Image: Peter H. Bick
The Secret to Fast Open Turns
All swimmers are taught to do open turns, but not every swimmer does them quickly
For most swimmers, the open turn is one of the first skills you learn when moving into fitness or competitive swimming. It’s a simple way to change direction when going from one end of the pool to the other.
While open turns are fairly simple and require less practice than the flip turn, they tend to be slower. Still, with some practice, you can make your open turns nearly as fast as a flip turn. Here, we’ll focus on how to speed up your open turn for improved performance.
Open turns are no secrets to swimmers. Normally an open turn is the first turn taught to any swimmer, but as most swimmers continue to progress with their own swimming career, there is one key element that's often forgotten with open turns.
Knee Drive
One key element that many swimmers forget when executing open turns is to focus on the knees. Perfecting the knee drive is the secret sauce to a great open turn.
The fastest and best open turners out there drive their knees into their chest so quickly as they arrive at the wall that the entire open turn itself takes less than one second to perform. That's from hand touch to feet hitting the wall. Not bad, and certainly something to strive for.
However, it’s easy to get lazy when executing open turns. For some swimmers, this means moving the legs around to the side, which slows your ability to bring the knees up and in turn lengthens the time you’ll be stuck on the wall.
Instead, the next time you're at the pool, focus on bringing you knees up as fast as you can. You may surprise yourself by how much faster you can be with just a little focus and effort.
