I’ll never forget the first time I saw some video footage of me swimming underwater, to say I was shocked would-be understatement. I didn’t believe it was me and thought they had mistakenly showed me another swimmers footage! That weird claw thing I was doing with my left hand when pulling will forever live in my memory.
What this clearly showed me as a young swimmer at the time was the huge disparity between what I thought I was doing and what I was doing. In my head I clearly thought I was moving through the water like the great Alexander Popov when there were quite actually a few areas that could have been a lot better. As a high-level swimmer I did feel a little frustrated that this hadn’t been picked up previously by coaches in the past. But what I quickly came to realise when I started using video analysis is that there are some things that are difficult to pick up with the naked eye that only become visible when you slow the stroke down and can see the stroke fully underwater.
The immediate power of swim video analysis was not lost on me because as frustrated as I felt at the time it was easy to correct some of these faults. The reason for this is because nearly all of us are highly attuned to visual learning. Once we see what we are doing wrong it makes the process of correction extremely fast. Then it’s just a simple process of repetition over time to achieve the desired result.
But first you must realise that you can’t always trust what your brain is telling you!
The biggest problem I see with swimmers today is that they make way too many assumptions about what they are doing right & wrong. This largely comes from the incredible amount of misinformation and poor coaching advice that is currently out there. It pains me to see the path many swimmers are taken down, sometimes through no fault of their own.
Unfortunately, being able to filter what is right or wrong for you is a very tricky task and that’s why the best investment any swimmer can make in their swimmer is to start off by getting a one-to-one swim video analysis session. This takes the guess work out of it so you can make progress far quicker than playing the guessing game. Being able to see yourself swim from all angles, above, below and from the side can quite literally be a revelation for many swimmers.
The goal of any coach should be to help you find the right way as fast as possible and that’s what I focus on here at Swimmer Reborn. Quality swim video analysis negates the need for endless/costly weekly swimming lessons because the changes can be made on the day and then I make sure you have the right plan to follow to embed these changes. This is the tailor-made approach that I give to all swimmers I work with, so they don’t have to keep coming back for more and more sessions all the time.
My goal is to give you all the tools you need to help you swim in a way that suits your body, improves your efficiency and most importantly feels good to you. The key to unlocking this is a swim video analysis session where we can filter out what you don’t need to think about and simplify the areas that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. The sooner we do that the sooner we can open up a whole new world of swimming enjoyment and progression.
Quality swim video analysis in the right hands is an extremely powerful tool. The investment in this will then pay back ten-fold over time. I promise you one thing, you’ll only wish you did it a lot sooner.