Smaller the Ball – Faster the Turn

Video Transcription: So the interesting part about phase two is no matter how big, tall, small you are, you want to become the smallest version of you in order to flip super fast. The term I like to use is “the smaller the ball, the faster the Turn”. And this is really due to the law of conservation of energy. Whether you’re a physics guru or not, this law states that the energy of a total isolated system, aka a swimmer in a pool, will remain constant and conserved over time. Another way to think about that is all the factors that make up the energy of a rotating system are on one axis. So the swimmer’s mass, the radius of the mass, and the angular velocity squared, if manipulated, will always come out to the same constant. Out of those things, a few of them you can change and a couple of them you can’t. You can’t change someone’s mass, but you can change the radius of that mass. So if you change the radius of the mass, which makes the ball of the Flip Turn or the somersault smaller, something else in reality is going to have to get larger because the outcome on the other side of that equals sign is constant, it’s consistent. If we reduce the size, we increase the angular velocity, which is really super awesome. What we want to do is try to think about how small of a ball can we get into because that will increase our speed multiple folds because it’s angular velocity squared, which means that the whole system itself will flip faster.

So when you’re thinking about tucking tight for a Flip Turn, you want it to be like you are in a deep squat, your chest is touching your knees, your bum is on your heels, everything is so tight that it’s kind of an awkward place. If you were to do a yogi squat on land, it’s like that, but even tighter.