The other day I was talking to Budd Termin, who coached at University at Buffalo and is one of the most technically saavy coaches in our sport. He told me about a talk he had given in Portugal entitled Simultaneous Recordings of Velocity and Video During Swimming. He reported for the first time his discovery that all breastrokers come to a complete stop when they bring their arms forward on the pullout. What? A complete stop? Even Brenden Hansen or Katijima? Can it be?

I couldn’t wait to get to practice the next day and see for myself. Though I didn’t have the sensitive velocity testing device or camera that Budd has, I could focus clearly on the small black tiles on the line on the bottom of the pool. Each time I brought my hands forward, no matter how tight to my body, no matter how hard I pulled back or thrust with a good dolphin kick, I saw the same thing; the little tile squares stopped moving. Budd was right. Wow, we really are bricks.

One of my new hobbies in the Keys is Paddleboarding. Standing upright on a large surfboard, I reach forward and dig into the water with a single paddle and pull the board forward. The exercise uses similar upper body muscles to swimming and believe or not, I can get going pretty fast down Tavernier Creek. But if I ever want to stop, I merely stick the paddle into the water and presto, I come to a dead stop. So if the Paddle Board comes to a dead stop so quickly, why should it surprise us that our brick-like human bodies do the same when we drag our arms forward on the breastroke pullout? It shouldn’t. Then I had a revelation.

I could not help but marvel (like everyone else) at Michael Phelps accomplishments in Beijing. But why can he make the best of the world in the 200 freestyle look like age-groupers? How does he do it? OK, there is not a simple answer. Yes, he has a super long torso and yes, he has Lance Armstrong-like aerobic capacity. But is there more? I think so. Michael Phelps has managed to make his body less like a brick than anyone else. He has mastered the art of minimizing resistance and drag of the human in water. And I am not just talking about his streamline off the wall or head position (read my blog Thick as a Brick from a few months ago) or his Lazer swim suit. One of the things I was most intrigued about was the height of his elbows on the underwater pull in freestyle.

Of course, we have all heard our coaches preaching at us for years to keep our elbows high on the underwater pull. Until Budd told me about the zero-velocity underwater pullout, I never really understood why. I always thought that having the elbows high put our arms into a stronger position for the pull. Wrong. Keeping our elbows high doesn’t put us into any biomechanically better position for a stronger pull. It puts our arm into a position of less drag, less resistance.

Years ago, my coach at Indiana University, Doc Counsilman, was the first to film the position of the hand in relation to the water during the underwater pull. He made a startling discovery and that was that the hand really didn’t move forward or backward in the water during the pull, but rather side to side, like a sculling motion. We know that the human swims through the water at a top speed of just over 2 meters per second. That means that the hand is moving backward (in reference to the body) at the same speed to result in a net-zero velocity in the water. Yet we know that the hand is attached to the body by the arm at the shoulder. The shoulder is moving in the water at 2 meters per second and the hand is at zero. That means every part of the remainder of the arm is also moving forward in the water with a velocity that diminishes from 2 meters per second at the top near the shoulder down to near zero at the wrist near the hand. But the important thing to remember is that except for the hand, all parts of the arm are moving forward in the water. Anything that moves forward in the water creates drag, and for anything non-streamlined like the human body or arm, pressure drag is the most significant (as opposed to friction and there is no surface drag on the arm while it is under water). Now let’s go back to the Paddleboard.

The Paddleboard is a relatively streamlined object, especially when compared to the human body. It offers very little resistance in the water as I churn my way down the creek. Yet, even though the board is streamlined, when I stick that fat paddle in the water and don’t pull back with it, boom, I come to a dead stop. The motionless paddle is moving forward in the water (because the paddleboard is) and the drag on the paddle brings everything to an abrupt halt. So if that happens on a streamlined Paddleboard, you can imagine what would happen if we stuck out a paddle from our brick-like human bodies. You guessed right… the same as the breastroke pullout; zero velocity. The human arm is not shaped a lot differently than that paddle. It is pretty big and long and if it is pointed in the wrong direction, ie down instead of forward, boom, we start to slow down. It acts like a motionless paddle in the water.

All of this buildup is to point out that the reason Michael Phelps keeps his elbows super high so that at least the upper part of his arm, the part of his arm that is traveling the fastest in the water, and the part of his arm that most resembles a paddle, will be pointing forward, not down, and creating minimal drag. He is not to doing it to gain some mechanical advantage for the pull. He is being less like a brick and so that given the same power as anyone else who might drop the elbow down, he will go faster.

Thanks Budd. Now I get it.