(jazz music)
- Okay, the pull buoy, believe it or not,
the pull buoy is not meant to be a lifesaving device
for those sink-your-legs swimmers out there,
which is shocking, I know.
- Now, we're not saying that you can't use it
if you really do need to stay afloat with it,
but there is another use for the pull buoy
that is intended to help and improve your swimming.
- Yeah, they really are very useful.
And actually, we do pull work all the time
to try and isolate the arms
and really focus on parts of our strength.
So today, we're going to show you how to use a pull buoy
and the benefits.
- Let's start with a few basics.
And the idea of pull work is that,
well, quite literally,
we're pulling ourselves through the water
using our arms with no leg kick at all.
And of course, for most people,
if you take the leg kick away,
your legs will tend to sink
and that's where the pull buoy comes in.
- Most pull buoys are buoyant to some degree,
so what we wanna do is place this
between our thighs
and that's gonna help keep our legs afloat.
But also what it'll do is prevent us
from kicking our legs
because we have the pull buoy between our legs.
And they do sometimes come
in various different shapes and sizes,
although working the same way,
what you might find is,
one end is larger than the other.
So what you do in this instance is
that you'll place the largest part lowest in the water.
So if we're doin' front crawl, for instance,
we're on our front,
we want that largest part down at the bottom,
so we place that that largest part around the front,
and simple as that, really.
- And that stops it from slipping out
from between our legs, as well,
and just gets our legs that little bit more lift
that we need.
So that being said, let's go ahead
and show you how to use it.
- Using a pull buoy might sound simple enough,
just don't kick your legs, right?
Well, you would be surprised.
He kicks all the time.
But obviously, that is not the aim.
We want to really keep our legs still
and isolate the arms.
But you can be excused
if you are starting out with pull work.
You wanna try and build that strength up,
so you can kick a little bit, flutter your legs.
- And there really is no shame
if you find it really pretty difficult.
And if that is you, then you can opt for something
like a larger pull buoy
that all of the stores offer as one of their options.
Or actually,
something that my coach used to give me is the option
of a second pull buoy.
You'd strap them together with a band or something
and that just gives you a lot more added buoyancy
when you're swimming.
- It can take people years to get the hang of,
can't they phrase that?
- Yeah, still working on that.
- But as we've mentioned, the idea is
to really isolate the arms
and if possible, literally keep your ankles dead together,
so they're locked together, you're not moving them at all.
But again, like I say, a tiny bit of movement is okay.
- This is effectively one of the big benefits
of swimming with a pull buoy
because now, for any given speed that we're swimming at,
you're gonna have to work a lot harder,
because obviously, we don't have our kick to aid us.
And that gives a lot of extra arm strength
and that's a real benefit to swimming with a pull buoy.
And another benefit too is also the fact
that we're constantly swimming
with our arms with no kick,
we can really work on the dead spots
that might be present in our stroke.
- So if you are relatively new to pull work,
then you may want to start with fairly short reps.
That way you can focus on the quality of each rep
with a short break to recover and reset.
A simple example would be something
like 12 by 25 metres
with a 20-second recovery between each.
You can then build from this
to something like 8 by 50 metres
and then to 4 by 100 metres, for example.
(upbeat music)
Okay, that's all great,
but what are we really trying to focus on here
with pull work?
- Well, first things first is it really makes us think
about emphasising the catch part
of our stroke.
- And like you mentioned before,
doing pull work highlights those dead spots.
And you almost wanna think of it like a see-saw,
if you don't have that catch at the front,
then your legs are gonna drop.
But if you have that catch at the front,
it helps to bring the feet up.
The other thing is, obviously,
it's really emphasising the pull phase, as well.
- And that's really allowing us
to think about the entire mechanics
of the stroke from when our hand enters the water
through the catch phase
and then also right out to exiting, as well.
- And if you don't have a strong pull,
you're not gonna move anywhere.
And again, it's really gonna highlight that
and allow you to really work on it.
And it's really important
that we actually make this quite obvious,
is that pull work isn't there
for those people that are learning,
obviously it helps,
but it's actually a really good training tool.
We do it all the time in our training.
- I can't remember the last time I wasn't using a pull buoy
for a substantial part of a swim session
when I've been training and I definitely think
that goes for most of elite-level athletes
that you're talking to, really, isn't it?
- And it can be progressed as we've mentioned
in some of these session examples before.
We can add more volume to it,
and also can start adding paddles,
and maybe even a band.
But we will talk about band work in another video,
another point.
- And other benefit of the pull buoy is
that it actually does a really good job
of mimicking the position
that our body has when we're wearing a wetsuit in a race.
So in that regards, it's really useful to practise.
- However, do not fall into trap
of relying on a pull buoy.
I do know a lot of people
that reach for a pull buoy
at every opportunity.
And sure, it does help to keep your legs afloat,
if maybe, you do have sink-y legs.
But instead of relying on it,
try to think of it more as a tool
to try and improve that catch and pull
to make you better.
- And hopefully, in time, you'll find
that you are not actually relying
on that pull buoy quite as much
and you're able to swim well without it.
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then just click up here.