10 swimming myths....busted (Page 4)

He starts off by saying most of us don't know what an 80 or 90 stroke count feels like ... and he designed a drill to help you get there  ... incorporating the "dolphin kick" ... and once 1 kick syncs with 1 stroke then you are in the 80+ stroke range ... then he says now go back to flutter kick ... and later ... with practice you will be able to sustain this for a longer period of time ....

So my take was that the drill part is adding the dolphin kick ... but that once you learn or can do 80-90 strokes per minute, then keep practicing that until you can do it continously.

So, I still wonder if this is just a good technique for shorter distances like 1000m or 500m or less ... of if this is also meant for longer distances like in the longer distance triathlons?

I learned to swim just over a year ago with T.I. as my guide. I developed a very efficient stroke with consistant 15 strokes per 25yds and different people told me I looked great in the water. But I was very slow, had hit a plateu and I couldn't get clean breaths because of my slow velocity during the pause. Someone told m to try a shorter, faster stroke and it has transformed my swimming. I am still not fast but a good minute off my 400m race times and getting clean breaths makes me a believer.

The 80 count is really not all that high, if you consider elite swimmers in the pool, doing distance events (800-1500). I have put together this blog post to summarize some work that I am interested in:

http://www.findingfreestyle.com/passive-technique-blog/strokeratesi...

For perspective, the rate of 80 spm is 0.75 seconds per arm pull, which translates to 1.5 seconds per cycle. In my blog post I use cycles per second (for the life of me I can not tell you why - I need to change that), so 80 spm is 0.7 cycles per second. That is actually near the MEDIAN side of stroke rates - think Katie Hoff, with folks like Peter Vanderkaay doing 0.6 cycles per second (slower rate 72 spm), and Kate Ziegler and Brooke Bennett coming in around 0.8-0.9 (~100 spm).

As for the dolphin kicking drill, that is a good one, don't know if he advocates doing it head-up, but that will REALLY get your stroke rate up there, and also teach you to catch more aggressively.

r.b.

There are a number of posts on the TI forum under "Favorite Sets & Practices" that discuss the use of a tempo trainer to test and train faster arm turnovers and find your sweetspot so that you can create smart training sets targeted for improvement.

I have seen those but for most of us mortals that increase in stroke rate has to come at something. For me it is stroke length. I use the tempo trainer today and 70 spm was just slightly hard to do. That is about the rate I swim/race at.