Why Forward Motion is harder than it sounds

If you understand the concept of a Full-Body Streamline that is excellent, but you can’t just lay there and get faster, you need some forward motion.

The principle of forward motion is deceivingly simple:

All aspects of your technique should drive you forward as much as possible. If it is not driving you forward, minimize it or eliminate it completely.

Let’s take a quick look at your butterfly, breaststroke and freestyle to see if your technique is slowing you down.

Butterfly BreathingYou were probably taught to lift your head to breathe in butterfly. Newsflash: you are wasting your energy! If you lift your head you also raise the shoulders and the more you raise your shoulders, the more resistance your body meets and the lower they will fall afterwards.

If we were trying to slowly bob up and down then that technique might be worth looking into, but we are strictly interested in forward motion.

Instead of lifting the head (especially if you have a big head), you should be tilting your chin forward to get a breath. This allows your mouth to reach an ideal breathing position without using extra energy to lift the upper body and head out of the the water.

If the timing of the breath, the arm stroke and the body dolphin are correct, the swimmer will have maximum forward motion with minimum resistance. – Bob Bowman, coach of Michael Phelps

Freestyle Kicking

Most of us equate a big kick with fast swimming and that’s sounds pretty reasonable right? If a small kick makes you go faster than no kicking, then shouldn’t a bigger kick make you go faster? Long story short…nope!

When it comes to moving forward, a narrow kick is much more efficient than motorboat kick because after a certain amplitude, the kick creates more resistance than propulsion.

During big kicks the feet have the tendency to come out of the water and one can only wonder: “If your feet are in the air, what are they kicking?” AIR!

To become an elite swimmer you will have to be good at kicking something else other than air, if you know what I mean.

Breaststroke

More than any other stroke, breaststroke is all about timing. In the other three strokes if you have really bad timing, you’ll probably look awkward. In breaststroke, not only will you look awkward, but you will remain in the same place while looking awkward.

To squeeze every drop of propulsion out of a powerful kick, you should not kick until the front of the body is in a streamlined position. This means that the pull is finished, the head/eyes are down and the hands are stretching forward. This might seem like a late kick to you, but it ensures that all of the power from the kick translates to forward motion.

Since a good breaststroke kick accounts for roughly 80% of the propulsion/forward motion, it is important to time it well. Not sure what it looks like? Just take a glimpse at some footage of the last Olympics. They know what they are doing.

Applying Forward Motion

Don’t stop here! Evaluate your own strokes with your coach and keep in mind that anything that isn’t helping you to move forward is slowing you down.

I like the principle of forward motion because it is a really simple way to evaluate technique. No matter the technique and no matter the swimmer, I always ask the same question: Does that produce the maximum amount of forward motion? If the answer is a no, then out of the window it goes.