kick efficiency
hey guys,
(preface: this is kinda off the subject of monofins, but swimming with guns, it's kinda hard to pull yourself throught the water with your arms. hunting is not something you want to get your whole body into)
deeper blue is the first place i've heard of people really using the mono's to their advantage. i'm in both stiffnesses of the cressi gara's. i've learned from several fish on how to increase my speed/efficiency. really, i sh%$ you not. when we hunt mutton snapper they have a way of bursting out flutter kicks... gliding... flutter kicks... then more gliding. it's not a continuous kick. and, they haul ass! it actually makes a cool sound, cause they do it so intensely. but it's for such a short time, i don't imagine they use a significant amount of energy.
well, we've tried it. using bi-fins(and this is the only way i'm considered bi) we just try to kick out short, powerful sweeps. maybe three of them, then coast. this is the only way i get to the surface, now. it's awesome, powerful, and the time you get to coast is a great time to transfer energy stores.
being an engineer(please forgive me) i've thought about how in every type of medium there is a terminal velocity sort of effect. well, everyone knows that certain fish are more adapted to swimming at speed than others. so i figure that dependant on personal hydrodynamics, you should have a sort of hysteresis curve on your speed v. energy. this means.... please bear with me... that as you increase your kick speed/power you will increase your relative velocity(swim speed). and, if you think about having an unlimited amount of energy and you do use it, there will only be a certain max speed you could possibly attain underwater. lost anyone yet?
but, we don't have an unlimited energy supply. we're actually trying to conserve our energy. and we're stingy! you think that's stingy, try working on the power supply systems on satellites! but, back to speed v. energy... as we slowly increase our kicking energy we should slowly get a proportional response in our speed. there comes a point in time where the amount of energy we're increasing by is not resulting in as much speed increase. this is called saturation. for example, if your car didn't have a floorboard to stop the accelerator, do you actually think your car would go faster? or do you think that if you powered a ceiling fan with 220V instead of it's required 110V it would spin twice as fast? no to both. so, everyone's going to have a certain speed with a certain type of fin where they're at max speed without wasting energy. it means that they're getting a linear response to their energy input.
when we're chasing a fish, we can close the gap quickly with these flutter kicks, without looking like we're going nuts. it seems like we're jumping up to a faster pace, then using the momentum to glide. when we start to slow, another burst of flutterkicks. the fish don't notice anymore effort on our part and next thing you know, we're in range. bamm! gotchya!
also remember that there are different types of muscle fibers that range in aerobic characteristics. white(fast twitch) fibers are completely anaerobic as opposed to red(slow twitch) fibers which are packed with capillaries and require the big 02. black athletes have a larger percentage of white fibers than white athletes(on average). that's why you see that the majority of olympic sprinters are black, and the majority of marathon runners are white. the ability to oxygenate red fibers is much easier than recharging white fibers. all has to do with stamina. i think this may also have something to do with efficiency, although oxygen is a key component in that kreb cycle thingy we learned in biology101. anyways, half of this seems about 80% logical. just thought i'd share.
alright, back to work...
later,
anderson
ps. i'll be posting my thoughts on spearfishing with mono's later. i have quite a bit to comment on that.
