Front-Quadrant Swimming

Now that you’re acquainted with how the stroking arm is connected and timed to the rotation engine, you need to understand how the recovering arm and stroking arm are connected. The shape of any vessel in the water, including your swimming machine, and the ratios of length, width, and depth determine the amount of wave drag that that vessel has at any given speed. This is why racing boats of all kinds are long and sleek. The implication for your swimming machine is that drag and the power required to overcome it are significantly reduced when the body stays as long as possible throughout each stroke cycle. Imagine a sailing event in which two evenly matched racing boats and crews are pitted against one another. Also imagine that once every second, one of the boats morphs into a tugboat shape for half a second, then morphs back into a racing-boat shape. You would bet on the other boat because it keeps its long, sleek shape.

Now imagine a 6-foot-tall (almost 2 m) person who, when stretched to full streamline position, becomes an 8-foot-long (2.4 m) vessel in the water. We’ll call this his racing-boat shape (figure 5.1). 

 

Say that he begins his recovery and his stroke at the same time and that his recovering arm and pulling arm are therefore passing the shoulders at about the same time. He has shortened his vessel back to 6 feet. We will call this his tugboat shape (figure 5.2). This swimmer alternately morphs from the 8-foot racing-boat shape to the 6-foot tugboat shape and back with every stroke he swims. 

 

The woman in the next lane (same height, same racing-boat shape) has learned a technique called front-quadrant swimming. In the following figure, you can see that instead of starting her recovery and pull together, she stays on her side with her lead arm extended until her recovering hand has passed her head. The large circle shows that the woman’s recovering arm is about to enter the water while her stroking hand is still in the front quadrant. Another way of thinking about this is by imagining that her passing zone—the area where the recovering hand, which is moving forward, passes the stroking hand, which is moving backward—is in front of her head (figure 5.3). In this way, she maintains her streamlined, side-lying position and most of its length for nearly the entire stroke cycle. Keeping her vessel long throughout each stroke cycle reduces wave drag dramatically and allows the arm stroke and core rotation to begin together. The stroke-integration drills will teach you to keep your swimming machine long and to properly time your arm motions.