An ideal crawl technique.

[Chris Hobson]

Following on from my earlier post about kick drills, we have got our legs sorted so what about our arms. From my own experience and from watching the kid's classes at the pool, I have reached the conclusion that just about everyone learns to do the crawl by starting out doing it badly and then eliminating faults one by one. First some terminology. Our arms move in a sort of eliptical motion which has two phases. The pull phase when our arm is in the water and we are propelling ourselves forward. The recovery phase when our arm is out of the water and reaching forward before starting the next pull. Now, time to start ironing out those faults.

Hooking. When reaching forward to start our next pull our elbow is bent and our hand is entering the water in front of our face. This is a problem firstly because the hand entering the water at an angle is actually briefly propelling us backwards which we obviously don't want. Secondly the bent arm shortens our pull phase, we want our pull to be as long as possible so bent arm bad ok. My solution to this fault was to over compensate by doing my recovery phase really wide until I got the hang of it.

Head too high. Our body needs to stay horizontal in order to progress efficiently. I've never really understood why this is but if we lift our head up our legs sink and mess up our streamlined position in the water. For most people getting their head down is no problem, they come unstuck every time they have to take a breath. When doing the crawl we breath out through our mouth and nose while under the water. We breath in by turning our head to the side just enough so that we can breath in through our mouth without taking a drink. Whether we breath in every other stroke, every third stroke or every fourth stroke tends to be down to individual preference, I normally breath every three. We need to avoid lifting our head and concentrate on just turning to the side.

Finishing pull too early. The pull needs to be as long as possible. Our hand needs to brush our thigh just above the knee before we move into the recovery phase.

These are the biggest problems that contribute to poor crawl technique. Once these are dealt with we are down to the fine tuning, maybe for a later post.

 

[Lucyr]

All my swimming was learnt by going at the same time as the kids lessons and listening to their teachers correct them to improve their technique! It’s a good strategy. I really miss swimming and would love to go again but not sure how I could get back into it, especially since the suspected chronic fatigue syndrome. I only did breaststroke but was working on my technique and speed.

 

[Lisa5466]

I'm currently having lessons in Crawley. I've managed to sort the legs, arms and face down issues, but can't for the life of me manage the sideways head turn to breathe. Every breath results in a mouthful and a coughing fit! Will keep trying....apparently one day it will all click 🙄

 

[Lucyr]

I'm currently having lessons in Crawley. I've managed to sort the legs, arms and face down issues, but can't for the life of me manage the sideways head turn to breathe. Every breath results in a mouthful and a coughing fit! Will keep trying....apparently one day it will all click 🙄

I don’t think I’d be much good at the sideways breathing either. You’re doing more than me in managing the rest of the crawl though, I only manage breaststroke

 

[Chris Hobson]

I had the same problem when I wanted to change from breathing every four strokes to breathing every three. I had always turned to the left to breath which I could do fine, but in order to breath on every third stroke I had to learn what is termed bilateral breathing, taking every alternate breath by turning to the right. I was either getting a mouthful of water or turning my head so far that I was looking at the ceiling. At the time I was attending the masters swim classes at Beverley leisure centre. The coach there used to split his time between two groups. The proper swimmers and the bunch of wannabees that I was in. At the start of one class I mentioned the problem that I was having with the breathing and he said "Right, that's your task for tonight, get going up and down the pool and by the end of the session I want to see you doing it right." So I set on and by the end of the night I had pretty much cracked it.