Five Clues for Better Swimming

By Stephanie Ellis

How easy do you find swimming? Do you need to have lie down after a swim or does it energise you? Which bits of you ache afterwards? Do you enjoy swimming?

Have you noticed that some people seem to make it look easy whilst others make you feel exhausted just by watching them?

Noon Etienne and Stephanie Ellis working under the name of Strokeworks can help. Their approach is built around a series of drills that help the swimmer discover how to work with the water to enable them to swim quicker and yet without having to work so hard.

Stephanie set this up, but Noon has studied what she does and is, and will be, running most of the sessions from now onwards.

Many Serpies have trained with them, and even when you go to other coaches you will find some of Stephanie’s trademark drills being used. The drills surprise the swimmers at first. And some seem amazingly difficult at first. But if you persevere you will find that they become easier, and at the same time your swimming becomes more fluid and effective.

Stephanie spent a number of years working with different coaches in America and Europe learning different approaches (including Total Immersion and the Shaw Method). What all these teaching approaches involve is the realisation that your speed in the water depends upon the power you can put into each stroke but also how well you can reduce your drag (the way that water slows you down). Her approach focuses on reducing this drag.

You can get a sense of this by looking at five clues your swimming gives you about how effective your stroke is.

One - The noise you make

One of the easiest ways of telling how well you are swimming is to listen to yourself. If you can hear yourself splashing or gasping for breath these are powerful messages that you are not swimming effectively. Splashing wastes energy – energy that should be used to helping you get to where you want when you want. Gasping for breath is also a sure sign that you are burning up oxygen and energy faster than you need. The short-term solution is to slow down and concentrate on making the stroke more fluid. The longer-term solution is to work on getting the stroke right.

Two - What you do with your head

The position of your head affects the rest of your body. It is, after all, the heaviest chunk of you. In the water you see this by the way that, if you lift your head out of the water the rest of your body has to sink and in doing so increases the drag. Learning to move through the water keeping your head low, even when breathing, is a key skill in swimming.

Three - Where your legs lie

Watch other swimmers and you will see that many swim with their legs quite low in the water: and this will mean that they are slowing the swimmer down. Keeping the legs high in the water reduces that drag. Many try to do this by kicking but this means that the kick is no longer propulsive. If you want to go through the water more quickly you need to find ways to lie flat in the water. (By the way notice that contrary to what many beginners think you swim in the water – submerged.) Physics helps. Think of the body as a seesaw pivoting around the hips: if the head and shoulders are high then the legs must sink. So, on each stroke drive the leading arm down and lean in to it as it goes forwards: the legs won’t sink then, and then they can do a more useful kick.

Four - Are you swimming on your front, back or side

This is another aspect of your body position. Many people assume that the front crawl and back crawl mean that you swim flat on your front or flat on your back. Actually, this accentuates the bow wave you create as you move through the water and this slows you down. Rolling from side to side reduces the bow wave and enables you move through the water more easily.

Five - How do you feel about breathing?

Ask anyone learning to swim what the most difficult thing is and more often than not they will say breathing. This is perhaps the most misunderstood and most anxiety provoking area of swimming. The answer is however to do less, to slow down, to relax, to only put just enough work in and all of a sudden you will find that breathing stops being the big problem.

There you are – five simple clues as to how well you are swimming. What more could you possibly want? Well, if it came down to just 5 clues and you could swim better by reading, you are now an expert swimmer! For mere mortals, we can coach you to get the most out of these clues along with a host of others.

Four or so times a year the sessions will include video recording and feedback on your progress. The main sessions are going to be, as usual, on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday mornings, but under Noon’s direction we will be offering sessions on other days and at other pools.

For more information, please contact Noon at strokeworks2@gmail.com and discover how to enjoy swimming