Triathlon swimming made easy

by Terry Laughlin

  Hiding your head does not mean burying it, nor pressing it down. It simply means holding your head in a neutral position, the way you hold it when you're not swimming. One of the simplest ways to achieve that head position is to simply let go! Just give up the weight of your head entirely to the water and let it find it's own most natural position.

  When I'm coaching, as I look across the pool, I want to see that tiny sliver of the back of your head showing above the surface whenever you're not breathing. Or a thin film of water flowing over it. Ask a friend to eyeball you as you swim and drill, after showing them the photo on the next page.

  Reach Deeper

  Once you have learned to hide your head, your next emphasis should be on slicing your hand into the water - entering it close to your head - and slice it down to make your "catch" at a position well below your head. You'll learn the right position for your hand in the Skating drill in Chapter 10, Lesson One, then imprint it in the "Switch" drills to follow and continue focusing on in whole-stroke swimming. One simple way to begin working on it, even before doing drills, is to practice slipping your hand and arm into the water silently. If you do that without making a sound, you will almost certainly end up with a deeper catch than previously. You can also reinforce this by tipping your fingers down each time you extend your hand forward - particularly while breathing opposite that hand and on your first stroke following pushoff.

  Swim "Downhill"

  We no longer emphasize this as much as previously, but for "balance challenged" swimmers - and particularly lean triathletes who have weak kicks or rigid ankles (from years of running) - consciously shifting weight forward - "leaning on your lungs" - remains very helpful. Press in until you feel as if your hips are light, as if the water is simply carrying you. The ZipperSkate drill (Lesson Three in Chapter 10) will help give you a greatly heightened sense of how this should feel.

  Drill with Total Patience

  The most important advice I give to the 20% of workshop attendees who are "balance challenged" is to do as little swimming as possible. Until you have at least the basics of balance, you will almost certainly "practice struggle" to an unacceptable degree while doing whole-stroke swimming. It is essential to take all the time necessary to patiently move through the basic balance drills until effortless support begins to feel natural. Don't swim and don't even do much advanced drilling. Just stay with the most basic drills — Lesson One in the drill section that begins on page 76 — almost to the exclusion of everything else.

  Use the fistglove® stroke trainer

  After mastering Lessons 1 through 3 (see pages 74 to 95), one of the simplest and quickest ways to further develop your basic balance skills, while doing "switch" drills and whole-stroke swimming, is to wear fistglove® stroke trainers for 50 percent or more of your pool time. These latex "mittens" tightly wrap your hand into a fist and make it impossible to use your arm as a support lever or to muscle your way through the water. They force you to use your torso for balance and support and encourage you to use much more finesse while swimming. Soon, a weightless arm is your only option.

  Should I Use a Pull Buoy?

  Once a swimmer has learned balance, he should never use a pull buoy again; a balanced body is its own perfect buoy. The basic problem with pull buoys is they provide artificial balance; take the buoy off and it's lost. If you really commit to imprinting a neutral head position (starting with the Fish and Skating drills) and slice your hand in at a steeper, deeper angle (find and imprint the right position in Skating and ZipperSkate drills; continue reinforcing it in all Switch drills), you'll soon learn how it feels to have your hips and legs effortlessly supported and how that can free your arms to simply glide forward without the buoy.

  What about My Wetsuit?

  Wetsuits are universally popular with triathletes for one primary reason. They instantly solve the balance problem. Yes, they help keep you warm in cold water but, more important, they make you comfortable and confident. In Chapter 20, I'll give detailed guidance on how to use that freedom to maximum advantage in a race, but for now just be aware of this: The greatest advantage offered by a wetsuit is the freedom to slow down your arms, lengthen your body on each stroke, and end the frantic churning. If you happen to do some wetsuit swimming in pool or lake, focus more on slowing your arms and lengthening your body than on anything else, and recognize that you are imprinting the balanced-swimming form. Then when you swim without your wetsuit, try to keep the same feeling of leisure, control, and flow.

  Just as a balanced body fights the water less, the laws of physics also say that a longer body will slip through the water more easily than a shorter one. And, happily, there are ways to make our bodies "longer" too — at least as far as the water is concerned. So now that you've mastered balance, it's time to start "Swimming Taller."

  Chapter 6

  How to Swim Taller: Regardless of Your Height

  As with balance, "swimming taller" is neither natural nor instinctive; in coaching thousands of triathletes, I've seen only a few who swam taller without having been taught. But, as with the other Fishlike skills, knowing how to lengthen your "vessel" in the water can be learned by anyone, given the right kind of practice.

  The most significant advantage to swimming taller is that the extra length makes your body more slippery. According to Froude's Law, as you increase the length of a vessel at the waterline, wave drag decreases and energy cost goes down. And though it may be a stretch to compare a 60-foot steel hull making 20 knots in open seas to a six-foot triathlete trying to make one meter/second in Kona Cove (and whose "vessel" is continually shape-morphing with each stroke), there is no doubt swimmers can benefit greatly from trying to be more "Froude worthy."

  The payoff is clear. If you watched the finals of the 100-meter freestyle at the 2000 Olympics, you might have noticed something striking about the finalists: They look like they would make a pretty decent basketball team. In fact, the fastest men averaged about 6'5" while the fastest women were 5'10" or taller.

  Common sense suggests several advantages of being taller: Longer arms to win close touch-outs. Long legs to turn a bit farther from the wall. Incremental advantages like those would help in a close race, but the more critical reason is that the maximum speed of a human swimmer is approximately one body length per second. All things being equal, this gives a 6'6" swimmer an advantage of approximately 10 yards over a 6'0" swimmer in a one-minute race. Thus, the price of admission to a final where everyone swims about two meters per second (48 to 49 seconds for 100 meters) is a body that's about two meters tall. And where do 6-footers find success? Generally, in events where the winning time might be only 1.7 to 1.8 meters per second, such as the 400- or 1500-meter freestyle.

  Most triathletes are not endowed with unusual height, nor can they expect another growth spurt, but luckily this is not really a handicap in triathlon - as it would be if you harbored a secret goal to swim the 100meter final in the next Olympics. The point is to do all you can to maximize the speed potential of the body you do have and to take back the advantage from taller rivals who haven't learned how to use their height to full advantage.

  Here's why this works: Drag increases exponentially as we go faster; thus it takes a HUGE increase in power to swim faster if nothing else changes. But it is in your power to change the equation: Keeping your bodyline as long as possible for as long as possible during each stroke cycle is among the simplest things you can do to reduce drag. And anything you do to reduce drag hugely reduces the power required to swim at any speed. The less power and energy it takes you to swim, say, 28 minutes for 1500 meters, the better you'll feel on the bike and run. Here's how you do it in freestyle:

  1. Hide your head and swim "downhill." First things first. Keep working on your primary balance cues until you feel a clear sense of a "weightless arm" before you actually start trying to swim taller. Remember, if you haven't mastered balance and learned to make the water support you, your arms will be so busy trying to keep y
ou afloat that you won't be able to use them to lengthen your body.

  2. Lengthen your body with each stroke. As you swim, instead of thinking "Stroke...Stroke...Stroke," think "Reach...Reach...Reach" You'll still be stroking — the right arm strokes as the left arm reaches, and vice versa — but your focus will shift to the reaching arm, which has far more potential to increase speed and reduce drag. This will change the entire focus of your swimming, away from pushing water toward your feet (concentrating on what's happening under your body) to lengthening your body (concentrating on what's happening in front of your body). And that shift in focus will reduce your level of perceived effort. If you imagine you're sliding your arm through the sleeve of a jacket, you'll have it about right.

  3. Reach through, not over, the water. Slice your hand into the water fairly close to your head, then extend it just below the surface. Reaching over the water is more natural, but a hand in the air is a weighted object that makes balance more difficult. Moreover, it does nothing to increase the length of your vessel at the waterline (remember Froude). But extending your hand just below the surface gives you that extra length. To get this right, practice this while doing your TI freestyle "overswitch" drills, and later while swimming:

  • Have your hand barely clear the water on recovery.

  • Slide your hand back into the water almost directly in front of your nose.

  • Re-enter the water as if trying to cut a hole in the water with your fingertips and slip the rest of your arm cleanly through that hole.

  4. Reach with a "weightless" arm. If all your brain cells are shouting "Reach!" as your hand enters the water, but your hand still plunges toward the bottom as it enters, there are two possible reasons: either you haven't solved your balance problem (in which case, see #1 or review Chapter 5), or the force of habit is still too powerful. If it's the latter, you can correct it by a little creative self-deception: Pretend each stroke is your last of the lap, and reach forward as if for the wall before you begin the stroke. This will help you form a new habit of extending your hand weightlessly, effortlessly, and unhurriedly before stroking, as if it was just floating out in front of you.

  5. Use shoulder roll to extend your hand. Though you may feel as if your arm is weightless, don't feel as if it's disembodied. Use your arm as an extension of your torso. Work on this by extending each arm until you feel that shoulder touch your jaw; men with a bit of chin stubble should finish each practice with a small red spot inside each shoulder. An added dividend: More body roll will add an inch or two to your reach — and to the length of your vessel.

  6. Learn the "Switch," and practice "FQS." Swimming taller means you should always have one hand in front of your head — particularly at slower speeds — which also means that for a brief moment in each stroke cycle both hands should be in front of your head. This is known as FrontQuadrant Swimming (FQS), though many people confuse it with catchup swimming (a non-TI drill in which the recovering hand touches the extended hand before each stroke).

  As the photos show, our object is to learn to time strokes precisely so that one hand remains extended for slightly longer in each stroke, until the other hand is just about to enter the water. The quickest and easiest way to learn this is with our series of "Switch" drills, found on the Freestyle Made Easy DVD and in Chapter 10.

  7. Master one skill at a time. Swimming taller in freestyle involves more coordination than in other strokes. Avoid mental overload by learning the six stroke modifications just one at a time, in the order listed. Mastery of one will lead naturally to the next. Spend 10 to 20 minutes of each practice on one skill, and focus on only one or two skills in each session. Allow yourself at least two to three weeks to incorporate each skill. Most important, don't rush to practice them in whole-stroke swimming. Star t with drills, then a mix of drill and swim. When you do begin wholestroke practice, focus on only one point a time. Whenever you swim, never push off a wall without knowing what skill you are really trying to do well.

  A Note on Front-Quadrant Swimming

  Among the many non-traditional recommendations in the first Total Immersion book, the most-debated was for Front-Quadrant Swimming mainly with regard to sprint swimming. Some critics have pointed out that, at top speed, sprinters usually don't race with both hands in front of their head (though most of the fastest middle-distance and distance swimmers do). And it's true that swimmers who practice FQS too rigidly can find themselves restricted from reaching the stroke rates necessary to swim fast in 50- and 100-meter races. So let's clarify how you can find out if it's really advantageous for your swimming and, if so, how to apply it properly.

  Because this book is written for triathletes, it's important to point out that freestyle sprinters race at a stroke rate (SR) of up to 100 arm-strokes per minute, while the best SR for most triathletes is just 50 to 60 strokes (25 to 30 stroke cycles) per minute. At that SR, it should be quite easy to maintain FQS (or semi-catch-up) timing with no sense of restricting your ability to swim freely and rhythmically. But even so, we always encourage swimmers to experiment with a range of stroke timing at a variety of speeds and stroke counts to find the timing that feels best to you. Here's how to do that.

  Finding Your Best Stroke Timing

  At TI workshops, we describe FQS as the most "negotiable" of the skills we teach. Practicing the Switch drills that teach FQS timing will allow you to discover for yourself whether you can make FQS feel comfortable and natural. A small percentage (less than 10%) of all the students I've worked with have found that FQS timing inhibited their natural sense of rhythm. We advised them to use the Switch drills to add just a bit more awareness of length to their strokes without disrupting their natural rhythms in whole-stroke swimming.

  For the great majority — and particularly the slower-stroking triathletes — who can adopt FQS with a rhythm that feels comfortable, I explain that this is nonetheless still a practice strategy for imprinting timing that is not natural or instinctive. Do a good job of that by purposefully and consciously working on FQS at lower speeds in training, and when you start chasing the pack on race day, the nervous system will just know how to maintain the greatest efficiency at what feels like an appropriate and sustainable SR. You'll be able to swim freely at the stroke rates and rhythms that move you fastest.

  What about those of you who might like to swim a short freestyle event in a Masters meet? Is it true that FQS doesn't work if you need to swim really fast? I can only say that I personally watched Alexander Popov for a cumulative total of several hours, both in meet warmup/warmdowns and in practice, while he was in New York for the 1998 Goodwill Games. Other coaches I know have also observed Popov's practices during his visits to the USA, for anywhere from a couple of hours to three weeks. And we all observed the same thing: He swam most of his practice laps relatively slowly with impeccable form, and every stroke on those slower laps was done with FQS timing.

  The payoff comes on race day when, as a result of this rigorous nervous-system training in practice, Popov maintains greater stroke length at his highest stroke rate than do swimmers who fail to practice FQS. That's also why he held his form better in the closing stages of races, and won so many races over the final 10 to 15 meters.

  I wanted the sprinters I coached at West Point to be able to do that too, so here's how we got the best out of FQS while ensuring they had the necessary SR for short races. At super-slow practice paces, we consciously practiced the greatest degree of overlap or FQS timing. As the pace increased, we gave up overlap bit by bit, trying to hold on to as much as possible without feeling restricted. I instructed them, as they approached race pace and race tempo, to just do what feels most natural.

  The results, over the course of each six-month season during my three years coaching at West Point, were undeniable: a significant improvement in the SL my swimmers were able to maintain at their highest speeds. And by season's end they invariably swam significantly faster, and with significantly improved SL. As a long-distance open-water swimm
er myself, I have used exactly the same approach in my own training

  I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn't just work for the youngest and fastest among us, either. Over several years, I have been able to steadily reduce the number of strokes it takes me to swim 100 yards at super-slow speeds (from 52 to 39), to gradually improve my speed at every stroke count (13 spl, 14 spl, etc.), and have dropped my SPL in mile races in the pool from 19/20 to 15/16. This progressive increase in Stroke Length and economy has made me feel much more smooth and controlled at my top speeds. Best of all, it has helped minimize speed loss over my 12 years of Masters racing, from age 38 to 50.

  You're almost fishlike. You've improved balance to save energy, letting the water do work that you once struggled to do. And you've reduced drag with a longer vessel so more of your energy goes into speed instead of making waves. All that's left is the final stage of the metamorphosis: learning how to slip through the smallest possible hole in the water.

  Chapter 7

  Slippery Swimming: The Smarter Way to Speed

  I began swimming with aspiration upon entering my first race at age 15 in 1966. As soon as speed replaced fun as the goal of my pool time, I became aware of the gospel: "Swimming is hard." Virtually everything I've heard or read on swimming since has described the price of speed as "more" and "harder." No surprise then that the whole world understands the swimming speed problem in the same way.

  Fortunately the whole world has it wrong. The one non-negotiable, unavoidable, unyielding limit to speed is resistance, not your capacity for long or hard work. There is no workout, wet or dry, that can overcome the amount of drag produced by your body as it travels through the water.