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 (and the higher heart rate that unavoidably accompanies it) on your coordination. As SR increases, your ability to stay coordinated, fluent, and efficient diminishes rapidly. As your form becomes more ragged and inefficient, the energy cost goes up even more. And, finally, you disturb the water around you far more when you're churning than when you're gliding smoothly. In essence, a fast turnover is like constantly swimming in white water. Your hand can't "grip" churned-up water nearly so well as it grips still water, and one of the surest ways to find more still water to grip is to swim with a greater SL and lower SR.
If we plug some simple numbers into our formula V = SL x SR, we can clearly see the advantages of an improved SL. Let's say two swimmers racing 200 yards both pass 100 yards in 60 seconds. But swimmer "A" took 60 strokes (an SR of 30 cycles/minute) while swimmer UB" took only 54 strokes (an SR of 27 cycles/minute). Swimmer "A" will have "spent" far more heartbeats to swim the first 100 than swimmer "B," who will have more heartbeats remaining "in the bank" to win the race. If both swimmers have an effective SR "ceiling" of, say, 32 cycles/minute, swimmer "B" can potentially raise his SR — and speed — far more to unleash a powerful finishing sprint. By learning to swim the first half of the race in fewer, longer strokes, swimmer "B" has increased the range of strategies he can employ to win a tight race.
What Makes My SL Go Up or Down?
Although you're usually not aware of it, virtually everything that happens in practice 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're swimming, 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 is holding up at various speeds and distances, your instincts will successfully tempt you to fall back too much on SR. Let's consider what you can do today to raise your SL to its optimal level.
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. The effect is that your body goes farther, with more ease and less deceleration, on a given amount of propulsion. The other way to improve SL is to maximize propulsion, and you do this by focusing on doing a better job of moving your body forward
When I began teaching TI workshops in 1989, swimming technique was about one thing: how you use your hands to push water toward your feet. Every coaching clinic, talk, or article on improving your swimming focused on pushing water toward your feet more effectively, and most swimming research centered on it. Swimmers themselves thought of little else. All emphasis was on maximizing propulsion rather than on minimizing drag.
But thinking about swimming was on the verge of a sea change. I had recently become acquainted with an independent thinker named Bill Boomer, who urged coaches to at least balance their emphasis on teaching propulsion skills with some attention to teaching swimmers how to minimize drag. Like most coaches, I had focused on teaching swimmers to propel themselves better and, because my interest in technique and teaching had always been so acute, I had become more adept than most at it. As I began to understand more and more the wisdom of Boomer's approach, I realized there was an enormous amount of information on how to teach propulsion, but next to nothing on how to teach slipperiness — eliminating not just drag but also the number of heartbeats a swimmer would routinely have to "spend."
So having already shifted my full-time preoccupation horn giving workouts (teaching propulsion) to teaching technique, I decided to divide my energies between showing people how to propel themselves better — which I could already do very well — and teaching them how to be more slippery, a process that was still very much an art, and a highly experimental art at that. I was clear on one thing: I was going to measure my success as a teacher by how much my students improved their SL. And, right from the start, I noticed a striking phenomenon with every student. When I was successful in teaching them how to push water toward their feet, I would see a modest improvement in their SL. When I was successful in teaching them to become more slippery and to do a better job of eliminating drag, I would see a dramatic improvement in their SL. That got my attention in a hurry, and we soon began to devote more and more of our precious pool time to "slippery swimming."
Over the past 10 years, we've helped thousands of "average" swimmers learn to be more fishlike in the water. We've had a limited amount of time to work with each of them - two days (five days for kids) isn't much time to unlearn a lifetime of bad habits and to imprint something new. So we've had to refine and be highly selective about what we teach and how we teach it. The result is that we've looked for what really matters in teaching each of the four strokes, and we've developed what we feel is an unbeatable system for teaching. So let's begin learning how to be more slippery in each of the strokes.
Chapter 3
Balance: Becoming Fishlike Starts Here
"For a person to learn to maintain balance while walking normally, a certain amount of time and repetition are needed Moreover, that repetition needs to be pretty much just walking normally.
"Now for a person to maintain balance while break-dancing on a trotting horse's back (I took my kid to the circus last week), to avoid falling down 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 selected 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 land-based activity—wrong for water-based activity." —TI Senior Coach Emmett Mines
"Since your workshop last week, I've been swimming twice a day. The reason is, I'm afraid if I wait too long I'll have forgotten how to be balanced in the water. Every time I get in I hope to myself, please, please, feel like it did last time.' I've never felt anything like it! I can swim at my usual pace, yet I feel like I'm literally just floating along." —a TI workshop alumnus
Sad to say, but poor balance will limit, or at least slow, the progress of probably 98% of all swimmers—even though it's among the simplest of all skills to teach In fact, though few people seem to realize it, poor balance is why "human swimming" so often seems frustrating and difficult.
Our balance in water is not much better than it is on frozen water. The primary reason we don't catch on to this is that the painful penalty for losing our balance on an icy surface keeps us highly attuned to being careful and paying attention, but in the water there's no danger of broken bones or other impact injuries from poor balance. And because virtually all swimmers are unbalanced from the time they take their first strokes, most of us simply assume that's how swimming is supposed to feel. So we go on to more and harder laps, figuring the way to deal with how tired we get is still more laps, and all the while burning our unbalanced stroke into muscle memory. Only when we finally learn balance, real balance, do we realize how much easier swimming can be.
That's why mastering balance is the bedrock, non-negotiable foundation of "fishlike" swimming, a step that must be taken by every would-be swimmer before anything more advanced is attempted. In that sense, our swimmers are no different from the pre-toddler taking her first uncertain steps. Developing the dynamic balance that will transform walking from a near-impossible task to a no-brainer may take months of practice, but that ability starts a process that will later enable every movement
/navigation skill imaginable, from running and bicycling in the pre-school years, to rehearsed movements such as ballet in toe shoes, and ultimately to split-second balance skills used in such sports as soccer and downhill skiing.
In each instance the body's center of gravity (several inches below the navel) must artfully be kept aligned over the feet while the body is moving in ways that want to upset that alignment. We spend virtually all day, every day of our lives, consciously or unconsciously refining or practicing some form of that skill. And our motivation to excel at balance on land is great for if we don't, we'll be terrible at sports or at least could fall down a lot and fracture things.
Fast forward our toddler maybe six years, and see her join the swim team. Now she is working to master a dramatically different balance skill—trying to stay horizontal in water — while her body is still faithfully trying to keep its center of gravity over her feet, the worst possible thing for her swimming. Fortunately, learning this new balance skill is much simpler. Over the next few years in the water, she will need to master only two basic forms of balance: one for the long-axis rotation used in freestyle and backstroke, the other for the short-axis undulation of butterfly and breaststroke. And the better and faster she learns them, the more likely she'll become a really successful swimmer. In fact, it's likely that no other skill will have a greater influence on her swimming progress. Balance is the essential ingredient of fluent swimming.
Unfortunately, it's also the ingredient least likely to be developed because virtually no one — swimmers, teachers, or coaches — fully grasps it. If our student is learning in a Red Cross class, it's a virtual lock that her instructor will be clueless because balance isn't even mentioned in Red Cross instructor-training materials. If she's learning on a swim team, she can expect her novice coach to possibly pay lip service to the idea ("Balance? Oh yeah, it's that pushing-the-chest thing."), then two minutes later reverse himself and declare, "You've got to kick harder to keep your hips up." And that will be only the most common of a multitude of energy-wasting compensations she will learn to employ because she hasn't truly mastered balance.
The Myth of the "Weak Kick"
Whenever I hear a swimmer bemoaning her weak kick, I remember how my introduction to in-line skating convinced me I had a weak back. I took up "blading" because it looked like a fun way to work out. But it wasn't much fun at all the first time; after just 15 minutes, my lower back was so sore I had to quit. "That's odd," I thought. "My legs are doing all the work."
So I resolved to keep plugging away at this tough new workout until I'd whipped those apparently flabby back muscles into shape. But my very next time out, after a lot of looking around, I realized something: It was poor form, not weak muscles, that was making this activity so tough. The better skaters seemed fluid and effortless, moving with impressive speed simply by swaying from side to side. A smooth skater would lean all her weight on the left skate and then, at just the right moment, shift it all over to the right.
Others, probably like me, looked choppy and labored, and now I could see that the difference was not back or leg strength, but timing. Like all the other lurching skaters, my balance was off. My 200-pound body would teeter out too far, and those weary back muscles would have to snatch me back. Eventually, of course, they'd have gotten stronger, but then I'd merely have turned into a stronger bad skater instead of simply a bad one.
Most swimmers make the same mistake, but never realize it. They spend years trying to get stronger and fitter, when they could fix the real problem balance — almost overnight.
That's why we begin every TI workshop with a balance drill so simple that 90 percent of our students master it in 10 minutes, and it makes a huge impression every time. Though the drill teaches balance in a non-rolling position that we'll make little use of when we actually swim, the simple sensation of being fully supported by the water is a revelation to swimmers who have struggled for years without ever feeling very good. Ten minutes, and one simple skill, have made them feel more capable than anything else in their swimming experience so far. That's the power of balance.
We've taught this same basic drill to every level of swimmer from novice to world-class. All have learned something worthwhile from it. Even swimmers on the U.S. National Team have told me they could feel their hips seem to become lighter and higher, though we could not always see a striking difference. But with Olympic team berths and medals often decided by the tiniest of margins, even fractional improvements in efficiency can decide the race.
Their dramatic impact on every swimmer to whom we've taught our basic balance drills has shaped our TI instruction as nothing else has. Now in every camp, workshop, and swim lesson, as I said, we don't teach anything else until the pertinent balance skills have been mastered. And every one of the hundreds of coaches who have attended a TI workshop and seen how quickly a sense of balance can transform a struggling swimmer into a fluent one has gone home determined to teach balance—how it feels, how to achieve it, and how to maintain it.
What they have come to understand is that mastering balance is not only important in its own right, but also influences nearly every part of the stroke. Here's how.
1. Balance keeps you horizontal and slippery. Imagine kicking with a board angled slightly upward. Few swimmers would do that on purpose because the increased drag would make kicking a lot harder. Now imagine how much drag your whole body can create riding 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, but it's an obstacle many swimmers put in their own way. Over the past 10 years we've done underwater video analysis on more than 10,000 swimmers. Well over 90% - including a surprising number of elites — have had room to improve their balance, including many who appear from the deck to be doing fine.
Usually the best-hidden imbalance is the one that 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. In fact, when you see it this way you have to marvel, "How did they ever swim fast like that?" The swimmer, of course, even the highly accomplished swimmer, usually has no idea this is going on at all until he does a simple drill—which we'll cover later — that finally alerts him to how much better it feels to be completely in balance.
2. Balance keeps 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 swimming energy are wasted because of the nearly universal misunderstanding that good body position means riding high in the water.
Novice swimmers seem to spend about 90 percent of their energy trying to keep from sinking because they think that if they do sink, they'll drown. This leaves little energy for moving forward.
And 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 sleek speedboat may begin to lift up out of the water and hydroplane at 35 or 40 mph, but a human body making 5 mph (world-record speed in the 100-meter free) will not. The pointless effort to stay on top not only squanders energy, but also keeps your arms and legs occupied, tremendously compromising their ability to propel you efficiently.
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 your most natural 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 you more efficiently. The technique-teaching style most coaches use is one I call "detect and correct." They observe a dropped elbow or splayed-leg kick and order, "Keep those elbows up!" or "Keep your legs closer together!" In nearly all cases, they're asking the swimmer to correct the symptom not the cause, much like a doctor instructing you to "Get that temperature down!" rather than seeking the cause of the fever.
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Swimmers do have an instinctive understanding that it's desirable to remain horizontal and stable. When they sense themselves in a poor position, they automatically use their arms or legs to fix it. These compensating or stabilizing actions appear to the coach as stroke errors. As soon as the underlying balance error is corrected, in most cases, the more visible error corrects itself, too. The arms are freed up 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 instantly becomes a far more efficient mechanism for propulsion.
4. Balance frees up more of your power. A baseball slugger's power is useless if he swings from an off-balance stance. A great in-line skater, crosscountry skier, or speed skater's powerful quads can do no good if the body they're in isn't stable and ready for the push. A power lifter trying to heft hundreds of pounds overhead? Well, you get the idea. No good athlete ever attempts to perform in anything other than full dynamic balance. When you're on land, fully affected by gravity and needing all of your body's power to excel, your body just knows it can't deliver full power 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 probably 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 work nearly as well to tell you how you're limiting — through poor balance — the in-water power you do have.
But limiting it you are. For a swimmer's power (as we'll explain later) comes from effortless core-body rotation, which unleashes the kinetic chain that ultimately powers the arms and legs. And as we have seen in countless thousands of unbalanced swimmers whose strokes we have studied on underwater video at TI workshops over the years, a swimmer who lacks dynamic balance loses the ability to freely rotate the body. In water, poor balance inhibits the full expression of power just as surely as it does on land. Many of these swimmers, vaguely aware that something is holding them back, think they should spend hour after hour building power with lat pulls and tricep presses. Truth is, they could free up effortless power instantly by improving their balance.
Swimming made easy Page 3