Both positions inhibit the swimmer's freedom to roll fully and effortlessly to both sides.
To understand the right head position, take your finger and trace a circle from an inch or so above your eyebrows (just below where your swim cap would be) down past the corner of your eye and high on your cheek (an inch or so inside your ear) under your jaw so it passes just under your chin and up the other side. The area inside this circle is all that should show above the surface while you kick, drill, or swim backstroke. One simple test is your ears — they should always be under water (see the illustrations on pages 100-101).
Next, adjust the angle of your chin. Hold your head so you could just fit an apple or your fist between your neck and chin. This gives you the most neutral and natural head position.
Finally, imagine you are carrying a glass of champagne on your forehead. Your head position should be so stable that you wouldn't upset the glass. It can be done. While teaching, I often ask swimmers to set their half-empty water bottle on their forehead and swim (or drill) a length of backstroke to help them gain a sense of how stable the head should be. With some practice, they become quite good at maintaining a stable head position. It really works.
Balance your torso. In backstroke, you "press your buoy" by leaning on your upper back (in a pressure band that runs from your sternum out toward your latissimus muscles on each side). Keep steady pressure on this band as you stroke and roll, and your hips will be lighter and higher in the water. As that happens, you'll spend less energy kicking.
Because all of this focus on maintaining dynamic balance will probably be new for you, it's a good idea to give it some concentrated practice. Spend time paying attention mainly to the sensation of leaning on your upper spine as you swim. You'll find it easier to learn what good balance feels like by practicing the long-axis balance drills described in Chapter 12 (and demonstrated on the Four Strokes Made Easy DVD). Knowing that feeling will, in turn,help you to apply this skill much faster. In any case when you do swim wholestroke backstroke over the next few months,
your balance will improve most dramatically if you shut out all distractions (like what you're doing with your hands) and think mainly about hiding your head and pressing in your upper back as you roll your whole torso—hips and shoulders together—rhythmically from side to side.
Breaststroke and Butterfly Balance:
Rocking Your Way to Rhythm and Flow
In backstroke and freestyle, you balance by keeping your head in a neutral position and maintaining steady pressure on your buoy as your body rolls from side to side. In breaststroke and butterfly, the process is altogether different. Both of these short-axis strokes are re-balancing strokes.
In breaststroke and butterfly, the body rotates around the "short axis" (the line from hip to hip), producing an undulating motion. With each stroke and breath, the shoulders rise and the hips fall. As the body lengthens to full extension, the chest presses down, lifting the hips back up again. So you give up balance briefly as you begin each stroke, then regain it as you complete the stroke and lengthen the body.
This up-and-down rocking action provides several advantages:
1. It allows you to breathe with a minimum of head movement (very important, as we'll see later).
2. It produces maximum power with minimum work for both the pull and the kick, by recruiting torso muscles to drive the arms and legs.
3. It returns the body to its most streamlined, long-and-horizontal position during the gliding phase of each stroke.
Keep your head "in neutral." We've seen that a neutral head position is critical to balance in both of the long-axis strokes. It's just as critical — perhaps even more so — in breaststroke and butterfly. In fact, with countless swimmers I've observed, the simplest and quickest way to make an immediate, and often significant, difference in efficiency and speed in breaststroke and butterfly has been to simply get the head as close as possible to a neutral position while breathing. And between breaths, as well.
One way or another, head movement will always hurt your efficiency. Jutting the chin while breathing, excessively bobbing the head up and down, or moving your head independently of your body, can all have drastic effects on stroke length, the availability of power, and the effectiveness of the pull and kick in short-axis strokes.
The correction to excessive head movement in breast and fly is fairly simple. Just concentrate on the following:
1. Always look down slightly while breathing; you should see the water and not the far end of the pool.
2. Minimize head movement as you breathe; it can help to imagine you are wearing a neck brace.
3. Keep your head as close as possible to a neutral position at all times. This includes laying it between the arms — but not pushing it under water — as your arms reach full extension, following the breath.
4. Particularly in butterfly, practice a technique we call "taking a sneaky breath." Imagine someone is watching you swim. Try to "hide" your breath from them, making it difficult to tell whether you've taken one.
Press your buoy. A simple rocking motion—rhythmically pressing your sternum down, then releasing it to rock back up — is the essence of both butterfly and breaststroke. This motion is best learned by doing Short-Axis Pulsing (SAP) drills, also known as Body Dolphins, which we'll describe in Chapter 13. These drills can teach you not only to perform short-axis rotation rhythmically and effortlessly, but also to kick butterfly using an absolute minimum of energy. They can also help you learn to keep your head in a neutral position while breathing. If you've never worked on this before, I can guarantee that SAP drills are your fastest way to learn a more fishlike breast or fly.
The idea behind the drills is the same as the idea behind good wholestroke swimming: to make rhythmic pulsing of the sternum one of the focal points. When you want to swim faster, avoid trying to pull or kick faster. Keep the focus primarily on your torso, and rock it up and down faster.
And again, as I suggested for backstroke, any swimmer who has never focused on short-axis pulsing will benefit from several months of blocking out thoughts of what the arms or legs are doing, freeing the brain to zero in on nothing more complicated than rocking your torso rhythmically.
Just as a balanced body fights the water less because of reduced resistance, 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 we've gotten ourselves balanced, it's time to start "Swimming Taller."
Chapter 4
How To Swim Taller: What Sleek Boats and Olympic Sprinters Teach Us About Swimming
Just like the other skills of Fishlike Swimming TM, "swimming taller" is neither natural nor instinctive for any but a handful of gifted athletes. But just as with those other skills, knowing how to make your body as long - from fingertips to toes — as possible in the water can be learned by anyone, given the right kind of practice.
The payoff for learning this skill is as dramatic as it is obvious—especially if you've ever watched the finals of the men's 100-meter freestyle (the race that decides the title of "world's fastest human") at the Olympics or World Championships. If you have, you may have noticed something striking about the finalists in those races: They look like they might make a pretty decent basketball team. In fact, all those who can swim 100 meters long-course freestyle in 49 seconds or faster seem to be about 6'5" (2 meters) or taller. The fastest women in the same events are usually 5'9" or taller. What gives?
Common sense suggests a couple of advantages taller swimmers might have. "Well, sprint races are usually decided by small margins," you might reason. "I suppose it helps to be taller so you can use your long arms to win those close touch-outs." Or, "It's probably an advantage to have long legs so you can turn a little farther from the wall." To some extent you'd be right, because such incremental advantages would unquestionably help you in a close race.
But the most significant swimming advantage to being taller is that the extra height makes your body into a longer boat or "vessel" in the water. And as any naval architect can tell you, longer boats are faster boats, other things being equal. A principle called Froude's Law says that as you increase the length of a vessel at the waterline, wave drag decreases. As wave drag decreases, less energy is wasted stirring up the water, so more is left to make the boat go forward. And though it may be a stretch to compare a 100-foot-long steel hull making 20 knots in open seas to a six-and-a-half-foot human trying to make two meters per second in a pool (and whose "vessel" is constantly shape-morphing with each stroke), there is no doubt swimmers can benefit greatly from trying to be more "Froude worthy."
Swimming researchers estimate the maximum speed of a human swimmer to be approximately one body length per second. So it's no surprise, in our example above, that swimmers who can swim faster than two meters per second (or faster than 50 seconds for 100 meters) do in fact tend to be at least two meters tall. All things being equal, this gives a 6'6" swimmer an advantage of approximately 10 yards in a one-minute race over a 6'0" swimmer. This explains why world-class sprinters look like basketball players...natural selection! (And what of those who are of only average height, say, 6 feet tall? They tend to be more successful in events where the winning time might be only 1.7 meters per second such as the men's 400-meter freestyle — or in shortaxis events where the hydrodynamic laws give less advantage to the tall.)
Fortunately for those of us not endowed with unusual height — particularly those of us who have already stopped growing — there are several things we can do to maximize our speed potential by swimming taller without actually growing taller. And in the process, we might be able to take back the advantage from taller swimmers who don't know how to use their height to full advantage.
You swim taller mainly by rethinking how you use your arms. Our strongest instinct is to regard them as the paddles we use to push water toward our feet. "If I move forward by stroking," our logic goes, "I'll move faster by stroking faster." But stroking faster nearly always causes us to swim "shorter." We chop our strokes to speed them up. Not helpful. Instead, we must realize that the most important thing we can do with our arms is use them to lengthen our vessel.
It works like this. The most significant development as we go faster is that drag increases exponentially, meaning it takes a HUGE increase in power to swim faster if nothing else changes. But something else can change, and we can change it. Keeping your body line as long as possible for as long as possible during each stroke cycle is among the simplest things we can do to reduce drag. And anything we do to reduce drag hugely reduces the power required to swim at any speed.
Here's how you do it.
Swimming Taller in the Long-Axis Strokes
How to Eliminate Drag in Freestyle
1. Hide your head and swim "downhill." First things first. Keep working on these two balance aids until you feel a clear sense of a "weightless arm" before you actually start trying to swim taller. For if you haven't mastered balance and haven't learned to make the water support you, your arms will be so busy correcting balance that you won't be able to use them to lengthen your body.
2. Lengthen your body with each stroke. As you swim down the pool, 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 have shifted to the reaching arm. This will change the entire focus of your swimming—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 o/your body). And that shift in focus will reduce your level of perceived effort. If you think of how it feels to put your arm into the sleeve of a jacket, you'll have it about right.
3. Reach through, not over, the water. Put your hand into the water fairly close to your head, just a few inches below the surface, then extend it forward. Reaching over the water is more natural, but a hand in the air is a weighted object that makes it more difficult to balance. Moreover, it does nothing to increase the length of your vessel at the waterline (remember Froude). But a hand extending just below the surface gives us that extra length. To get this right, practice this while doing your TI freestyle drills, and later while swimming: Imagine you are cutting a hole in the water with your hand 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 stubbornly plunges toward the bottom as soon as it enters, there are two possible reasons: Either you haven't solved your balance problem (in which case, see #1), or the force of habit formed by millions of hurried or choppy strokes is still too powerful. If it's the latter, you may be able to 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 angle your hand down and anchor it (make it stand still as if holding an underwater rung) to begin the stroke. You're trying to form into a new habit the feeling of being able to extend 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, you shouldn't feel as if it's disembodied. Just the opposite, in fact. Your arm is an extension of your core body, and it's body roll that drives one arm forward and the other one back. So make the most of it. You can work on this by extending each arm until you feel that shoulder touch your jaw. An added dividend: More body roll will add an inch or two to your reach — and to the length of your vessel. (See drill #2.1 on page 113 for more details.)
6. Learn the "Switch," and practice Front-Quadrant Swimming (FQS). Swimming taller means you should always have one hand in front of your head — particularly at slower speeds, which also means that at some point in each stroke cycle both hands should be in front of your head. This is known as Front-Quadrant Swimming (FQS), though many people confuse it with catch-up swimming (a drill in which the recovering hand must touch the extended hand before stroking).
As the next illustration shows, 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 — Over Switch and Triple Switch - which are described on pages 137-142, and which are shown on our Four Strokes Made Easy DVD.
7. Master one skill at a time. Swimming taller in freestyle involves far more coordination of timing and fine-motor skills than it does in any other stroke. So don't try to take on all six of our suggested stroke modifications at once, unless you want to experience mental overload. Try to learn just one at a time, in order. Since I've arranged them in the most logical sequence for your central nervous system to absorb, mastery of one will lead naturally to the next. Spend 10 to 20 minutes of each practice session on one skill, and focus on only one or two skills in each session. If you allow yourself at least two to three weeks to incorporate each skill, your learning process will go much more smoothly.
A Note On Front-quadrant Swimming
Front-Quadrant Swimming is by far our most controversial recommendation. Swimmers who practice FQS too rigorously can, in fact, find themselves restricted from reaching the stroke rates necessary to swim their fastest. To drive this point home, critics have pointed out that, at top speed, sprinters usually don't race with both hands in front of their head (though many of the fastest middle-distance and distance swimmers do). So let's pause briefly to clarify how to find out if FQS is really an advantageous strategy and, if it is, how to properly apply it in practice and in races.
In TI workshops and camps, we describe FQS as the most "negotiable" of all the skills we teach. Our advice is that all swimmers at least practice the Switch drills that teach FQS timing, enabling these
swimmers to discover for themselves whether or not practice makes FQS feel comfortable and natural. A small percentage (less than 10%) of all the students I've worked with have found that FQS did in fact inhibit their natural sense of rhythm. The way around that for them, we discovered, was 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 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 on race day the nervous system will just know how to maintain the greatest efficiency at the highest rate. You'll be able to swim freely at the stroke rates and rhythms that move you fastest.
Skeptics counter that if FQS is so great, why doesn't Alexander Popov, one of the fastest humans in the water, bother with it? Glad you asked that. Because I can tell you that he does, having personally watched him 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 US, 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 considerable overlap — FQS timing. The payoff always comes on race day when, as a result of this rigorous nervous-system training in practice, he maintains greater stroke length at his highest stroke rate than do swimmers who fail to practice FQS. That's also why he holds his form better in the closing stages of races, and finishes faster than other swimmers over the final 10 to 15 meters.
Swimming made easy Page 5