Keep It Simple In Swimming!

By Wayne GoldsmithThree Key Learning Points:* Propulsion is Newtonian, not aeronautical. Reach out, grab the water, pull straight through.* S-patterns, keyholes and question marks are obsolete - they just haven’t been told yet.* There is no perfect technique. Every swimmer is different - every technique is different.There are a million things written about swimming technique every week.Go to Google. Go to Gemini. Go to Chat. Go to Claude. Go to any of the online swimming or triathlon forums.You will find everything you could possibly want to know about swimming technique online and unfortunately a lot of it is wrong.I want to talk about the big picture stuff - the things I think every coach, every swimming teacher and everyone coaching coaches and teaching teachers needs to sort out in their own head first.And it starts with a phrase everybody knows.Keep it simple, stupid.In our case - keep it simple in swimming.K.I.S.S.Bernoulli: the theory the fluid mechanics experts laugh at:A long, long time ago, in the in the 60s, 70s and 80s, work came out about propulsion in swimming being built on “Bernoulli’s principle”:* Hand pitch angles had to be 45 degrees on entry in fly, back and free.* The human arm as the wing of an albatross.* The human arm as the wing of an aeroplane.* Hands as hydrofoils, moving through water the way birds fly and planes fly.It was complicated. It was very difficult to understand. And a lot of very good people struggled with it - which should have been the first clue.My friends, the reality is that the contribution of the hands and forearms working like hydrofoils and albatross wings is negligible.I know people who are genuine experts in Fluid Mechanics including an old friend who advises the Air Force on design issues. When I raise Bernoulli’s principle being applied to human beings using their hands like aircraft wings, he laughs at me. My son is studying Fluid Mechanics at university right now. He asked his lecturer about it - and got the same response.There may be some lift effect in breaststroke. There may be a small influence of lift on hand entry.But do your homework. Do your own research. And look at what’s actually happening in the water - which is the most important evidence there is.Get hold of some underwater footage of an international swim Meet and watch what the good swimmers are doing. It’s basically Newtonian physics. Reach out. Grab the water. Pull straight through.The stuff in the triathlon magazines, the stuff in the front section of your Learn to Swim journals and coaching books…..a lot of it is simply out of date.Patterns: the shapes we invented and can’t let go of:While we’re here, let’s do the other one: Pull patterns.In freestyle we used to say - touch, then trace an S. In butterfly - make a keyhole. (Although not many people nowadays have ever seen a keyhole!)Exaggerated S patterns. Question marks. Keyholes. Obsolete. All of it.Slow down some front-on underwater footage of world-class swimmers in any of the four strokes and look at what you actually see.It’s simple. It’s straightforward.You do not see complicated hand patterns, exotic pitch angles, keyholes and weird shapes in the vast majority of good swimmers.All of that came out of textbooks written in the 60s, the 70s and the 80s. And for reasons nobody has ever adequately explained to me, it still dominates swimming textbooks, coaching courses and teaching courses around the world today.Don’t teach weird patterns and bizarre shapes.Reach out. Soft hands. Grab the water. Keep pressure on the water. Pull straight through.Perfect: the only kid with perfect technique:The other thing about swimming technique I share with coaches everywhere is this.There is no perfect swimming technique.The only kid whose technique is textbook perfect is the kid whose picture is in the textbook. And that technique is perfect for exactly one person - the one in the photograph.There is no single stroke model that works for all swimmers, all ages, males, females, all strokes.The great and late Gennadi Touretski said the words that should be on the T-shirt of every Learn to Swim teacher on earth:“Every swimmer is different. Every technique is different”.Every swimmer is different. Every technique is different. Remember that.The Five H’s: get these right and you can teach anyone to swim:I once tried to get thousands of Learn to Swim teachers working in a very large aquatics management group to teach