As far as ordinary swimming, I've been doing it some - and I usually soak in the hot tub after using working out in the gym. It's very low impact.
Based on Youtube, the swimming technique the people in mermaid suits are using is essentially the same as one of several common techniques used by scuba divers.
The underwater dolphin kicks seems to be used a lot by competitive swimmers in swimming pools. In particular, they pretty much all use it immediately after kicking off the wall. Apparently, even when they are competing a particular stroke (e.g., backstroke), they are allowed to use this stroke just after coming off the wall - perhaps until they come to the surface for their first breath. I think it extends the distance they can travel at high speed from that kick, without creating much drag, because it lets them keep their head low, creating a smoother streamline. I assume the reason it isn't used instead of the Australian Crawl in the rest of freestyle swimming, is that once they raise their head to breathe, the underwater dolphin kick doesn't let them accelerate back to speed as fast as the Australian Crawl does.
But I might have that all wrong - I'm mostly a largely self taught swimmer (one swimming pool posted pictures of someone doing each of the strokes, and I tried to copy it, probably inefficiently and with bad timing), and don't understand proper technique.
Though I did get a lot of practice doing the side stroke while whitewater kayaking, to tow the boat to shore, before I learned how to reliably roll the boat instead of exiting it when I flipped.
While the underwater dolphin kick is used for the very fast after-wall spurt by competitive swimmers, the mermaid suit swimming technique link from the Fin Fun company that I posted at the start of this thread said that their idea is to go more slowly and gracefully. It talked about using core muscles to make it work - which is what makes the technique appealing to me.
Core muscle use is absolutely essential to efficient paddling technique (because those muscles are bigger and have more endurance than arm muscles, and stiffening them helps transfer momentum from other parts of the body), and I've been trying to use it to make my skating more efficient too. But I haven't figured out how to use the core while swimming - it's all arms and knees for me, with only a little bit of thigh and core muscle use.
I once tried to take a set of adult group swimming lessons, but they weren't at quite the right level, though they helped a little with breathing. The teacher also had us isolate arm and leg movements, e.g., by using a kickboard, to work on each part of the body alone. I took a private lesson from the same teacher - but she had me try the scuba fins to try to improve my "flutter kick" - which almost immediately badly sprained and/or strained my foot, taking me out of commission for weeks. The lesson only lasted a few minutes before the injury occurred.
I still breath too infrequently. If I breath as often as they say to, I hyperventilate. Perhaps I breath too deeply?
Or perhaps I just got used to breathing infrequently, because I used to play saxophone. I was taught to take a deep breath by expanding the lower abdominal area, and use the lower abdomen to support the breath, creating a fast thin column of air which generates sound against the reed or vocal cord very efficiently (with less air volume), so it lets you play longer between breaths. It actually takes a lot more air volume - so the breath lasts less long - to play softly, using less pressure, than to play loudly. I think it also creates a better acoustic resonance between your lungs and the instrument, allowing you to control the tone quality better. (A lot of saxophone playing is tone poetry.) I've been told that trained singers are taught a similar technique.
I really should get more swimming lessons (definitely without scuba fins!). E.g., though I've experimented some with different techniques to try to figure out how to swim more efficiently, I'm still a lot slower, and can swim a lot less far, than people who know how to do it right.
Topic: Mermaid suit swimming :) (Read 5300 times)