On Sunday 30th September I held one of my regular Total Immersion Effortless Endurance swimming workshops with a wide range of swimmers from around the country. It’s always great fun to spend the day talking about swimming with people interested in learning, and I’m always blown away by how much progress people can make in one day.
And I always learn something myself too – either from the coaching team I’m working with or from the swimmers in the workshop.
This time we had the pleasure to coach a swimmer who was only able to swim with one arm due to a disability. This meant that the coaching team had to coach and demonstrate single arm drills and swimming with 1 arm. With good balance and rotation swimming is driven by a weight shift and if these things are in place then it’s quite possible to swim effectively with 1 arm.
This quickly highlighted some differences between my arms and some opportunities to work on my stroke so I added it to my swim practice this week.
A mistake I see at a lot of swimmers making is practicing single arm drills with the other arm out in front or resting on a float. This limits rotation and takes out the weight shift so is limited in its effectiveness. Read this blog from Terry Laughlin for a more in-depth discussion.
Have a look here to see what the drill looks like.