Flat Out Propulsion Drives Un-Flat Freestyle (with video)

by Louis Tharp

This doesn’t work for everybody. It has a high frustration quotient. Not as high as understanding quadratic equations, but similar in that there are two unknowns:

1. Whether a person can transfer the benefits of the drill to propulsion in the swim.

2. How much water you’ll suck in trying to breathe while doing the drill. (Hint: go into breast stroke.)

3. Whether you’ll ever figure out how to achieve forward motion by pressing your chest in the water.

Ok, three unknowns, but solving for aX+bY+cZ = d is too much to ask for in a swim drill metaphor.

It’s called stone skipper, and the fact is, stone skipper is your friend as long as you resolve to not go too fast, not use your feet to kick, stretch your arms and keep them at the top of the water even if it does wear you out, and stop to breathe.

Check out the video:

Here’s what stone skipper does: If you can learn the drill, you will be using your core body for propulsion by pressing on your chest and allowing the resulting reaction to raise your hips. You’ll create this press by stretching your arms in front of you as far as possible. This action creates chest pressure on the water.

All you have to do is let your feet follow behind.

To transfer this to freestyle you’ll want to stretch to provide the downward force on your downward side and then allow this to engage your hips just as you are in the middle of your stroke with the other hand. Yea. It’s hard to describe and difficult to learn.

But if incorporating core body/hips into your stroke for significant propulsion gains were easy, you wouldn’t see 80 pecent of triathletes dragging their hips behind them like so many U-Hauls behind Audis leaving Southern California in 2008.

About:

Louis Tharp is a competitive age-group swimmer and a TI triathlon swim coach who is currently taking a few semesters off from West Point coaching in order to work one-on-one with Nicholas Sterghos, an ’09 West Point graduate and pro triathlete.

Louis Tharp’s book, "Overachiever’s Diary, How The Army Triathlon Team Became World Contenders" is available from Total Immersion.

Read a sample chapter and reviews from the top triathlon and swimming media at Overachiever’s Diary.

Buy Overachiever’s Diary by Louis Tharp on TI. Read a review of Overachiever’s Diary at active.com

His home pool is Club Fit, Briarcliff in Westchester County, New York.

Want to know what Louis Tharp does when he’s not coaching?

December 23rd, 2010 Louis Tharp. 10

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JBeaty

Louis,

Are you proposing to swim freestyle with more of a butterfly like motion as one switches from side to side?

John
http://www.overachieversdiary.com Louis Tharp

Yea, I get in trouble with stone skipper when this question comes up. The answer is no — do not swim with more of a butterfly motion — if doing it causes bounce, undulation or any other drag-inducing activity.

Incorporating stone skipper into freestyle is more focal-point-based and less muscle- and motion-based. The objective is to go faster by incorporating core body.

It’s more like that little vent in the corner of your dashboard that points air toward the side window. If you put your hand in front of it, even with the defrost fan on high, you can’t feel the air coming out, but the window isn’t fogged up, so something is happening.

I think the biggest mistake I used to make was assuming that drills are useless after the basic gross body movements are learned. I’d bore swimmers to death with them when they’d rather be doing high-heart rate activities, so they’d look at them as training wheels to be relegated to the garage as soon as possible.

I think drills serve this gross muscle training goal, but as swimmers become more proficient, drills are one of the few mechanisms available to help us recognize the nuances necessary to go faster. This means they have to become dynamic activities that are incorporated into swimming.

When I read Terry’s blogs, like “Little Known Fact About Speed” [/url]http://www.swimwellblog.com/archives/926[/url], I feel like he is talking directly to me and addressing this nuanced, swimming-incorporated drill structure. I read about his swim adventures and see them as mental and physical puzzles he works out – drills – in order to increase his speed as well as his love for the sport.

This is another way of saying the brain has to direct the muscles.

When muscles direct the brain the freestyle swimmer bounces after doing stone skipper.
franla1917

Any chance the video could be shot such that a the body is in the center of a landscape frame? The diagonal orientation of the body across, what looks like, a portait orientation is disorienting to me. Also, a good portion of the time the legs and/or arms are out of the frame.
http://www.overachieversdiary.com Louis Tharp

Hi Francis:

Yes. I can reshoot it. Steve Jobs and I have this ongoing discussion about why I have to hold my iPhone sideways to get video that shows up in portrait format on my pc but then in…anyway, I’ll reshoot it and send Steve the bill.

Thanks for reading my blog.
Greg_A

Wow, stone skipping looks like a great technique. I am hopeful that it will help many swimmers with their freestyle. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I hope to come back here from time to time to check out other training techniques that you might have to share with us. This looks like it might be difficult but worth it [url = ‘[url=]http://www.telugufilmblog.com’style=’color:rgb(253,253,237)[/url]]poker sites
http://www.swimwellblog.com terry

The drill he’s performing is actually body dolphin. We used to – but no longer – teach it for Fly and Breast. We abandoned it because it had great potential to produce swimmers who felt the point of the two strokes was bobbing up and do rather than moving forward.

StoneSkipper, which we also let go, was a Fly-only drill that involved bring the hands back to hips after a chest pulse. Why do we no longer teach it? Because we now emphasize a fly stroke that is more about landing forward than pushing back.

Since we let it go, you’re welcome to appropriate the name.;)
http://www.overachieversdiary.com Louis Tharp

Thanks Terry. This is why we all should go to the coach training camps regularly. Swimming proficiency is a moving target and we’re very lucky to be around the smart guys like Terry who keep finding better ways to teach swimming.
kueli

Louis, I love your posts —both their form and their content. But this one I just do not get it. To me stone-skipping looks like a fly drill. AndI have just learnt that it is no longer being taught —where can I find the updated butterfly doctrine, I wonder. After 3+ years of TI this power from the core seems to me as elusive as the Chesire Cat. But the few times I manage to summon it, it feels much more like a hip rotation than like a hip undulation that you show in the videoclip. Pray tell, what is it that I am missing?
Louis Tharp

Hi Javier:

Thanks for writing. Although I compete in butterfly and individual medley events, I’m not a TI butterfly coach/instructor so I can’t help with fly. But, if you go here [url]http://www.totalimmersion.net/store/home-page/betterfly-for-every-body.html[/url]you’ll get what you need to know about the stroke.

If you want to talk about power from the core, I can help explain it, but it can be like Americans understanding intransitive verbs. One day you just get it and it makes sense. But this doesn’t help if you haven’t figured it out yet and you’ve got a grammar test.

You are right to use the Cheshire Cat analogy.

I’m more existential with hip involvement discussions, so I’m comfortable using a fly drill to help people learn freestyle hip connection. I know many students aren’t though. A lot of people want to know exactly what to do to incorporate core body into a stroke. I’m hoping, however, that your brain will make some connection between the fly drill and hip involvement in freestyle and the intransitive verb euphoria will take over. In a strict training environment such as TI, I need to make sure everyone understands that I don’t have an easily transferable set of steps to guarantee power from the core.

I work one-on-one with athletes and they all eventually get it. I’ve never seen someone jump in the water and swim with connected hips. People think about not drowning, breathing, moving arms and legs, and then start thinking about hips.

Also, swimming is something you do differently as you get better and it’s really impossible to bring hips into the picture when gross body movements aren’t controlled yet. So we ignore core body propulsion for the most part and that’s our fault for not emphasizing that you may be kicking gently with your feet to complete drills but that doesn’t mean you will move your feet faster in order to go faster. We need to make the transition to core body propulsion a coming attraction when a swimmer first gets in the water.
MichaelP

“This doesn’t work for everybody. It has a high frustration quotient. Not as high as understanding quadratic equations, but similar in that there are two unknowns” I think that you would have to have a very strong core in order to be able to do this. Most swimmers do but I agree that this is not going to work for everyone [url = ‘[url=]http://www.netnewspublisher.com’style=’color:rgb(238,238,237)[/url]]Poker Sites