Swim Speed Secrets: Master the Freestyle Technique Used by the World's Fastest Swimmers Author: Sheila Taormina | Language: English | ISBN:
B009NIPNYI | Format: EPUB
Swim Speed Secrets: Master the Freestyle Technique Used by the World's Fastest Swimmers Description
In Swim Speed Secrets, 4-time Olympian, gold medalist, and triathlon world champion Sheila Taormina reveals the swim technique used by the world’s fastest swimmers.
Over the course of 4 Olympic Games and throughout her career as a world champion triathlete, Taormina refined her exceptional technique as a student of the sport, studying the world’s best swimmers using underwater photographs and video analysis. From Johnny Weissmuller to Michael Phelps, the world’s fastest swimmers share one common element: a high-elbow underwater pull.
Many swimmers and triathletes neglect the pull, distracted by stroke count or perfecting less critical details like body position, streamlining, and roll. Swim Speed Secrets focuses on the pull—the most crucial element of swimming—to help triathletes and swimmers overhaul their swim stroke and find the speed that’s been eluding them.
With a commonsense approach that comes from decades of practice and 15 years of hands-on coaching experience, Taormina explains why the high-elbow underwater pull is the most important part of swimming and how swimmers can transition to this vital technique. She offers the best drills to cultivate a sensitive feel for the water. Her dryland and strength building exercises develop the arm positioning and upper body musculature required to swim faster. She describes what it feels like when swimmers have learned the secret and offers tips that helped her perform at a world-class level for two decades.
Sheila Taormina’s Swim Speed Secrets brings the focus back where it belongs—to a powerful underwater stroke. With this book, triathletes and swimmers can stop swimming for survival and break through to new levels of speed and confidence in the water.
- File Size: 4309 KB
- Print Length: 212 pages
- Publisher: VeloPress; Reprint edition (September 27, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B009NIPNYI
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,921 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Water Sports > Swimming - #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Individual Sports > Triathlon - #10
in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Exercise & Fitness > Swimming
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Water Sports > Swimming - #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Individual Sports > Triathlon - #10
in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Exercise & Fitness > Swimming
The author focuses mainly on the high elbow catch. What others spend a paragraph in a book or 60 seconds in a video, this author covers in great detail in an entire book. This reminds me of the total immersion (TI) books that use an entire book to focus on a narrow aspect of a stroke. Though it seems that one should be able to cover the high elbow catch with fewer pages, much like the TI books this book really drives the point home for the reader.
I like this book a lot. Perhaps I am reading it at the right time for my training. Though everyone will benefit from it, I would suspect some readers will benefit more depending on current swimming level. Total beginners may benefit more from the TI books. This book does not try to teach you how to start swimming. It assumes you can do some laps. However, this book will not hurt you if you are a beginner and very soon it will become indispensable for you, too.
The authors style of writing is very friendly. You will feel like you had a good coaching session after reading it. The pictures are very inviting. The pages are printed nicely. Very good job. On the presentation this book is the *best* swimming book out there.
Where I think the book could improve is where I enjoyed the book even more. As the title suggests, the book is about 'secretS' (many). And indeed, there are many secrets/topics in it, but they are all revealed in a less organized way during high elbow catch discussions. I greatly enjoyed the other tips. I just wish the 'secrets' were presented in a structured way. Perhaps the author feels that they are of lower importance. But... swimming is a sport of millimeters.
Kudos to the author for this book. I like it a lot
By dnk512
I am a triathlete (or perhaps a wanna be) and swimming has not been my strength. While I get advice from coachs on movement that is visible outside of the water, I typically see MANY people doing exactly what those coaches are telling me my problem is, yet going MUCH faster than I. Clearly, something else is the problem, something going on under the surface, that's making the difference. This is where Sheila focuses - on the pull. She invokes the 80/20 rule and states that the other stuff - body streaminglining, arm recovery, hand entry - is all the in the 20%. And the best evidence she provides for that is Johnny Weissmuller held all swim records in the 1920s, while swimming holding his head out of the water! His speeds are certainly not up to today's olympic standards but he swims WAY faster than I or 99% of most triathletes (57s / 100m is Pretty Darn Fast). What he did have was a really good pull.
This is a well-thought out book with drills and training approaches. She does take her time making her point in places but this is the best book on the important parts of technique that I've seen. Highly recommended.
By Bruce P. Douglass
Swim Speed Secrets: Master the Freestyle Technique Used by the World's Fastest Swimmers Preview
Link
Please Wait...