#422 : Why You're Not Faster After Working On Your Catch with Brenton Ford
4/7/20265 min
You've probably heard it before — your freestyle catch is everything.
And maybe you've been working on it. You've improved the position, you feel stronger in the water, and technically… it looks better.
But here's the frustrating part — you're still not getting any faster.
So what's going on?
Today, we're breaking down exactly why improving your catch doesn't always translate into speed… and what you need to do to actually get the benefit from it.
Because recently, I worked with a swimmer who had done everything right. He sent in underwat...
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer, and live a better life. Here's your host, Brenton Ford.
Brenton Ford· Host0:10
[upbeat music] You know your catch in freestyle is important, which is this part of the stroke here, but you're just not sure why you can't seem to get any faster even though you feel like you've improved your catch. In this video, I'm gonna share why that can happen and what you can do to make sure that you actually get the benefit from a better catch position in your freestyle. Recently, I was working with a swimmer who had been working on his catch, and he'd sent us some underwater footage, which we took a look at, and we saw that his catch position, which is this part of the stroke, so we begin up here and we get down to here, this is what we would call the catch in freestyle, and that's the position where we are set up really well to press back and start to generate a lot of our propulsion. And we saw that he had almost a perfect position for his stroke, except he hadn't really gotten any faster despite improving that position, and he wasn't sure exactly why that was. When we looked back at his footage, we saw that he was actually going too quickly into that catch position. So once he entered the water, instead of extending forwards and then rotating a little bit and then getting to his catch, he would come in and straightaway begin the catch and bend his elbow. And so while the position was better and he had more surface area, so he had a bigger