THE MECHANICS OF FRONT CRAWL
Why is front crawl the chosen swim stroke of triathlon? And how can we swim it as efficiently as possible? Kicking off this open-water special, coach John Wood breaks things down to make you a faster triathlon swimmer…
Check out any pro field in a triathlon swim – or the pointy end of any age-group competition – and you’ll quickly notice one thing: everyone is swimming front crawl. Now, we get asked about this a lot at 220, and the answer’s yes – if you’re a newbie and want to swim breaststroke then there’s nothing in the competition rules to say you can’t (and you’ll find plenty of other folk at the ‘chilled’ end of things doing the same). But, if you want to be competitive, you have to give front crawl a go. But why is that?
In technical terms, front crawl (aka freestyle) creates more constant and efficient propulsion, while having the lowest levels of frontal resistance. Basically, it’s faster.
Swimming (and particularly freestyle) is inherently complex, with a lot of moving parts. But the best way to improve your stroke is to build it from the foundations up, so that’s where we’ll begin!
Breaststroke is potentially an easier stroke to breathe on, but it’s also incredibly inefficient. In front crawl, the body stays level on the surface of the water so everything stays hidden behind your lead hand and your head, which means you punch a relatively small hole through the water.
Front crawl also puts a lot less strain on the body, meaning you can do more of it to get fitter, stronger and faster. So how do we swim it efficiently?
01 START WITH BODY POSITION
The biggest reason people struggle with swimming front crawl is their body position. If you feel massively out of breath or find your legs are kicking too hard and fast, then these could be symptoms of poor body position. The other thing we tend to see is a reliance on using a pull buoy – athletes swimming faster with a float between their legs than when they’re kicking!
All of this comes down to lacking a solid, strong body position, where your body is as horizontal as possible at all times rather than allowing your hips and legs to sink far below the surface.
To improve this key element, swimmers may be encouraged to ‘look down’ while swimming, but this is only part of the solution. What we really need to do is include ‘posture’ in our swim, i.e engage the core muscles.
By lengthening your spine or standing as tall in the water as you can, and pulling your belly button inward, we can turn the body into a see-saw that pivots over the lungs. This way, when you drop your chin a little and look down, it brings your hips up toward the surface.
By swimming tall and engaging the core/trunk muscles, not only do we reduce our frontal resistance, but it also puts us in a better position to control the water with our arms and helps us make swimming a full-body action, rather than just relying on the arms and shoulders.
A favourite cue of mine is to streamline every time you push off the wall. This does two things: 1. You get used to moving at a faster speed and maintaining at least some of that speed every length; 2.It encourages you to lengthen your spine and reset your body position each time.
When you push off the wall, have your arms pointing forward as far as your shoulders will allow. Not everyone has full range of motion around the shoulder, so it may be a case that your arms are a little lower than straight. This is okay, we work with what we can do. In a perfect world, you’re able to squeeze your ears between your biceps. You don’t need to hold this position for long, just one or two seconds before you start taking strokes.
If you like using a pull buoy, try swapping the float in and out periodically so that you can try to mimic the position you’re in when you don’t have the float. Another drill you can try is to put the float further down between your legs rather than at your thighs – challenge yourself!
DRILL
DEADMAN FLOAT
Float face down, let everything relax. Notice your body position. Repeat, but lengthen spine, lift arms forward, engage core – feel body float upward to some degree (some people will reach the surface, not everyone).
02 MAKE YOUR KICK COUNT
Kicking is an interesting part of swimming, especially in triathlon. On the one hand, your legs don’t produce much propulsion even when done well, plus you want to save your leg muscles for cycling and running. On the other, the legs play a big role in balancing your stroke and controlling your rhythm. The three major issues for people with their kick are either that the legs are too low (connected to body position), that the kick is tiny (barely any amplitude), or that the knees are bending all the time.
“The key for a good kick is that your legs stay long but relaxed. You want to be kicking from the hip with a small bend in the leg”
The ideal kicking rhythm is a two or four-beat kick. That’s to say, you do two kicks for every stroke cycle, or four. Any more and you might be burning more oxygen than needed.
The key for a good kick is that your legs stay long but relaxed. You want to be kicking from the hip (i.e. the whole leg should move, not just the shin/foot), and your leg should have a small amount of bend in it. If your leg stays dead straight, you’ll be pushing water straight up and down, and not really go very far. Think of your leg like a diver’s fin – long, almost straight but not quite.
An exercise that I really like is to kick with your arms by your sides, thumbs pressing into the sides of your glutes. If you can feel your glutes tense/firm up while you’re kicking then you’re doing something right! If you can’t, you’re bending your knees too much.
I like to get athletes doing a bit of kick work in every session. Not because I want them to work their legs really hard, but because it’s a great way of working on both body position and an efficient leg kick at the same time.
DRILL
KICKING WITH ARMS BY SIDES
Press thumbs into sides of glutes to feel if you’re using the right muscles. Face down, lift your head to breathe.
03 ROTATE YOUR BODY
There are four main reasons why we want to rotate our whole body rather than swim completely flat: 1. Increased stroke length/ reach; 2. Further reduced resistance to the water; 3. Bringing the bigger muscles of the back in to play; and 4. Making it easier to breathe.
Many people roll from side to side already – whether they realise it or not! A lot of this comes from trying to stretch as far as they can. Unfortunately, this tends to mean that the body works as two separate parts: shoulders and arms, and the rest. This also means you leak energy and effort. What we want to try and do is keep everything moving together, as one.
Good drills for practising this are side kicking and 6-1-6 (six kicks to one pull). The key here is to balance on your side, to exaggerate the body roll position, and to keep everything as lined up as possible – from fingertips to shoulder to hip and on down toward the feet. The more you can control from your core/trunk muscles, the less your shoulders need to do, and will massively reduce the stress on your arms.
When it comes to introducing that roll back into your full stroke, think about rocking your hips with every stroke – taking the position you force yourself to hold on the drills, and gently going most of the way there. This becomes especially important when you breathe, because by moving your hips and shoulders round you have more space to turn your head.
DRILL
SIDE KICK
One arm out in front, 4-6 inches below surface. Other arm by side. Turn hips so whole body faces the side of the pool. To move to 6-1-6, take one stroke from here and switch sides – try to keep the head still as you turn.
04 PROPULSION AND PULL
What you do with your hands under the water is what generates your speed. Everything else you’re doing is about setting up this stable platform so that you can push the water backward as effectively as possible.
When your hand is under the water the key is to feel resistance, first against your palm and then on your forearm. If you’re at the end of a lane, move your hands around in the water in different directions, feel how you push it in different ways when your hand is tilted at various angles. The key here is awareness.
Drills like sculling build awareness of your hands in space at different points; entry point (position 1) scull is about controlling the water at the front of the stroke, reached forward and a few inches below the surface. Midpoint (position 2) scull is about getting your forearms and hands pressing the water under your nose, preparing for the big power phase of the stroke. Exit-point sculling is getting used to your hands pushing the water right back at your thighs where you can finish your stroke. In all cases, the real focus is on making sure that your hands face backwards as that’s the direction you want to push the water so that you can go forward.
When you aim to engage with the water, or feel the ‘catch’, you need to think about bending your elbow and reaching your hand down toward the bottom of the water. A common cue is to think about reaching over a barrel. What this really means is that once you’ve reached forward, you want to roll your arm over and down into the water so that your palm and your forearm are facing backwards. This is a key part of the stroke, as without this it makes it quite difficult to use your lats, the big back muscles. Think about pressing the water backwards rather than trying to pull it back (and, as a result, your elbows tuck into your sides).
You may choose to use paddles to help improve your pull. These can be particularly useful, but don’t go for something too much bigger than your hands, and use them as a technical tool rather than to just beast your way through a set or session. Just use the finger straps, and this will force you to press your hands on the water securely rather than grabbing and ripping at it. If you’re not holding the water, the paddles will pop off your hands.
DRILLS
SCULLING
Keep the hands moving in the same place wherever you’re sculling. Palms facing backwards, press out, pivot your wrists, and press back in again.
DOUBLE ARM PULLS
Kick your legs along the surface, arms in front, in line with shoulders. Bend your elbows so forearms are pointing downward under your nose. Press the water backward with your forearms all the way to your thighs.
05 TAKE A BREATH
When breathing you want to make as little disruption to your stroke as possible. I like to get swimmers doing lengths of little/no breathing (always done safely, without pushing to/beyond limits). This is to get a feel for a smooth stroke rhythm and getting the hips and shoulders moving and rotating in sync. Then you can introduce breathing, and the only thing that should change is that the head should rotate. As you pull through, turn your chin toward your shoulder. If you’re rotating well, your mouth should clear the water easily – and then you can return your face to looking down.
People struggle with breathing in two main areas. The first is that they go from having a nice smooth body roll when not breathing, and then they go to move their head and the body stays flat – keep the hips moving with every stroke!
“When breathing while swimming you want to make as little disruption to your stroke as possible”
The second issue is breathing very late in the stroke – the head turns and it doesn’t feel like you have enough time or space. But you don’t necessarily need to move your head faster, it’s just a case of turning slightly earlier in the stroke.
TRI SWIM HEROES
Examining the front-crawl technique of three of triathlon’s strongest swimmers…
LUCY CHARLES BARCLAY
Charles-Barclay has a solid background in longdistance swimming. As a result, she kicks her legs a bit more than most triathlete swimmers would do which helps her maintain her rhythm and fairly high cadence. Being 5ft 7in she’s not super tall and doesn’t have very long arms, so actually, moving her arms a bit quicker allows her to keep the power on and move quicker. If her arms were longer, she’d need a huge amount of power and strength to keep her arms moving at the same rate – especially over [an iron-distance] 3.8km.
HENRI SCHOEMAN
Schoeman swam as a junior and has an ‘old fashioned’ style of technique. He reaches a little longer and relies more on smoothness and power for his speed rather than the high cadence of Charles-Barclay. This all comes despite being the same height and weight as LC-B. His recovery is more high-elbowed, with the hand coming through closer to the body, and under the water he gets more of a vertical forearm – that solid catch and control of the water. This requires more power from the lats to help press backward.
JESS LEARMONTH
Learmonth is a fraction shorter than the other two athletes here at 5ft 6in. She has a similar stroke and style to LC-B, but she swims a little flatter, with less body roll or rotation, which means she’s using her shoulders a little more on the pull. Her arms don’t quite come up as high over the water as LC-B’s do, but with all three athletes their elbow comes forward first, before the hand. This helps keep the arm as relaxed as possible and minimises pushing the hand forward – taking the stress and emphasis off the shoulders.
THANKS
Thank you to David Lloyd Swindon for allowing us use of their outdoor swimming pool for this photoshoot. The club has a 25m indoor pool and 20m outdoor pool – find out more or find your local David Lloyd by visiting davidlloyd.co.uk. Thank you also to our two swim coaches who modelled in this feature: John Wood (tricoaching.co.uk) and Caris Hedd Bowen (swimzoneopenwatercoaching.com)