Swimming Drills Discussion (Faster swimming means better technique)

Drills, drills, drills is one of the swimming streams many coaches take in the pursuit of a perfect stroke. It is not easy to maintain a beautiful, efficient stroke in high speeds and that is when technique drills come into play. The hardest part about having the perfect stroke is the ability to change, modify and adjust swimmer's stroke as the swimmer develops.

If one desires perfection he/she cannot be afraid to try new things. Swimming is a constant learning process, as many great coaches state, "to be the best, you gotta learn from the best". Here are a few tips on how to get started with good technique.

1. Watch a lot of swimming videos of top level swimmers (start here: at swim.ee )

2. Do not think of technique as something that you will learn and never have to think about it again. Wrong! The perfect stroke requires constant attention, so stop your mind from wondering all over the place when you swim and focus on how the water feels, how much of it my arms are pulling, am I kicking enough, am I relaxed, do I hold a good streamline off the wall etc.

3. To help you with motivation, you may pretend that you are being watched in every single practice by fans in the stands or on the pool deck and they will laugh at you if your stroke looks like crap. Let's see you now not think about the technique. Nobody likes to be laugh at (even though it is only imaginary:).

4. Ask your peers or coach to watch you and evaluate what you are doing right and what you could correct in your stroke.

5. If you have an access to an underwater video camera, USE IT. If you do not own one, they are not that expensive to buy and are worth the purchase. Film yourself from the front, the back, from each side and from 45 degree angles on both sides in the front. Then upload the video to YouTube, Blip, or Vimeo and let me know. I will provide you with some hints on what to improve and get you swimming properly in no time.

6. Have fun and don't be afraid to play around in the water. By playing with your stroke you might discover some knew technique or movement that might just work for you.

7. Finally, relax! It is the ease, relaxation and efficiency of the stroke that makes you go fast, not how many muscles you put into it.

Happy Swimming!

New Breaststroke Rule Adopted by FINA

Some of you already might have heard that FINA has updated their breaststroke rule to accomodate a dolphin kick while under water after a turn. The rule marked as SW 7.4 clearly states "A single downward dolphin kick followed by a breaststroke kick is permitted while wholly submerged. Following which, all movements of the legs shall be simultaneous and in the same horizontal plane without alternating movement."

Not sure what to make of this, but I believe it was received with a positive feedback on many fronts. There is one country, however, that does not like this rule. As swimnews.com indicated in their recently published article, the Chinese swimming committee decided not to follow this rule during the China's 10th National Games.

I personally think this rule will reduce the number of disqualifications and will allow for faster swimming of skilled butterfly kickers. It potentially might even help those IMers that struggle on breaststroke. Finally, I predict we will see some breaststroke world records going down with adoption of this rule. If you have any thoughts, do not hesitate to leave a comment.

Get your swimming news instantly

It has become the standard to include RSS feeds to every website with freshly updated content (blogs, news portals etc.) . Large swimming portals are not an exception. If you'd like to have your swimming news directly automatically uploaded and displayed without accessing the website RSS feeds are the way to go. To help you with that, there are a few programs that you might be interested in. The new Google Reader or the Google Personalized Homepage. For the more technically skilled with higher computer power you should try the Web Clips feature of the new Google Desktop.

Finally, where do you find the swimming RSS feeds? Well, I have compiled a few for you to get start out with. Otherwise, when visiting an interesting swimming site/blog, look for a little RSS button on the button or top of the page. Sometimes the portals itself have links to their own RSS pages.

Your swimming feeds:
Swimator Blog
Swimming World Magazine
USA Swimming.

Guess where this pool is?

Where is this beautiful place? Florida, California, Texas, perhaps Hawaii?

Not a University of Hawaii, but very close guess. :)

Swimming Hall of Fame

Did you ever wonder where you can find a place where all swimming history comes together forming one entity stored forever? If you haven't been yet, you definitely should visit Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A city which holds the Swimming Hall of Fame . You can find here swimming heroes starting with Duke Kahanamoku and Johnny Weissmuller, Mark Spitz all the way to Alexander Popov and beyond. The hall of fame is right next to the home place of the Fort Lauderdale Swim Team (FLST) which used to be headed by the former Olympic coach Jack Nelson.