What I noticed yesterday (and a long time ago too, I just forgot it) that if I pull my naval closer to my spine when swimming freestyle, my whole upper body elevates out of the water so much that it makes swimming freestyle so much easier.
It felt like I was one of those guys on a freestyle teaching videos who can swim freestyle with ease. The breathing was easier, the hand recovery was easier, rotating was easier, I was faster and yet more relaxed.
I've always read about how our body should be in the water when swimming freestyle and I had always thought that I had been doing it the right way. I guess I was wrong.
I can't wait to get back in the pool tomorrow and start swimming again with this new technics - for me anyway.
I guess I had my body too deep in the water making it more difficult to swim before.
I think I have to work on my core to have a good posture in the water. I know for a fact that I have weak core muscles.
Does anyone has the same experience?
Any comments welcome
Fishy, check out the "kicking rhythm?" thread from just a few days ago. It had some really good descriptive posts about what it feels like to swim with an engaged core from some swimmers who have been through the "learning curve" on that one. Very good stuff - and it fits right in with your discovery. Sounds like you've hit on yet another way to express what it feels like to swim with an engaged core.
Just saw another video of myself swimming freestyle and was surprised (again) at the disparity between how I feel/think I'm swimming and how I'm actually swimming. Big difference. Even though I thought I was already learning to engage my core, I'm clearly not engaging them nearly as much as possible. So tonight, I decided to try really squeezing those core muscles HARD. It felt ridiculously hard - like, "no way could this be right" kind of hard. It was like a combination of the "pulling the navel to the spine" feeling combined with the "reaching for something overhead" feeling described by vo2 on the "kicking rhythm?" thread. Just holding on to the edge of the pool and squeezing like that, even without swimming, was exhausting. But it seemed to make a big difference when I did try swimming like that. Just like you were saying, Fishy,"It felt like I was one of those guys on a freestyle teaching videos who can swim freestyle with ease. The breathing was easier, the hand recovery was easier, rotating was easier, I was faster and yet more relaxed."
I don't know how long it will take for these core muscles to get used to engaging to this degree. Seems like it could take a while. I could only keep it up for about 50 yards at a time on this first experiment. But now that I have a pretty good sense of what muscles were involved, I'll look for some core-building exercises that target them.
That is awesome.
And BTW I checked out the thread you told me to. It does have a few very interesting posts, advises. Thanks for that, and keep it up
Yes - you did help me! So thanks for sharing your discovery! Hope you have many more and continue to post them here so we can all benefit.
Now there's another thread on this topic under the title "Ditch core work?"
Seems to be an "engaging" topic, ha ha
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