Chapter 6 Stroke Flaws – Cause and Effect

     Working on your stroke technique is not just something for swimmers new to freestyle; every swimmer of any ability level should regularly work on their stroke – it’s a never-ending pursuit. Nearly all swimmers, even those who are swimming very well, have areas of their technique they could improve on significantly which would make their stroke more efficient, relaxed, faster or offer better endurance. Even an Olympic champion with a fantastic stroke will still spend a significant portion of their weekly training maintaining and reinforcing their technique; without doing so their performances could easily drop off.
     Working on your stroke technique does not sound very exciting but it can actually be a lot of fun: it brings variety to your swim training and gives you a different sort of challenge to that offered by fitness training. We will use the Swim Smooth drill set (Appendix A) to assist you in this task; each drill or visualisation is a highly developed tool to help you work on the weaker areas in your stroke technique.

     Before we start looking at each area of the freestyle stroke, it is important to remember that when you jump in the water to correct your stroke you need to keep things simple at all times. To help you do this, Swim Smooth uses a simple but deceptively powerful coaching philosophy called ‘Cause and Effect’.
     Cause and Effect says that for every stroke flaw (the effect) there is an underlying cause for it. This is powerful because it helps you get to the root cause of stroke flaws and fix them for good. For instance, a scissor kick where the legs part excessively creating a lot of drag is triggered by a loss of balance from crossing the centre line with the lead hand in front of the head (the cause). By removing the crossover you will fix the scissor kick, without ever thinking about your kick itself. The conventional approach to fixing a scissor kick is lots of kicking technique work and focus on keeping the legs together but ultimately the scissor kick will keep returning as the underlying cause has not been removed.
     Note that ‘Cause and Effect’ also reduces the number of problems that you have to fix in your stroke. You could look at a swimmer and say that they hold their breath underwater and that they have a poor body position with low legs. This is not really two problems though, it is just one: by improving their exhalation the swimmer will reduce the excess buoyancy in their chest and help bring the legs up high. We are sure you are beginning to see the power of this methodology, especially if you have felt a little ‘cluttered’ in the past by trying to correct multiple aspects of your stroke at the same time.
     As we look at each area of freestyle stroke technique in turn we will take a look at the cause of every stroke flaw and provide you with drills and visualisations to remove that underlying cause.
     OK, let’s get to work!