Freestyle Technique - Anchoring Your Arm in the water

Anchoring your arm is not well understood, but it's the most important part of maintaining power in swimming. Here I explain where power should be developed and why anchoring is so important.
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[@HERU-ls9jn]

Your technical analysis is second to none. ❤

[@adrianburton6477]

I am working on getting back into shape, and I would love to compete in a Sprint triathlon next year. Your training videos are outstanding and so informative. Please keep them coming I am a big fan!!!

[@SwimCycleRunCoach]

Let us all know how you go and which type of videos might be of help. Good luck.

[@laciko12]

Your explanations are just on a whole another level. Thanks a lot

[@SwimCycleRunCoach]

Glad you like them!

[@mabelcharlotteschilfrohr5108]

Thank you ! - it is exactly what the great Aussie coach Bill Sweetenham was also always saying!!

[@chunyuenlau56]

So anchor, and apply power to propel your whole body forward past the anchor, with the maximum power at the end of the stroke. The last part is very important and highlighted by many elite long distance swimmers too. However, many factors come into play as well such as hip turn, leg kick and body remaining horizontal.

[@personal-coach]

Thank you so much Wayne. Great video!

[@cflee534]

Very clean and fully understood. Thanks

[@SwimCycleRunCoach]

Glad it helped!

[@leventakn6448]

Very helpful! Thanks!

[@SalimSalim-vd3wl]

من فضلك شرح للسحب الذراع على شكل حرف s والمحافظة على السباحة على خط مستقيم

[@trykozmaksym]

Thank you - just like you promised! Now watching 100m Olympic swim in slow motion - it looks like anchoring works even for sprinters... and I thought they only pedal like crazy. It makes perfect sense to increase power till the end of the stroke - like a crankshaft moving fastest near top dead center to keep piston's speed constant. I wish I watched this a few years ago.

[@barrycrichards]

What about the mass times acceleration force of the recovering hand which is directed forward on the hand entry. Seems like a meaningful amount of momentum in the right direction.

[@robohippy]

Well, this brings, to my mind anyway, which is correct, the hips drive the shoulder rotation, or the shoulders drive the hip rotation? It seems the majority favor the hips driving the shoulders. In every single slow motion freestyle clip, no doubt that the pull arm engages first, then the hips rotate, then the recover arm follows through, which to me, implies that the shoulders drive the hips. For sure, there is 'spiral' energy as my martial arts instructors have called it where energy is transferred from one end of the body to the other. To generate greater rotational energy, you need an anchor. With feet on ground movements, think Bruce Lee's 1 inch punch, you start that rotational energy at the feet, it goes through the hips, and out through the shoulders and arms. With swimming, since you don't have anything solid to anchor to, your shoulders and arms, when you start the pull, this gives you a leverage point. You have no real leverage point from the feet and hips. This is the only explanation I can think of that tells why the first kick in the 3/6 beat kick is the strongest. It is because it is at the long end of that spiral motion. The hips are the pivot point or maybe fulcrum, not the anchor.

[@SwimCycleRunCoach]

Yes, the swinging arm takes the shoulder over and the hips follow. However the aim is to move both the shoulder and hip over at the same time, ideally. That means a strong core is important, giving the swimmer a better ability to align the right shoulder and the left hip. If we think of those two as making a plane and the opposite shoulder and hip a plane, then we can try to keep each plane aligned, with no twist. Cheers

[@robohippy]

@@SwimCycleRunCoach Well, no one can argue that the core needs to be strong so that you don't lose energy along the power line from one end of the body to the other, either spiral like freestyle or back stroke or whip like butterfly. I have heard maybe one other coach besides you comment that the hips and shoulders should move at the same time. I have never seen that in actuality. In any sport that uses any type of spiral/twisting motion to generate energy, more obvious with land sports than with swimming, the feet start the rotation, the energy goes through the hips, then shoulders and then out the arm. This is a sequential movement. If you don't observe very closely, it might appear that the hips and shoulders move at the same time, but the hips always move slightly before the shoulders and arms do. With swimming, there are those who say that the hips drive the shoulder rotation. Since the hips have nothing to 'anchor' onto for forming a base for generating that spiral energy, and since the feet only provide 10%+ of the propulsion, they have nothing to anchor against, they can not drive the shoulders. Your catch arm starts the shoulder rotation, and by the time you get your catch arm to the power point at about 45 degrees or so, you have some thing to anchor against, then the recover arm follows through. So yes, the recover arm is driven by the hips, but the hips are driven by the catch arm. I have watched many slow motion videos of freestyle, and never seen anything different.

[@Sc0rphionx]

@@robohippy I'm studying it, practicing it and analyzing it and, several sources indicate that the hips are the one that activates first (and should be) in order to provide you a thrust, "ideally" you shouldn't be "sliding" too much, you should slide what your hip force let you instead of how long you extend your arm. PLEASE and honestly Please correct me if I'm wrong because I'm trying to learn the best I can.

[@robohippy]

@@Sc0rphionx This is one of those ongoing debates, some say hips drive shoulders, and some say shoulders drive the hips, and I am in that group. So for any land based sport, throwing, kicking, or punching, the action is sequential as in it starts at one end of the body and goes all the way through to the other end. With any land based sport, you have to be anchored to the ground as you will never get full power until you utilize the drive from the feet and lower body. Use of the core muscles having them like spring steel, is essential to this movement because if your core is not engaged, then you lose the rotational power when you 'crack the whip' because a loose core will absorb energy and not transfer it from one end of the body to the other. It is not a whip like a bull whip, but a whip like the rattan cane used in martial arts or maybe twanging a metal ruler off the edge of your desk. So, taking this to the water, with the exception of breast stroke, you get maybe 10+% of your drive from your feet and legs, and the rest comes from your upper body. This makes it impossible to get any drive from your lower body because it has nothing to anchor to, and you have very little thrust of leverage from the lower body to generate any torque to add to the power of your stroke. This is where the anchoring of the pull/catch arm comes in. You have leverage and some thing to anchor on when you get to the 'power phase' of the stroke. With freestyle, it is easy to see that the shoulder on the pull arm rotates first, then the hips, and then the recover arm. This is a sequence. I have heard a couple of coaches say that the hips and shoulders rotate at the same time. With freestyle, it is easy to see this, in any slow motion video I have ever watched. With back stroke it is slightly different, but if you observe closely, the shoulders rotate slightly before the hips do, and again, any slow motion video shows this. If you don't observe very closely, it can appear that they move at the same time. They do come close to moving at the same time, but if they did actually move at the same time, you would not get full rotational energy. With the high stroke rate sprint styles, the pull arm/shoulder still activates slightly before the hip rotation. This 'spiral' action is essential in getting the most out of the movements. Just watch Bruce Lee's 1 inch punch video.

[@sollompusetsang6653]

At what age should all these skills be taught or even be perfected in the LTADP?

[@SwimCycleRunCoach]

Hi Sollo, great question. These skills should be taught from the beginning, with teachers demonstrating the skills in the right way with excellent demonstrations on poolside. Young swimmers try to copy what they see the teacher doing and most problems occur because the demonstration just isn't good enough. As coaches we spend a good deal of time trying to correct poor technical teaching of stroke mechanics. Start wrong and it's soooooo hard to correct. Long term athlete development isn't a problem if the fundamentals are there.

[@drdecco1]

I think rather than a literal “Maximal usage of energy” he means - maximum efficiency in consuming one’s store of energy. No?

[@boutroschalouhy2931]

You need to get straight to the point and the sound quality could be better- maybe use a microphone

[@carloschorao7386]

A fantastic articulation. Thanks for the explanation.

[@jelle191]

Your content is great but you really have to work on the audio level differences from scene to scene:)

[@paulofischbr]

This is one of the most difficult concepts of swimming and needs months of practice to become natural.

[@АндрейЗаостровцев-т7х]

Agree

[@shekharrudrabhatla8594]

Great tip. Thank you. It is so simple yet powerful. Your analogy quite helped me understand better.

[@venkateshmc7212]

I get the concept, but how do we implement it? I mean, how do we push the rest of the body forward while keeping the catching arm "stationary", as against pushing the catching arm backwards?

[@scotthsimpson]

That's where the cycling analogy is a little problematic. You don't want your arm to be going round in a cirle and applying the power at the right point in the circle - anchoring the water means getting your forearm vertical (elbow toward surface, hand directly below, pointing to bottom of pool) then pulling staight back - so it's a straight line pull, not a circle. You get anchoring by maximizing the time your forearm is in that vertical position, which is effectively increasing the surface area you're pulling on. This is a bit simplistic as there's rotation as well, and some up/down movement, but that's the basic principle.

[@ViennaDisco]

Thank you for this, can't wait to hit the pool.

[@mille1000boy]

As a cyclist who has turn to swimming due to a knee injury this makes perfect sense, thank you 🙏 I have a decent high elbow stroke but have probably been pulling too hard to soon. Is it fair to say that if I still can’t get a decent anchor once a start pulling at the correct point then I need to look at my body position to reduce any excess drag?

[@mary-chrisstaples9767]

Best explanation ever!! I can imagine seeing this when I practice!

[@hcwollaston]

The girl in the pink suit has a beautiful stroke. Her perfectly horizontal position looks unreal.

[@user-pl4eu5jc5w]

Good analogy! Thanks for the tips!

[@SwimCycleRunCoach]

glad to be of help.

[@mabellera2000]

brilliant way to think about it and visualize it and explain it. the dynamics of the pull rather than the technique. hair splitting, but this puts bigger picture/objective of the stroke in a new perspective!

[@SwimCycleRunCoach]

Ta

[@anthonybeckman9665]

Very helpful! Thank you

[@999goldendragon]

Great couch you helped me so much in my technique.

[@SwimCycleRunCoach]

Thanks

[@justincu9613]

非常有帮助的视频，谢谢！

[@johnnybutler523]

Great advice , thanks. There must be some good “dry land” drills to help with this .