3. Sensory Skill Practice (SSP)
In November of 2000, I raced 800 meters at a Masters meet. Employing my usual negative-split strategy, I began with a relaxed, controlled first 200, then picked up the pace and tempo in each successive 200, finishing strongly and passing several other swimmers over the last half of the race. Checking my splits and seeing that my final 200 was my fastest, I was congratulating myself on another race plan successfully executed. Until Lisa Bauman, the coach of Aquafit Masters on Long Island (and someone I coached 25 years earlier) came up and said, "Terry, do you know that you stopped rotating your hips on the last 200? You rolled to your left to breathe but never rolled to your right."
Oops. Well, I bad felt far less smooth, but I thought it was just end-ofrace fatigue. Pondering it, I realized that I had sacrificed rotation to increase Stroke Rate, which left me swimming mainly with my arms. The touchpad came just in time; I was toast at the end. Fortunately I knew how to fix it.. .permanently. For the next three months, I spent about 70 percent of my practice time focusing on just one thing: after each left side breath, I would drive my "high" (left) hip down, ensuring that I rotated completely to my right.
When I swam super slowly, I drove the hip down slowly. When I went a little faster, I drove the hip down more briskly. Most important, whenever I swam at near race pace — where things had broken down in the 800 — I focused relentlessly on creating that speed mostly by driving my left hip down faster and more forcefully. Two months later at my next meet, I had driven my high hip down tens of thousands of times. My narrow focus resulted in a strikingly improved race experience: fast closing splits that felt much stronger and smoother.
This is just one illustration of the value of what I call Sensory Skill Practice: a focus on doing/us/ one thing well. I have already suggested it as a useful technique for drill practice and drill-swim sets. As you do more whole-stroke sets it's one of the easiest ways to simplify what may seem like a monumental task of coordinating all the fine skills of Fishlike Swimming. Here's a menu of sensory cues you can use in your wholestroke practice:
Hide Your Head
Lead with the top of your head, not your forehead.
Feel water flowing over the back of your head much of the time.
See the bottom directly under you, and not much that's forward
of you.
Swim Downhill
Lean on your chest until your hips and legs feel light.
Rhythmically press in one armpit, then the other.
Feel completely supported by the water.
Lengthen Your Body
Extend a weightless arm.
Be able to float your arm forward for a 1-o-n-g time.
Reach for the far wall before stroking.
Put your arm into the water as if sliding it into a sleeve.
Keep extending your arm until you feel your shoulder touch your
jaw or ear.
Practice Your Switches
Make a hole with your fingertips and slip your whole arm cleanly
through that hole.
Feel "archer timing" in your stroke.
Clear the water by the slightest margin on recovery.
Have your hand out of the water for the shortest possible time
on recovery.
Anchor Your Hands
Make your hands stand still as you begin each stroke.
Move your body past your hand, rather than pushing back.
Never move your hand back faster than your body is
moving forward.
Swim faster with your whole body not your arms and legs.
Skate and Rotate
Feel yourself slide effortlessly past a few lane markers
before stroking.
Breathe by rolling to where the air is.
Drive the high hip down on every stroke.
"Look" at each wall with your belly-button in each stroke.
Slippery Swimming
Pierce the water; slip through the smallest possible hole.
Maintain a low profile, as if swimming under a very low ceiling.
Silent Swimming
Drill or swim as quietly as possible.
When increasing your speed (descending sets or negative splits) try
not to make more noise.
How SSPs Work
If you've swum with your head high forever (you know, millions of strokes), you have carved a deep groove in your nervous system for a high head position. You might be able to "hide" your head if you really think about it, but it will probably feel unnatural, and the moment you stop thinking about it — perhaps to think about extending a weightless arm — chances are your head will pop up again. But each lap you consciously focus on hiding your head faintly imprints a new groove in your nervous system. After five or ten minutes thinking only about that, it will feel a bit more natural and you improve the chances that you'll keep doing it when you're not thinking about it. Each time you devote another ten minutes to it, proper head position becomes a bit more permanent.
If you take all those focal points mentioned above and give time to each of them, the incredibly complex business of a really efficient stroke will gradually assemble itself in a pretty seamless way. With each passing hour, week, and month of purposeful practice, each piece will be polished on its own and fit a bit more naturally with all the other pieces, while you avoid ever becoming overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it all.
How long will it take until your new stroke is perfect and permanent? The rest of your life! The polishing process should never end; you can continue improving endlessly. But my rule of thumb for getting a skill to the point where it's a "no-brainer"—to the point where you'll always do it even when you're not thinking about it — is 100,000 yards. That's not to say that you should think only about hiding your head for the next 4000 laps, but by the time you have devoted 4000 laps to that focus, it should be permanent.
How to Practice SSPs
As with drills and drill-swim sets, start using SSPs by choosing one focal point and sticking with it for 10 or more minutes of highly attentive practice, before shifting your focus to another one. As that way of swimming feels more natural, alternate it with other SSPs with gradually increasing frequency. Here's an example:
Block Practice
300 yards of Hiding Your Head + 300 yards of Weightless Arm + 300
yards of Archer Timing + 300 yards of Driving the High
Hip Down.
Random Practice
3 rounds of: (100 yards of Hiding Your Head + 100 yards of
Weightless Arm + 100 yards of Archer Timing + 100 yards of Driving
the High Hip Down).
Very Random Practice
12 x 100 as: (25 Hiding Your Head + 25 Weightless Arm + 25 Archer
Timing + 25 Driving the High Hip Down). Don't practice like this
until each of those skills feels like a "no-brainer" on its own.
Open-Water Rehearsal
One of the best applications of SSPs is for purposeful open-water practice. One drawback of doing SSPs in a pool is this experience: You push off and begin working on making your hands stand still. After 10 or 12 strokes you start to become attuned to what your hands do in that fleeting moment just before stroking and think you can anchor them just a bit. Then the wall interrupts your concentration and you have to start all over again. Just as you begin to feel it, you lose the flow. So a 50-meter pool is far better than a 25-yard pool for this. Better yet would be a "pool" that's 400 meters or a mile long — i.e., a calm lake or reservoir or cove.
In open water, you can "groove" that sensation and then just keep going for a hundred or more strokes of profound imprinting. Even better, you can use SSP as rehearsal. Experiment with a number of focal points and see which make you feel the best. Then, on race day, you know exactly how to put yourself in a flow state. And if conditions change (more chop or higher swells, for instance), you can try out a variety of SSPs to see which work best in various conditi
ons. Practicing SSPs for a set number of strokes in open water gives purpose and organization to formerly aimless open-water training and is the best possible rehearsal.
We've finished our lessons, progressed through the stage of making those formerly alien-feeling movements a bit more natural and begun to turn them into rock-solid habits. By now, you're probably itching to do a real workout. We have that for you, too, but with a critical TI tweak — time to move on to Effective Swimming.
Chapter 14
Effective Swimming: The Smartest Way to Train
Alan, a budding triathlete of enormous promise, swims in the Masters group where I train. Just a few years removed from college track, boasting impressive 10K times, he quickly became a force on the bike. When I first time met him, eight months ago, I was amazed at how beautifully he swam. I was paddling a canoe, taking my turn as lifeguard for the open-water group we swim with in the summer, when I saw a tall, lanky figure gliding through the water with long, balanced, smooth strokes. I was impressed to discover that such a good runner with no real swimming background could swim so beautifully. But Alan instinctively knew the right way and thus had all the ingredients for real success in triathlon.
A few weeks ago, watching him again near the end of a Masters workout, I was surprised again.. .but this time less favorably. His fluent, effective stroke had become rushed and choppy — not auspicious for open-water success. How had Alan lost his form? Very simple: Replacing nearly languorous, untimed lake swims with workouts — repeats, tight intervals, chasing (or being chased by) lane-mates, urgings from the coach to go hard — had shifted Alan's focus from just feeling good in the water to working hard in the water. It appeared to me as if the main dividend of eight months of faithful workout attendance was lost efficiency.
Having come this far, don't let that happen to you. This chapter will give you a detailed plan for putting your energy into the most beneficial kind of training: workouts (I prefer to call them "practices") that not only increase your fitness, but also train you to maximize it with the kind of efficiency that makes elite swimmers so much better than the rest of us.
Traditional workouts are virtually always focused on racing the pace clock and/or other swimmers. As anyone who has done swimming workouts knows, the longer the set...the faster the pace...the tighter the interval.. .the harder it is to maintain your efficiency. The upshot is that even as you give your all to getting stronger and fitter, powerful "human swimming" instincts are limiting your potential because virtually everything that happens while working out pushes you to use more SR and less SL to make those intervals and descend those sets.
The key to training intelligently and effectively is never to lose sight of the importance of the equation V = SL X SR. The world's best swimmers are faster than you because they travel so much farther on every stroke cycle, not because they move their arms faster. From now on, if you aren't doing Learning or Practice sets, you should be doing Effective Swimming. The difference between Effective Swimming and conventional training is constant awareness of SL and awareness that any time you're not monitoring SL, it's very likely that habit and instinct will cause you to use too much SR.
Effective Swimming sets do two incredibly valuable things: (1) Encourage you to use more SL and (2) Alert you immediately when you don't — i.e., when you revert to the Human Swimming tendency to use too much SR. And all you have to do is begin counting your strokes. For the rest of your life, if you're not doing a drill, or focusing on an SSP, you should count your strokes.
Initially, counting strokes will take nearly all of your brainpower. That's why you'd find it difficult in the first couple of months to put sufficient focus on an SSP and count strokes. But, as you do it regularly, it will require less concentration. Before long, you'll be counting almost automatically. So automatically that you may find it hard not to count strokes — your hand goes in, your brain registers "One." So automatic that you'll be able to even do semi-advanced math in creative combinations of stroke count and time. So let's get started on constant SL awareness.
Finding Your SL
Let's cover some basics first. How to count? Some count stroke cycles, e.g., counting only right hand entries. I prefer counting each stroke for slightly finer accuracy, and I do so as each hand enters the water. In effect, I'm counting the stroke as I finish it.
Next, is there a particular stroke count you should aim for? Not at first. Just start counting and simply take note of what that tells you. If you swim a consciously competent 25 yards and take 16 strokes, you have the first bit of information that will gradually evolve into a keen awareness of the challenge of conserving efficiency as you swim farther or faster. If you swim 50 yards and take 16 strokes going and 19 coming, you've learned that it's difficult to maintain your initial stroke efficiency. You can then set a simple goal: To swim 50 yards in 16+18, doing a little better job of maintaining your efficiency as distance increases. If you swim 25 yards at a slightly brisker pace and see your stroke count rise from 16 to 18, you have another important piece of information.. .and you can set another goal: Find a way to add a bit of speed without giving up quite as much SL.
Doing the simplest stroke-counting sets as suggested below will help you establish a stroke-count range and learn the lowest stroke count you can swim at any speed with a minimum of effort and a maximum of flow and rhythm. In the beginning, for super-slow 25s, a rhythmic and smooth 14 strokes per length (spl) might be better than a lurching, heavy-kicking 12 spl, but in a few weeks you may learn to swim a rhythmic and smooth 12 spl. Over time, with more practice and increased efficiency, your stroke count range should both get lower and narrower. You may find your initial range, for instance, to be 14 to 24. In three months that may improve to 12 to 20 and in a year to 10 to 16. Once you know your range, plan to do 75% of your training in the lower half of your range.
How this benefits you can easily be understood with a weight-lifting analogy. Let's say your record for one bench press is 120 pounds. When working with 110 pounds, you might be able to lift it only three times. But as your maximum improves to 140 pounds, you'd probably be able to lift 110 pounds ten or more times. As your SL improves, you'll be able to do more at every count above your minimum. When your lowest spl is 14, you might be able to swim only two or three lengths at an average of 15 spl. And your pace for 50 yards at 15 spl might only be 50 seconds. But when your lowest spl drops to 12, you'll probably find you can swim as much as 500 or 1000 yards at 15 spl and that your pace for 50 yards might have improved to 45 seconds when you allow yourself the "luxury" of taking 15 strokes.
Start Counting
The following exercises are a good way to get started. They will allow you to begin developing some SL benchmarks, to learn how distance or speed or stroke tweaks may affect your SL, and to begin working on self-adjusting your SL. Use yoga breaths, rather than the pace clock, to set rest intervals. It's not necessary to do all six exercises in one session. Just do a couple, as a way of beginning to include some Effective Swimming with your drill and SSP practice. Some days you might do one of the exercises several times with a goal of improving on subsequent rounds. But don't do them to the point of fatigue or raggedness. Call it a day or return to easier drilling, rather than practice struggle. Experienced swimmers are welcome to double the repeat distances (50-100-150-200), but anyone can learn valuable lessons while doing the basic sets.
SL Exercise #1
Swim 25+50+75+100. Rest for 3 to 5 yoga breaths after each swim.
Take note of your stroke count on the 25, then without trying to strictly limit your count, just swim at a consistent pace or effort and see what happens to your spl average on the other swims. If you took 15 strokes for the 25, how far above 30-45-60 strokes are you on the 50-75-100? Again, just take note and file the information away for future reference.
SL Exercise #2
Swim 100+75+50+25. Rest for 3 to 5 breaths after each swim.
Start with an easy 100. Count your strokes and divide by
four. This number becomes your "N" (benchmark spl count) for the rest of the set. E.g., If you took 72 strokes, your N is 18 spl (72 divided by four lengths). Again, simply note how far below 54-36-18 strokes you are for 75-50-25.
SL Exercise #3
Swim 25+50+75+100.
Repeat Exercise #1, but this time with a focus on any SSP — perhaps hiding your head, or slipping through a smaller hole, or swimming more quietly. Again, just take note of your stroke count; don't attempt to hit any particular count. This is purely an experiment to see if technique "tweaks" affect your SL. If so, this exercise demonstrates that you can affect — and ultimately choose your SL.
SL Exercise #4
Swim 2 rounds of: 25+50+75+100.
1st Round: Swim with fistgloves®. Just swim at your previous effort, not trying to hit any particular count. How many strokes above your ungloved spl are you?
2nd Round: Swim without fistgloves®. Without particularly trying, but simply letting the fistglove® experience affect you naturally, compare your stroke counts to your previous spl, both with and without gloves.
SL Exercise #5
Swim 100+75+50+25.
Repeat Exercise #2 but this time, maintain the spl from your 100 at every shorter distance. If your 100 is @ 72 strokes for an N of 18 spl, your goal is to take exactly 54-36-18 for 75-50-25. Here are several possibilities for this set:
1. You find it difficult to "fit in" all the prescribed strokes as you swim shorter distances.
Triathlon swimming made easy Page 12