By Louis Tharp

Hi Bill:

Thanks for writing and for over-rotating.Without over-rotators coaches would be forced to work as investment bankers, and after the first hundred million where’s the fun?

Question:

Lou, when I first began learning TI, three years ago, the coach emphasized "stacking" the hips and shoulders in drills and whole stroke. Not long after that, I discovered that Terry’s emphasis had changed to "just-enough" rotation. How do you teach the "just-enough" amount of rotation?

Bill Lang, December 15, 2010

Seems like in swimming we ask people to do something and then a few months later we ask them to something else. Stacked hips vs. a more modest rotation is an example of this. The part that’s sometimes hard to understand is why we ask a swimmer to do something and then we say, "don’t do that anymore."

There are two reasons. First, we figured out that "something" doesn’t work as well as something else. Second, you don’t need to do that something anymore. Stacked hips, for me, falls into the second category. It’s harder to achieve balance with stacked hips than on your back or stomach, so I like to ask swimmers to do it.

Generally if you can sustain balance on your side with a gentle kick, you’ll be able to do it easily with limited rotation necessary for fast freestyle. There’s also a breathing drill I like in the stacked hips position that alerts you as soon as you become unbalanced.

But, practice makes permanent, we say, so what happens when a swimmer takes the stacked hips drill into active swimming? The swimmer doesn’t swim as fast. Efficiency stays high, but speed suffers.

Perhaps you don’t want to increase your speed. Perhaps you are happy swimming in max glide position, and if you are, then do it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with going to stacked position before taking every stroke as long as you are balanced. But, what can you do if you want to increase your speed? And how do you know how much  rotation is enough?

Easy, raise your elbow and shoulder as you go into your anchor position.

You can stop reading now and get in the pool and play, or you can continue reading for the Louis Tharp philosophy. (This is when West Point cadets’ eyes roll back in their head and they dream of life back on the farm in the square states.)

I’d like to clean out all this focus on what you’re not supposed to be doing.

There’s a positive energy that’s lost when we focus on something we’re doing wrong instead of focusing on something else we can do correctly that will make the bad stuff go away.

Example: when a person is over-rotating, it’s not productive to tell them they’re over-rotating. Instead, I tell them to raise their elbow and shoulder. This probably will cure over-rotation without all the emphasis on what the swimmer is doing wrong. If it doesn’t I’ll tell a swimmer to do something else positive, or video tape them and let them work out how they can add more speed to their stroke.

So forget about the concept of over-rotating or flat swimming, and try focusing on a high elbow and shoulder position. If you like the speed that comes from modifying your stroke in this way, your brain will figure out how much to rotate in order to maximize it.

Side note: some swimmers question this process and say something like, "just tell me what I’m doing wrong," and my answer is "what you’re doing wrong is that you’re trying to focus on what you’re doing wrong." And then I remind them that their ex used to do this, and that’s why this person is their ex.

So, forgetting about whatever it was you were doing wrong when you wrote to me, as you move into your anchor position with your leading hand, feel a stretch in your shoulder that tells you your hand is reaching as far forward as possible. When this happens, raise the elbow and shoulder of this stretched arm so that you are prepared to recruit your lats and abs more effectively as you begin to take your stroke.

Then incorporate the Ryan Chapman (see his blog below) visualization of the rock climber and get on with your stroke.

It’s hard to show you how to raise your elbow and shoulder using words, I know, so don’t get frustrated at the limitations of words in this answer. I’ll try to remember to shoot 30-seconds of video of this next time I’m at the pool, and put it in a future blog.

But until then, consider this, too. Swimming fast and efficiently is an ongoing negotiation between glide and power. If you want to go through the water with minimum resistance, you could push off from the wall and go into a stacked hips position and hang out there. If you create a tight cylinder through the water you’ll glide with minimum resistance.

You’ll also cruise to a stop.

In order to swim, you’ll need to apply propulsion and this requires a series of movements that induce drag. Add this to the simple fact that going faster in the water increases drag.

So while balance to the novice swimmer means keeping your hips off the bottom of the pool, balance to an advanced swimmer is negotiating the right amount of glide vs. power so the net drag throughout the stroke is low and the net propulsion is high.

So what does this have to do with stacked hips?

If you stack your hips on every stroke you’re spending a lot of time getting to this low-resistance position. That’s why it feels so good — because it’s low resistancee. Problem is that time factor.

A stacked, or over-rotated swimmer, spends time getting stacked while the person in the next lane is sacrificing some glide in order to get on the power.

This means that person in the next lane is swimming a bit flatter than the stacked swimmer in order to get positioned for the next application of power — the next stroke.

How does this person in the next lane do this?

By raising shoulder and elbow in the anchor position.

 

 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.

Learn more about Nicholas Sterghos.

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?