Swimming Made Easier for Bikers

Streamlining: The “new” way to swim

If you’re over 40, you learned to swim an entirely different stroke than the freestyle swum today by world-class swimmers. The word that makes the singular difference between the freestyle of today, and the freestyle of yesteryear, is STREAMLINE.

Streamlining means keeping your body in as long and small a space as possible. To do that, you lock your straight arms over your head, squeezing your head just above your ears, and locking one thumb over the other palm (it doesn’t matter which thumb over which palm, one will feel more natural.) You reach up as high as you can (towards the ceiling on land, towards the other end of the pool in water), and the rest of your body follows your hands and head. Keeping your legs together, especially at the knees, is key, and your feet, even while kicking, should only be slightly apart.

Kicking: Harder than it looks

A good kick is essential. Without it, you won’t be able to go super-long distances or do hour-long workouts without developing good kicking technique. As a well-toned cyclist, you’ll find that the legs you have worked so hard to sculpt become your enemies in the pool. Most of the recreational swimmers I see struggle with their stroke simply because their kicking isn’t strong enough to keep shoulders and arms on top of the water. The good news is that you can convert your legs to helpers in the pool if you know how/why they are dragging you down.

From cycling, you have developed extra-large and heavy thigh and calf muscles, as well as inflexible ankles and feet. Doing dryland stretching that loosens and stretches out these muscles and joints, on a daily basis, is a good start to improving your kick, and it can’t hurt for your cycling either.

For freestyle, we use the flutter kick, merely a continuous “fluttering” of the feet, the effort of which starts out from the top of the hips. If you took swim lessons when you were a child, you might remember grabbing the side of the pool with both hands, stomach-down, holding on and extending your legs out straight behind you, and kicking hard. Nothing about this part of the stroke has changed, and if you want a good cardio workout, repeat this childhood experience but try to do it as hard as possible for 30 seconds kick, 30 seconds rest, repeating as many as ten times.

Next, graduate to the kickboard. Grab a board and kick as many lengths of the pool as you can before your legs give out. If you can kick up to 20 lengths (500 yards), you’re kicking as much as the average Masters swimmer does in a workout, and your legs, no matter how developed they are, are not a handicap, and you can skip ahead to the next section.

If you can’t, though, kick as many laps as you can, and remember the number. Then try to increase your number of kicking laps each time you get in the pool. You can also do kicking on intervals, like 20 x 25 yards. If there is a pace clock at your pool, or you wear a waterproof chrono watch, start at 00:00 and push off to kick one lap. You have one minute to get to the other end. If you get there in 40 seconds, you have 20 seconds to rest. Push off for #2 (called repeats) when the clock reaches 1:00 minute.

To make kicking easier:
hold the board with both hands at the top of the board, loosely. Don’t let your elbows rest heavily on the board, they should be off to the sides.
flutter kick easily, feeling lots of floppiness in the ankle joints, starting the kick from the top of your hips, do not bend your knees, lots of flexing of ankles and feet. You want floppy fast feet, toes pointing down towards the bottom of the pool. DO NOT BEND YOUR KNEES! You want to feel all the power and work coming from your hips.
Did I mention don’t bend your knees? If you do bend them, your knees will have the opposite effect of slowing you down. You want a nice smooth kicking motion to flow from the top of the hips (and core) down through your toes, with your hips and ankles doing all of the work.

If there are no kickboards around, you can kick without one. To start, practice your dryland streamline body position prior to getting into the pool. Then use the “streamline start” explained above, and keep kicking with your hands locked in front of you, underwater for as long as you can hold your breath, then above water (with your hands still locked in front), to the end of the pool. The above-water part of this drill is extremely difficult for most beginners, so take it slowly and try not to be frustrated if you can’t make a whole lap. To make it easier, unlock your hands, keep your arms still outstretched in front, and “scull” back and forth, making a fast scooping motion similar to polishing a pumpkin.

When you’ve got streamlining and kicking down (you can do 20 laps with a board), it’s time to focus on your arms, hands, trunk rotation, and roll.

Full stroke mechanics:

Your head remains stationary, with your face straight down, looking at the black line at the bottom of the pool, when not breathing.
To breathe, move your head only slightly to the right or left with your mouth open, and inhale.
Enter the water thumb-first, then glide your hand and reach as far as you can forward, while rolling onto that arm’s shoulder and side. Your strong kicking leg is on “top”.
“Grab” as much water as you can with your outstretched hand (this is called the catch.)
Pull straight down from your elbow, keeping your elbow near the surface of the water, with your flat palm, keeping your fingers closed, and wrist slightly bent.
Using your strong forearm, pull past your hip, keeping your palm close to your body, then use you elbow to lift your hand just barely out of the water.
You will be reaching maximum glide with the other arm, so turn your head slightly and take your breath as the hand coming out of the water starts to come out.
As you reach maximum pull power, use your trunk and snap your hips to the opposite side.
Skim your fingertips past your head, always keeping your elbow higher than your hand and bent, and immediately enter the water thumb-first to start the next stroke cycle.

If you keep your elbows high, and emphasize the body-roll at maximum glide, you will feel like you are rolling through the water side-to-side, rotating your shoulders when your arms come out and over your head, and rotating your core on a center axis, so that you are always swimming on either your left or right side with the opposite arm extended out as far as you can reach.

Most common stroke flaws I see in bikers and runners learning to swim:

Lifting the head too high out of the water to breathe. You should be turning it slightly and laying it sideways on your non-pulling arm, mouth open to catch inhale.
Trying to kick too hard with bent knees. It’s impossible to roll from side to side if you are bending your knees while kicking.
Keeping your fingers open. Easiest thing to correct! Some top freestylers keep the thumb slightly away from the palm; your hand should act like a paddle.
Poor elbow position. The most common flaw, and the hardest to correct. Just being aware of dropped elbows is helpful, you may want to ask either the lifeguard or your workout partner to watch you underwater and see where your elbows are in relation to your hand and body.
Arm entering the water “crossed over”. Your hand should enter the water ahead of your head, as if you drew a line from the outside of your eye to arm’s length ahead of you—don’t cross in front of the side of your head. This is extremely tough to do correctly since you can’t see your hand entry if your head is correctly positioned face down.

Once you’ve got a good strong flutter kick going, you can feel confident trying the following drills. They will be more difficult with poor kicking. You can use fins if you have them, they are an excellent way to keep good balanced body position while trying to master the drills.