Bike Forums - Swimming Questions

I am a self taught swimmer. I'm at the point where I can swim long distances pretty comfortably and I feel efficient moving through the water. I definitely didn't feel that way when I started. But I have a few questions:

What is the better way to pull your hand out of the water? Palm up, trailing your fingertips, or palm inwards, sliding your hand up past your hip?

I feel pretty good and efficient at low stroke rates (I am guessing 50, but it's hard to tell). But when I bring it up, I feel like I am just shortening the front end, grabbing less water, and just less smooth, more spastic. Are there some good tips for transitioning to a higher stroke rate?

As I am swimming, I think about a few different things and often use analogies to focus on these techniques. I find that thinking about movement in the right way really helps me. Sometimes it will just click when I think about what I am doing in a different context. Anyways, here are some of the cues that I think about. I was hoping that I could get some feed back on whether these are good techniques or if there is a better way to think about it:

At the front end of my stroke, I do a little hand wave (up down, not side to side) just before grabbing the water, kind of like waving goodbye to the glide.
I start my catch by pulling from my elbow a little bit before the rest of the arm. I find if I use the whole arm at full extension it really torques my shoulder.
On the recovery, I sometimes think about getting my shoulder and side as high out of the water as possible, like I am throwing that arm over my head... kind of hard to explain this one. It's like my movement isn't coming from pushing through the water, it's from repeatedly throwing my weight up out of the water.
Sometimes I try to get the feeling that I am literally crawling my way through the water, that my weight is on my arms, not on my buoyancy.
Sometimes I try to swim to a steady rhythm of my hands hitting the water every beat "pat, pat, pat, pat" , sometimes I swim to the beat of "push.... glide, push.... glide". The glide is not very long and my other arm is still moving, it's just a different rhythm.