2. Importance of Flip Turn

Video Transcription: Let’s think about Turns in competitive swimming. Take the 500 Freestyle, which is one of the longer events. You’ve got 19 Turns. During those 19 Turns. It takes an elite Swimmer somewhere between five to seven seconds. And that’s from Flags in to Flags out. Five yards in, five yards out, equaling 10 yards total. That’s a good time from Flags to Flags. But only about a second of that 10 seconds is devoted to the Flip itself. When you think about it, going into the Turn and coming out of the Turn is most of the time spent surrounding the Turn. So, it’s important for Swimmers to focus on their Approach and their push-offs to really maximize their velocity and minimize their time spent transitioning between laps. The purpose of a Flip Turn is to help a Swimmer transition between a lap going in one direction to the lap going in the next Direction and it’s faster than an Open Turn and it does help a Swimmer carry the speed on the surface more than if you were to just touch the wall with your hand. Let me explain that a little bit further here in a second.