Sample: How good is your double ‘S’ back crawl arm propulsion demonstration?
During one of our seminars, we asked all 60 odd delegates to stand and demonstrate a bent arm back crawl arm action as they would to their pupils. Only 2 were even remotely correct. Why is that?
In simple terms, they don’t understand it, no one has shown them how to do it and they have not thought out how it works.
The 3 elements that are often misunderstood, mis-demonstrated or mis-taught are:
- Whilst the swimmer is on their back, the recovery arm comes straight up out of the water at right angles to the line horizontal body axis. Incorrect. At the point of hand exit, the body is at its maximum rotation, so the arm is actually travelling away from the body.
Because this is taught on qualification courses, demonstrations generally show incorrect hand recovery path. - The initial propulsive action is with the catch of the hand which then leads the action in a pattern that is effectively an ‘S’ shaped hand path in 2 different planes, not one. The result is that most demonstrations are elbow led, which of course produces no propulsion whatever.
- One of the main causes of poor backstroke propulsion in learning to swim swimming effective back crawl, is swimmers maintaining their shoulders on the horizontal axis, where in fact, the torso should be rotating (up to 89O) on either side of the long axis continually throughout the stroke.
This often arises from most teachers not rotating their torso when demonstrating the arm action, this sending the wrong visual message to their pupils.
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