Common Pushoff Mistakes

Video Transcription: Common mistakes may include not setting up your streamline fast enough so you get your feet on the wall, but your hands are still messing around trying to find the tight streamline. They may be close, but they’re just not quite there. 

Lifting your head into the turn, which makes the flip, itself, take longer. We did talk about looking at the wall during the approach. We definitely don’t want to do that because it’s going to slow down your literal turn. 

Twisting while flipping. Not planning truly on your back. 

And then messing up your stroke count as you’re coming into the wall, which leads into rolling the wrong way. When you’re teaching younger age groupers how to do a Backstroke Turn, sometimes they don’t know which side to roll towards. If you’re going to be crossing your right arm, you’re always going to roll away from the arm that’s opening up. Sometimes they roll towards the arm that’s open. So they’ll take their right arm up over their head and then they’ll roll towards their right to get to their stomach. Doing that doesn’t get that extra twist velocity. Ideally you want to combine the angular velocity there, along with your surface velocity. So messing up your stroke count and also flipping the wrong way are huge common mistakes on Backstroke Turns that we really want to try to avoid.