Platinum Bars… Good For All Swimmers

January 30th, 2012

Many of you who have been to The Race Club camps have heard the story before. But it is worth telling again.

In 1999, one of the most promising thoroughbred stallions on the racing circuit, Fusaichi Pegasus, sustained an injury to the front elbow at a crucial time in his career. The owner was considering putting the horse to stud and never racing him again. Dr. Doug Herthel, an equine veterinarian in Santa Ynez Valley, California, heard about the injury and offered to help. The owner agreed and allowed Doug to take the horse to try to rehabilitate it. His program included changing nutrition and using Platinum Granular formula, essentially the same ingredients as in the Platinum bar.

Remarkably, a horse that was never supposed to race again, Fusaichi Pegasus came back from the injury to win the Kentucky Derby in 2000. Doug attributes much of that success to changing the horses diet.

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Analysis of the Underwater Pull – Phase IV: Release

December 20th, 2011

The final phase of the underwater pull is the release, when the hand moves from 9 o’clock back to 12 o’clock, precisely where it started this .85-second, almost circular journey.

Since the hand/arm are now moving in the forward direction again, the objective of this phase is to slip the hand and arm out of the water with the least amount of frontal drag possible. To achieve this, the swimmer draws the elbow up and forward first with the forearm and hand following. The hand then rotates internally with the palm facing toward the swimmers body in order to reduce drag as it leave the water.

The duration of this final phase of the pull is about .15 seconds, slightly longer than the previous phase, but not much. Since the motion of the hand and arm are now forward and up, there is neither propulsion nor lift to be gained from this final phase of the pull. Once the hand leaves the water and begins the recovery above water, the sooner one can get the arm and hand back in the water for another pull cycle, the better.

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Analysis of the Underwater Pull – Phase III: Propulsion Back Quadrant

December 13th, 2011

As the hand continues its propulsive motion rearward and enters the back quadrant, past the shoulder, to get from 6 o’clock to 9 o’clock, it takes a different course than going around the perimeter of the glare clock. To maximize the propulsive power of each arm pull, the force vector of the arm/hand needs to remain in the opposite direction of the body’s motion. To accomplish this, rather than follow the perimeter of the clock, which would create an upward force, increasing frontal drag, the hand elevates and the wrist dorsiflexes to maintain the maximum surface area possible pushing backward. In other words, the hand cuts off much of the quarter of the clock when going from 6 to 9 o’clock.

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Analysis of the Underwater Pull – Phase II: Propulsion Front Quadrant

December 6th, 2011

At the point when the hand reaches 3 o’clock on the ‘glare’ clock, the distal part of the arm and hand change functions. They stop acting like a wing and/or applying downward force for lift and suddenly change directions and accelerate backwards. For approximately the next 1/3 of a second, the hand (and forearm) will create a propulsive force by moving in the opposite direction for a distance of approximately two feet and that motion will help drive the swimmer forward.

The amount of body speed that is generated by this propulsive phase of the underwater pull is related to the effective surface area of the pulling arm/hand, the speed or acceleration of the hand/forearm as it moves backward and the amount of force generated by the counter-rotation of the body. The body speed is also inversely related to the amount of frontal drag created by the ever-changing shape of the entire swimmer throughout the pull cycle.

I often ask my campers the question of whether the power of the arm pull is greater in the front quadrant or the back quadrant, separated anatomically by the shoulder. I would say that the responses that I get are about half and half, which is to say that at least half the people don’t know the answer. The others are probably good guessers.

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Analysis of the Underwater Pull – Phase I: Lift

November 28th, 2011

Lift is simply due to forces that elevate the level of the human body in the water. Since water is about 800 times denser than air, so long as we are on the surface, the more of the human body that is in air and the less in water, the less frontal drag will be encountered when moving forward. The difference between frontal drag forces in air and water are so profound, that even the slightest elevation of the body in the water can reduce overall frontal drag significantly. A good example of this fact is found while swimming in salt water, which is slightly faster than swimming in fresh water. The added buoyancy of the salt elevates the body and reduces frontal drag.

Short of wearing a wetsuit, the only two natural contributors to lifting the body while swimming are the arms and legs. While using a six-beat kick, the legs contribute three times the number of lift efforts to each arm pull. However, the arms are capable of making a huge contribution to lift, but that occurs only at the beginning of each underwater pull, from the 12 o’clock to the 3 o’clock position on the ‘glare’ clock. During that time, the arm and hand are in a lesser frontal drag position, stretched out in front, close to the line of motion of the body.

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Analysis of the Underwater Pull – Introduction

November 2nd, 2011

How the hand and forearm are used to propel a swimmer through the water has been the subject of great debate and controversy since the advent of modern competitive swimming. Prior to 1970, the hand was thought to be analogous to a paddle or an oar for a boat, providing propulsion using Newton’s law of motion. As the hand would move backward in the water, the drag forces created from that motion would result in an equal but opposite reaction: the forward movement of the body.

In the late 60’s and early 70’s, my coach at Indiana University, Dr. James Counsilman, began to study the motion of the hand underwater using strobe lights attached to the fingers of the swimmer in a completely darkened pool. ‘Doc’ would lie still on the bottom of the pool with his scuba gear and his high speed Bolex movie camera, encased in a plastic waterproof housing, and film swimmers such as Mark Spitz, Charlie Hickcox and me overhead. He would then do the same from the side view. From these movies, ‘Doc’ was the first to observe that the hand releases from the water very nearly at the same point as it enters the water to begin each underwater pull. He also observed that the hand moves with considerable sculling motion, from side to side, during the underwater part of the cycle. From this, he deduced that the primary function of the hand/forearm was not a paddle, as previously thought, but rather more of a wing, providing lift. This function obeyed an entirely different law, Bernoulli’s principle, which requires that relative to the arm and hand, the water molecules above the arm are moving at a greater speed than those below. The difference in relative speed of these molecules results in a pressure differential from above and below the arm, creating lift.

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Platinum Performance

October 2nd, 2011

Webbed friends,

I address you from my inter-web computer in California, my new home state. It’s kind of like the bat phone, but for swimming. And it’s a computer.

After one year and eight months I moved out of Seattle. While there is a lot to love about Seattle I couldn’t get over the rain. By the way, Seattle gets a lot of rain by reputation, and reality.

Platinum Performance

The Hall, Jr. family moved to Santa Barbara County. I took up a consulting role with a company that I’ve worked with since 1999. Platinum Performance® human formulas were developed in 1997 with the purpose of advancing preventive, therapeutic and sports nutrition. I was introduced to Platinum product in 1999 and since used it religiously through my swimming career and beyond, and found that the Platinum products help to increase performance, reduce recovery time and helped maintain my blood sugar levels.

The Race Club is proud to share association with such a prestigious brand. I’m sure that you’ve noticed Platinum Performance presence on The Race Club webbed-site. Platinum makes a product that we believe in, wholeheartedly. More importantly, we believe in the company, and the family that stands behind that company.

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Born to Swim by Sabir Muhammad

July 20th, 2011

“A few weeks ago I nearly lost my two front teeth to a Jaguar Shark named Marlie. She’s probably the tiniest in her gam but a fierce competitor nonetheless. I bet her my two front teeth, since she’s missing her own, as the prize for beating me while swimming the anchor leg for our respective relay teams. Marlie battled to the end, and luckily for me, the race ended in a tie, so I kept my teeth, she’ll have to wait for her own to grow in.” -Excerpt from Atlanta Swim School’s Captain’s Log

This year I formally launched the Atlanta Swim School. The Atlanta Swim School is an organization I started to support my belief that swimming is not just a sport, but a vital life saving skill. Our swim school offers lessons for students of all ages, from infancy to adulthood, and we believe that anyone, at any age or economic background, can benefit from swimming. The Atlanta Swim School has launched the Four Plus One movement, offering one free scholarship for every four paying swimmers. This movement allows us to fill our ranks with swimmers from various economic backgrounds.

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What is The Race Club?

May 27th, 2011

I recall sitting at lunch one day at the Olympic Trials in 2004 with Peter Carlisle, Michael Phelp’s agent, and he asked David Arluck and me what The Race Club was all about. David gave him a rambling answer and then it dawned on me that he really didn’t know. Nor did I.

“It is a great logo, though, don’t you think?” I chimed in. We all agreed on that.

I became a little more involved in The Race Club in 2006, when its focus was more directed to helping elite athletes reach their Olympic goals, and I had just moved to Islamorada. After sending 17 swimmers to Beijing in 2008, for the first time, I took a long breath, leaned back and really started to understand what The Race Club could become and what it could offer. That is when I became fully involved and very excited.

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ISHOF Fran Crippen SafeSwim 2011

May 14th, 2011

On the weekend from Friday May 6 to Sunday May, 9, 2011 the International Swimming Hall of Fame hosted the Centennial Celebration of Fort Lauderdale’s Famous Beach and International Swimming & Diving Heritage. As part of the effort to promote safety in open water swimming, ISHOF and the Crippen family introduced the 1st Fran Crippen SafeSwim event in celebration of the late, great swimmer who passed away in a race in Dubai last October.

I drove up to Fort Lauderale on Saturday morning to take part in the 1 Mile Race. The course was setup as a straight one mile ocean swim both starting out of the water and finishing out of the water on the beach. One would think that after the Swim Miami only about a month ago I would have known better and learned how important of a role strategy and actually having a race plan is in open water swimming.

So let me tell you about the mistakes I made that Saturday morning. The one thing that was different from Swim Miami was the beach start and finish. The running start had me get all excited and made my racer instincts go crazy. Running in the ocean behind Olympian Peter Vanderkaay made me take a chance and after the first few dolphin dives I was swimming as hard as I could to keep up with Peter and the lead pack taking a right turn at the first turn buoy swimming towards the finish. It didn’t last long and even drafting off their feet wasn’t an option anymore…they had taken off. It should be obvious to anyone that a guy who swims about the same yardage a week as someone like Peter does in a single workout shouldn’t try to out swim that other person.

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