Hi! My name is am Coach Topolski. I am going to talk about a topic that was brought to me or brought up in an email to me about Techpaddles. I had a couple of different questions. One was -- there is a left and right by the way. This is the left one.
A young lady was having some pain right here from the techpaddle. The techpaddle is kind of an interesting piece of equipment. You don't wear it like a hand paddle, you wear it for 50-100. Now I myself, I swim with it a lot of time and I have been trained that more is better, but it's not true with the techpaddle.
The techpaddle is very technical piece of equipment, it's to remind you to hold the position, it forces your hand into a position that's early, whether it's a straighter arm or a bent arm, everybody has, every good swimmer has a great catch. An early vertical forearm is one attribute every single good swimmer has. And it differentiates Olympians from beginners. That's how important it is, I think everybody should have one of these.
If you are having a pain right here in a mark, that's means you are pulling down too far. Your hand is bending more than 12 degrees and that's not a great type of characteristic for a swimmer. You know, you'd think that, that helps you but the fact of the matter is if you are bended, you have to unbend it and you are going to unbend it at the most powerful phase of the stroke. So, if you bend prematurely more than 12 degrees with your hand feeling that pressure, you have to keep it straight and when you are keeping it straight, you lose pressure at the most critical time.
So, if you have a feeling like this is pushing on your hand too much and it hurts, you're pushing down too far. Another thing is if you see a stress break, not a stress break, but you'll see it starts turning white, you've got swimmers that are pulling the paddle down like this with their hand. So, they're doing this with their hand and that's not good. The early vertical forearm trainer is meant, you'll hold it firmly, okay, but not too firm.
Like a golfer almost holds, a golfer, I mean it's like Jack Nicklaus you would say, you want to be able to feel like you are squeezing a bird and not letting go but not killing it. You know, it's got to be a nice type of grip, not too hard, not too soft.
Now, the techpaddle allows you to correct it, as a coach can correct things because if you grab it harder, it starts moving more to this side. If you grab it lighter, it kind of moves it to the other side. So, the techpaddle can be used in a variety of ways to improve your stroke if a coach knows what he is looking for.
So, if there is pain here or stress fracture here, you are doing this with your hand. Keep it up a motion this way, one motion together. Okay and you'll feel instead of a pressure here, the whole paddle will be pushing into your forearm.
Thank you. If you have any questions, please email me at tomtopol@netzero.com. I also have the Facebook page, I'd like you to join me as one of my friends and you can ask me any questions and I can do my best to try to answer them for you. And good luck to you. It takes 3 to 8 weeks for some positive changes depends on how coachable you are, how is that muscle memory creates a habit quickly or not. So, staying with it everyday, our swimmers use these techpaddles every single day right after their warm-ups and they do their isometrics, EVF isometrics and we've been seeing some terrific drops across the board and hope you do too. Thank you.
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