Posture

Let’s start at the very beginning, how you hold you body is the most important thing that determines how you perform as an athlete. All movement in sport starts from the core and extends out through the arms and legs. In swimming, we used to spend a lot of time teaching posture by focusing on being tall; extension and length were important ideas. Being tall is still important, but focusing on extension and creating alignment from your hips to your shoulders created problems, mostly it diminished power and left the athlete open to shear forces. Shear forces are rotating movements, which swimmers experience during freestyle and backstroke. Here is a comparison, from the Williams Health Group Blog, of an athletes’ core with a good connection between their hips and shoulders and a poor connection between the two:

Anytime you see this shearing of the core, it is a massive loss of energy and power. This is always bad. So if creating posture by extension isn’t the answer, what is? I would argue that teaching an athlete, even a swimmer, base athletic posture is the way to go. Base athletic posture starts by learning the hip hinge movement:

What the hip hinge does is activates all of the muscles in the core and creates what is refered to as the “serape effect“. The serape effect creates a balanced “firing” of both abdominal and back muscle groups. This balance is really important in athletes. In youth sports, we see a lot of low back injuries, especially in early teenage girls. Most of the time, when athletes go to the doctor for these back injuries, which can range from disc compression to stress fractures, they assume that they need to get a stronger core, which they think is their abs. What they are told is almost always that their abdominal strength is good, their back strength is poor. This imbalance is the root of the problems. When you apply force, it will always seek an area of weakness to escape through. When force is misapplied, it can create a tremendous amount of damage. The hip hinge activates muscles which create a balanced 360 degree brace to manage force. It also places the spine in the neutral position, which shifts force from the spinal column to the core muscles.

Okay, so the hip hinge is great for sports on land. It is the key to safely moving weight and creating force with your feet on the ground. It is the base posture for all athletic movements:

but what does that have to do with swimming? Do I really need to push my hips back that far? The answer is yes and no. Watch this video and think about whether you see the hip hinge:

Can you see the connection between the hips and shoulders? Can you see a hip hinge movement? Do I move my hips like that while I swim freestyle or backstroke? The answer to the last question is no, but you do make the hips the center of the rotation. The most important concept with the hip hinge motion isn’t how far the hips move, it is the “activation” of all of the core muscles. With a bit of practice, you can activate all of the right core muscles by hinging the hips only 2-3 inches.  This is enough to create the serape effect without creating excess drag or throwing the body into extreme and unmanageable positions. For freestyle and backstroke, we want to push the hips back slightly and hold them there while you swim. This will create the right level of activation, teach you to kick from your core (not your lower leg), and protect your lower back from an imbalance which leads to injury:

To learn the hip hinge, you should do 3 sets of 10-15 reps 3-4 times per week. As you become better and better at it, you will find that you don’t need to move your hips nearly as far to feel the activation of the core muscles, this is the goal. As you become better at it, think about how this activation and movement applies to all phases of swimming.

Tags: dryland, injury prevention, mechanics, mobility, movement, posture, skill transfer, swimming