Swimming made easy

by Terry Laughlin

  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 avoiding its possible pitfalls: At super-slow paces, we consciously practice the greatest degree of overlap or FQS timing. As the pace increases, we give up overlap bit by bit, trying to hold on to as much as possible without feeling restricted. As we close in on race pace and race tempo, we just do what feels most natural. As a distance freestyler myself, I use exactly the same approach in my own training.

  Yes, there are times when we end up sacrificing more stroke length than we'd like in the bargain, but we don't get down on ourselves about it. We simply make a note to remember how it all felt, and continue to do purposeful nervous-system training at all lower speeds, learning to better negotiate the trade-off of SL for speed.

  The results, over the course of each six-month season during my three years coaching at West Point, have been undeniable: a significant improvement in the SL my swimmers can maintain at their highest speeds. And by season's end they can invariably swim significantly faster, and with significantly improved SL.

  I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn't just work for the youngest and fastest among us, either. Over several years of practice, I've been able to gradually improve my speed at every stroke count (13 s/1,14 s/1, etc.) and have dropped my stroke count per 25 yards in races from 19-20 to 16-17. This in turn has made me feel much more smooth and controlled at my top speeds. Best of all, it has helped minimize speed loss over my 10 years of Masters racing, as I close in on the 50-year mark.

  How to Swim Taller in Backstroke

  Your main trick for swimming taller in backstroke is to have great balance and to increase body roll. So, first make sure your head is hidden and you are leaning on your upper back; this will free up your arms to lengthen your body fully. Then stretch your hand toward the ceiling midway through the recovery, and maintain that reach as your hand enters the water. Finally, as one hand goes in, make sure the shoulder of the other arm rolls clear of the water for recovery. This combination will help increase your body rotation, and optimal rotation in backstroke will also help make you "taller" by a few inches.

  The best drill for increasing your awareness of whether or not you're swimming tall in the backstroke is Slide-and-Glide (see page 148). Do it with long pauses — at least two to three counts in your sweet spot before rolling to the other side — and you'll be able to focus on the feeling of being taller and sleeker in your side-balance position. Gradually reduce those pauses bit by bit, moving toward a normal, uninterrupted swimming rhythm while holding fast to that feeling of swimming taller. Count your strokes to see how you're doing. Then add a few 50-yard Swimming Golf repeats (add your time in seconds to your stroke total to get your score) to learn to use that longer vessel to produce more speed.

  One of the questions I hear most often about backstroke is whether it pays to practice FQS in this stroke. It might, if it weren't so awkward to do "catch-up" swimming on your back. Backstrokers can, however, benefit from experimenting with a slight overlap in their stroke, and you'll find more info on this in Chapter 12.

  Swimming Taller in the Short-Axis Strokes

  The most effective way to swim taller in butterfly and breaststroke is to focus on the importance of lengthening your bodyline on each stroke, just as you did in freestyle. In fact, you can make immediate changes just by avoiding one of the most common errors: the tendency to try to create short-axis rotation (i.e., lift the hips) by diving down as you initiate the new stroke. Many breaststrokers and flyers see the hip lift that is now common to both strokes and mistakenly think it comes from diving with the hands and shoulders.

  It doesn't. Once you learn to produce short-axis rotation by rhythmic body dolphins — particularly bead-lead body dolphins—you understand that it's downward pressure on the chest that creates hip lift. Your hands are simply used to channel that up-and-down motion into linear energy — i.e., moving you down the pool. In both strokes, the fingertips go forward as the chest goes down, and the body follows where the fingertips go. This is precisely the movement pattern that is imprinted onto your neuromuscular system with Hand-Lead Body Dolphins. This drill is described on pages 163-165, and is shown on our Four Strokes Made Easy DVD.

  How To Swim Taller in Breaststroke

  Several stroke techniques in the breaststroke can easily add several inches to the length of your "vessel." First, keep your head as close as possible to a neutral position (the position it's in when you are standing erect) and eliminate "head-nodding" from your stroke. This will help channel your energy forward, not up and down.

  Second, make sure you stretch your body into a long, clean line for at least a moment during each stroke cycle. Fully extend and streamline both arms as you reach forward; keep stretching until you finish your kick; and squeeze your feet and legs together. The best way to make this position second nature is to practice holding it for at least one or two counts between strokes at moderate speeds.

  Third, make sure that your head is directly between your arms, aligned with your spine, and looking directly at the bottom as you reach that stretched-out, glide position. Looking forward during the stretch phase will limit your ability to fully extend.

  And, finally, your stroke timing will have a large impact on how "tall" you are in breaststroke. The idea is to "stay as tall as you can for as long as you can" in each stroke cycle, and to minimize time spent in the short position. You are tallest when your bodyline is at full extension. You are shortest when your hands are under your chin and your feet are drawn up toward your buttocks. So the idea is to spend as much of each stroke cycle as possible in the stretched-out position, and as little time as possible in the crunched-up position. And you'll definitely spend too much time in the crunched-up position if you pull too wide or too far back, if your elbows come back alongside your ribs as your hands pass your chin, or if your hands pause after completing the insweep and before shooting forward to the extension.

  To teach yourself "swim-taller stroke timing:"

  • Keep your pull quick and compact.

  • Keep your hands as far in front of you as possible at all times during the pull.

  • Keep your hands where you can see them at all times.

  • Spin your hands directly to the front as soon as they turn in at the corners (they will sweep in front of your chin first, but the intent of sweeping them to the front helps minimize the possibility of pulling too far back).

  • Make sure your hands return to full extension before your face is back in the water after each breath.

  The quickest, most effective way to become proficient at these skills is to practice them as drills, rather than in whole-stroke swimming. TI's unique drill progression, the same one that has proven so successful at our weekend workshops, team workshops, and summer kids' camps, is described in Chapter 13 and illustrated on the Four Strokes Made Easy DVD.

  How To Eliminate Drag in Butterfly

  The tendency to dive down to make the hips come up is most pronounced in butterfly. The best way to overcome that tendency and to maintain a long body is to:

  • Think of landing forward, not diving down as you re-enter the water.

  • Use a wide, flat, sweeping recovery rather than a high, arcing one.

  • Practice using a "sneaky breath" (looking down slightly as you breathe) to avoid climbing or lifting as you breathe.

  • Keep your shoulders as close as you can to the water's surface at all times.

  • Practice Short-Axis Combo swimming; your breaststroke cycles can actually put a bit more length into your fly cycles as well. (Find a detailed description of combo swimming on pages 190-191 and see it illustrated on the Four Strokes Made Easy DVD.

  So far, so good. You've gotten yourself balanced to save energy, letting the water do the work that you once struggled to do. And you've eliminated drag so that the energy saved can be used for speed instead of for making waves. But there are still other ways
to become more like a sleek fish and less like a gangly human. Time to begin the last stage of your metamorphosis. Time to get really slippery.

  Chapter 5

  Slippery Swimming: How To Get Faster Without Training Harder

  "Reducing the resistance a swimmer must work against is much more effective than increasing the amount of power the swimmer uses to combat that resistance." — TI Coach Emmett Hines

  "A swimmer can increase propulsion by increasing force, by reducing drag, or by some combination of the two. Increases of propulsive force can take weeks. Drag can be reduced in a few minutes by orienting the body differently." — Ernie Maglischo, in his book Swimming Even Faster

  "Swimming velocity may be increased by: 1) increasing the energy put into the water and/or 2) reducing drag. At some point, the swimmer cannot add further energy to the water, because in turbulent water, power transmission becomes increasingly inefficient. A swimmer who reduces drag and turbulence can swim faster on less power than a thrashing, windmilling, inefficient swimmer exerting maximum power." —Ted Isbell, swim coach and engineer

  FACT: Even world-class swimmers who swim as efficiently as humanly possible (covering 25 yards of freestyle in as few as seven or eight armstrokes) use no more than 10 percent of their energy for propulsion. More than 90 percent is consumed by making waves and pushing water aside. And the average lap swimmer, the one taking 25 or more strokes per length? That poor bloke may be squandering as much as 98 percent of his energy output on making waves.

  So if you're one of the countless people who would love to swim better but find it difficult, frustrating, or exhausting, it is a virtual certainty that drag is to blame, not your fitness or strength. Drag is the reason why even the world's fastest swimmers can barely manage 5 mph, while some fish hit 50 mph with ease. Fish are so much faster because eons of living under water have shaped them ideally to minimize drag. Arm-thrashing, leg-churning humans are almost as ideally designed to maximize drag. And no matter how conscientiously you streamline your body, just the fact that you swim "like a human" still creates a huge amount of water resistance. But there are helpful steps you can take that will make a big difference.

  The seeds of those helpful steps were planted in my mind long ago while I was on the seat of a bicycle. I've spent about 40 years enjoying myself on wheels, and for most of that time I've had a general understanding that I could ride more easily, at any speed, when I was tucked over the handlebars than when I was "tall in the saddle." But I didn't fully appreciate how powerfully drag could influence cycling speed until I read that an extraordinarily high percentage of a cyclist's energy output goes into pushing air out of the way. Relatively little actually makes the wheels go around. Ergo, a great deal of cycling speed can be created simply by tucking better to avoid air resistance, instead of laboring to build leg power or aerobic conditioning.

  I recall the precise moment when I realized this would be even truer for swimming. In 1978 in Midlothian, Virginia, I began coaching at a pool with an underwater window that was easily accessible from the deck. The first time I went down and watched my team do a set, I was spellbound by a graphic picture that had eluded me all the years I'd coached only from the deck. As I watched my swimmers push off the nearest wall, I could see that the tightly streamlined ones traveled a looooong way before they had to begin stroking. And for those brief graceful moments, they actually looked like fish in an aquarium. As soon as they began swimming on the surface, they worked much harder and moved much slower than they had just gliding sleekly under water.

  Those who stayed relatively sleek could cover five to eight yards and still look fast and easy. Any swimmers not tightly molded into a torpedo shape lost speed so dramatically during the pushoff that they looked as if they'd run into a wall. And they had. To a poorly streamlined body, the water is a wall. Instantly, I understood that the primary factor determining how fast my swimmers could go was not the training I gave them but the effect of drag on their bodies. I could finally see that the most valuable skill to teach was to streamline — not just on the pushoff, but down the whole length of the pool. It was a logical conclusion, based on the well-known fact that water is about 800 times denser than the "thin" air that costs cyclists such a stunning amount of energy. In a medium as "thick" as water, the payoff for reducing drag at even the slowest speeds can be enormous. And, in a sense, water gets "thicker" as you go faster. Drag increases exponentially as speed goes up, so the good news is that the payoff fora voiding drag also increases exponentially the more expertly you avoid it.

  Why Water Is a Wall

  Boats, cars, and planes all avoid drag best when they are long, sleek, and tapered. Human swimmers can enjoy a moment or two of that as we push off the wall, but as soon as we begin stroking again, most of us revert to blocky and angular shapes. Fast swimmers maintain the most streamlined position as they stroke; slow swimmers do not. And this is the most important distinction between them.

  But drag is not just some general retarding force. There are three distinct forms of drag. Two can be minimized by changes in technique, one by changing your suit.

  The Three Forms of Drag

  1. Form Drag

  Form drag is resistance caused by the shape of your non-fishlike body. As you swim, you push water in front of you and pressure builds up. Behind you, your body leaves a turbulent swirl in its wake, creating an area of lower pressure. Higher pressure in front and lower pressure behind creates a vacuum that, in effect, sucks you back. (That's why drafting off other swimmers, as in circle-swimming, makes swimming so much easier. The low-pressure area trailing the swimmer in front of you sucks you forward) Form drag increases as the square of your velocity. Thus, twice as fast means four times as much form drag.

  Your body's size and shape determine form drag, and the best way to minimize that drag is to slip through the smallest possible "hole" in the water. You do that by staying as close as you can to a balanced, horizontal position, and by making sure all side-to-side movement is beneficial rotation that helps power your stroke —not snaking or fishtailing. Coach Emmett Hines puts it succinctly: "If you're perfectly streamlined — as in the pushoff—any motion will increase form drag." That means it's critical, once you begin swimming again after the pushoff, to make your propelling actions as smooth and economical as possible. Concentrate on keeping your shape like a long, sleek racing shell even as you pull and kick, and you'll be on the right track.

  Of course the way in which that long, sleek racing shell needs to ride the water differs for long-axis and short-axis strokes. In backstroke and freestyle, you're longest and sleekest when you spend most of each stroke cycle on your side. In breaststroke and butterfly (where swimming on your side obviously isn't an option) slipping just inches under water in a needle-like shape between strokes is the least-drag position.

  But be forewarned: To do either one requires impeccable balance for that position.

  2. Wave Drag

  Just like a boat, you make waves and create a wake while swimming. Wave drag is simply the resistance caused by the waves or turbulence you create. As Hines quips, "Making waves takes energy — all of it supplied by you." How much energy depends mainly on how big the waves are:The bigger your wake, the greater your energy loss. Unlike form drag, which increases as the square of velocity, wave drag increases as its cube. So as you double your speed, energy spent on wavemaking increases eightfold.

  According to Ted Isbell, who coaches Tl-style swimming at Channel Islands Aquatics in Ventura, CA, "Wave drag becomes negligible underwater, so a swimmer can travel much faster under water than on the surface." That's why the best swimmers in many events now try to stay under water for up to the rules-limited 15 meters after a turn. Under water is also a good place for shorter, more powerful competitors to even things up against the taller, sleeker swimmers who have an advantage on the surface. "Submarines are designed with short, round, fat hulls because they have less surface area than a long, slim vessel," explains Isbell. Good
news for shorter and/or stockier swimmers and one of the reasons why such swimmers are often more successful in breaststroke or butterfly (which are swum partially under water), while backstroke and freestyle are often dominated by taller, leaner athletes.

  Another key factor in wave drag is how smoothly you stroke. A rough, choppy, or hurried stroke increases turbulence, and turbulent water increases resistance. That's one of the reasons a long stroke is such an advantage: It lets you use a slower, more controlled turnover at any speed, which in turn means less turbulence, fewer waves — and less wave drag.

  3. Surface Drag

  Surface drag is friction between the water and your skin. No technique can change this law of nature, but you can affect how it applies to you by wearing the right suit. Shed your billowy boxers for a skin-tight racing suit, and just feel the huge difference it makes. Racers, as you probably know, also shave down, and on top of that may don special racing suits made of Teflonlike fabrics to reduce surface drag further still. So slippery is the material when compared to skin, in fact, that an increasing number of elite (and many subelite) competitors now wear styles that cover the body from neck to ankles and wrists. For the rest of us, however, a well-fitting lycra suit will do the trick.