Improve Your Swimming Technique Making Eddies With Your Hands

A Minor Change That May Improve Your Swimming Technique

How can you improve your swimming technique? This is a question that I often get asked by adults. In fact, it is only asked by adults because usually, kids don't care (a fact that surprisingly makes them easier to teach).

The answer may be "Eddies". No, I don't mean the person Edward (Eddie for short). I mean the eddies that we create in the water when we swim.

One of the curiosities of swimming is the means of propulsion. Most people think that when you swim you push the water away from you and that is what makes you move. But this is not the whole story. Like all objects, water wants to stay where it is doing what it is doing and so it resists any attempt we make to get it to do anything else. Instead, when we push water, it creates eddies in an attempt to avoid being in any place other than where we want it to be.

The irony is that the reason we can move in the water is that we can use these eddies to push against and that is what allows us to move. If it weren't for the eddies we would make a whole lot less progress if any at all, in the water because there would be less to push against.

The problem that some swimmers have is that they are not making efficient use of the eddies that they create when they swim.

Wait... Get Your Lesson Plans Here

For Example

If your fingers are too close together or too far apart you are not taking advantage of the eddies you create when you move your hands through the water. The same is true of your feet if you are not allowing your feet to flip flop about you are not taking advantage of the eddies that are created by your kick and the same applies to your arms, you need to move them in such a way as to take advantage of the eddies that your movement creates; that is you should move them in such a way as to take advantage of the eddies they create as they move through the water.

Below is a video that I tried to show what the eddies look like. They are not very successful but if you look closely you can see the eddies between my fingers. The idea is to more or less "Hold on to these eddies for as long as you can when you swim. The more effective you are at holding on to them the more efficient your swim will be.

So the next time your swim teacher asks you to move your hands, legs or arms in a particular way and you don't understand why, think of Eddy... (I mean eddies). Grabbing them (not him) as much as you can, will make a big difference to your swim.

Enjoy     
Richard