Rotation on freestyle - how much is too much?

Well if his balance is poor why not some balance drills on land, and water combined with core strength.

On Land:
- Planks/Bridge with arms on swiss/exercise ball.
- Do these on sides too, staying balances
- Planks/Bridges with toes on swiss/exercise ball, hands on ground
- Hold these positions with good head position and tight core (Suck bellybutton to spine)

In water do different drills, swimming side to side keeping a tight line. Lots of streamline kick.

Other balance drills in water:
- Float with a flutterboard under the chest, streamline arms, kick water. Keep flutterboard balances.
- Add 2 more flutterboards under chest (3) when swimmer is comfortable with the first.
- Keep going until you hit 5-6 flutterboards and can do streamline kick on these boards.
- Make them do this same drill on their back.

- One good with the flutterboards try things like big floating pool balls under their chest and doing streamline kick with them staying under.

When working on making the kick stronger do combined sets of good streamline kick to work body position, and short intense kick with flutterboards.

IE:
2-3 x [100 Streamline Kick, 4 x 25 Kick @ 60-90 seconds, try to go faster than 20 seconds]

Do 25m intense kick sets until they are say, 20 seconds or faster. Then build to 50's @ 40 seconds or faster (on say 2:00) until they can do 75's under 1:20. This is a great baseline for kick.

Drills like one-arm freestyle breathing low and holding the non-moving arm out in front of them should work well too.

Hi Tyler...what do you mean by "lots of streamline kick?
Thanks

Hey, I'm developing a tool "analyzing" the front crawl timing so everything sounds to me like a timing issue. In fact my tool just "paints" shoulders rotation in the phase space of the long axis rotation and/or hips rotation. Nice pictures, loops/bubbles, every swimmer has her/his own.

Anyway. World class (male) swimmers who rotate shoulders a lot often start the pull a little wider with humerus in neutral position or even with a slight outer rotation. And yet they do not loose any efficiency precisely thanks to the long axis rotation. The key point is to end the pull narrow, close to the body.

So my tip (I estimate 20% chance that it works) is as follows:

1. Wider entry (1/11 o'clock and while drilling 10/2 o'clock).
2. Begining of the pull with slight outer rotation, as if we wanted to sweep inward.
3. Dynamics of the pull is from wide to narrow (most of the long axis rotation contributes to this dynamics and thanks to it the pull looks nice).

While drilling it should be smooth and rhythmical. One has to learn the "music" to such a pull.

As I wrote the trick might or might not work. One can hardly "unlearn" to swim so I would give it a try. Experimenting is fun and yields often astonishing results.

Streamline Kick: Arms tight to head and kicking at a moderate pace. Too much flutterboard kick seems to me to train swimmers to kick "uphill" since the torso floats. By putting in streamline kick swimmers can mimic the body position better. We also so "Super slow arms, fast kick" as I once read that the human body is better able to transfer isolation exercises when they more closely mimic the actual movement.

Dustin: Have you looked at his hand entry and how quickly he gets to the catch position? Recently I've been really working on making my swimmers strokes "Basic." Thus we've eliminated almost all dead spots, and in sprinters there is zero shoulder drop at the top of the stroke. This did come at a cost of some DPS which meant more work on the kick to make up the difference, but overall was quite pleased with the result.

The distance swimmers still do a very traditional style stroke similar to Hackett/Thorpe.

You may also want to work on establishing proper timing of the 6-beat kick; 6-beats means 3 kicks per arm stroke. Try slow swimming with that pattern as the focus. This may also be a swimmer who will benefit from a change in head position, if it is currently neutral try having him look a little further ahead to attempt to hydroplane a bit more.

I would also wonder that with the rotation you describe - what does his hand look like as it travels through the water. With my approach to a basic stroke our focus is on getting that elbow high and keeping the hand & forearm perpendicular to the bottom of the pool as long as possible during the stroke.