How Even Rotation Benefits Freestyle
- It makes it easier to recover the arm forward and reduces the stress on the rotator cuff muscles (an injury-prone muscle group).
- Through rotation, you engage the powerful muscles of the lats, pecs, and core to strengthen the pull. When swimming flat, the weaker shoulder muscles are the primary muscles used.
- Rotating evenly to both sides also lengthens the arms’ reach, resulting in an earlier catch and more propulsive stroke.
Your mission this week is to rotate evenly to both sides in all freestyle sets. That means the shoulder ball must break the surface, the same amount, on both sides. This technique is challenging for swimmers who breathe to one side only as the breathing shoulder typically rises higher than the non-breathing one.
Scoreboard:
- Gold: Mission accomplished.
- Silver: For the most part.
- Bronze: Until I lost my focus or got too tired.
- Tin: Kept going back to my old stroke.
Fill out my online form.