What is different about my swimming this year compared to last year

I’m not incredibly faster this year over last year but I am definitely not working as hard. It’s too bad my HR monitor didn’t work at Timberman. I would have loved to know what my average HR was during that swim. I’ll try again at my next race. Last year at Buckman I think my Swim HR was an average of 170. Yikes! Hyperventilate much? That was typical all of last year.
Anyhow, I just thought I’d list some of the stuff I know that I’ve worked on and changed.

1) bi-lateral breathing: The biggest benefit to this in my opinion is that it keeps me from hyperventilating. Breathing to the same side (every 2) causes you to breathe too often. It seems really difficult at first but eventually it is incredibly relaxing. It also helps you swim straighter and reduces the likelihood of fatiguing one shoulder more than the other. It balances the load.

2) Front Quadrant swimming and balance. Look at the catch up drills and change it to almost catch up to understand what your arms should be doing to swim front quadrant. The big benefit of this change has been balance. It seems to promote downhill swimming for me.

3) Stroke mechanics. This is the stuff that doesn’t seem to be mentioned often enough. For someone without a swim background, this is not obvious.
A) Arms should not travel under your body. Think of paddling a surfboard and your body is the surfboard. Keep those arms wide.
B) At the catch your hand needs to be even with or slightly below your shoulder. Otherwise the first motion you make with that hand is pushing water down towards the bottom of the pool, which will lift your upper body out of the water and provides no forward propulsion. When you are driving your hand forward to the catch, think about sending your hands to 8 o’clock and 4 o’clock, 9 and 3 would be would be even with your shoulders. Also allow your hands to drift to the outside rather than closer to your body line as you drive your hand forward.
C) Arm and Hand path during the stroke. Think about pushing water towards your feet at all times. This means you have to bend your wrist. I was pushing water up towards the top of the pool at the end of my stroke. This pushing water up towards the surface would push my legs down, which messed up my balance and didn't move me forward.

4) Tempo Trainer: This tool was huge for me. I have been told many times that I need to slow down my stroke. That has not been easy for me. Largely I think it was because of the stroke mechanic problems listed above. Without those fixes, I only felt balanced in the water when I was pulling and it was a false sense of balance. With those fixes in place, my balance improved to the point where I could actually balance without pulling. I could finally glide.
Back to the Tempo Trainer, using this metronome I was able to try out different swim cadences to determine which is the most efficient. I had/have a tendency to overstroke. I would be at 60 or more strokes per minute. As it turns out, currently I’m just as fast swimming at 50 strokes per minute. I get to save 10 strokes for the same speed! A huge energy savings in terms of effort. Of course the next goal is to be able to stroke at 60 and actually be faster. A matter of maintaining my distance per stroke at the higher cadence.

There you have it. It's just that simple ;-)