Freestyle Hand Entry

After my fantastic bike ride on the Boulder half Ironman bike course yesterday morning, I met the equally (if not more) fantastic Mary Miller for a stoke analysis and swimming lesson at the Colorado Athletic Club. If you don’t know Mary, you are missing out. Not only is she a fabulous athlete but she’s also a really cool person. Mary had good news for me. I’m probably going to survive the swim. She seemed pleasantly surprised by my stroke, though I have to admit, I do set people up to assume the worst when it comes to my swimming ability.

We “warmed up” by doing a couple of laps sharing a lane. This alone was an extremely eye opening experience. The first thing I noticed was how much water she moves while swimming. I was approaching the wall at the same time she was leaving it during one lap and I think the force of her push and first couple of strokes after that almost pushed me into the next lane. I realized how different her mental approach to swimming must be compared to my approach of “conserve energy and survive.”

Her main piece of advice was that I be much more aggressive with my hand entry. I had been allowing gravity to drop my arm from a recovery position into the water then down so that my body went up and I could breathe. I thought that this must conserve energy when really, it probably just caused me to bob up and down a lot, making me pretty inefficient.

Mary suggested that a more aggressive hand entry would give me forward motion and set up my pull to be much more powerful. It would also cause my shoulders to rotate more naturally and allow me to breathe without turning my head as far.

Here’s how to do it:

1. During recovery, be sure to keep your elbows high
2. Think about leading the entry into the water with your thumbs (slightly, don’t over exaggerate this) about the height of your goggles or swim cap
3. Push your hand and arm forward in an aggressive motion about 2 inches under the surface of the water
4. If you do it right, this aggressive motion will turn your body onto the side so your tummy and back faces the sides of the pool (I had been trying to get this turn to come from my hips with very limited success)
5. If you move your upper body with this kind of purpose your legs will, almost automatically, do what they need to in order to stabilize your motion so you don’t need to think about them anymore

She suggested I do 5 sets of 100 meters thinking about that – about 10 laps – resting for about 10 seconds every two laps. While it sounded counter intuitive to me at first, this also regulated my breathing and allowed me to go much further without needing to stop and gasp for breath as much. Thanks Mary.

Lindsay Brust