by Admin Mediterra | Jun 1, 2020 | Fundamental Skills
In the first freestyle fundamental lesson we work on Forming Streamline Shape.
This lesson will help you establish the second of our Four Essential Features of the freestyle stroke which encompass lengthening, balance and streamline skills.
Below is the outline of the drills and attention cues, with links to video demonstrations of the drills. The following lists of activities and the lists of cues may contain more items than you experienced in your lesson. The instructor will watch the time and your pace of learning and choose a certain sequence of activities and the few most relevant cues for you to work with.
Skills
- To maintain Build The Frame skills and…
- Hold long, straight, firm Streamline, from fingers to ankle
- Hold low, stable rotation angle
You want to feel long, straight, sleek and stable at a low-rotation angle in Streamline Position. Along with the sensations from Build The Frame skills, you want to see that you can slide parallel to the line on the bottom of the pool and slide farther, more easily, the more streamlined and stable your body is. Sliding in Streamline for 6 seconds with these positive feedback signs is a good goal to work towards.
Drills
Cues
To help you pay attention, interpret, and send commands to particular parts of your body your instructor gave you a selection of cues in each drill. There are more cues on the lists below than you were given in your lesson, as the instructor chose a few to get you going, without overwhelming you with too many details. You may be able to figure out the meaning of the others you were not originally exposed to.
- Cues for Scapula Slide Position and…
- Scapula of lead arm stays slide forward
- Lead Arm stays on Wide Track
- Head Stays Anchored (it does not turn with torso)
- Back hand tucked deep into pocket (keep arm underwater)
- Low Rotation Angle (rotate just off your stomach)
- Upper shoulder blade touches the air
- Lower shoulder blade just below the surface
- Light flutter of the feet (if necessary to prolong time in drill)
by Admin Mediterra | Jun 1, 2020 | Fundamental Skills
Form Streamline Shape Introduction
This introduction refers to the second of our Four Essential Features of the freestyle stroke: Form Streamline Shape.
The Streamline Position
Streamline Position is the start and the finish position for every stroke in freestyle. This position is the most hydrodynamic (low drag) shape you will be in during the stroke cycle, and the moment you will experience the most forward movement. Streamline Position is how you deliver the flow of force through the body into forward motion. In this position, your body line most easily parts water molecules ahead so that your body can occupy that space instead. The more smoothly, the more uniformly and therefore the more quickly those water molecules move out of the way, the faster you will travel forward.
Streamline Position is the most important skill of all because it is determines much of how well you convert effort into forward motion and it is the platform on which you swing the recovery arm forward and the platform on which you take an easier rhythmic breath. You cannot practice Streamline Position too much because there are so many ways to make it better, stronger, more stable.
Imagine how a speed skater places her weight confidently on the skate and transfers the wave of momentum into that skate to accelerate forward. That skate blade is long, straight, sharp, and stable. It receives the wave of force and conducts it onto the ice and the skater slides forward. The skater is holds herself with stability on that single skate, over one side of the body, while drawing the other leg forward, getting ready to unleash another wave of force into the other skate on the other side. Stability in this position is crucial to maintaining rhythm and momentum.
The Streamline Position has some lessons we can learn from this action in ice skating. At this moment in the water, you are shaped into your most streamline position, holding a slightly rotated angle, while leaning (laying your weight) onto that streamline side of the body. That streamline side of the body receives the wave of force you generated in the stroke and conducts it forward into the lead arm and leading edges of the body to put that force to work parting water molecules ahead. You hold this position with stability that comes from core muscle strength and control, while the other side of the body brings up the recovery arm to prepare to unleash another wave of force into the Streamline Position on the other side.
A good streamline position is:
• slightly rotated (about 30 degrees)
• a straight line from wrist to ankle (as seen from above)
• stretched (without twisting or tilting the spine) from wrist to ankle, especially from shoulder to hip
• stable for at least 2 seconds
In your lesson you will learn how to form this streamline shape and learn how to hold it with stability for a few seconds, long enough to be able to swing your recovery arm forward in a relaxed and controlled way.
This position is critical – everything else you do in the stroke will depend on your ability to slip into the position immediately and hold it steady while other actions are taking place.
by Admin Mediterra | Jun 1, 2020 | Fundamental Skills
Build The Frame Introduction
This introduction refers to the first of our Four Essential Features of the freestyle stroke: Build The Frame.
The first skills we work on is to lengthen the body line, and establish better balance, from front-to-back and from side-to-side (lateral balance) with the support of water beneath.
Lengthen The Body Line
Like building the frame of a long, lean sea kayak, we need to lay the body out on the surface of the water and lengthen it along the spine. This lengthening of the body triggers a response inside the body to stabilize the spine, pelvis and legs, forming one long fuselage.
This lengthening you want to create is meant to put the spine into a neutral position, to stretch it out and stabilize it comfortably. Your body should feel straight and tall, but not strained to hold this position.
Balance
Balance refers to keeping the body parallel to the surface, in the ‘neutral corridor’, or the ‘neutral zone’ between gravity pushing down and water pressure pushing up. This is the corridor where you can swim along without having to waste energy fighting against those two natural forces.
The human body will rest in water like an iceberg. When at rest between gravity and water pressure, approximately 95% of your body will be submerged, give-or-take depending on your body composition. You choose which 5% of your mass gets to stick above the surface. Unfortunately, the head makes up about 10% of body mass and so if you insist on keeping it up, above the neutral zone like a good land-mammal, gravity will shove some other part of your body deeper, triggering a sinking sensation detected by your brain which raises your heart rate, and requires you to start pushing down in order to hold too much of your body mass too high. Your sense of effort will go way up. So, you will practice keeping the head down in the water, where it can fully rest on the water as if on a pillow. A body at rest in the neutral corridor, parallel to the surface, will have just a sliver of the back of the head, the back of the shoulder, and perhaps a side of the hip touching the air.
Using the drills and cues, you work on keeping your body’s frame parallel to the surface by shifting weight forward through that frame. You let the weight of the head and the weight of the arms be heavy, letting them rest fully supported by the water, rather than hold them up. You use the internal tension of your muscles, tendons and fascia to lever your long body line body like a teeter-totter board, pivoting over the buoyant lungs, to shift weight forward, making the upper half of the body feel heavier, and the lower half feel lighter. This will be especially important and appreciated by those who have sinking hips and legs.
Like a torpedo, think of your body line like a long, firm, sleek, weight (more evenly) balanced from rear to front. Think of the body traveling parallel to the surface and just below it.
Build The Frame
Let us use a couple analogies here to make the point…
First, imagine a long, straight, firm torpedo. The torpedo is very straight, very solid, and aims straight for the target with no deviations up/down, side-to-side. The force from the motor in the rear is transmitted along the torpedo frame, into the water-cutting edge in front.
This is what you want your spine, from tip of your head, the your tail, and even down the imaginary line between your ankles, to look and feel like. The tip of your head, where the spine would project if it were continued on a laser line, is the tip of your torpedo. Aim that tip underwater, down the lane in the direction you are traveling.
This means your eyes will be looking straight down at the bottom of the pool, not forward, not even a little bit.
Your shoulders and your hips will be locked together, forming a single, solid torso unit. When the torso rotates, the shoulders and hips rotate together as one unit. And, when the torso rotates, the head remains anchored, not turning. The torso turns around the stationary head.
This alignment and and this firm connection along the spine means less stress and more protection for the neck and spine. For anyone who has had neck or back problems, this is good news.
And, now imagine a long, sleek, firm wooden kayak frame. Once wrapped with a tight covering, that internal frame provides two services to the vessel:
1. The water can push up and support the entire vessel evenly.
2. The frame can receive and transmit the force the paddler creates with each stroke of the paddle.
By simply putting your body into a certain shape and then holding that shape firmly, continuously, the water can more easily support your entire body at or near the surface, and when you apply propulsive force, the body can transmit that to the water-splitting edges in front.
If the body is not fully firm, then the water presses up against the body less uniformly. The buoyancy in the upper half of the body cannot lend its buoyancy to the lower half.
If the body is not fully firm, then when you sends a wave of force into it from the stroke, the body absorbs that wave rather than transmit it to the front, where it can be put to work parting water ahead.
This frame alone may not be enough to bring the lower part of the body up to the surface and hold it there perfectly, but it will make it a lot easier, once you add the other three features and some forward motion.
Our very first drills in the freestyle lesson series are going to help you build this frame and learn how to use it to keep the body parallel to the surface (perhaps a bit longer than you could otherwise), and to transmit forces through your body more effectively.
by Admin Mediterra | Jun 1, 2020 | Fundamental Skills
There are many skills that need to be in place for the freestyle stroke to work well and feel good. We have organized them into what we call the Four Fundamental Features of the Freestyle Stroke. They are listed in their order of priority, in the order they are best learned. The first skills in place set the stage for the second, and so on.
When these four features are in place, working together, you are in position to experience the ‘magic’ of a smooth, rhythmic stroke. If one of these features are missing, or far less developed than the other features, then you may not be able to tap into that satisfying stroke motion so easily.
Here are the four features in your stroke:
- Build the Frame
- Form Streamline Shape
- Generate Forward Momentum
- Make First Connections
Over the course of our lesson series we work through each of these, making sure you have the essential features in place.
With these four features in place, you are set up for much easier breathing and so the lesson on Integrated Breathing typically comes after you have been introduced to and worked on these features.
In our first session, we typically work through the first two lessons on this list: Build The Frame and Form Streamline Shape. In the second session we typically work on Generate Forward Momentum. In the third session we would work on Make First Connections. In the third and/or fourth lesson we focus on Integrated Breathing, while going back over and reinforcing the four fundamental skills.
Build The Frame
Just as a boat or a plane, or any vessel has an internal frame, you also need an internal frame to interact with the forces of nature and to transfer the forces you generate into effective forward motion.
Upon this frame you can establish much better balance and stability in the water, so that your body remains more easily, if not effortlessly, parallel to the surface of the water.
Through this frame you can transmit forces forward smoothly, efficiently, without absorbing or dispersing that force in useless directions.
Form Streamline Shape
Power is important in swimming, but because water is 740x denser than air, maintaining good shape is far more important than power.
The human land-mammal body is not designed for hydrodynamic motion in water, but we can make it much better through lining up the body line into its ideal asymmetric rotated streamline position. You will learn to find this ideal position on each stroke and hold it while the other side of the body is completing the recovery swing. In this position you will most easily transmit force into forward motion and travel the farthest.
Generate Forward Momentum
The return of the arm from rear to front is actually the beginning of your acceleration forward. When well shaped, sent on a particular pathway and held with relatively relaxed muscle tone, this arm motion contributes greatly to your forward motion and overall stability in the water. The arm is attached to the torso and its major muscles through the scapula and its supporting tissues and the way this arm moves determines how well you can tap into the power of the torso for the slide forward as well as for setting up a more powerful (and safe) catch in the moment ahead.
Make First Connections
And this final feature is where you learn to connect the action of the two arms, through their scapula, to the power of the torso rotation, for one smooth coordinated action of both sides of the body together.
This is a preview of the thrilling synchronization lessons to come later in Freestyle Advanced!
