Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Race Analysis






When we were in Winnipeg, I had a professional video analysis done of Kyle Haas' 100BK in prelims in order to get a high resolution video for feedback, but also to get a meter by meter analysis of speed, stroke rate and distance per stroke to find out what the difference was from morning racing to night time racing. Kyle is usually much faster at night and I wanted to know why. I also want to make him instinctively faster in the morning and in order to do that, I need to know where the areas of weakness are in order to fix them. This will also improve his performances at finals.

The video is above. The picture is a copy of the actual meter analysis.

In the analysis:
V = Velocity (speed meters/second)
DPS = Distance per stroke
SR = Stroke Rate
SCT = stroke cycle time (amount of time for one complete stroke to happen)
SI = Swim efficiency index (looking for a high number here)

One of the major things the jumps out at me while watching the video is that Kyle slows down quite a bit when approaching the wall at the 50m mark and lays out of his front for a long time. Analysis confirms this, as the 5m approaching the wall, he speed slows from 1.53m/s to 1.40m/s. Obviously he looses speed the further he goes, but the abrupt drop in velocity on those 5m is because he's not actually doing anything, just riding his momentum.

This is very confusing for most people and it wont likely mean much to most people but I find it interesting. Learned quite a few things from this. Check it out.



Mike Thompson
Head Coach
HHBF