The Catch

Swimming Technique: The Catch

The Catch

Over the last three or four weeks in our Swim Squads we’ve been spending a little time during our sessions working on the catch.

The catch, for me, is arguably the most important part of the swim stroke.

(assuming you can breathe and you can hold yourself high in the water / have good body position)

If you can get your catch right, you can transform your swim.

Over the past month, we’ve worked on trying to connect our hand and forearm and put them in a position to maximise our surface area to push water backwards.

What do I mean?

We are not trying to push water backwards with our hands. They are not very big and will not ‘hold’ a lot of water. Instead, we want to use both our hand and forearm to act as a larger paddle to push water backwards.

What Have We Been Doing?

Fists Drill

It’s as simple as it sounds. You make your hand into a fist and swim as normal, as you usually would.

When we do this drill, we are trying to push water back with our forearms. To do this, we need to keep a high elbow in the water, trying to get our forearm in a vertical position, so we push water backwards.

Water Polo Drill

In it’s simplest terms, we are swimming with our head out of the water.

With this drill, we are trying to enter the water with our hands just in front of our heads and then start to pull back immediately. The aim of this is keep the elbows high when we enter the water and start the pull, meaning we are pulling back with a large vertical paddle – no dropped elbows.

If you do it well, you will notice how much resistance you feel when pulling back simply because of your high elbows in the water.

Other Technique Cues

These were the two drills we used, but we also thought about a couple of things whilst we were swimming full stroke.

Firstly, we were thinking about ‘overpowering’ the first half of the pull. Once we have started the catch, we were trying to concentrate our efforts on the first part of the stroke, holding the water and accelerating backwards (and reducing the power at the back end of the stroke). Focus on feeling resistance early on in the stroke.

Secondly, we were thinking about our fingertips. We wanted to get our fingertips pointing towards the bottom of the pool as early in the swim stroke as possible (without bending at the wrist). Enter the water with our hands, and extend forward as normal, and then try and get the fingertips pointing towards the bottom of the pool.

Thirdly, we were ‘keeping an eye on our elbows’. When swimming along, using our peripheral vision, can we see our elbows nice and high in the water?

In all of this, we are trying to keep our elbows pretty high in the water, whilst our fingertips are pointing down – creating a vertical forearm to pull and push the water.

What Do The Swimmers Think?

“I think that was a Eureka moment!”

“I could feel my lats working … that’s new”

“I could feel myself moving tonight”

“When I get the catch right, swimming feels powerful”

“1.27 … new PB!”

“Enjoyed this session, really like focusing on catch and tinkering with it, ie thinking about different cues 🙂 definitely feel it in my back more today.”

“Enjoying the technique focus again though. My 25s were getting quicker with each new thing to think about – I even equalled my 25m PB of 18 seconds!”

“Worked on catch and high elbow. Felt more powerful in the water (but lost some form on drills and as session went on). Need to be able to sustain that power over a distance.”

No matter how good of a swimmer you become, you will always be thinking about your catch. Ignore it at your peril!