Swam laps today, progressing slowly with efficiency

I went for a lap swim this morning which was cut a little short as the pool opens a 1/2 hour later and the lap swim session is only 1 hour. I go to two pools and may need to venture over to the other one for a longer session.

I had the lifeguard mention 'time' to me so I said 1pm. He then said that they were closing off the pool for the next session of free swimmers... Haha, at first I thought that he was asking me for the time.........lololol.

So I ended up with 1,750 yards in 53 minutes.

The Garmin Connect website will show you the Pace, Strokes and Swolf for your session. You can move the cursor over the graph to see specific times and the associated data points.

If your doing an interval type of a workout, you can see the times for each swim across the pool. In my case, each 25 yards. The Garmin Connect site will try to determine what type of stroke you did which is color coded. When the time across is too long, it states 'unknown'. Sometimes there is a long amount of time as you can be putting on fins, or hand paddles.

I received a GoPro 5 last month as a gift, so I put it to use today and filmed a few laps. I learned what I know now from Youtube videos and what you think you are doing may not actually be the case.

Like a golf swing, you might think you are doing something in particular based on a book instruction or your friends suggestion only to find out by video, that you are not doing what you think you are doing.

After looking at the video footage, I still need to work out a few things to become more efficient at swimming. One of the items that I noticed was my left arm was starting the stroke to the front left instead of straight in front of me. I have had rotator cuff surgery on that side, so my range of motion may be impeding it a bit.... Anyway, something to work on.

One of the YT videos that I have watched a few times was this lesson from Swim Smooth. He mentions that the lady in the video has short arms for her height so she has a slightly faster cadence to her stoke. Although my arms are not short, I do have smaller hands. (Ever see those olympic swimmers? Tall with large hands....)

So I have been trying to emulate the swim stroke in the video below. Since I only go about once a week, it may take quite some time...