7.4. How to do sculling correctly?

Let’s now try the sculling figure-eights together.

Place your hands on the table and imagine you’re sweeping sand away from you and then raking it back again. And you mustn’t lose a single grain in the process.

Do both hands do the same? Isn’t one following the other?

Sculling is purely a technical drill to develop feel. It’s no longer used during the actual front crawl stroke, where we move along the classic S-shaped path.

At each phase of the front crawl pull, the angle of the hand’s tilt is slightly different. If we push with the palm and tilt it too much somewhere along the way, it makes the water slip off the hand in the middle of the stroke, and we lose power and support. The palm needs to be tilted just right along the entire path to move us forward effectively.

And be careful—it’s not a flat hand!

Your palm follows an S-curve, as we talked about in Chapter 4, tilting just like riding along a curving S-track.

f you can draw horizontal figure-eights with your hands in the water and feel forward movement when your hands move both outward and inward—basically in both directions—then your sculling technique and underwater pull are likely already better than average.

Most swimmers struggle with the inward pull—the phase from outside to inside. That’s the part that should be pushing you forward, so it’s worth paying extra attention to. Try, for example, applying force only in the inward direction during sculling and relaxing in the outward direction—the direction that usually comes easier to most swimmers.

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