Triathlon swimming made easy Read Online Free PDF Page B

moving forward. More accomplished swimmers — no longer in any danger of drowning — waste energy, too, because they've heard that good swimmers ride high on the water. Coaches sagely repeat it, and swimmers grimly try to do it. The reality? A speedboat will not hydroplane until it's reached at least 33 mph, and no human swimmer has ever exceeded 5 mph. The pointless effort to stay on top not only squanders energy, but also keeps your arms and legs so busypressing down (to keep you up) that they have no opportunity to propel you forward.
    You save much more energy by learning to sink in a horizontal position instead of fighting to stay on top. As soon as you learn to find an effortlessly horizontal position in the water, you eliminate needless tension, you gain flow and ease, and you save energy for propulsion.
    3. Balance "liberates your limbs" to propel more efficiently. Coaches often observe a dropped elbow or splayed-leg and order, "Keep those elbows up!" or "Keep your legs closer!" They're really asking the swimmer to correct the symptom, like a doctor ordering you to "Get that temperature down!" rather than seeking the cause of your fever.
    Swimmers have an instinctive understanding that it's better to remain horizontal and stable. When they sense imbalance, they instinctively use their arms or legs to fix it. These compensating or stabilizing actions appear to the coach as stroke errors. But when the underlying imbalance is corrected, many of the more visible errors often disappear. The arms are freed to perform their most valuable function — lengthening the bodyline and holding on to the water. The legs are freer to stay effortlessly in sync with core-body rotation. The stroke automatically becomes far more efficient.

    4. Balance frees more of your power. A baseball slugger's power is useless if he swings from an off-balance stance. An in-line skater, crosscountry skier, or speed skater's powerful quads can do little good if the rest of the body isn't stable and positioned for the push. No good athlete attempts to perform in anything other than full dynamic balance. On land, grounded by gravity and needing all of your body's power to excel, your body just knows it can't deliver if it's not balanced.
    In the water, it's different. Supported by buoyancy, your body weight is only 10% of what it is on land. And because you're not on solid ground, you're similarly restricted from using all of your potential power. On top of that, without those clear dry-land signals, your body's balancing instincts can't tell you how you're limiting the power you do have.
    But limiting it you are, because swimming power comes from core-body rotation, which triggers the kinetic chain, which powers the arms and legs. As we've seen in thousands of unbalanced swimmers on underwater video, a swimmer who lacks dynamic balance loses the ability to rotate freely. Many of these swimmers, aware that something is holding them back, spend hour after hour doing lat pulls and tricep presses. Truth is, they already have ample power and could tap it instantly by improving their balance.
    5. Balance frees you to be more fluent. The unbalanced swimmer, especially in freestyle, is often trapped in a cycle of frantic movement. He responds to the feeling of sinking by churning his arms more. The faster he churns, the shorter his strokes become, and the more strokes he has to take to maintain speed. Eventually, he's flailing his arms frantically just to keep moving.
    As soon as you master balance, you escape the trap. You can move at the same speed with a far more leisurely stroke, can find a more natural and fluent body rhythm, and will swim in calmer water.
    Getting Your Balance
    We define balance as being "effortlessly horizontal" in the water. The key word is effortless. It's possible to achieve a horizontal position if you do things such as kick hard, skip breaths or use your arms for support. But we're after horizontal balance with minimal kicking,