Monday 14 December 2009

BALANCE ...

“A swimmer cannot improve their efficiency or velocity without first forming a relationship with the water”


Establishing your Balance:

The human being is shaped into a land-based animal through basic design and a lifetime of exposure to the land environment. As a swimmer, you need to recognise that the aquatic environment is very different and much more complex than your familiar home on land.

You will also need to understand that the land developed body structures, reflexes, and instincts very much limit your full potential when they are applied to the art of control and movement in the water.

Your skin is stretched around your skeleton, and this skeleton can be divided into two distinct parts:

• Your Axiel skeleton
• Your Appendicular skeleton

The axial skeleton includes the bones in the center of the body, namely the spine, rib cage, and pelvis. The appendicular skeleton includes the bones that support the extremities.

Improving your performance through the water will mean keeping the resistance you create as low as is humanly possible. You can reduce resistance or water drag by establishing correct posture and good balance in the water.

The traditional paradigm of increasing performance levels through increasing the amount of power you can produce has second priority to reducing drag. Bill Boomer, the best technique-coach in the world, explained to me, why and how you can achieve this.


Your Problem:

During you training session things are going smoothly, then you start to realise that your legs are too low in the water and are creating a lot of drag. You feel the force of this tremendous resistance and your immediate reaction is to kick even harder to get your legs up towards the surface, where you know they should be.

At first your legs do ride higher, but the energy costs are also high. Before long, your legs begin to tighten up, your heart rate soars, and your lower body is lower than ever!

Your Short Term Solution:

So, what do you do? You grab a pull buoy or put on a pair of fins and then continue your workout. Congratulations, you've successfully treated the symptom. Now let's do something about the root cause.

The Facts:

You are a land-based animal by nature and design, and whenever you enter the water, you are not just a traveler to a new land; you are a visitor inside a new world. A world that is approximately One thousand times denser than air you breathe.

Water will create an environment where all your forward motion will encounter considerable resistance. Buoyancy will try to push your chest up towards the surface, as gravity tries to pull your legs down towards the bottom of the pool, and the resulting torque force twists you towards a vertical position. If this torque effect is allowed to continue you will assume a position known as a ‘Dead Mans Float’.


Buoyancy and Weight:

These are opposing forces that act upon the whole of your body, through a single point. If these forces act through points that are close together then your body will be able to achieve a stable horizontal base position in the water. If these opposing forces act through points that are apart, a Torque or Rotation away from your stable horizontal base will be created, as described above.

Your weight is the force that is exerted by gravity (a downward force) and this force acts through your Center of Gravity or COG.
Buoyancy provides an upward force on the object.

According to Newton's first law of Motion, if the upward forces (including your buoyancy) balance the downward forces (including your weight) the object will either remain at rest or remain in motion at a constant rate. Otherwise, it will accelerate upwards or downwards.


Buoyancy is the force that is equal to the weight of water that is displaced (an upward force) and acts through your Center of Buoyancy or COB, which is located in your chest area, and therefore closer to your head than your COG.

The relevant magnitude of these two opposing forces, and the relevant position of your COG and COB will be the determining factors in enabling you to achieve a very stable horizontal base, from which you can direct your swimming from.

As you have grown and matured, a very natural change in the size and the composition of the tissue in your body has taken place. An increase in your bone mass and muscle mass has made you denser or heavier in the water.

At the same time an increase in your lung volume and body fat has made you less dense or lighter in the water.
Your swimming technique will have become influenced by the relative balance of these forces as your body has matured.

These changes have resulted in a number of trade offs, that manifest themselves in your ability to produce a propulsive force against a large increase of resistance you will encounter, due to the change in the structure of your body as it moved through the water.

The platform upon which you must apply force (the water) is far less stable than the ground you are used to pushing against when you run or walk. Further more because of your land based posture it is not intuitively obvious to you how to maneuver in a fluid.

Boomer’s Universal Law of Rotation:

States that” on land you will rotate towards your platform of stability, in water you will rotate away from your platform of stability, when you lose your balance.”


You will need to achieve a dynamic balance that allows you to move forward efficiently through the water, yet you have few instincts or behavior patterns on which you can rely. Rather, you must first learn to find your balance. If you don't, a large percentage of the energy you will impart to the water will tend to increase your own instability rather than propel you forward.

So, how can you achieve this dynamic balance of opposite forces? Bill Boomer’s answer is to think of your body a First Class long lever.

Why a First Class Long Lever?

This lever can be considered a balancing tool that is experience driven; as you develop you learn the basic principles of balance via learning how to stand. The more you ‘played’ as a child the more this lever became involved. Once you achieved your aim of learning how to balance, this lever became very efficient in the use of energy. The fulcrum for this type of lever is located between the force and the resistance.

There are two other types of lever that you as a human being use they are the Second Class lever and the third class lever.

The second class lever is utilized to gain force. Its fulcrum is located at one end, force at the opposite end, and the resistance can be anywhere in-between the fulcrum and the force, but usually close to the fulcrum. This lever is associated with your emotional response via your ‘Fight-Flight’ mechanism and is extremely inefficient in its use of energy and is extremity focused. This lever is utilised by 99.9% of all swimmers. In the scenario above the swimmers legs started to sink, so the swimmer went to their legs for support, now that is a very good example of second class levers in action!


The third class lever is used to gain speed. It has its fulcrum located at one end, resistance at the opposite end and with the force (your body) relatively close to the fulcrum. You make use of this lever every time you recover your arm when swimming front-crawl. This lever has high quickness coupled with a low force output.

Achieving Balance:

To achieve balance in the water you will have to move your center of gravity forward along the your established line, towards your center of balance, and the closer you can get these two opposing forces of nature to each other the less torque rotation will be acting upon your body.

To really counter these forces you will have to extend your arms forward and point your toes away from you.

By gently ‘Loading’ your line (gently shrug your shoulders) you will increase your downward pressure on your center of buoyancy.

It is from this balanced position that you will create your stable platform from which you can direct your arms and it is also from this position you can establish your rhythm line that will direct your stroke from your hips.

This is a crucial condition for having the ability to increase your velocity through the water.

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