Dave Mullins swims 234 mtrs DYN - new NR

[OceanMan]

Oh ! Ok, sorry.

I am pretty sure that Bill said once that paddles are not allowed for DNF or CNF.

[Goran Colak]

I think he ment paddles fod DYN.

[efattah]

Canadian Greg Fee often did his dynamics with short fins, doing dolphin kick, glide, handstroke, glide. He managed up to 115m, which was pretty good since using normal plain kicking about 85-90m was his max.

[ant williams]

I first saw Natalia swim in 2004 over in Cyprus. I was amazed with the fluidity of her style - a constant swim technique. I have no idea who was the first to use the kick glide effectively. I began using it in 2002 as it just felt natural. Back then I was swimming max's of around 170m with a soft Waterway M1 (and no neckweight). All the sports science boffins at the local university talked me out of the kick glide as they insisted the cost of accelerating after allowing myself to slow on each kick was making a very basic technical error of efficiency. After 8 months of constant swim technique I threw in the towel and went back to what felt right for me.

The kick glide style doesn't really suit the WW M1 fin as it is easy to spill water and doesn't have enough floatation. I bought a Russian Hyper fin that is super-floaty and have changed my technique to suit the fin. The main change was using the floatation (as Kerian mentions) to "pre-load" the fin in to my next kick at the end of the glide phase. I initiate this by relaxing the hips and knees. Coupled with the floatation of the fin, it sets you up for your next kick with almost no physical effort (but takes a whole lot of practice).

For me, the key has been to understand what functional time I can swim while holding my breath and adjusting my swim technique to suit. Using Dave Mullens as an example, he can swim 200m+ using a variety of techniques. But the styles he uses are relatively slow when compared to a freediver like Peter Pederson (Dave's 234m swim took around 3mins 40secs). Swimming slowly I run out of breath by 3mins 30secs - and travel around 200m. So increasing my speed seems to be helping at the moment. I still swim at a pace slow enough for me not to accumulate much lactic acid. And when I see (or hear about) guys like Walter, Stig, Alexey, Henning and Dave swimming so far using a kick glide variation I think that it is at least as competitive as using a constant swim style.

[pehtran]

Here is a nice example of an exelent kick/glide technique from last years MadCup... I am always impresed by it (minus the finish of course... )

podvodni video posnetki | foto / video | freediving competition Maribor Apnea Days MAD CUP 2007

(Klick on the athlet Mitja Stampfer DYN.)