A Comprehensive Guide To An Efficient Front Crawl Stroke
Stroke Builder, for Apple iPhone and iPad, has just been launched by leading UK triathlon coaching company thetrilife.com.
The app uses high definition video clips, narrated by former Great Britain Olympic coach Dan Salcedo, to provide a step-by-step guide to stroke improvement, assist the athlete in identifying their own faults and illustrate a collection of the most useful swimming drills.
Novice triathletes and swimmers will benefit from the Stroke Builder section of the app. Here, each phase of the stroke is clearly explained and demonstrated with video. The app suggests drills to develop an efficient and relaxed front crawl stroke so that novice athletes can swim their race distance comfortably without feeling exhausted.
For more experienced triathletes, wanting to shave off a couple of minutes from their race swim time, the finer points of a great swim stroke are described in detail and the mystery of a good catch and pull unravelled. Athletes that know where their faults are will want to use Fault Fixer. Fault Fixer allows the athlete to compare their own swimming to a collection of video clips illustrating commonly observed faults and suggest drills to correct the fault.
Coaches will find the Drills Database invaluable, not only in terms of quality of the footage (drills demonstrated by ex elite triathlete Andrea Whitcombe) and quantity of drills available but also because of the ease of use. The app will become the coaches’ pocket drill bible for showing their athletes exactly how a drill should be performed as well as providing the coach with reminders of which drills are best for which faults – no longer will coaches have to resort to links to youTube videos.
Former Great Britain Olympic coach Dan Salcedo said “Our aim with this app was to produce a comprehensive guide to front crawl in one easy to use resource that is like having your own coach at home. Using videos has allowed us to show details of the stroke that are not always clearly explained in books. We are thrilled with the app and hope that athletes will be too.”
Liz Scott, director of thetrilife.com said “We have been working on this app for a number of months and we are delighted with the result. We wanted to create an app that would become a coaching tool that every triathlete and coach would want to have in their pocket at the pool. We think that we got what we wanted.”
Stroke Builder is available now from the iTunes App Store.
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