Analysing my stroke

One of the sessions we had on the Mallorca trip the other week was some stroke analysis. It wasn’t done in great depth – with a group of 16 it’s hard to concentrate on any one individual for too long. However, it’s the most analysis my stroke has ever had, so I found it fascinating.

The first element was to film the stroke from three different angles: overhead; side-on underwater; head-on underwater. It’s the first time I’ve ever had the chance to see my stroke like this, so it was very illuminating. Here it is:

This is a film I took of the TV screen which was playing the film of my stroke, so the quality’s not great, but you get the idea. There were five main things that I thought / spotted as I watched this:

– Ooh look, that’s me swimming – as I said I’ve never seen myself swim before.

– My legs are going faster than I expected – however thinking about it I think that this was about it being earlier in the morning and chilly in the pool. I was just trying to wake and warm myself up.

– My right arm is close to crossing over – this had to be pointed out to me, I didn’t really spot it, but I don’t think this is a major issue, but certainly something I need to be aware of.

– My left hand goes down and then back up after entering the water – it looks really pronounced on the side-on view. I suspect that this is something that I do to try and elongate my stroke and extend the glide phase, but as you can see (although I was told too) it’s quite inefficient and I’m holding the water back rather than gliding through it.

– I just don’t rotate my right side at all – and this is something that I’m going to really work on.

But I think the main thing I took from watching this is – Ooh look, that’s me swimming! Deep insight there!

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