STREAMLINES AND THE 5 SECOND RULE

Now that we have gotten a few workouts in, we hope you have gotten rid of those late summer cobwebs settled into a regular routine that hopefully will take you to the place you envision yourself being in when March and April roll around.  

 The first week was spent on perfecting our techniques in the sport and this will be our focus for a couple of more weeks for all three groups.  The senior prep and junior gold groups will see increasingly harder sets that will focus on building that aerobic base towards the end of this week.  The junior blue group will be working on a lot of technical aspects of their strokes that will help them as they grow in the sport.

  The major areas that we have been working on in our swimming is how to properly leave the wall.  Tight streamlines and what I refer to as our  "5 second rule”.  Let’s look at these two areas a little closer.  The Streamline, I have seen all of you working on this aspect really hard during the first few practices and that is Great. You hear all your coaches emphasize streamlines, but do you really know why it is so important? The streamline off the start and the turn will help propel you through the water with the least amount resistance.  The better the streamline the less resistance and the less resistance means the less energy used during this part of your race.  Let’s focus on not only having our hands on top of each other but wrapping that thumb and squeezing our elbows together with our chins tucked to our chest.  Do not lift that head too soon, we have to work on timing it with our breakout stroke.

 

The “5 second rule” involves our underwater dolphin kick off the starts and turns.  Yes I know that a lot of you can probably go the whole 25 on a good day and if you do that your day will go from good to bad with a disqualification maybe even by mom or dad who may be that stroke and turn.  The rule is you have to be up at the 15 meter mark (those different colored buoys in the lane lines.  Oh and by the way the 15 meter mark are the ones furthest from the wall you are leaving from.). For our purposes we are going to use 5 seconds as a bench mark.  The reasons are that I have timed swimmers in actual races and the average time spent underwater is 2.5 to 4.0 seconds.  But wait you say, that’s not very long at all but ladies and gents that is actually pretty good in race conditions for your ages.  Yes we want to increase our distance underwater but not if we have to sacrifice speed. If you lose all your speed off the start and the turns before that first stroke, What happens?  You have to use a lot more energy to get back up to race speed.  All of this involves muscle memory and that’s why it is important to do it off every wall in your workouts and not only when you feel like doing it.

 

Instead of focusing on how far you can go, let’s look at it from a different angle, How fast and how far can I go in 5 seconds.  Do this and you are on your way to seeing some amazing results.