So now that I'm in off-season with nothing to train for and a knee to heal up, what do I do? Go straight to intensive studying of the swim stroke and proceed to immediately jump to my biggest swimming week yet (just hit my 3rd straight day of a hard 5k swim off a 20k week). So with all this swimming, I've also been able to observe a lot of other swimmers in the pool. Upon seeing these mistakes made time and time again with more swimmers than I can count, I'd like to go over my top 3 common mistakes I see in the many novice swimmers at the pool.
1. Crossing over the body's center line. This is the big one. The most common by far, and the easiest to spot (or simply most common because it is the easiest to spot). I particularly see this on the opposite arm when the swimmer is lifting (should be rotating...) the head to breath. When their head lifts/rotates, the arm moves in, crosses the center line and pulls the body off its axis of rotation.
2. Straight arm catch. Not getting the elbow high on the catch to pull back on the water and instead pushing down on the water first, causing the legs to drop to react to the force. This move can also cause shoulder problems, particularly with paddles (I should know, I experienced it years ago).
3. Ultra low cadence. While getting cadence up to as high as an elite swimmer is something I am struggling with and working very hard on myself, a cadence that is too low can make it very difficult/almost impossible to get into any kind of rhythm. It also means less oxygen delivery to the muscles from opportunities to breathe. Wherever your level, you can likely benefit from working on getting more comfortable at a higher cadence.
If you know you do one or more of those, don't worry, in the next post I'll cover some of my own flaws I have recently discovered about my stroke upon Swimlabs video analysis.
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