Better Pushoffs

Important Note to the Viewer

LESSONS: 17 VIDEOS

Vertical Sculling

Sculling teaches you a “feel” for the water. Rather than pushing the hands against the water, sculling helps you learn to slide your hand with a bit of a tilt so the hands act a like a propeller. Vertical sculling allows you to practice this movement without having to worry about your breathing. To get started, some people like to use floatation to make things a little easier. Here our swimmer is using a pull buoy to help him stay afloat while he practices sweeping his hands inward and outward. You’ll notice that when the hands are coming inward, the thumbs are tilted UP, and when the hands our sliding outward, the thumbs are tilted DOWN. Another method to help take some pressure off the hands is to use fins. A gentle kick while practicing sculling can help keep the focus on what your hands are doing. As you progress, you may be able to take the fins off, and use a flutter kick to help you stay up. This starts to work a couple skills at the same time. In sculling, try to only move the arms from the elbows down. Don’t use the entire arm, but treat your forearm, from the elbow down, like a windshield wiper, sweeping back and forth while the hands adjust their angle. Thumb UP coming in, thumb DOWN going out. Graduation of this drill is to use no floatation and no kick.

Vertical Jumps

Pushing off the side of the pool will be a big part of swimming in the pool. Learning to stay stable in your push off can be as simple as jumping off the bottom. Try to get in water that’s just a bit deeper (if you feel comfortable with your rhythmic breathing). With your arms down by your side, drop to the bottom of the pool until your legs are bent in a jumping position. How much you squat may vary, so don’t worry about getting it at some exact angle. Now just jump and and down a few times. If you feel like you’re losing your balance on the way back down, use your hands to stabilize yourself. Next, lift your hands above your head just before you jump off the bottom. Only this time, as your feet leave the bottom, pull both hands down toward the bottom. This will give you a good sense of how the initial stroke will feel when you’re pushing off from the side, and you’ll pop much higher out of the water for your breath. Always remember when you’re doing these exercises… breathe OUT through the nose and IN through the mouth. Finally, practice jumping off the bottom in the streamline position. That’s jumping with both hands locked together in a piercing shape. This will be a very important position to learn in your swimming, so practicing it here is a good idea. If you start to lose your balance after you’ve made it above the water, allow your hands to separate and use them for stability on the way back down as you get ready for the next jump.

Hover Position

There are a few ways to get started in a length of swimming, but we’re going to start by combining the sculling that you’ve just learned, with what we like to call the “hover position”. With your feet on the wall, allow your body to lean forward. Keep your eyes above the surface looking down the lane. Keep pressure on your body and feet by sweeping the hands back and forth. You’ll notice the similarities in the sculling motion of the hand. Thumbs UP on the way in, and thumbs DOWN on the way out. This position allows you to look down the pool to make sure your path is clear, while also allowing you to grab a breath just before your push off. When you’re ready to go, push DOWN on the water with your hands, which will pop your torso up just a bit and then allow the body to fall down to the level of the feet. Once your body is deep enough, allow the hands to fall into the streamline position and JUMP off the wall. Remember, scull to hold yourself in place, push DOWN to pop up, fall to the depth of the feet, streamline and jump. You’ll be much further down the length and go faster too.

Streamline

There isn’t a more universally accepted technique in all of swimming than the streamline. This position allows you to travel the furthest, the fastest, with the least amount of work. You want to become like a torpedo in the water. Put both hands together over the top of your head. Whichever hand is place on top, take that thumb and wrap it around the side of the bottom hand. This locks the hands together. Now squeeze the arms onto the side of your head. The arms should be right at or just behind the ears. Always try to be in the streamline position BEFORE you jump off the wall. This will give you the biggest payback from that great jump.

Handlock and Headlock

To further explore the streamline position, lets look at the relationship between the hand lock, and head lock. With the hands on top of each other, and the thumb wrapped around the side of the bottom hand, this will provide a bit of leverage to squeeze your arms against the side of your head. By squeezing the arms together, you can see how sleek our swimmer appears. If you’re lucky enough to be swimming outdoors in the sun, this is a great time to look at the shadow you’re creating. That confirms that you’re in the right position. You’ll notice that this swimmer is so committed to locking the hands, he’s developed a method that overlaps the hands and then brings them together with the top thumb immediately wrapping the side of the bottom hand. As the hands come together, he squeezes the arms onto his head and then jumps off the wall. By now focusing on the head lock, you will create a more rigid shape that will travel through the water with very little resistance. To really practice this, try to hold this position until your body pops up to the surface. That’s actually not as easy as it seems, but we’ll look more into that in the next lesson.

Proper Depth

Understanding an effective jump off the wall will also require an understanding of where you’re going. We’re talking about how shallow, or how deep. If you push off too shallow, the surface of the water will push against you and will slow you down. If you push off too deep, your body will lose momentum and then have to have a steep angle to get back to the surface, which will also slow you down. Even though this swimmer is going REALLY far on his push off, the angle that he’s reaching the surface is not the best. You’ll need to experiment with where you place your feet on the wall. If the feet are too low, you’ll push off UP toward the surface. If the feet are too high, you’ll push off DOWN toward the bottom. Your goal will be to find the position of the feet that allows you to push off parallel to the surface as much as possible. The body may tilt slightly, but practice various angles until you find that one that allows you to end the push off with your entire body getting to the surface as flat as possible. The angle of the “breakout”, which is the first stroke, should be very close to parallel. The less angle, the more forward movement you’ll transfer into your swimming.

Core Control

To achieve the BEST push offs, which means traveling further and faster with less effort, the entire body needs to stay straight. This is called core control. This means that the body is somewhat rigid, from the tips of the fingers, to the point of the toes.. and everything in between. Practice your push offs holding as tight a line as possible, without moving anything. Locking the thumbs, squeezing the arms around the head, pointing the toes as much as you can, and not allowing the body to bend in any way. If you’re new to this, and TRULY try to achieve this position…. don’t be worried if THIS happens to you. In time, we’ll try to control this, but this is when the air in your lungs takes over and rolls the lungs toward the surface. The good news is, you can learn to control this with your core (torso and stomach), and you won’t typically stay in this position so long that it will happen. Fighting this by twisting your body, or kicking, or using your hands, won’t teach you the correct position… so again, if this happens… we congratulate you on sticking with the position! You can adjust how far you go by pushing off a bit shallower, which should get you to the surface a bit sooner and also start to get you to the perfect 3-point pop-up, which we’ll discuss in the next lesson.

3-Point Pop Up

After you’ve had a chance to practice the proper depth of the push off, and work on the core control, it’s time to work on holding the proper position all the way to the surface. Finding just the right combination of depth and distance and core control allows you to take advantage of a great pushoff. The goal of this skill is to learn to have the body rise to the surface while being parallel to the surface. From above the water, we should see the body break the surface with the head, back and hips hitting the surface at the same time. Keeping the hands and feet tight, and body tight is the goal, and allowing the body to rise in a straight line. Try not to use the feet to correct or stabilize yourself, but keep practicing until you can achieve this skill consistently. After you reach the surface, try to hold the position a bit longer, then lift up for air.

Ready Position

The ready position is a great way to push off and to start to reinforce how you’ll be leaving the wall from your breaststroke and butterfly or open turns. Hold on to the wall with one arm, and your feet on the wall just below the hips. The body will be turned sideways with one arm outstretched toward the other end. The outstretched hand should be held palm up at this point. Find the position that’s the most comfortable for you, without too much strain on the hand on the wall. If you want to feel the straight line better, you can start with your arm fully extended and the palm down, but you’ll see in the next step why keeping the palm up may shorten the steps to the push off. We’ll build on this more in the next lesson, but this is where we’re heading. A slight lift of the body using the hand that’s on the wall, a swipe up with he extended hand to help the body fall to the correct position, the hands meeting in streamline and a jump off the wall.

Drop and push - Flat

In moving the ready position push off forward, the first step is to understand where you should be looking. To start, keep your eyes focused back on the hand that’s holding on to the wall. Use the leverage of that hand to pull you UP just a bit. This upward lift will add extra weight to the fall when you let go, making it much easier to drop to the proper depth for the pushoff. The pull up, or lift is very important to making this easy, just as the head position looking back. After you’ve lifted up just a bit, let go with the top hand and allow your body to fall into the water. Take the top hand over your head and allow it to meet the other hand as they prepare for the streamline position. You’ll notice our swimmer is on his side in this pushoff, but in this exercise, we want him to get to a flat body position like you practiced in the 3-point pop up. Using the FEET on the wall, start to torque, or spin your body before the feet leave the wall. Breaking this down just a bit more, let’s watch the full action. First, our swimmer is in a relaxed “ready position” on the wall. Next, he lifts his body up slightly using the hand that’s holding on to the wall. As the body prepares to fall, he actually repositions his feet just a bit higher. You’ll notice that he’s actually completely off the wall at one point before he pushes off. While the body is falling deeper into the water, he uses the bottom hand to sweep up, pulling the body down to the level of the feet. The hands meet in streamline and he starts the jump off the wall. As you leave the wall, use the wall to help you spin toward the flat position. The better your core control is, the easier this will be to master. Keep practicing until it feels natural.

Drop and push - Angled

Once you’ve mastered the drop push to a flat position, it’s time to learn the angled push off. Depending on how long you’re going to be holding your streamline before you swim, the angled push off can get you to swimming a bit sooner. It’s also useful for underwater dolphin kicks, but we’ll get to that later. You’ll start exactly the same way as you did in the drop push to flat in the last lesson. Use the wall hand to lift the body up a bit. Drop down and use the bottom hand to sweep up (even if just a little). Get your hands in streamline and jump off the wall. Since you’re leaving on your side, stay a bit on your side. While you’ll be tempted to roll your body to flat, your core stability should allow you to remain slightly tilted to your side. Remember, we’re trying to simplify the process, so since you leave on your side and you’re swimming freestyle, you’ll initiate the first stroke on your side. Practicing an extended push off on your side helps you to learn it more thoroughly.

Drop and push - Back

Now that you’ve mastered the ready position push off to the angled body line, it’s time to see why. This drill ads one component to the previous skill. Drop down from the ready position. Push off in streamline to the slightly angled body line. Now, take the bottom hand and allow it to fall back… like a pull, but don’t put too much force behind it. Keep the other hand extended and allow your body to rotate nearly all the way onto your back. This is a foundation position that will start the process of building your stroke, so don’t rush through this. You don’t have to push off as far as our swimmer does, but the movement should be this simplified. Again, drop down push off to the angled position. Allow the bottom hand to release from the streamline and fall back… like a pull, but easier. As the hand lands on the side of the thigh, roll your body on to your back and start a flutter kick on your back.