How to Swim Fast Using techpaddles

And you are going to notice a big difference after about 4-5 weeks of training with this paddle on such slow motions, it's not to be done fast. Let's talk about what the techpaddle does. Swimming propulsion is all about an early vertical forearm position. An early vertical forearm position is something that coach is often and commonly refer to as a catch. Did you catch water better than you can paddle, you go faster, simple. You are going to put the hand in and the first thing that you want to do is, after you get a good streamline position, is take the knuckles, move them down underneath the elbow and this is not an easy position again, and so take your time. Watch this. I can go like that, that's wrong. It's going to be knuckles down, elbow up. So you go towards the streamline or toward the mid-line of your body, outside your mid-line and then after that you can make the stroke in, that nice stroke in and finish your stroke. Every instructor and coach needs to get the techpaddle on kids soon. You want to develop an early vertical forearm position and make it a base and a foundation for success in the future. I am going to show you some drills that you are going to be able to show kids to get that early vertical forearm position ingrained in muscle memory so when they get older, they are going to be successful and they are going to have the catch, that Olympians have. If Olympians spend hours and hours trying to develop and keep that early vertical catch, you need to do the same thing with kids and early. Now let's talk about how you can best utilize the techpaddles in the training that you have to use to get the most. We are going to go through a couple of things. We are going to go through dryland exercises which are going to encompass isometrics, weights and therapy bands or stretch cords. Then we are going to go through the actual swimming drills. We call them exaggerated Dog-paddle drills, X-dog, Double-dog. We call them right arm, left arm drills, we call them Hesitation drills. We are going to go through all those things so you can get the most out of your techpaddles. Let's start with dryland exercises, things that you can do outside the pool that can accentuate, accelerate an early vertical forearm position. Remember, everything we are going to do is to develop muscle memory to help you get into the early vertical forearm position. Let's start with an isometric drill that's really simple. I call it the Coach-T drill. You go like this, you bring your hands over your head in a soft-C position and put one hand on top of the other and press down and hold it at 80% of your ability for 20 seconds, simple. Just like this. You can also put your hands out here and just tense up an isometric challenge to hold these hands in that position for as long as you can. You are going to feel your shoulders immediately begin to feel like they are in an exercise. There is another exercise that you can do, you can put your hand on top of a -- this is a starting platform and just hold that position. You can hold two positions and hold them there. Try not to bend your arms like this. When you start bending your hand and taking out of a nice solid position, you are going to get into a bad habit. We only want about 9 to 10-12% of a bend in your hand at all times. You can straighten out of course, but right at the beginning I see some swimmers go like this, that seem correct. You want to keep that palm in this forearm really solid. That's one isometric drill. Let me show you how you can use the stretch cord. Most coaches have this available to them. You can swim stationary but you can take a stretch cord like this, just a regular surgical tubing and if you have small children, have them stand on it. Place the hands like this and remember don't bend the forearms or the wrist here and hold them up here and you will hold this position in that soft-C position that catch position for as long as you can. Now this is pretty tough. Now if I want to make this tougher, I will grab the stretch cord lower and if it's really too difficult, I will just grab it a little higher. This is simple. Now I can hold this position for a long time. What are we doing? Developing these muscles to get muscle memory so this position is easy to get into. I want to tell you something, the lats are very strong muscles. They overpower your stroke. You want to drop it with strong lats here and we have got to develop these muscles in our shoulders to combat that. The other thing you can do and -- let me, use your imagination. Use imagination, and take a weight 5 pound, 2.5 pound dumbbell and hold it up here in this position. See this position that I am into right now, this is the position, not here but that's good drill. You can do this. You can do this. But try to get into this position of the soft-C, and outside the shoulders. We don't want you to start developing habits that have you start doing this kind of swimming, okay? Extension outside the shoulders and look, this is the position, if I raise my hand with weights or holding them up here and holding the position as long as we can. That's going to help you develop the muscle memory and accentuate and accelerate your progress towards success and times that rock. Now let's start with the drills. The drills and drills to -- it's not practice makes perfect, it's perfect practice makes perfect and you don't want to start swimming with these on, because you are not going to accelerate your improvement as much you want to do with drills. Tighten them up, easy to do, one at a time, make sure they are comfortable. They are meant to give a little bit so you don't cut off circulation. Lets talk about the Double-dog or X dog drills. We used to do these in San Antonio with my good friend George Blott (ph), a master of drills. He can make and do certain things with drills and this is one of the things. You are going to -- let me use this table as demonstration, just to show you. If I were in the water and I were teaching this drill, it's called a Double-dog drill. All you do is swim with an extension, catch. Extension catch. Now that's a breaststroke drill but it's also a freestyle drill because the freestyle, the breaststroke and the butterfly have an identical or very similar catch to their stroke. And early vertical forearm position is important in all the keystrokes. Let me do another drill. A one arm dog and we used to call X-dog, exaggerated dog paddle, where the swimmer just does this. They only go to the catch position and then they extend again. They don't have to swim all the way through. If Olympians can use this drill, I want to make sure our little toddlers and they learn to swim in the young age groupers use this drill a lot. Use X-Dog, Double-dog. Hesitation drills, you can swim with them. I don't recommend swimming with them all the time. I want you to do drills, perfect drills. Extension, stop, go through with a regular stroke. Stop and hesitate, go through with your stroke. Remember, early vertical forearm position. There is a couple of other ones you can do, you can do right arm only, left arm only. Remember, you want to give your swimmers and swimmers focus on just one thing, is your knuckle down and your elbow up. If you are doing that, you are going to get the catch. When you take them off, you are going to feel spectacular. Let me go through a couple of drills that we do for our backstroke. I love them for the backstroke. Let me use this side here without tipping over. You have to go deep. Remember deep first, 18, 12-18 inches deep. Once you get into this position, this is what you do. Make sure your hand does not break the water, your knuckles gets under the water and this is the catch. If you watch the Olympics, you saw this dramatically in the wonderful Olympic films that we saw of the world record holders and the Olympians in backstroke. You can do a Double-dog drill on your back. Remember, all we are looking for is knuckles up, elbows down, the opposite of the other competitive strokes, for backstroke. Right arm down, left arm back, coaches, swimmers focus on drills, on drills, on drills. Then if you are an Olympian already and you have a great catch, put them on and just start swimming them, this will help you accentuate and remember, 1/100th of a second sometimes separates an Olympic champion from second place. You can get better by doing drill after drill, after drill. Please, work on the techpaddle as often as you can. Start out slow increments of time. Your shoulders are very weak, so just make sure you spend just a short amount of time first and then as you get better as these muscles get stronger, you can use them longer. Take them to your swimmings, warm up with them, make sure you take them to every swim practice. You can't be without this techpaddles.