Swimming on the web

YouTube.com - a great FREE video resource

Most people have at least heard of youtube.com. It's a video sharing site that was bought by Google a few years ago. Youtube is interesting to swimmers for a number of reasons: there are a ton of videos about swimming that you can watch, including race footage of elite swimmers and how-to instructional videos; but you can also upload your own videos which can be useful for team or personal video analysis.

Youtube has a huge number of race videos, mostly captured from television broadcasts. Just type in your favorite event, e.g.
200m butterfly
and you are likely to find dozens if not hundreds of videos. In many cases you can find specific races by entering something like:
200m butterfly Athens

Beyond race videos there is a lot of videos that are useful for analyzing technique. For example, here is a video of Michael Phelps' freestyle from multiple camera angles.

A few years ago the swimm.ee web site moved its video collection to youtube. These videos show specific aspects of elite swimmers' strokes and turns and are a great resource.

There are also videos of a more explicitly instructional nature, for example a US marine recorded a series of swimming instructional videos for his little brother and posted them on youtube, here's the butterfly lesson.

But youtube is useful for more than looking at other people's videos. Teams can use youtube as a way to distribute video taken at practice and/or swimmers can use it as a way to get feedback on their technique from people located in far away places. You can see some of the video our team has taken at practice under the listing of MNBOVideo's videos.

Posted at 07:53PM Jul 28, 2008 by Lindsay in General  |  Comments[0]