Hey Reader,

I have watched a lot of swim video. Hundreds of athletes, same camera angles, same slow-motion replays. After all those hours in front of a video editor, I know that the faults wrecking your swim are almost never the faults you think you have. You think you need a stronger pull. You believe if you just “swim more” it’ll fix your stroke. You show up to the analysis ready to work on your engine, and then we roll the tape and find out the engine needs to wait—the problem is the parachute you’ve been towing around without knowing about it.

That parachute is drag, and drag is the enemy. A swimmer fights two forces: the water pushing back against the body, and the swimmer’s own attempt to push that water backward for propulsion. Most triathletes pour their energy into the second fight and ignore the first. This gets the priorities backward. You can train your propulsion for years, but if you swim with your hips dragging along the bottom of the pool, you hand most of that work straight back to the water. Speed in the pool comes from subtraction. You get faster by doing less of the wrong thing at first, not more of the right one (that part comes later).

The part that makes swimming frustrating is that you can’t feel any of this. Water is an alien environment. Your brain spends most of its budget making sure you don’t drown, which leaves very little left over to notice that your right hand crosses your centerline on every stroke, or that you hold your breath until the last possible second. This is not a character flaw. It’s biology. It’s also the entire reason video analysis exists, and the reason I can spot these five faults from across the deck while you swim along convinced everything feels fine.

I see these five in almost every analysis I run. Four of them slow you down by adding drag. The fifth robs you of propulsion you already earned. None of them ask you to get stronger. All of them ask you to get out of your own way.

Let’s go through them, and eventually you’ll look like Image A, leaving behind Image B.

You're Holding Your Breath

We talked about this a lot last week, so we won't linger here overlong.

This is the fault I’m happy to see, because I can fix it that very day. Most stroke corrections take weeks to integrate. Swimming is more like golf than cycling, where a hundred small movements add up to a swing, and changing one of them takes time to settle into the rest. Breath-holding is the exception. If you can fix it this morning, you’ll swim faster this morning.

The swimmer takes a breath, puts her face back in the water, and then holds that air until the next breath comes around. She thinks she’s exhaling but she isn’t. I’ve watched hundreds of analyses, and the tell is the same every time: face goes down, mouth stays shut, and then a burst of bubbles erupts right before the head turns to breathe. That burst is the giveaway. She dumped the air at the last second and grabbed for the next one.

Two problems come from this...(read more)​

What are the other four faults, you might ask, in the service of brevity?

1. A straight arm catch-and-pull
2. Crossing the centerline at the front of the stroke
3. Stroke is hand-and-shoulder initiated instead of hip initiated
4. Losing the "front quadrant" of the stroke

Maybe you've got only one of these, and maybe you've got all five. Either way, it wouldn't be a bad idea to go ahead and read more on our free Substack (did I mention it was free?).

Happy training,

Chris