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The Two Classic Swim Training Mistakes
Switching Off The Negative Voice Inside Your Head
Contrast that feeling with when you are happy and confident doing something you love. In that situation you calmly and confidently go about the activity and the voice in your head is quiet.
This negative internal dialogue is really just your fight-or-flight mechanism telling you not to do something and run instead. By listening to it you are giving it a voice, which amplifies your feelings, giving you an even greater surge of anxiety. It's like a feedback loop running round and round your head creating more self doubt and heightened anxiety.
The next time you hear the voice, take control and tell it "I know what you are, be quiet!". Do this any time you are feeling nervous: when you are thinking about tomorrow's squad session, getting in your wetsuit on the beach or half way down a lap of swimming. Realising what that voice really is - and that it is only a small part of you, not all of you - is very empowering indeed.
Switch off the voice, walk onto the pool deck tall and proud and your confidence will build and build. Soon you won't hear that voice any more.
Swim Smooth!
A Story Of Dramatically Improved Efficiency
Dear Swim Smooth team
I just had to write to send a huge thank you to all of you for an amazing transformation that your website has unlocked in my swimming.
I am, as I discovered from your website, a 100% classic 'glider' swim type, with a stroke per minute figure somewhere around 36 to 38 (as I know now, very slow) with a huge dead zone between hand entry and catch commencement. My absolute fastest possible 50m split was about 54 seconds, in a 25m pool. Well, last night after discovering your website, I headed down to the pool with the goal of just seeing what 60 strokes per minute felt like. After visualising strokes at one per second at the pool edge using just the seconds hand on my watch, I set off. First go: 45 seconds! I just dropped 9 seconds off my fastest ever PB; I couldn't believe it could be that simple. It didn't even feel like it was all that hard.
I figure that has got to be the best swimming tip I have ever received bar none, in 5 years of trying to get faster in the water. I can't wait to get back in the pool again - I'm sure there's another 5 seconds in there somewhere on your website! So ... um ... THANK YOU!!!
Lee Berry
The next day we heard from Lee again, as he took off another three seconds from his 50m time! The fact he's now swimming 24 seconds per 100m quicker without much or any increase in effort really highlights how inefficient Overgliding with a big deadspot in the stroke is. As you can see from Lee's email, he did this by visualising better rhythm (simply from looking at the second hand on his watch!) which is exactly what Overgliders need to be working on.
If we look at our Stroke Rate Chart we can see that Lee's moved out of the blue zone (signifying too slow a stroke rate) up into the white zone. This is why he's been able to make such a big step forward with his efficiency. Of course if he went too far he'd end up fighting the water by moving into the red zone :
If you're an Overglider, as you swim work on keeping your lead hand constantly in motion: either extending forwards, tipping the hand at the wrist to initiate the catch, bending the elbow or pressing the water backwards - never stopping and gliding! A smooth and continuous catch technique will lift up your stroke rate with little if any increase in effort and you'll regain a real sense of rhythm to your stroke. All the details on how to do this are in our Swim Type guides: www.swimtypes.com/guides
Overgliding has become an epidemic in our sport over the last two decades: we sell 41% of Swim Type guides to frustrated Overgliders, many more than any of the other five Swim Types! Lee's experience is quite an extreme example and we can't promise every Overglider can improve quite so dramatically in just 48 hours but you too stand to make some big steps forward in your stroke efficiency by removing the pause from your stroke.
Swim Smooth!
Checking Your Breathing *Timing*
Many swimmers breathe late and rotate their head slightly after their body rotation, from the pool deck you can see this as a flicking movement of the head as the swimmer has to suddenly rotate their head in a hurry. Breathing late leaves you with a much shorter window to breathe in and you will still be trying to breathe as your recovering arm enters the water - which you might feel hitting your nose! :
Even advanced and elite swimmers can suffer from this problem and is something they can work on. A good visualisation to develop correct timing is to think about 'turning your head away from your hand' :
As your recovering arm and hand enters the water, turn your head away from it to breathe, as if you are trying to avoid seeing it. By doing this you will find you are in a breathing position much earlier giving you plenty of time to inhale smoothly. Of course, you should also make sure that you're exhaling into the water between breaths so that you only have to inhale, not exhale and inhale in that short window! See here.
One other observation: If you have a strong preference for breathing to one side then it's much more likely your breathing will be late on that side. On your non-preferred side you won't have any bad habits in place and your breathing timing will probably be much better: As you swim, see if you can compare the movements of the two sides and see if you are indeed breathing late to your preferred side.
Swim Smooth!