Backstroke - Margaret Hoelzer

Important Note to the Viewer

LESSONS: 29 VIDEOS

Big Rotation

Nowadays, when the trend in backstroke seems to be less rotation and faster turnover, people look at my stroke and my big rotation and say, you know... you should think about changing the way you swim. The truth is that I’ve tried all these things, but...for me...they’ve never really worked. For me, a big rotation is the key to my entire stroke. It’s the starting point. And even if I’m the only person in the world who does this, if it works for me, then maybe there are other swimmers out there who might get something out of it. The important thing is to keep an open mind and to know there are lots of ways to swim fast. For me, rotation affects everything... from my catch to my kick. I use a big rotation, and I try to rotate an equal amount on both sides. But even with a big rotation, I try to keep my head perfectly still. You don’t want your head moving around and rotating with you. In this clip, focus just on the hips, and notice how they generate power and drive the stroke. With a big hip rotation, I get power from the core, and not just from my arms and legs. When I race the 200 backstroke, my hip rotation will be about the same as you see here. It doesn’t matter if I’m going slow or fast... the rotation is what drives the stroke. In a 100, when the pace is faster, the rotation is a little bit less, but I still use more than most other backstrokers because it’s what works for me. My favorite drill for working on rotation is to do 6 kicks on one side -- with one arm up and the other arm down -- and then take one stroke and rotate to 6 kicks on the other side. I try to kick completely on one side, so I’m completely vertical. And I try to maintain a constant kick as I’m rotating from one side to the other. Then take it to 3 kicks on a side, still exaggerating the rotation and getting ALL the way on your side. And then take it to one kick on a side. At one kick per side, there’s not much time in between, but you should still try to exaggerate the rotation. And you want to keep your head perfectly still. This drill helps you work on head position and a constant kick, but it really helps exaggerate your rotation. It will make this amount of rotation feel a lot easier, and will teach you how to get more power from your core. Before we go to the next chapter and talk about the catch, I want to point out one more thing about my rotation. The reason I’m able to rotate so much is that my shoulders and hips aren’t 100 percent together. I actually rotate my shoulders first... and then I rotate my hips. Here it is again. It’s not a big delay, but you can see that the shoulder leads... and the hips follow just a fraction behind. Hang on to that, and in the next section we’ll see how it ties into the catch.

Shallow Catch

For me, rotation affects everything about my stroke, and this is really true for the catch. In fact, I don’t know how to separate those two -- the rotation and the catch. One makes sense because of how I do the other. In this clip you can see that I have a very shallow catch. I enter with the fingertips and the back of the hand. The hand enters, stays shallow, and then I rotate. It’s not until my hip is deep that my hand turns and starts to catch. Here it is again. The hand goes in and stays shallow. The hips rotate. The hand anchors. And then I throw my hips over. I’m throwing my hips as my hand is pulling. The power for the pull comes from the rotation -- from getting the hip down, anchoring the hand, and then throwing the hips to the other side. Part of the reason I’m able to have a shallow catch is because my rotation is so deep. Instead of depending on my arms for power, I wait for the hips to engage and then use hip rotation as the main source of power. When my hand enters the water, it makes kind of a sculling motion. If I was already on my side at this point, the sculling would be a bad thing. But because my hips rotate a slight fraction later, I use the scull to get my feel, and then I anchor and pull once my hips are rotated. That’s what I mean about the rotation and the catch being related. Because my rotation is big and deep, I can have a shallow catch, and this is what works for me. The sculling might be an unnecessary movement, but because my hips aren’t there yet -- because they’re not fully rotated -- my hand is just kind of holding out on top. I’m waiting for the hips to engage... to engage the hand. The catch starts right here... when I turn the hand from flat to on its side. At this point I’m fully rotated. The hand is just a little bit outside the shoulder. When I think about the pull, I think about this initial movement -- when everything starts to engage. It’s the front half of the pull where I try to get the most power. My hand is anchored, my hips are set, and then everything happens together -- the hips turn and the hand begins to pull. I’m very much focused on the first half of the pull because that’s where I get all the power from my hips. I swim with a slower tempo than most backstrokers but, for me, it’s better to have a slow, powerful tempo than one that’s fast and rushed. In this clip you’ll notice that I have a shallow catch and a shallow pull. I’ve tried to do a deeper pull, but it’s never worked for me. The reason I’m able to keep it shallow is because of how deep my hips go in the water and how deep the rotation is. I don’t try to think about a particular pull pattern. I focus mainly on keeping the elbow really high. People talk about dropping the elbow on freestyle, but you can drop it in backstroke, too. The key is to keep the elbow high and to really power through that front half of the pull. You’ll notice a downsweep in my pull, just before the exit, which is always thumb first to make it a clean exit. The downsweep is mostly a balance thing -- to compensate for the fact that my catch is so shallow up top. Another thing to focus on is the wrist. You definitely have to keep that joint locked in all the way through the pull. Just like you don’t want the elbows to drop, you don’t want the wrist to drop. If you’re not keeping the wrist and elbow high, you can lose your feel for the water when you pull. Watching it again, the big thing to notice is how the rotation affects the catch. The hand entry is shallow... slight scull while I wait for the hips to engage... then anchor and power through the first half of the pull.

Kick Through the Rotation

When I think about the kick, I’m also thinking about rotation. Many swimmers tend to kick only when they’re flat on their back or when they’re on their side. They don’t kick through the rotation, but for me this is very important. Your legs are the most muscular part of your body, so it makes sense to train them to generate a lot of power. No matter what distance you’re racing, your kick needs to be strong all the way to the finish. I try to keep my flutter kick strong and fluid and consistent, which means I want to kick throughout the rotation, without stopping or pausing at any point. Here’s another angle to show what I mean. I use a steady, 6-beat kick, and my goal is to kick all the way through the rotation. Pointing your toes is definitely important, but you don’t want the kick to be too rigid. The kick and the legs need to flow, with the power generated from the top of the leg. When I train the kick, I like to kick on my back, with both hands up and apart, and slightly out of the water. It’s the equivalent of being in streamline except your hands are separated, with palms up and hands about shoulder width apart. With the hands slightly apart, it sets the body in a more realistic position for backstroke, and you’re actually training the kick that you use when you’re swimming. In this last clip you can see how the hand position that I use for kicking... relates to where my hands enter when I swim.

Find Your Perfect Rhythm

Rotation affects everything about my stroke... from my catch to my kick. It also sets my rhythm. I have a big rotation that’s driven from the hips. So it’s the speed of the hips -- and not the speed of my kick or the speed of my arms -- that sets the rhythm for my stroke. I’ve done a lot of tempo work, experimenting with different rhythms, and I’ve found that what works for me is a tempo that’s a little slower than some of my competitors. But, for me, it’s more important to be slow and powerful as opposed to fast and rushed. The reason I have a slower tempo is because I’m extremely powerful throughout my rotation and throughout my catch. Every swimmer has to find the tempo that’s right for them, and it will usually be different for the 100 and the 200. I think your body naturally has a tempo or a pace where it operates best -- and your coach can help you find it. A lot of it is just experimenting and having someone watch and tell you at what point you’re NOT being efficient. If you have to watch yourself, you have to feel for when you’re losing efficiency. One way to test your efficiency, and to work on finding your best tempo, is resistance training. Here I’m working on a parachute. I’m experimenting with different tempos and seeing how far I get with a certain number of strokes. Swim tethers are another way to find your best stroke and your best tempo. If your arms are slipping, it will show up right away on the tether. When we do resistance work, it’s not about going hard. It’s about slowing things down and really thinking about what you’re doing. On the tether, I try to be extra precise. My coach calls this perfect swimming. Because you’re going slower, you have to be more powerful and more connected. It’s the same thing if we do pulleys. Instead of loading up the weight to see what’s humanly possible, we go with a reasonable weight and try to maintain great technique. In practice, we do a lot of stroke-count sets that focus on swimming perfect strokes at your ideal stroke rate. These sets are mostly aerobic, so it’s like slow, perfect swimming, working on all the technique things you’re supposed to work on, but within a certain number of strokes at your ideal tempo. A lot of times, we’re doing a stroke or two less than what you’d naturally want to do. So you have to really think about what you’re doing -- good pull... good kick... you have to put all the pieces together to hit the count right on target. For me, this kind of focused swimming, working on ideal counts and rhythms, is the same as doing drills. The key is focus. Whether you’re doing drills or resistance work or stroke-count sets, the idea is to slow down a bit and keep everything precise. Never let it be slow, sloppy swimming. Find your perfect rhythm, and then practice it every day, in every set that you do.

Flow The Kickout

In this day and age, EVERY swimmer needs to be doing great kickouts. In a long-course race, kickouts can be 25 percent -- or more -- of your race. In short-course races, you can swim half your race under water if your kickouts are good, so it’s important to work on these at every practice. When I work on my kickouts, I’m training two different things. I’m training breath control... and I’m training technique. And the technique is all about learning to flow and learning to find your rhythm. For me, the best rhythm is a medium tempo. I’ve tried fast and small kicks. And I’ve tried big, huge kicks. And I’ve found that a medium-size kick -- a medium frequency or amplitude -- is what works best for me... because that’s where I find the most power. It’s all about experimenting with different rhythms to find what feels comfortable to you. In this clip, my coach is timing me to see how fast I can get to a certain point, using different amounts of effort and different rhythms. This is a great way to find your perfect tempo for the kickout. The power for the kickout comes from the hips. But, as you can see here, the hips are only part of it. I’m using everything. If we slow it down, you can see that the kick starts with the hands. You don’t want this to be a big movement. It’s just a very small move that brings the shoulders and chest into play. The motion gets bigger and bigger as it spreads down the body to your hips. And when the motion gets to your hips... that's where the actual power comes from. In this clip, watch just my feet and legs. Notice that I’m kicking both ways. I’m kicking up AND down. When you’re on your back, kicking up is natural. It’s kicking down that you have to think about. I don’t want to say that I focus my kicking down, but I focus on keeping it even. The up part happens naturally and then I have to make sure I’m kicking downward -- equally. If you don’t kick equally, you’re not going to stay under water. You’re going to go up. So you have to balance the up and the down when you kick. Watch the feet again and notice that they’re simply following the motion of the hips. A lot of people tend to kick from the knees down, and they’re not using their hips. Ideally, your feet should simply follow your legs. When you kick from your knees, you’re going to feel what your feet are doing. But if you kick from your hips, your feet are just flowing along from the movement initiated by your hips. When you get it right, it’s sort of a snapping motion. For me, the kickout is all about flow. Sure, it’s important to work on ankle flexibility and pointing your toes, but for me it’s the flow. Training the flow can be done with a couple of drills. In this one, you lie on your stomach in Superman position and try to flow across the pool without kicking. You’re trying to get a dolphin movement without a big downkick. You don’t want the kick to be moving you across the water. You want your rhythm to be flowing you across the water. This is a very slow drill, and if you’re trying to do a 25, it takes forever. But this is how you find your rhythm. You can also try this drill on your back, and this one will help you find your rhythm and learn to balance your upkick and downkick. Try not to kick with your feet or your knees. Make the flow and the rhythm come from your core and flow down through your feet. These two drills bring up another important point, which is that it’s extremely important to know how to do butterfly to do backstroke. So it’s good to work your kick equally on your stomach and your back. The more balanced you are with kicking on the front and the back, the faster you’re going to be -- not just in backstroke but also in butterfly. In the next few clips, let’s focus on the angle of the body during the kickout. Some swimmers, like Misty Hyman, kick completely on their side and this works for them. What works for me is to push off straight on the back, and then I rotate just a little bit. If you can learn to do this on both sides, you can use it to check out your competition in a race. I’m flat or just slightly to the side when I dolphin, and then I angle a little bit more to the right as I get ready to take that first stroke. I always pull first with my right arm. So I always finish the kick so that I lead to my right side. Here you can see that as the right hip goes down, the right hand anchors... and then I rotate forcefully to the other hip to get good rotation into the breakout. Lots of people ask me how many dolphin kicks they should take. This depends on your training and your technique. One thing I can say is that, in a race, you want to be consistent, and this means being consistent in how far you go rather than how many kicks you take to get there. It won’t do much good if you go 15 meters under water after the start and then 3 meters on all of your turns. The start can be your longest kickout, but you want all the other kickouts to carry you about the same distance. And in the 100, you probably want to travel a little farther than in the 200. As you can see, I travel pretty far on my kickouts. And to train for this, you just have to do it. You have to work on holding your breath. In a race, I take 10 to 12 kicks on the kickout. In practice, I take 6. But I take 6 kicks off every single wall. It doesn’t sound like much, but in a 3-hour practice, if you can take 6 kicks off every single wall when you’re doing butterfly or backstroke, that’s at least half your workout. It’s really all about working on it in practice. And we definitely do a lot of underwater-25 sets. To have a great kickout, you have to train two different things: breath control... and technique. If you train these things every day, you’ll have great kickouts when you race.

Back-Half Race Strategy

I’m definitely a back-half swimmer. And by that I mean that the second half of my race is almost as fast as the first half. One of my favorite things to joke about, but it’s really true, is that when I’m swimming a 200, I think of it like a 100. My mentality is... you just do the first hundred... get it out of the way... and you race the second hundred. It’s almost a game. On the first hundred, it’s... OK, I need to go as fast as possible and make it as easy as possible. The game is to find speed that’s not costing you a whole lot of energy. And then on the second hundred, it’s like you just go. The second hundred you just race. It’s a very different mentality from a lot of people who look at the 200 and they just go for it and then hang on. Being a back-half swimmer is nerve-wracking because you can get behind sometimes and you have to be confident in what you’re doing -- that you’re not going to get tired and other people are going to get tired. It’s finding what works for you. At Olympic Trials, my 100 backstroke was 29.2 and 29.9. It looked like I came from behind, but it was just an even split, with a steady stroke tempo the whole way through. Swimming a strong second half is something I work on every day in practice. It’s not just something I do in a meet. I have to train for that on almost every set that we swim. During practice, I make a constant effort to be relaxed on the first half of each swim. I don’t think of it as going easy, because it’s not easy. I like to think of the first half of the race as being as relaxed as possible, and then really going after it in the second half. I think about coming home. In our practice sets, I mentally split each swim into two parts. For a 150, I think of it as 75 and 75. Or I stay relaxed on the first hundred and then push the second 50. I do this a lot more than my coach tells us to do it. It’s that little extra something that I like to do, and that gives me confidence that my race strategy is going to work. And you have to be confident. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve not been anywhere near the front at the halfway point in the 200. It’s about being confident enough in your race strategy that you’re not going to panic. It’s not letting others scare you. It’s not letting others affect you. It’s finding that strategy and having confidence in it and being able to stay in your head and in your lane. It’s staying within your race and then finding that little extra...something that lets you get it done. I have always been a back-halfer -- at least in backstroke. I’ve experimented with other strategies, but this is what works for me. And knowing that’s my strategy, I like to figure out how extreme I can be with it -- or how not extreme I can be. Like... where is that perfect mix of being relaxed but not too relaxed on the first 100? Where’s the perfect balance for being fast on the first 100, but not expending too much energy to get that speed? How do I need to feel at the 100 to be able to finish the race? Figuring this out is something you have to do in practice, by working on it in set after set. And then you take that strategy to a meet... and you practice racing. If you’ve done a good job of practicing your strategy in practice, it should be automatic by the time you get to a meet, and you can just race, which is the most fun part of the sport. But what can also happen is that you have a conversation with yourself, even while you’re racing. You know your strategy so well, that your brain can have a physical conversation with your body. Sometimes I’ll kick out and I’m physically telling myself, “relax...be calm. You’re fine.” And then at the 50 I’m saying, “OK, don’t back off too much, but don’t go too hard.” I’ll hit the hundred wall and I’m like, “Slow down...” or “Now’s the time to make your move.” It’s definitely a conversation. And then the last 50 is everything you’ve got left. Sometimes I’m yelling at myself and it’s a pure “HANG ON.” I’m trying to find a way to finish the race and finish fast. So you can use these kinds of conversations to swim a positive race and swim according to your strategy. But the most important thing is to find a race strategy that works for you, and then practice your strategy every time you go to the pool.

Backstroke Start and Underwater

Margaret's backstroke start shot from underwater. This clip shows her entry, when she initiates the underwater dolphin, how she travels back toward the surface and transitions to her breakout into her first stroke.

Underwater Dolphin and Breakout

Margaret performing the underwater dolphin. This slow motion clip focuses on Margaret's hands and head as she heads for her first stroke. Watch how gradual the climb to the surface is, not direct, but a slow, upward line that keeps things moving more forward.

Underwater Dolphin - Side - Margaret

Margaret performing the underwater dolphin. This slow motion clip shows her from the side showing her practicing in deep water. Focus on how stable the hands and head are as the body undulates to create the snap from the legs.

Underwater Dolphin - Margaret

A slow motion clip of Margaret performing the underwater dolphin kick. This angle shows the whip, and flexibility of the feet as well as the amplitude of the kick.

Backstroke Catch - Margaret

Head on underwater shot of Margaret's backstroke. This illustrates great head position, rotation and catch, as well as how she finishes her pull.

Backstroke Catch

Another slow motion shot of Margaret's catch, shot more from the side. This shows a good path of her hand and how quickly she gets to the catch, even with her unique hand entry.