Breakwater Freestyle 2 - MAC Jan 30, 2013
Session 1: Initial Video and Introductions

Posture, line and balance. This was the mantra of the late Richard Quick, who coached eleven Division 1 national championship teams at Stanford and Auburn, and the US Olympic Women's team (six times). Everybody who ever swam with Richard or stood on his pool deck heard him yelling over and over again "Posture! Posture! Posture!" or "Balance! Balance! Balance!" or "Hold your line! Hold your line!" It didn't matter whether he had a pool full of 10-year-old beginning swimmers, or the US women's Olympic team. Swimming well (and fast) is always about the fundamentals.

So with every video I see, I begin the stroke analysis by looking at posture, line and balance. For freestyle posture, I want to see a straight spine (so much as that is possible) and a strong connection between the head, chest, and hips. The chest and hips must rotate as a unit, and the head must lead and disrupt the steady forward movement of the torso as little as possible. See Mastering Posture for a more details.

Regarding balance, I don't want to see the hips drop at all, and I want to see the legs kicking mostly within the shadow of the body mass. One side of the core - from shoulder to hip - should always be at the surface. See Mastering Freestyle Balance for more details.

Your line is the path your body describes as it moves through the water. It's not just a straight line at the surface - there should be virtually no up and down movement of the core as it moves forward. If your line isn't straight, you are wasting energy and time.

At the first session I noticed that everyone needs to do a little work on their head position, particularly when breathing. Have a look at the first video on the Video Clips - Breathing page.

Kristin and Dave - because you are both triathletes training for distance swimming, I mentioned to both of you that you ought to be aware of your critical swimming speed (CSS), and use that both as a regular (monthly?) test set and to set the pace for your interval training. For distance swimming, most of your interval training should be at CSS. Have a look at About Critical Swimming Speed. (Beth - you might use this as well. A "test set" is a benchmark workout that we perform from time to time to assess progress - or the lack thereof.) There is a description of how to use your CSS to determine your endurance training categories here: About Training Categories. Paul Newsome (from SwimSmooth in Western Australia) has a nicer calculator and another explanation on this page (great information, but the page title is too long...)

Back to the Freestyle 2 program page.