So the little swirl that shoutatthesky sees with the hands is often taught as part of breast-stroke, to catch the last bit of water.
I went to the pool and had someone video me with my little digital camera and came to the conclusion, Will really does have a really good stroke for the discipline. I do not have a very good stroke (breast stroke has always been my weakest stroke style wise, butterfly my best)
Wes does point out that part of the fast cycle time is because these divers really are over-weighted and that makes sense to.
Two more questions:
1) Why don't either Martin S. or Will T. do the descending glide hands first?
I am talking about the point on the way down when the athletes are negatively buoyant. It seems they would be faster doing a hands up glide (kick yourself off of a wall and see the difference of how far you can make it across the pool, hands up and hands down. It makes a difference in DNF)
I assume that the reason is relaxation, and the trade off for speed vs. relaxation goes to relaxation here. Though it seems like more stretching could made hands up more relaxing. Any other thoughts?
2) What about adding a very small Dolphin kick to the end of the pull, right before main kick and recovery?
My personal tests suggest this is a little bit faster, but I don't know about any more efficient. It evens out the speed a bit more because at the end of the stroke you have very little power, and the dolphin kick produces almost no drag. The idea for this comes from breast-stroke wall starts.
http://www.goswim.tv/vids/kevinunderwater.mov
Again efficiency is less of an issue that pure speed, and here the swimmer is doing a big dolphin kick which finishes as the stroke finishes. Imagine a smaller kick that starts later but finishes at about the same time. Maybe this is just because I have a big belly and it smooth out my stroke a bit and if I was more Martin S. shaped I would have no desire to do it
.
Thanks for clarification and thoughts on this!
