Seatan
07-29-2014, 01:46 PM
Being a really slow swimmer when not wearing fins, I was reading a book on swimming and discovered there is a mathematical reason why swimming with arms extended in front of you (like in the proper dolphin kick) makes you go faster than doing the same kick with your arms at your sides. I found it interesting and thought I would share.
Reference: Laughlin, Terry (2012-03-13). Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way To Swim Better, Faster, and Easier (Kindle Locations 500-515). Touchstone. Kindle Edition. (http://www.amazon.com/Total-Immersion-Revolutionary-Better-Faster-ebook/dp/B006VHJ53Y/ref=zg_bs_159908011_1)
Longer Boats Are Faster. Longer Bodies Are Too.
When I was still pretty green at the coaching business, I was lucky enough to have two very gifted swimmers on my team and smart enough to realize I could learn more from them than they could from me. The first thing I noticed was that no matter how fast they swam, they made it look relatively effortless. That didn’t come as such a surprise—I’d observed this in accomplished swimmers before— but why did they also somehow look taller in the water than everyone else? The best swimmers, I’ve noticed over the years, always do. And it has little to do with their actual height. A skilled swimmer who is only 5'10" looks taller in the water than an unpolished swimmer who is 6'2", and it’s no illusion. Better swimmers do “swim taller”—something anyone can learn—and because they do, they go faster. It’s one of the fundamental principles naval architects have been using for over a century to design fast ships. In the 1830s, a fever broke out among clipper ship owners to shatter the record for the fastest ocean crossings. The boats had only sails for power and couldn’t simply install bigger engines, so more speed had to come from better hull design. W. Froude, a naval architect in England, tested various vessel shapes in a tank to learn which would produce the fastest design. His key discovery was that, all other things being equal, a vessel’s drag decreases as its length at the waterline increases. Translation: Longer boats go faster—and easier. To this day, his calculations, known as Froude numbers, are used to predict the potential speed of various vessel designs. What applies to clipper ships applies to you. In the vernacular of naval architecture, your body—along with racing yachts, rowing shells, or canoes—is a “surface-penetrating moving body” subject to many of the same laws. If a longer vessel can go faster, a taller swimmer can too. And taller swimmers do. In the 100-meter freestyle, swimming’s premier sprint event, the fastest men in the world average about 6'6".
There are ways you can swim tall too, regardless of your height. And they are important to learn because they put mathematics powerfully in your favor. Take a hypothetical six-footer who swims the mile in 25 minutes. Feed him some growth hormone so he sprouts up to nine feet. He doesn’t train any longer or harder, he doesn’t get any stronger or fitter, he doesn’t change his stroke in any way. He just gets taller. But his improved Froude number predicts that he can probably do the mile in 18 minutes! Fine. But what if you’re “only” 6'0" and at thirty-something quite likely to stay there? Well, as far as the water is concerned you can still grow, stretching your six feet to nearly nine feet from fingertips to toes by simply extending your arm overhead. And if you can stay in that extended—taller—position for more of each stroke cycle, you improve your own Froude number enough to go much faster on the same amount of energy. Here’s a simple experiment to prove it. Under water, push off the pool wall as hard as you can with your arms at your sides (the six-foot position) and glide as far as possible until you surface. Then do it again with your arms straight and streamlined overhead (the nine-foot position). See how much farther you go? That’s also the secret for swimming taller, what my mentor, Bill Boomer, calls front-quadrant swimming, or FQS. In the illustration below, consider the waterline as the x-axis and an imaginary vertical line through the shoulder as the y-axis. The two lines divide the swimming space into quadrants, the front quadrant being the one in front of the shoulder and under the water. FQS swimming means always keeping one or the other of your hands in that front quadrant. (At the beginning of each stroke, of course, both hands are there.) It’s really just another way of saying “swimming tall,” of lengthening your body line and making you taller than you really are. Leave your right hand out in front while the left is stroking, then begin stroking the right just as the left returns to the front quadrant, and so on. One hand doesn’t start until the other one’s nearly back. Leaving each in place just a split second extra can make a big difference in your Froude number. Common sense? Well, actually not so common. Why else would almost all the swimmers in my weekend workshops show up the first day as rear-quadrant swimmers? Why else would I have worked so hard when I was in college at being a rear-quadrant swimmer? Because it’s easy to fall into the trap: “I move my body by pulling my hands back, right? To get it going faster, then, I just move my hands back faster, right? Gliding along with hands stretched in front? All that will do is slow me down!” So my college swim strategy was like a bathtub windup toy: Dig in and pull back as soon as my hands touched the water. Unfortunately, it guaranteed that I would spend precious little time with either hand out in front of my head. I swam short, and it showed. I took 24 to 25 strokes per length, compared to the 14 or 15 I now use in my early fifties. Stroking fast was making it harder to swim fast.
Reference: Laughlin, Terry (2012-03-13). Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way To Swim Better, Faster, and Easier (Kindle Locations 500-515). Touchstone. Kindle Edition. (http://www.amazon.com/Total-Immersion-Revolutionary-Better-Faster-ebook/dp/B006VHJ53Y/ref=zg_bs_159908011_1)
Longer Boats Are Faster. Longer Bodies Are Too.
When I was still pretty green at the coaching business, I was lucky enough to have two very gifted swimmers on my team and smart enough to realize I could learn more from them than they could from me. The first thing I noticed was that no matter how fast they swam, they made it look relatively effortless. That didn’t come as such a surprise—I’d observed this in accomplished swimmers before— but why did they also somehow look taller in the water than everyone else? The best swimmers, I’ve noticed over the years, always do. And it has little to do with their actual height. A skilled swimmer who is only 5'10" looks taller in the water than an unpolished swimmer who is 6'2", and it’s no illusion. Better swimmers do “swim taller”—something anyone can learn—and because they do, they go faster. It’s one of the fundamental principles naval architects have been using for over a century to design fast ships. In the 1830s, a fever broke out among clipper ship owners to shatter the record for the fastest ocean crossings. The boats had only sails for power and couldn’t simply install bigger engines, so more speed had to come from better hull design. W. Froude, a naval architect in England, tested various vessel shapes in a tank to learn which would produce the fastest design. His key discovery was that, all other things being equal, a vessel’s drag decreases as its length at the waterline increases. Translation: Longer boats go faster—and easier. To this day, his calculations, known as Froude numbers, are used to predict the potential speed of various vessel designs. What applies to clipper ships applies to you. In the vernacular of naval architecture, your body—along with racing yachts, rowing shells, or canoes—is a “surface-penetrating moving body” subject to many of the same laws. If a longer vessel can go faster, a taller swimmer can too. And taller swimmers do. In the 100-meter freestyle, swimming’s premier sprint event, the fastest men in the world average about 6'6".
There are ways you can swim tall too, regardless of your height. And they are important to learn because they put mathematics powerfully in your favor. Take a hypothetical six-footer who swims the mile in 25 minutes. Feed him some growth hormone so he sprouts up to nine feet. He doesn’t train any longer or harder, he doesn’t get any stronger or fitter, he doesn’t change his stroke in any way. He just gets taller. But his improved Froude number predicts that he can probably do the mile in 18 minutes! Fine. But what if you’re “only” 6'0" and at thirty-something quite likely to stay there? Well, as far as the water is concerned you can still grow, stretching your six feet to nearly nine feet from fingertips to toes by simply extending your arm overhead. And if you can stay in that extended—taller—position for more of each stroke cycle, you improve your own Froude number enough to go much faster on the same amount of energy. Here’s a simple experiment to prove it. Under water, push off the pool wall as hard as you can with your arms at your sides (the six-foot position) and glide as far as possible until you surface. Then do it again with your arms straight and streamlined overhead (the nine-foot position). See how much farther you go? That’s also the secret for swimming taller, what my mentor, Bill Boomer, calls front-quadrant swimming, or FQS. In the illustration below, consider the waterline as the x-axis and an imaginary vertical line through the shoulder as the y-axis. The two lines divide the swimming space into quadrants, the front quadrant being the one in front of the shoulder and under the water. FQS swimming means always keeping one or the other of your hands in that front quadrant. (At the beginning of each stroke, of course, both hands are there.) It’s really just another way of saying “swimming tall,” of lengthening your body line and making you taller than you really are. Leave your right hand out in front while the left is stroking, then begin stroking the right just as the left returns to the front quadrant, and so on. One hand doesn’t start until the other one’s nearly back. Leaving each in place just a split second extra can make a big difference in your Froude number. Common sense? Well, actually not so common. Why else would almost all the swimmers in my weekend workshops show up the first day as rear-quadrant swimmers? Why else would I have worked so hard when I was in college at being a rear-quadrant swimmer? Because it’s easy to fall into the trap: “I move my body by pulling my hands back, right? To get it going faster, then, I just move my hands back faster, right? Gliding along with hands stretched in front? All that will do is slow me down!” So my college swim strategy was like a bathtub windup toy: Dig in and pull back as soon as my hands touched the water. Unfortunately, it guaranteed that I would spend precious little time with either hand out in front of my head. I swam short, and it showed. I took 24 to 25 strokes per length, compared to the 14 or 15 I now use in my early fifties. Stroking fast was making it harder to swim fast.