Here’s a short video I did a couple weeks ago on swimming for triathlon tips.
Transcript:
Hey guys it’s Kevin here at Triswimcoach.com and I wanted to talk today about a question I had come up on podcast a few months ago where I had listeners send in questions and I answered them on the podcast. If you want to see that, it’s at triswimcoachonline.com and just click on the podcast menu tab up at the top. The question that came up over and over, and you can see it in the blog, is basically how do I get faster? It is kind of a general question, but a lot of people asked it in various ways like what should I do with the pull, how should I do the arm recovery, how should I kick and things like that, but it all led to how do I get faster?
There is one thing, one thing that you should be doing to get faster in freestyle, and this is something that a lot of people, most people don’t do, especially the triathletes and the beginner triathletes, are really not doing this in their stroke and I see this all the time. I’ll demonstrate it. It’s called the high-elbow catch and I’m sure a lot of you listening or watching out there have heard this term before but it doesn’t really make sense unless you see it. I’m not at a pool right now; I’m in my apartment as you can tell so I can’t demonstrate it in the water but I’ll show you just from a standing point, how the high elbow pull or the high elbow catch should look and then I’ll explain why this works better than, and this is the number one thing you should be doing.
Basically what you want to, if I’m coming towards you, let’s say in the water, I’m first, let’s start with head position, I’m going to have my head down. I’m looking down at the bottom of the pool. My hands going to come up here and I’m going to enter into the water and then I’m going to extend that arm so as you can see my arm is off a little bit to my right and then as soon as you extend you want to bend that elbow. Again on camera here, you want to bend that elbow right away. It should look something like this. Your head is down and your elbow is bent and then you are going to pull all the way back. You are pulling back to an extension point here right about at your hip or as far as your hand can go and then
you are going to lift your elbow out of the water again. The main point is extend that arm out in front and then bend the elbow and pull back.
It sounds simple and it may even look simple but when you try it in the water it’s a different ball game. It is something that you have to work on regularly. You have to practice it and it’s not going to come easy at first, but eventually you’ll get it.
The reason that that works is you’re getting the catch up there. You’re getting the most amount of water up here and that’s where you want to pull. A lot of people will extend their arm in the water and the elbow just drops so they’re not getting a lot of propulsion out of their pull.
That’s basically it. There you have the number one way to get faster in freestyle. It is a stroke technique tip, so we’ll talk about workouts down the road, but that’s something to start with from the very beginning if you are working on your freestyle.
Thanks for watching and go ahead and check out http://triswimcoach.com to get more tips on getting
faster and improving your freestyle for triathlon.
Thanks again and we’ll talk to you soon.