Now if only I could swim "right"

[cjsmith]

I have developed a weird style that has arms from, oh, the breaststroke or the butterfly or something, and a scissor-kick from the sidestroke. My head bobs on every stroke; at the high point I breathe, and even at the low point my eyes are usually still out of the water. (That last is very handy for me. I veer if I'm not looking.) I'm bothered by the asymmetry of the scissor-kick, but not enough that I spend time doing it the opposite way.

I have almost completely forgotten how to do the basic crawl. I can flutter-kick, and I am comfortable doing that when I am on a kickboard, but the flutter-kick doesn't go well with what my arms want to do. The arm and head motion of the crawl feels very wrong to me, and besides, it puts water in my ears. I am convinced this is the main purpose of the crawl. :-)

Comments

[firecat]

Assuming you want GAS: The most efficient change I can see you doing to swim "right" would be to learn one of the breaststroke kicks. A benefit would be that since breaststroke gets most of its momentum from the kick, you could choose how hard to work your arms at any point in your workout.

There are a bunch of web pages with animations and videos to show you different swimming styles.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yes, I bet it would be good to learn a symmetric kick that goes well with the lurching arm motion. A web page would be a great start because I don't have to take time off work (or significantly decrease my precious relax-at-home time) to learn! :-)