Loads of people learn front crawl from Mum, Dad or an older sibling. Once they’ve got the basics they stop learning. We’re ALWAYS happy to provide some stroke improvement help to anyone who would like to join the club with only that purpose. Having a good stroke means you can relax and enjoy swimming, whether in a pool or in the sea a whole lot more.
With a good stroke, you can swim further, emerge more relaxed, enjoy quieter parts of the beach, impress the girlfriend, amaze the kids, and maybe one day be a better rescuer. So here’s a few tips and hints to improve your crawl.
- Get a proper pair of trunks or a one piece cossy. Seriously, no-one ever won a major event, swam the channel or rescued a ship-wrecked mariner (well you know what we mean), wearing a pair of shorts that come down to the thigh, let alone below the knee. Wearing the right stuff adds to the experience.
- Buy (and obviously use) a pair of goggles. You CANNOT swim front crawl without putting your face in the water and, unless you’re really unusual, you can’t see properly without goggles. Even if you claim you can see, then that’s only because you’ve just opened your eyes from the pain of the salt water! Why be a masochist? [More hints on buying goggles to follow.]
- Begin in the pool – it’s usually a lot easier to stand up as there’s fewer waves.
- The power in front crawl comes from the arms. The arm action should be smooth, rythmic, without lots of effort – ie NO WINDMILLS.
- The legs merely serve to keep the body flat. They DO NOT add anything significant to the power. So.. NO SPLASHING! Keep your feet trailing behind you with the occasional flutter just to keep the body flat.
- Splashing of ANY kind is ineffective and inefficient.Splash happens when a body part (legs, arms and head are the main culprits) go backwards and forwards between the water and the air. Splash indicates that something is wrong. The energy that goes into creating the splash is wasted energy – it does nothing to help you move through the water.
- The ideal body position is almost flat in the water an inch or two below the surface. Lots of people let their legs sink – usually because they get tired from kicking too much. When their legs sink, they bend at the hips or at the top of the thighs. Keep FLAT. Practice by pushing off from the side and gliding as far as you can – that will be the right body position to try to maintain throughout.
- The longer length of the body, the faster it goes. If you want to sail a faster yacht, you get a longer one. If you want to swim faster (or for less effort) you get a longer body… Well, you elongate the one you’ve got. For a prolonged part of the stroke, you legs should be straight, your hips straight, your chest straight, your head and neck tall, and one of your arms stretched ahead of you just under the water surface too.
- The longer the body is long, the faster it goes. Sounds a bit odd this one, but the longer that you have one or other arm outstretched, the faster you’ll be. When there’s not an arm ahead of you then the body will be presenting a less streamlined shape to the flow of water past it. Less streamlining = loss of speed. So the aim is for the arms to swap over smoothly but with the minimum amount of time where neither is ahead of you. You can practice this with a drill known as catch-up, where you only recover one arm when the other hand has caught up with the leading one on each stroke.
- The power of the glide. OK if you’re competing you may not glide as long, but for the rest of us, there’s a LOT of benefit from having a long glide. After each arm has pulled back, recovered, and is in the leading position, there should be a pronounced glide. In the glide, you get the benefit from the power of the arm action.
- The power of the arms is in the recovery. When you pull with your arm under the body to pull yourself through the water, you’re using a complex set of levers to get the maximum power from the pull. But the thing that gives you most power is the distance that the arm pulls through. So the most important contributor to the power is not the pulling power of the arms but the extent to which you extend them at the end of the recovery.
TO BE COMPLETED…
