Triathlon swimming made easy

by Terry Laughlin

  How fast you swim (V) is a product of how far you travel on each stroke (SL), multiplied by how fast you take those strokes (SR). In that way, at least, swimming is no different from running or in-line skating or crosscountry skiing, where SL and SR refer to Stride Length and Stride Rate.

  Throughout the animal kingdom, the really fast creatures — race horses, greyhounds, cheetahs, Marion Jones, Michael Johnson — use about the same stride rate at all speeds. They run faster by taking longer strides, not by taking them faster. (Please note though that elite runners and triathletes have higher stride rates than recreational runners and make subtle changes in speed by tweaking their stride rate while maintaining a biomechanically efficient stride length.) Using real numbers, a runner doubling his speed from a 10-minute-per-mile pace to 5-minute miles, might well do it by stretching each stride from 18 to 33 inches (an 83% increase), while increasing stride rate by only 8%, from 83 to 90 per minute. But in the water, for all the reasons I explained earlier, we humans do just the opposite, resorting to churning our arms madly when we want more speed.

  It seems self-evident that a longer stroke or stride would be more efficient than a shorter one, but in the water a longer stroke is much more efficient. Here's why. First, there's the energy cost of a higher SR. As you increase SR, the energy cost goes up by a cube of that increase. Double your stroke rate and you burn energy eight (2x2x2) times faster. Second, there's the effect of a higher SR on coordination. As SR (and your heart rate) increases, your ability to stay coordinated and fluent diminishes dramatically. As your form becomes increasingly ragged and inefficient, energy cost goes up even more. And, finally, you disturb the water around you far more when you're churning than when stroking smoothly. A fast turnover is like swimming in white water. Not only is drag higher in turbulent water, but also your hands can't "grip" churned-up water nearly so well as they grip still water. One of the surest ways to find still water to pull is to swim with a greater SL and lower SR.

  How Can I Improve My SL?

  As soon as you begin counting strokes, you'll recognize that virtually every choice you make in training influences your SL in some way—the distance of your repeats, how much you rest between them, the length of your sets, how fast you swim, your heart rate. But the single most important reason for a mediocre SL is failure to pay attention to it. If you are not consciously monitoring how your SL holds up at various speeds and distances (by counting strokes), your instincts will drag you back into too much reliance on SR. In fact, if you were to put this book away now and do nothing more ambitious than count your strokes regularly and set some personal standards or an acceptable upper limit, you would immediately start improving. When you do monitor your count, you'll be alerted as soon as your SL falls too steeply and can immediately take steps to fix it. And what might those steps be?

  SL can be improved in two ways. The easiest way is to minimize drag, and you do this by simply repositioning your body in the water to make yourself more slippery. We'll help you do that by showing you how to pierce the water. The more slippery your body line, the farther you will travel, with more ease and less deceleration, on a given amount of propulsion. The second way to improve SL is to maximize propulsion, and you do this by focusing on doing a better job of moving your body forward. To improve that, we'll show you how to replace exhausting arm churning with coordinated whole-body movements.

  When I began teaching TI workshops in 1989,1 had recently become acquainted with an independent thinker named Bill Boomer who urged coaches to at least pay so/we attention to "vessel-shaping." I decided to balance my attention between showing people how to propel themselves better and teaching them how to be more slippery, which in 1989 was a highly experimental art. I was clear on one thing: I would measure my success as a teacher by how much my students improved their SL.

  And, from the start, I noticed a striking phenomenon. When I was successful in teaching swimmers to stroke better, I would see a modest improvement in their SL. When I was successful in teaching them to pierce the water, I would see dramatic improvement. Norton Davey, one of the few 70+ athletes to complete an Ironman, was a prime example. At a TI workshop in Chicago in 1994, it took him 36 strokes to swim 25 yards as we videotaped him on Saturday morning. By Sunday afternoon he had increased his SL by 100%, taking only 18 strokes, but the pushing-water part of his stroke, as shown on underwater video, was virtually unchanged. His body position, though, had changed from about a 30-degree "uphill" posture on Saturday to very nearly horizontal on Sunday. Countless experiences such as that got my attention in a hurry, and we soon began to devote more and more of our limited teaching time to "slippery swimming."

  How Many Strokes Should I Take?

  The simplest way to monitor your SL is to make a habit of counting your strokes, at all speeds, and on virtually every length. That will give you a basis for evaluating whether you're spending your precious pool time concentrating on things that will really help you swim faster or more easily. You'll find there's not a single number that represents your "best" stroke count. You'll have a stroke count range — fewer on shorter repeats and/or when you're swimming slower; more when you're going farther or faster.

  Your primary goals should be to:

  1) gradually lower that range;

  2) reduce the difference between its top and bottom; and

  3) do the majority of your training in the lower half of your range. If your range was 17 to 24 SPL last year and 14 to 20 this year (or if you can swim faster at each point in that 17-to-24 range), stay the course; you're doing something right.

  But at what point have you gone far enough? Now and again, we'll see a workshop pupil proudly swim for the video camera on Saturday morning in a very low count, perhaps 12 strokes, because they've read my first book and taken its message to heart, working unswervingly to shave strokes. But their 12-stroke lap is anything but efficient. It's typically lurching and nonrhythmic, and there's a whole lot of kicking going on.

  I'll take the blame for that, having failed in that book to make clear that the goal of our instruction is to help you reach your optimal, not maximal SL. We don't want you straining to reach the lowest count you can squeeze out. We want you to free yourself to swim at an efficient count that you can maintain with relatively little effort, and relatively little kicking. These swimmers would actually have been better off with a relaxed and rhythmic 15 strokes than the 12 they were straining to hold.

  The key to that freedom, ease, and control is balance, the one skill of swimming that is non-negotiable...but also incredibly rare. Let's get straight to it.

  Chapter 5

  Balance: Becoming Fishlike Starts Here

  If there's one moment at every TI workshop that can be described as an epiphany, it's when our students first realize they can float — feel effortlessly supported by the water — just by changing their body position. For most, this is a total revelation — so accustomed are they to fighting "that sinking feeling" with every stroke. That sensation, created by a drill so simple that 90 percent of our students master it in 10 minutes, is so transforming that one of our alums exulted in an e-mail to me, "I've been swimming twice a day since the workshop because I'm afraid if I wait too long I'll have forgotten how it feels to be balanced. Every time I get in I pray, 'please, please, feel like it did last time.' I've never felt anything like it; I'm literally just floating along!"

  That sense of ease and comfort is transforming for swimmers who have struggled for years without ever feeling good. Ten minutes, and one simple skill, have made them feel more capable than anything else in their swimming experience. That's why mastering balance is the non-negotiable foundation of "fishlike" swimming — the skill that must be learned by every would-be swimmer before attempting anything more advanced.

  Which simply means that learning to swim is no different from learning to walk or learning any other land-based skill. Many years ago, just learning to stand unaided, and then take a few shaky steps, took each of us weeks
of utterly concentrated effort. But it was essential to every movement skill that followed, from basic play skills such as running and bicycling to advanced athletic skills such as gymnastics, dance, or downhill skiing.

  In each instance the body's center of gravity (several inches below the navel) must be kept artfully aligned over the feet while the body is moving in ways likely to upset that alignment. We spend virtually every waking minute consciously or unconsciously practicing dynamic balance in that way. And our motivation to excel at it is great for, if we don't, we'll be terrible at sports — and be much more likely to fall and fracture things.

  Part of the reason it has taken so long for swimmers and coaches to understand how essential it is to master balance is that being unbalanced doesn't have so serious a penalty in the water as on land. Rather than a painful fall and instant lesson, we start doing laps any way we can and simply get tired from all the extra drag of a body moving towards its natural (i.e., vertical) position (and begin learning how to struggle). Our reaction to that is "I need to get in better shape."

  Ten years of teaching have shown us that every swimmer who has not consciously worked on balance has room to improve on it. Even Olympic swimmers have told me they could feel their hips become lighter and higher after practicing simple balance drills, though we could not always see a striking difference. But with Olympic medals won by the tiniest of margins, even fractional improvements in efficiency loom large.

  The immediate improvement in every swimmer to whom we've taught our basic balance drills has shaped TI methods as nothing else has. It's also shaped the thinking of hundreds of coaches who have attended a TI workshop and seen how rapidly a sense of balance can transform a struggling swimmer into a fluent one. Mastering balance is not only important in its own right, but also impacts every part of the stroke. Here's how.

  1. Balance keeps you horizontal and slippery. Imagine kicking with a board angled slightly upward. The increased drag would make kicking a lot harder. Now imagine how much drag your whole body can create when positioned at a similar angle. If you're not perfectly horizontal, it's a lot more work to move yourself forward than if you are horizontal. After viewing underwater video of thousands of swimmers, we've concluded that well over 90% have room to improve their balance, including many who appear from the deck to be doing fine.

  Usually the best-hidden imbalance is that which happens only momentarily during the stroke (e.g., while breathing in freestyle). Viewed in slow-motion or stop-action from under water, it shows up glaringly. The swimmer usually has no idea this is going on at all until he or she begins regular balance practice and realizes how much better it feels to be completely supported by the water.

  2. Balance saves you from wasting energy fighting "that sinking feeling." Let's clear up one thing right now: Your body is supposed to sink. Huge amounts of energy are wasted because of the nearly universal misunderstanding that good body position means riding high in the water.

  Novice swimmers spend upwards of 90 percent of their energy just trying to keep from sinking. Their "survival stroke" leaves little energy for moving forward. More accomplished swimmers — no longer in any danger of drowning — waste energy, too, because they've heard that good swimmers ride high on the water. Coaches sagely repeat it, and swimmers grimly try to do it. The reality? A speedboat will not hydroplane until it's reached at least 33 mph, and no human swimmer has ever exceeded 5 mph. The pointless effort to stay on top not only squanders energy, but also keeps your arms and legs so busy pressing down (to keep you up) that they have no opportunity to propel you forward.

  You save much more energy by learning to sink in a horizontal position instead of fighting to stay on top. As soon as you learn to find an effortlessly horizontal position in the water, you eliminate needless tension, you gain flow and ease, and you save energy for propulsion.

  3. Balance "liberates your limbs" to propel more efficiently. Coaches often observe a dropped elbow or splayed-leg and order, "Keep those elbows up!" or "Keep your legs closer!" They're really asking the swimmer to correct the symptom, like a doctor ordering you to "Get that temperature down!" rather than seeking the cause of your fever.

  Swimmers have an instinctive understanding that it's better to remain horizontal and stable. When they sense imbalance, they instinctively use their arms or legs to fix it. These compensating or stabilizing actions appear to the coach as stroke errors. But when the underlying imbalance is corrected, many of the more visible errors often disappear. The arms are freed to perform their most valuable function — lengthening the bodyline and holding on to the water. The legs are freer to stay effortlessly in sync with core-body rotation. The stroke automatically becomes far more efficient.

  4. Balance frees more of your power. A baseball slugger's power is useless if he swings from an off-balance stance. An in-line skater, crosscountry skier, or speed skater's powerful quads can do little good if the rest of the body isn't stable and positioned for the push. No good athlete attempts to perform in anything other than full dynamic balance. On land, grounded by gravity and needing all of your body's power to excel, your body just knows it can't deliver if it's not balanced.

  In the water, it's different. Supported by buoyancy, your body weight is only 10% of what it is on land. And because you're not on solid ground, you're similarly restricted from using all of your potential power. On top of that, without those clear dry-land signals, your body's balancing instincts can't tell you how you're limiting the power you do have.

  But limiting it you are, because swimming power comes from core-body rotation, which triggers the kinetic chain, which powers the arms and legs. As we've seen in thousands of unbalanced swimmers on underwater video, a swimmer who lacks dynamic balance loses the ability to rotate freely. Many of these swimmers, aware that something is holding them back, spend hour after hour doing lat pulls and tricep presses. Truth is, they already have ample power and could tap it instantly by improving their balance.

  5. Balance frees you to be more fluent. The unbalanced swimmer, especially in freestyle, is often trapped in a cycle of frantic movement. He responds to the feeling of sinking by churning his arms more. The faster he churns, the shorter his strokes become, and the more strokes he has to take to maintain speed. Eventually, he's flailing his arms frantically just to keep moving.

  As soon as you master balance, you escape the trap. You can move at the same speed with a far more leisurely stroke, can find a more natural and fluent body rhythm, and will swim in calmer water.

  Getting Your Balance

  We define balance as being "effortlessly horizontal" in the water. The key word is effortless. It's possible to achieve a horizontal position if you do things such as kick hard, skip breaths or use your arms for support. But we're after horizontal balance with minimal kicking, breathing at will, and with "weightless" arms. And this kind of effortless balance is achieved by cleverly positioning your body parts and redistributing your body mass. You can almost forget about pulling and kicking.

  The way to do it is fairly simple. First, keep your head in a natural, neutral position - as close as possible to the way you hold it when you're not swimming. Second, angle your hand steep and deep on entry. And third, shift your body weight forward, pressing your rib cage into the water, until you feel the water pushing your hips back out. Pressing in is, of course, counterintuitive. But virtually everything about balance in the water is non-instinctive, as TI Coach Emmett Mines explains:

  "For a child learning to balance while walking, a certain amount of time and repetition are needed Moreover, that repetition needs to be pretty much just walking.

  Now for a person to maintain balance while break-dancing on a trotting horse's hack (I took my kid to the circus last week), to avoid falling off and getting trampled by the elephant next in line, a great deal more time and repetition are needed And that repetition needs to be pretty much just break-dancing on a horse's back, or pieces of that skill ordered in a progressive manner, so as to end
up with something people will pay to see.

  My sense is that swimming is more like break-dancing on a horse's back than walking Whenever we do anything in the water, the neuromuscular system is inextricably drawn to the 'wrong' conclusions about what balance is and how to achieve it. Not wrong for landbased activity - wrong for water-based activity."

  Which suggests that it takes a fairly deliberate and exacting process to master this elusive skill. Here are the elements.

  Balancing Your Freestyle "Hide" Your Head

  In the early days of TI we stressed the importance of leaning on your chest or "buoy." Years of teaching balance have shown us that head position is actually far more important. In fact, simply getting the head in a neutral (aligned-with-the-spine) position dramatically improves balance for many of our workshop students. So our teaching progression now starts with teaching swimmers to "hide" the head.

  From the deck, the coaches know your head is in the right position when we can see no more than a sliver of the back of your head or cap above the surface. We also imagine that a laser beam is coming from the top of your cap - directly aligned with your spine. We want to see that laser beam pointing directly at the far end of the pool. From your point of view, it should feel as if:

  • a thin film of water could flow over the back of your head at any time

  • you're looking directly at the bottom between breaths, using peripheral vision to peek just a bit forward

  • your "laser beam" is pointing straight ahead

  • your hips and legs feel lighter and are riding noticeably higher.