Chapter 5 What Makes an Efficient Freestyle Stroke?

     As someone interested in improving your swimming you’ve probably watched Olympic swimmers on TV or on YouTube. If you have a good club at your local pool you might have seen some very good junior swimmers up close and if you’ve been to a large triathlon or open water event you’ve perhaps watched the elite wave of the race. Comparing all of these great swimmers, all with different builds and all racing in different environments, you will have noticed a large range of stroke styles: some have strong kicks, others nearly no kick, some a high elbow recovery, others a straight arm recovery, some with a short punchy style, others with a long flowing stroke. Yet all of them are swimming extremely quickly. The stroke styles of elite swimmers can look quite different but there are common elements of great stroke technique between them all. Whilst you might never swim quite as quickly as an Olympic champion, just like them you should look to develop your own stroke technique into one that suits your body type and the environment in which you are racing. Whatever your chosen style, you should share the common elements of good technique with those of the elite swimmers so that you can have low levels of drag and high levels of propulsion in your own stroke.

     Shortly we are going to examine each aspect of good freestyle technique in turn, pointing out common flaws and showing you step-by-step methods to remove them from your stroke. We will clear up a few common misconceptions along the way and refer to Appendix A, which contains descriptions of the key drills and visualisations targeting different areas of your stroke technique. These drills are the standard set that we’ve developed and refined with our large training squads in Perth, Western Australia and also around the world with our popular Swim Smooth Clinic series. They are designed to be used by all levels of swimmer from beginner to elite swimmer – you’ll find them very useful to improve your own swimming.
     In Chapter 15 we will take a more in-depth scientific look at swimming efficiency, giving a lot of background on the coaching advice we offer to swimmers. If you are technically minded you will find this a very interesting section of the book as we put some classic misconceptions about stroke efficiency to bed.
     Later in Chapter 17 we’ll take a look at our innovative Swim Types system, which examines the six distinct styles that people use to swim freestyle. When you identify your own Swim Type then we will be able to give you some very specific advice to improve your stroke, referring back to the individual methods in Chapters 7–14 as we do so. This is an extremely powerful way to identify flaws in your stroke if you are not fortunate enough to have a coach watching over you when you swim.