Went to the pool again yesterday to try to build speed. Didn’t manage to get much faster, but did my exercises. I did notice that my heart rate wasn’t always at the level I wanted (a bit over 160) — I found I was running out of breath before I was able to do that.  But I did manage to get it generally into the 150-160 range.

Slept in today because my body felt like it needed it. Hopefully that will translate into some speed gains. I’m still quite tired, for whatever reason.

Went to the pool last night and executed my plan for interval training.  Some observations:

1. I must have been fooling myself to think I could do 25 yards in 45 seconds continuously. It’s probably more like 50 or 55 seconds.

2. When fresh, I can do the 50y in 1 minute, take a 15 second break, then do the next 50y.  But later into the workout I found myself taking more like 1:10 or 1:15, then taking a 20 or 30 second break.

3. Methodologies 2 and 3 are fairly unnecessary since I’m already pushing myself pretty hard when I do methodology 1. I probably should just do 2 sets of that (I didn’t really have time for a third set).

4. My heart rate towards the end of the workout was around 150-160. My max heart rate is supposedly 194 (although I’ve never seen any instance of that in all my training). 85% of that is 165, so I’m probably coming in a little below target effort for high intensity exercise, although not by much.

5. The 15 second breaks are quite convenient for measuring your heart rate.

I have a dinner tonight so I’m going to try to swim at lunch, but I’m fairly tired now so I’m not sure how well it’s going to go.

Had a bit of a breakthrough on my stroke technique today. It’s a bit hard to explain, but I tried getting my hand way out of the water, and keeping it out, until I had rotated my body to stretch it far forward, ready to enter again.  The effect of this was to cause my body to lie more flat in the water, which raised my shoulders and armpits above the surface.  In turn, this allowed me to swim much more rapidly — I felt like I was gliding on the surface, propelled forward like a strange water strider.

With my new stroke, I was able to get my best lap time down to around 30 seconds, where before I was struggling to get 37.

I experimented with some other technique changes as well, but the results were inconclusive.

I’m starting to suspect that the ideal head position may vary by person, so long as it’s “reasonably” pointed downwards.  The trade-off is that a higher head position allows you to put more power into the stroke (since you have an arched back), and it also facilitates breathing without raising your head too much because there is a bigger bow wave.  Naturally, you generate much more drag with the face not pointed straight down, so there’s a big disadvantage too.

This video of Ian Thorpe shows him with a rather high head position, so clearly it works well enough for the best:

This video came from this site, which has more info on head position.

Another interesting observation from the Thorpe video is that he enters his arms into the water at about a -20º angle (if 0º means putting your arm flat on the surface of the water, and -90º means putting it in straight down pointing toward the bottom of the pool).  However, he doesn’t just start pushing from that angle. Rather, he rolls, allowing him to stretch his arm and actually straighten it to a 0º position, except under and parallel to the surface of the water.

I tried doing the “Thorpe stroke,” but it didn’t seem to work too well for me. I find that placing my hands directly on top of the water and pushing down helps me stay flat on the surface and stop tilting, which would cause drag. It also helps me reduce drag by aiding breathing — under Thorpe’s stroke, I have to raise my head a bit and thus tilt my body away from horizontal.  Nevertheless, I did notice Thorpe’s stroke was a bit more efficient, presumably because I’m not wasting energy pushing down.  It also encourages more body rotation, which is supposedly an efficient way of using your core muscles to help you swim.

I think I’m more or less good on my technique now — there are certainly things I could improve, but it might be good for me to move toward a focus on building speed by doing intervals.

Most recently, I’ve been working on my freestyle technique. I found that they key to being able to do it aerobically was to change my breathing technique.  Until I changed, I was constantly getting water in my nose and mouth, making it difficult to breathe fully.

For me, the secret was the following breathing algorithm:

1. Do not “blow bubbles” underwater with your mouth or nose.  Although this can help the efficiency of your stroke, if you don’t have enough air to blow out when you surface, it’s too easy to end up inhaling water.

2. Turn the head to the side, just out of the water. Don’t turn too far or you’ll actually fall in deeper.

3. While turning the head, keep your mouth closed, and forcefully blow out air and water from your nose.

4. When fully out of the water, open the mouth briefly to inhale, then close it well before turning the head back.

In this setup, one always breathes out from the nose, and breathes in through the mouth.  Thus water never really has a chance to get into your system and cause you to cough or choke.

I spent my 40 minute workout today trying to improve my breathing system.  I think one error I’m making is turning my head too much out of the water, so my body starts dragging in the water, instead of remaining hydrodynamic, like a torpedo.  I practiced keeping one goggle glass in the water while breathing, but it didn’t seem to help too much.

Indeed, I’m not sure my breathing is the main problem with my technique: I tried swimming a bit while holding my breath, and I didn’t seem to go appreciably faster.  Unfortunately, I forgot my watch, so this was fairly subjective (to the extent I quantified it, it was based on whether I took more or fewer strokes to cross the pool).

I did experiment a bit with swimming on my side at different angles to the bottom of the pool.  It’s incredible how much faster you can go when your body is parallel to the bottom of the pool, rather than dragging in the water.  That clearly demonstrates that keeping head turning to a minimum is important.

Supposedly you can breathe in the “bow wave” formed by your movement in the water.  I’ve honestly never been able to observe this. Maybe I’m already doing it?

I also experimented with different arm strokes (again, the idea of thrusting my hand into the water at an angle, versus putting it in flat and letting it drop).  The hand thrust system does seem a little better, but not much.  It also makes breathing a bit more difficult, since I can’t push off the surface of the water to raise my head enough to take a breath.  (My head isn’t close enough to the surface to easily just turn and breathe.)

Rotating my body also seemed to help a bit in terms of speed.

Overall, a fairly inconclusive day.