High elbow drills

Today I'm going to post a few videos about high elbow drills (at recovery and during the catch).

The purpose of the recovery is to to place the arm in position for another underwater stroke. While this is an important function, it does not provide any propulsion, so the goals of the recovery should be : to get the arm over the water with the least disruption of lateral alignment, and to provide a short period of reduced effort for the arm, shoulder and trunk muscles. The shoulder should come out of the water first, followed by the upper arm and the elbow. The forearm and hand are last to leave the water. To do that the body should be rolled approximately 45 degrees toward the recovery side through the first half of the recovery so that the arm can carried over the water with a high elbow. The elbow should be the highest part of the arm from the times it leaves the water during the recovery until it enters the wtaer again in front of the shoulder. To accomplish this, the arm should be flexed at the elbow so that the forearm and hand can be carried almost directly below and only slightly outside it. Recovering in this manner will reduce the amount of outward arm motion during the recovery, and that will reduce the tendency for the swinging arm to pull the hips out of alignment.

and underwater

As for the EVF (early vertical forearm) technique, there are a few studies that reported significant contribution of the forearm to propulsion in the front crawl. That's because swimmers can begin accelerating the body forward sooner. I should mention that attempting to push back too early in the downsweep or outsweep is one of the most common causes of shoulder tendinitis in swimmers. To avoid this swimmers must wait until the elbows ride above the hands before they start to push back. There are quite a few drylanf drills that can help you understand the correct EVF technique. Some of them can be found here http://swimming.about.com/od/drylandexercise/ig/EVF-Dryland-Swimmer-Exercises/

and drills in the water