Triathlon swimming made easy
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This is why triathletes have responded enthusiastically to the simple logic of Total Immersion. We explain your difficulties in a way that makes sense. We suggest simple approaches that even inexperienced swimmers can confidently practice in a way that they know will make a difference. And, finally, we've replaced boring workouts with purposeful and interesting practice. The result is a style of swimming that, among its many virtues, always feels good It looks good, too. TI swimmers are instantly recognizable to other swimmers by their unusual flow and ease.
The Water Is Your Swimming Problem
The reason you're not swimming as well as you'd like is because you're a land animal in water. Humans are "hard-wired" to fight the water rather than work with it. There are literally only a few dozen people on the planet who have almost totally solved this. Swimmers such as Ian Thorpe (and former Olympic medallists such as Sheila Taormina) have learned to overcome the "human-swimming problem" because: a) they're gifted with a rare sense of how to be one with the water (coaches call this "feel of the water") and b) they've spent millions of yards (typically guided more by that intuition than by their coaches) developing a preternatural grace and economy.
You, on the other hand — along with virtually everyone else on the planet — probably swim more like "Eric the Eel," the athlete from Equatorial Guinea who won our hearts and admiration at the Sydney games for finishing the 100-meter freestyle, despite the fact that every stroke seemed like agonizing struggle for him. Human swimming looks like this mainly because water is an unnatural, even threatening, environment. Our bodies were not designed to travel easily through it, and our basic instincts as land-based animals cause us to fight it, not work with it. Our discomfort creates tension; we respond with turbulent churning. Both keep us from moving freely and fluently. Since water is a fluid, flowing freely through it is essential to efficiency. Any swimmer can learn how to do this. The first step is to understand what's holding you back.
Three Mistakes Every "Human Swimmer" Makes:
Chances are, you've thought there was something wrong with you because:
1. You think you'll sink. Fighting "that sinking feeling" is something all humans do from their very first stroke. After a very few additional strokes, the struggle to stay afloat becomes a habit. The result? Most of your energy and too much of what you hope are propelling actions (i.e., your pull and kick) are spent keeping you from sinking, instead of acting to move you forward.
2. You try to overpower the water. Water is 800 times denser than air. In essence, it's a wall. If air can feel so resistant at 20 miles an hour on a bicycle, then imagine how much resistance the water throws at you at even the slowest speeds. As you get a little faster—particularly if your legs tend to sink as you swim, drag goes up to almost inconceivable levels. Want to better understand how that wall of water reacts to your body? Next time you go to the pool, try walking half a lap. What you feel is drag. Next, try running the same distance. Ouch! And how do we instinctively respond to resistance? Mainly by pushing harder. But all that does is increase drag still more.
3. You churn your arms. The medium that was too solid when you tried to walk through it suddenly becomes very elusive when you look for a handhold to support or propel yourself.
When you try to push on it, it just swirls away. Compared with running, in which we move through thin air and propel by pushing off solid ground, swimming is like running through a Jello swamp. And because the water offers neither support nor traction, our natural response is turbulent churning, like wheels spinning on ice. This increases energy cost and the extra turbulence increases drag. A double whammy.
The 5-Step Swimming Solution
The reason TI methods create such fast transformation is simple: They've had to. By teaching hundreds of workshops that last just a weekend — rather than lessons that go on for weeks — by having hours to teach fluency, not months or years as most coaches do, we've learned to eliminate wasted steps. And since many of our students are inexperienced, we've done away with all of the technical mumbo-jumbo. Our instruction is simple and clear. And virtually everyone who follows five basic, but non-negotiable, steps learns to swim better with almost ridiculous ease.
1. Learn balance. Balance — the feeling that you are effortlessly supported by the water and free to devote all of your efforts to efficient propulsion — is what makes Ian Thorpe and other Olympians swim as beautifully as they do. Lack of balance — the sense that you must constantly fight that sinking feeling — is what made Eric the Eel swim as he did. In the Tl program, mastery of balance is the non-negotiable first step: You do nothing more difficult until you have learned to be effortlessly horizontal and completely supported in a few basic positions. And you continue practicing these positions until balance feels completely natural. When you learn balance first, you not only stop fighting the water and wasting energy, you also learn comfort and ease, which allows you to master every other swimming skill much faster...and ultimately will let you virtually glide through a triathlon swim of any distance.
2. Unlearn struggle; learn harmony. Being able to relax and enjoy the support of the water is just the starting point of a series of sequenced movement skills. At every step, it's critical to remember that your human DNA, combined with your history of "practicing struggle," makes you incredibly vulnerable to regressing. The great advantage of the TI process is that it starts with simple movements and positions and progresses in small steps. At every step, you have the opportunity to eliminate struggle and let fluency replace it as a habit. When you master basic balance, and move on to active balance and beyond, remember that the qualities of fluent movement you will be practicing are just as important as the mechanics of drills and skills.
3. Learn to roll effortlessly. Human swimming propulsion instinctively starts with arm-and-leg-churning. What that does best is make waves and create turbulence. Fish propel by undulating their bodies. Scientists have yet to puzzle out how, with little "horsepower" and resisted by drag, fish can reach speeds of 50 mph and beyond, without ever seeming to try. That effortless power is produced by core-based propulsion. You'll learn to tap effortless power when your rhythms and movements originate in your core body, not in your arms and legs. Those core-body rhythms release the energy and power that subsequently become a strong, economical rwimming stroke. You learn them by advancing from static to active (rolling) balance drills.
4. Learn to pierce the water. Torpedoes, submarines, and racing boats are sleekly shaped for the same reason fish are: to avoid drag. Because drag increases exponentially as speed goes up (twice the speed equals/owr times the drag), drag reduction pays off exponentially as you swim faster. That's why humans who learn to slip through the smallest possible hole in the water see such rapid and dramatic improvement. Slippery swimmers need far less power or effort to swim at any speed. Awareness of slipping through the smallest possible hole in the water is maintained at every step of our skill-building sequence.
5. Learn fluent, coordinated propelling movements. To most swimmers, technique means "how you use your hands to push water toward your feet." That's the starting point and remains the primary focus of conventional instruction and stroke drills. In the TI approach, arm stroking is among the last things we teach: First, you acquire a long, balanced, needle-shaped, and effortlessly rotating core body. Then you link your pull and kick to the body's movements and rhythms. As your propelling actions, practiced first in "switch" drills, gradually grow into "strokes," we maintain a focus on keeping them coordinated and integrated with core-body rhythm. Our slogan is "swim with your body, not your arms and legs." And the moment your speed, effort, or fatigue causes you to feel "disconnected," it's time to slow down and regain your flow. Never... ever... "practice struggle."
But remember: None of these positions or skills is natural or instinctive. You must apply yourself to learning them. The clear and logical course of instruction in the chapters that follow should put you on the path to better swimming immediately. But first I
'll ask you to forget everything you "know" about swimming so you can learn a completely fresh way to move through the water, a way I guarantee will make more sense, feel better and make improvement easier than anything you've tried before.
Dear Terry,
Early last year I started competing in sprint triathlons. I trained my proverbials off to become physically the fittest 1 have ever been, but remain a dreadful swimmer. Fortunately I came across your web site and purchased your book and video. Where I have been going wrong is so clearly described in the book that I instantly felt optimistic for the first time that I could actually start to enjoy swimming instead of dreading it and, perhaps, make some gains in my competition times.
I'm only 3 weeks into practice working on hand-lead drills but already feel so much more relaxed and controlled; all that arm/neck pressure I used to exert to get my head out of the water to breathe has disappeared since I learned how to balance and rotate my core. I can't wait to attend a workshop in the UK For now, however, I thank you sincerely for your work; it's revelational stuff! Cameron Irving Huddersfield West Yorkshire England
The lesson: As soon as you have correctly identified your swimming problem and started working on a clear and logical path to solutions, your sense of your future prospects will brighten immediately.
Part 2
The Smart Swimming Solution
In the next six chapters, we'll explain the smartest way to become a more effective swimmer. The information we'll present is simple, readily available, and logical.. .but widely ignored by swimmers and triathletes, who choose the much harder, more frustrating route of generic training. But not you. In the next few pages, you'll learn the most clever and reliable way to improve your swimming, and you'll gain all the tools you need to train smarter and more efficiently than virtually every swimmer on earth.
Chapter 4
Stroke Length: How You Can Swim Like Ian Thorpe
While special oxygen-analyzing equipment may be needed to measure economy in the research lab, in the pool economy is easy to recognize. The pool where I train is filled with thoroughly "average" swimmers. Their splashy, choppy, noisy strokes are the norm. The pool at Auburn University, where we did a TI team workshop for the school's two-time NCAA Championship team, is filled with extraordinary swimmers. Wherever we looked — even before we began teaching — almost all of the fifty men and women swimmers were practicing long, relaxed, unhurried strokes, with little noise or splash and a marked absence of visible effort.
Good swimmers have one thing in common: They make it look easy. Genuinely great swimmers — there are only a few dozen in the entire world — are so fishlike that they look downright elegant. The latest example is 2000 Olympic champion Ian Thorpe, who shattered world records in Sydney, while taking what The New York Times described as "strokes of languid purpose."
Since 1992, Alexander Popov had been my favorite exemplar of swimming economy. While Popov, for 10 years the World's Fastest Human, is enormously gifted, he and his coach also made a purposeful decade-long effort to emphasize the practice of fluidity and control at all speeds. The impression I get from champions such as Thorpe and Popov is that they always seem to be o/the water, not just in it. The word that best captures the quality of their swimming is flow.
And what is the secret to flow? For years I was convinced it was pure talent: great swimmers somehow knew in their bones how to remain fluid and smooth when going fast. The rest of us could just watch in envy. But ten years of intensive teaching have shown me that "Fishlike" swimming is possible for anyone who pursues it logically and patiently. At every Total Immersion workshop, we start on Saturday morning with splashy, choppy, "average" swimmers, like those that fill my pool, and yours. By Sunday afternoon, the flow pattern right across the pool is much like what we saw at Auburn.
Using simple information, you too can understand exactly how to achieve flow and then, to a surprising degree, achieve it for yourself. Once you've "broken the code" of fluid, relaxed swimming, you can consciously practice, as Alex Popov does, the movements and qualities that produce it, and that all but guarantee you'll swim your best. I won't promise you'll swim as fast as an Olympian, but you will swim as well as you're capable of swimming.
The key to being the best swimmer you can be is a longer stroke or, as swim pros call it, Stroke Length. This "secret" is actually widely known, but almost perversely ignored, by coaches and swimmers, who continue to pursue success mainly through sheer sweat, even though more and harder laps actually tend to make your stroke shorter, not longer. Hard work, without sufficient care and thought, will actually slow most swimmers' progress.
An even more powerful impediment than habit is instinct. Most every swimmer who wants to go faster automatically thinks first of churning the arms faster. And a faster stroke (i.e., higher stroke rate, or SR) results in a shorter stroke — again, just the ticket for swimming slower, instead.
Stroke Length: The Mark of Champions
How do we know stroke length is so important? Since 1976, more than a dozen researchers have analyzed the results of meets at all levels, from high-school championships to the Olympics, to figure out what made the faster swimmers faster. Each study produced the same result: Winners took fewer strokes. Test it yourself at any local pool or at your next workout: Count strokes per length for slower swimmers and compare with faster swimmers. The faster swimmers will almost certainly take fewer strokes.
This simple insight has incredible potential to transform your own swimming, if you'll just use it. But as I said, most swimmers or triathletes continue to train as if the pace clock and yardage total were all that mattered. If even one study had identified aerobic power as the key to better swimming, such overwhelming focus on distance, time, and effort would make more sense. But none did. Likewise, plenty of athletes pump iron or muscle their way through endless laps with huge paddles and/or drag suits, as if sheer power was the way to swim faster. Yet when scientists study the impact of power on performance, they usually find the best swimmers in the world are less powerful than any number of mediocre swimmers. So weight-room visits and power-oriented swim sets aren't the answer either.
None of this is to suggest that fitness is unimportant. But at the Olympics, everyone has worked hard; everyone is incredibly fit. Yet certain swimmers still have an edge over all the others. And that edge, up to 90 percent of the time, is a longer stroke.
What, Exactly, Is Stroke Length?
You can work more effectively on your Stroke Length (for simplicity, I'll refer to it as SL, and to stroke count per length of the pool as spl), if you understand it, but SL is one of the most poorly understood terms in swimming. Even though swimmers are beginning to grasp that a long stroke is advantageous, most are still unsure of exactly what SL means or how to make a stroke longer. They mostly think of SL as "how far you reach forward and push back."
Coaches usually recognize that there's more to SL than just "the length of your stroke," but few understand how to significantly improve it. When I eavesdrop at workouts, I hear directives such as, 'You've got to make your stroke longer!" which the swimmer naturally interprets as "Reach forward and push back more." This will produce a small increase in SL, but 99.9% of the time that increase will be lost the moment the swimmer tries to go faster. Nor will it bring the swimmer anywhere near his or her best possible SL. So the swimmer remains unconvinced and goes back to relying on SR (stroke rate) for speed.
For years, I struggled to increase my own SL without much success. So long as I worked on it by trying to push more water back, I managed to shave about one stroke from my average each year or two. Then my teaching experiences began showing me the importance of being balanced and slippery, and all at once I was able to lop off a jaw-dropping three SPL in a few weeks — and to help other swimmers score SL improvements of up to 50% literally overnight. Often, these were people who understood the value of SL and had been trying for years to improve it.
The reason stroke length doesn't have
a lot to do with arm length, or with how you push water back, is SL is bow far your body travels each time you take a stroke, and your success in minimizing drag influences it far more than how you stroke. You'll learn how to minimize drag in the next three chapters.
Run Like a Greyhound; Swim Like a Fish
The key to becoming a better swimmer can be found in a simple equation:
V = SL X SR
Velocity equals Stroke Length multiplied by Stroke Rate.