First Arm Stroke

I did a good pushoff and then soon a single right arm stroke and was pleased to cover 12 m until I stopped. This was repeatable.

Just for comparison, I did the pushoff with no arm stroke and covered 11.99 m! Disappointment now. This was repeatable too.

My wonderful powerful right arm stroke was almost totally ineffective!

I suppose that experimenting with when to commence the first pull might improve things a bit. I recall Rodrigues saying to commence the pull quite soon after pushoff when you are going faster than normal swim speed.

cottmiler wrote:

I suppose that experimenting with when to commence the first pull might improve things a bit.  I recall Rodrigues saying to commence the pull quite soon after pushoff when you are going faster than normal swim speed.

I agree: better taking the first stroke when you're still a bit faster at cost of breaking the streamline and losing a bit of speed, rather than taking the first stroke too late when you have already gone sub swim speed. On long steady sets I used to get lazy and do long pushoffs, but I recognize it was a laziness issue. That's another reason why I recently replaced sets like 10x400 with something like 1h of 25m reps with 3.5s rest.

Salvo

As training for the marathon races i m trying to be as slow as possible after push off the wall. First arm stroke and going faster than normal swim speed is a fake for me, not an indicator for ow swimmers.