed coming forward, and that’s a big advantage because the people swim with the bend arm stroke typically use a very strong kick, and they have a very power-oriented stroke under water. Watch Michael as he recovers you can see how relaxed he is, and then you can see the power he generates under the body as his arm moves back. A more straight stroke allows you to have a high tempo, and modern sprinters are going to this stroke more and more, because this allows them to generate higher tempo, particularly for 50 meters, and even now for a 100 meters people are experimenting with that. And you can still maintain a good body postion if you have a strong kick. No one in 200 m has really done that successfully because the distance is just too long, but the sprinters are really going to a more straight arm stroke. I think just like the kicking styles we talked about, all swimmers should be able to do each of this, and you can experiment, try some short sprint practice with straight arm and see how you like it. Michael does, he never does that to me, but it’s a good tool for him to use in training. And then try a very bend arm high elbow stroke where your hands are virtually touching your head. This will just give you a variety, and let you find out what you do naturally best. As anything we do in swimming, the wider variety of skills that you have, in your rubato, the more effective you’re gonna be. It’s important that as the hand enters the water, regardless of the style of recovery you use, let it slides into the water, and reaches forward upon entry. This does a couple of thing. No. 1 it clears the air of your hand and you have a clear entry into the water, so you’re minimzing resistance. Watch Michael and Katie both as they enter the water, they don’t have a lot of splash around their hands, and once their hands enter water the bubbles leave their hands almost immediately. This is very effective pulling. And a good tool you can use in practice, is to slide your hands in, always feel like you’re sliding them in, not chopping, not pulling back, you just wanna have your hand in, sliding forward. The second thing that this does, is that allows the body to get on the side, which is the most streamline position. As the hand slides forward, and it allows a good anchor position in the front of the stroke. The most effective freestylers are gonna have a great anchor in the front quadrant of the stroke. And that means that when their hand enters, their fingertips are gonna be heading toward the bottom of the pool and they’re gonna try to get their forearm perpendicular to the bottom. If you watch Katie swimming freestyle, it is a very good job of getting that high elbow in the front part of the stroke, and then pressing back, because once u r in this position, you can use all the muscles in your lats, in your back, as well as the muscles in your arms. If you’re flat, or your elbow is dropped, when your hand goes in, you’re just gonna be slipping water and you’re not gonna use your major muscle groups. Let’s watch Michael stroke under water, notice how well he slides his hand in, with minimum bubbles on his hand, he immediately gets into the catch postion, where his fingertips are pointing towards the bottom and he begins to pull backwards, to get to his elbow in postion for the major power phase of the stroke, once his forearm is perpendicular to the bottom, he pulls with his lats muscles, and he rotates to the other side, this motion really provieds the power of the stroke in its the greatest propulsion he’s gonna produce while he’s swimming freestyle. Take a look at his kick while all this is happening, it’s perfectly balanced, and in rhythm with his arms. His body is moving as a unit, and you can just see how the rest of his body react to the motion of the pull, it’s as if it’s everything is just one unit, there aren’t just arms pulling, feet kicking. Everything is together, and that’s how you wanna swim proper freestyle.
Flip turn
Let talk about freestyle flip turn. There are several key ingredients to a good flip turn. The first is your approach to the wall, you should not take a breath within probably 2 or 3 strokes of the wall when your are coming in freestyle. Because what that does is it transfers your momentum away from the wall, and it also keeps you from concentrating on the turn itself. So plan your breathing, so that you can get 2 or 3 strokes going into the wall withou a breath. You need to come into the wall with the maximum amout of speed that you can get, and you need to try to make the rotation of the turn as quick as you can. And the best way to do that is to move straight into the wall at top speed, and then submerge your head and shoulders as u r going in. Once you start the motion into the wall, you got to squeeze into a tightest ball possible to get the quickest rotation speed of your feet over. Try to get your toes on the wall as fast as you can, that’s what we tell our people of eh… North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Get your toes on the wall quickly, I think that your feet should be slightly apart, so the water can travel through your knees as you go over. And you shoud hit the wall with your feet up. That means you’re gonna coming in, when go straight off on your back in the pool, you should come off the wall on your back and twist to your side as you push. This allows the most effective transfer of speed in and out of the wall. Think as if it is a tennis ball, if you throw it into the wall, it’s gonna come straight back, that’s the fastest way to get in and out of that wall to change directions. So the fastest way for swimmer is to come straight in and come off on your back and then twist. Let’s watch the angle that Michael comes off the wall, notice he’s pushing down towards the bottom of the pool as he initially leaves the wall. This allows him to actually kick under the wave and the turbulence that he created coming into the turn, and it’s critical in sprint swimming. All freestyler need to be able to push off deep, so that they’re gonna be under their wave that they created coming in the wall. Michael off course is a great dolphin kicker and it’s a great weapon to use if you perfect it and you practice it every day. You notice he gets a lot of distance per each kick, he has a very high velocity under water and he has a very rigid body position as he does this. Those are the key elements of this push off, and what makes him so effective under water kicking. After your under-water-kick on the turn, you have to have an effective break out. And one of the key points of a good breakout is that the head stays in line with the body, you don’t lift the chin and the head and try to lift up vertically to get on top of the water. You keep you head in line and move straight forward horizontally to break out. The great swimmers accelarate into a break out, and they do this by breathing on the second stroke off the wall, not the first, you never breathe the first stroke off the wall. You’re gonna take one stroke under water and you will breathe on the second stroke. Like anything in your swimming, the key to good turns is practicing good turns. My swimmers often say “when are we gonna work on turns”, and I always say something like “well we just did 200 how’re yours”. Anything in swimming practices is full of opportunities for you to get better. And you have to focus on each one until the good habits become automatic. When you leave the wall you already have to be in a tight streamline position. One of the keys that I tell my swimmers in doing flip turns, is that your arm should be in a point position before your feet hit the wall. This ensures that you’re gonna be totally streamlined coming out under water. Watch Katie on this turn, and watch her excellent streamline position as she pushes off the wall.
Rotation drill
The next step will be what we call a rotation drill. And that would be where one arm is extended, the swimmer’s on their side, and you’re gonna take eight kicks, 1, 2……8, then initiate a pull, and rotate to the other side quickly and take 8 kicks on that side. Again the hip and shoulders need to move in the same plane, they are one unit. Let’s watch Michael do the next step in this drill which is called 8 plus 3 plus 8, which means he’s gonna take 8 kicks on one side, he’s gonna take 3 strokes, 1, 2, 3 and then he’s gonna be on the other side where he’ll take 8 kicks. Watch how he moves from side to side, how efficient he is, how small and tight his kicks are, and how his hip and shoulders move together.
I hope you’ve been enjoy watching this DVD, and watch the other strokes that we have coming out soon. Michael and Katie are now in preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games, we’re back here work every day, doing the same kind of fundamental work that we did on this video. Just remember, if you work hard and set high goals, you can achieve anything you wanna achieve.
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