Swim WEST Swimming Tip #2 – The shape of the palm
What’s your best palm position to swim looser, faster and to protect your lower back?
Learn why the shape of the palm can easily loosen your neck, shoulders and by that to help you swim much faster
Watch the video and improve your swimming technique!
Swim WEST is the best swimming technique to loosen your body and swim faster, because there is no such thing as 1 swimming technique that can be right for everyone.
Our second swimming tip discusses palm positioning. Should your palm be open? Sealed closed? Curved to a bowl shape? You have probably heard the saying “you don’t eat soup with a fork”. Yet, for years we’d taught to swim with sealed palms. Is it the right way?
What’s right for you is based on your flexibility level:
If you are highly flexible you can keep our palms straight and bit open.
If you are moderately flexible you should keep your palms nearly straight and loosened.
If you are not very flexible or feel pain in your shoulders, neck or lower back, you should keep your palm curved.
In the past we had tried to teach swimmers to swim with open and loosened palms, and then close the palms once they reach under water. People found it coordinately complicated to carry out. They got confused about when to open and when to close their palms. Therefore, since 1997, we have started to teach swimmers to swim with open palms constantly, believing that preventing injuries is more important for us than swimming speed. As years went by we came to understand how fast looseness swimming technique can make you swim.
Our palm is the part which grabs a certain amount of water per stroke, but also has the potential to hurt our neck, shoulders, shortens our stroke, overstress our body and break streamline. On the other hand, loosen palm can help you relieve stress, give you a little break before your next stroke, keep your strokes elongated and swim with minimal effort.
In other words, the extent to which you open your fingers, based on your flexibility level, can help you relieve stress, take care of back pain and swim way faster, with less effort.