Hi! My name is Tom Topolski, inventor of the Early Vertical Forearm Trainer, we called it Techpaddle. I am not going to talk about the techpaddle right now. You can see that in other films that I have made about the Early Vertical Forearm Trainer, how it can help you drop some times and break through some plateaus if you are at some. I would like to talk about exercises.
The Early Vertical Forearm position isn't going to be improved upon by doing push-ups, by doing pull-ups, by working on a Vasa Trainer or any other kind of pulling exercises. All those things are good and they are important, you need to do them. I like the Vasas a lot, but they are not going to help you very much with the Early Vertical Forearm position, because it's not a pulling movement. It's the opposite of pulling.
If you want to get faster, setting up your stroke is very important. Setting up your stroke means you are getting your position of the hand and the forearm in front of you and you are able to hold, you can hold that position unless these muscles in your shoulders are able to hold it in that position, and remember you're swimming forward, so water is pushing on your arm and it almost is helping you to drop it and you don't want to drop your elbow.
Dropping your elbow is one of the critical flaws in swimming. You don't want to lay out on your stroke either because that's not propelling you anywhere. It might help you breathing. If you want to just go across the ocean and swim a long distance, laying on your arm is probably very important for being and be a little bit more comfortable, but for speed laying on your arm doesn't do much of anything, except slow you down. You have to be in a propulsive part of the stroke and the Early Vertical Forearm position does that.
Let's talk about the exercise. So doing that, simply raising your hands in a EVF position is important. Hold it there for a while, now I am just holding it up. Now if I tense them up, I -- do in an isometric. If you can do an isometric at 80% of the maximum, you can do it for at least 10-20 seconds, you are going to get a training response that means it's going to get better.
So if you look at this position that I am in right now and if I were to bend over, you will notice that it mimics the Early Vertical Forearm position. So isometrics, do them regularly. You are doing, in fact, we have sets where we finished our set, and work out of the pool and our kids are like this. And as much as they do it, they still have a difficult time and some of them more difficult than others to get into that position. Okay, start young, you know you are not going to hurt yourself doing an isometric. 8-10 second isometric, it gets some results, if you do it consistently.
Now I want to show you some other things that you can do that are called the Early Vertical Forearm training exercises. We started out with the EVF position in an isometric position and you can take some surgical tubing, really light stuff. We use the red and yellow which are the lightest surgical tubing with our middle schoolers and we go to green, which is a lot more difficult, but -- you can get them into this position and you can have hold it, like this in that the Early Vertical Forearm position. We do it religiously everyday before practice as one of our dry-lands are, we do Early Vertical Forearm position exercises along with our others. It complements our dry-land training. We got to deal to this along; we do a lot of other exercises as well.
Now that's an Early Vertical Forearm position exercise. Here is another one to help you because remember I told you that, I didn't tell you but there are about 12 different muscles that help you get into an Early Vertical Forearm position. Four of them are smaller muscles that you need to work on and these exercises really try to develop that kind of muscle group.
You also can bend down with the stretch cords and I am standing on them right now and do some back drills and you want to get into position, so your elbows are pointing up and your inner position where they are at 90 degree angles and you are working on the bad muscles and trying to raise and that's another important, you know, area of your back and shoulders that need to be worked on.
I'll take these 5 pound weights which is pretty heavy for me, so 5 pounds is a lot, you don't want to be working on 5 pounds unless you can keep them in this position for a long time because your shoulders aren't really strong. You don't want to hurt them, you don't have to hurt them. None of these exercises are going to be impingement exercises that need to make your shoulders worse, you want it stronger, but it takes some time. So use very light pieces of weights.
These are 5, you can used 2.5, half pounds, half pound of weights and so on to get the shoulders in a strengthening mode or strength gaining mode where it's going to get improved upon.
So those are the exercises we do that complement our dry lands and I wish you all luck in the world and work on your EVF, it takes time and after about 6 weeks of working on it religiously, you can get some time drops that you're probably not been used to or experience and I think you are going to be very, very happy. Good luck to you.
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