What’s the ideal amount of rotation? I get asked this question a lot. At the end of the day, if you look at the body flat horizontally on the water. You don’t want the body to rotate more than like 30 degrees from the water surface, so a lot of the drills that coaches do like single or right single-arm left, or you could do six kicks one stroke six kicks three strokes, all those rotation drills, actually, over-rotate a swimmer, and a lot of times it’s just for swimmers to learn what it’s like to drive the hips fully down and be perpendicular to the water. By the end of the day, you’re never going to rotate that much you physically can’t with having a faster stroke, there’s just not enough time. It’s important to make sure that during the rotation you are rotating with the hands whichever hand is pulling backward let’s say my right hand enters my right hip will be driven down, and then as my right hand starts to pull back the opposite hip should start turning and then back towards neutral and towards the hand that’s pulling backward. The speed of the free stop pull should dictate how fast you rotate. If you don’t rotate at the same speed as your pull speed, we go way back to the washing machine analogy, you’re not going to hit that little blip or you’re not going to get a little increase in propulsion in your Freestyle stroke because you didn’t hit that little peak the hip itself is driving water towards the hand as the head is moving backward you’ll miss it.
