[PHOTO BY TODD DESORBO, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA ]
> Virginia’s Matt Brownstead is shown in the 50 yard freestyle the instant after leaving the wall.
College coaches Braden Holloway (NC State), Todd DeSorbo (Virginia), Matt Kredich (Tennessee) and Jessen Book (Kenyon) share their ideas on how they help their swimmers maximize turn speed. BY MICHAEL J. STOTT
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:46.02 to 4:46.09. It was a mid-season 500 free more than a decade ago between two all-state and, later, NCAA D-I swimmers. My distance freestyler lost a minimum of nine seconds on his turns; theirs didn’t. Neither athlete, who was never more than 67-hundredths apart at each 50, remembers the race...but both coaches do. “My guy came off the wall in a perfect streamline, launched his kick and powered home (26.46 to 26.78),” says Seton coach Jim Koehr. Turns—from summer league to the Olympics—make a difference. Nowhere is this more obvious than in North Carolina State’s recent showings at the NCAA Championships. “We work on turns every day,” says Wolfpack head coach Braden Holloway. “It begins in the weight room, working on explosive movements for explosive turns. We have turn work throughout all sets and all workouts. In a 3,000-yard workout, that could be up to 117 turns.” For those of you at home, 117 turns in a 3,000-yard workout— just six workouts per week times 50 weeks—is 35,100 turns a year. With such repetition, one could get awfully good just concentrating on the basics. “For example,” says Holloway “we start in warm-up. We can go 600 as follows: • Loosen, doing the first 100 with underwater technique turns; • 100 with fast flips (just the flips are fast); • 100 complete fast flips putting your hands on the top of the deck to prevent deceleration; • 100 with fast flips and MAX DPS push-offs with no kicks— trying for max distance—then add four-to-six fly kicks into the breakout; • 100 blast, flags to wall to fast flip plus putting hands on the deck and pressing body out, 100 blast flags into fast flip plus putting hands on deck and pressing body out of water completely to standing position as fast as possible. “We also add turns into mid-pool, working on a fast somersault 14
APRIL 2021
SWIMMINGWORLD.COM
motion, staying tucked and asking the athletes to rotate more than one time around. “Another way is to start or finish normal sets with flips. We could go eight rounds of a 100 swim plus a 50 kick with a board. Start the 100 with arms stretched out and feet out behind on the wall and then flip to begin the 100. The 50 kick ends with a pull into a fast flip, focusing on accelerating the feet around.” Pack swimmers also do no-wall turns. Swimmers may float and do fast flips in place or build speed to a fast flip in place. “In shallow water, we often have them float-blast four-to-five strokes, flip all the way around to where they can stand up and press down with their feet to the bottom and jump high in the air. If swimmers are thinking to flip all the way around to stand up fast, it keeps their acceleration up and their rotation small,” says Holloway. Russell Mark, USA Swimming’s national team high performance manager, has metrics on many aquatic elements. In timing turns, he says USA Swimming “always measured hand-to-foot touches and didn’t include feet contact time on the wall. For hand-to-foot, we used 0.65-0.75 as fast, 0.75-0.85 as OK, and 0.85+ as slow.” Holloway doesn’t time flips, saying “FAST is FAST. The biggest thing is making sure swimmers don’t place their feet on the wall, but maintain speed from the flip all the way around, knowing that the water will slow their rotation when their feet enter the water at the end of the flip. “Also, the wall never moves, so we want a flip fast and a maximized press against the wall. Too many kids actually slow their flip/rotation, trying to time their push-off or placing their feet on the wall for a push-off. “As for timing a flip during a race, we tell our swimmers not to change their stroke dramatically, but to exit the hand a tad early to help speed their rate and judge the timing of the somersault. We never want them to slow the rate down into the wall.” UP THE ROAD Todd DeSorbo, now in his fourth year as head coach at the University of Virginia, worked with sprinters while at NC State.
