Tuning in to Drag
Besides the drag-defeating strategies noted above, the simplest and best strategy for slipping more easily through that wall of water is to pay strict attention to every lap you swim. Alexander Popov may be the world's fastest swimmer, but he often practices swimming "super slowly" at speeds where he can feel the resistance trying to hold him back, so he can figure out what he can do to minimize it. Even without Popov's super-sensitive "drag antennae" to pick up signals, however, there are ways you can heighten your own sensitivity to drag.
First, intentionally create more drag. Push off the wall with your arms wide and head high. Wow! That's dragl Then push off in the most streamlined position, and compare the resistance. Use that "awareness training" in your regular swimming to cue in to the ways in which the water resists you, and to the stroke changes — such as keeping your head in a neutral position or using your hands to "part the waters" before stroking—that enable you to feel less of it.
Second, use your ears. That's right. How much noise do you make while swimming? Do you splash, plop, and plunk? Sound is energy, and the less of your mechanical energy you convert into noise, the more remains to move you forward. More to the point, anything that results in noisy swimming is evidence of inefficiency. Working on "silent swimming" is one of the best ways to tune in more acutely to how you're flowing through the water, and can help you improve your fluency.
Third, use your eyes. Are there bubbles in your stroke? Goggles make it easy to tell, and marathon swimmer and TI coach Don Walsh uses his to observe one of the most available pieces of "swimming knowledge" you can have about yourself. In fact, for a full year of practice, Don focused more on eliminating bubbles from his stroke than almost anything else, which is probably why he was able to complete the 28.5-mile Manhattan Island Marathon in 14,000 fewer strokes than his rivals.
That number is no figment. Walsh actually calculated it, by having his boat crew monitor his stroke rate and compare it with that of the other swimmers. He swam just as fast at 50 strokes per minute as other swimmers did at about 72 strokes per minute. That means in the nine hours it took Walsh to swim up the East River and down the Hudson, he took something on the order of 27,000 strokes, while virtually every other swimmer in the race — including many who finished behind him!—ended up needing about 41,000. That many strokes would have sent Don halfway around Manhattan again! Viewed another way, he got a "free ride" of almost 10 miles by being so slippery. If, like Don, you can learn to slip through the water rather than battling it, you'll see far fewer bubbles through your goggles, and there will be much less turbulence in your wake.
Finally, imagine your body has a kind of shadow trailing behind you as you swim. Remember: you're creating a wake similar to that of a boat, and though it spreads a bit as it reaches your feet, it doesn't spread much. Consider that wake your shadow, and anything that slips outside of it as drag. Your feet, for instance, may be moving you along as you kick, but as soon as they slip outside your "shadow", they increase drag.
The Choice Is Yours
As coaches Mines, Maglischo, and Isbell noted at the beginning of this chapter, swimmers have a choice to make each time they arrive at the pool: You can spend your time training hard and long to muscle up your propulsive force and inflate your aerobic capacity, or you can spend your time reducing the sheer physical effort it takes to swim, while increasing your focus on trimming drag and reducing the energy spent on wavemaking.
A single trip to any aquarium - or to the underwater window of any lap pool — will provide dramatic proof that the smarter path by far is the path of least resistance.
Up to this point you've been focusing on good "vessel design," exploring all the ways of keeping yourself balanced, long, and sleek. Now that your "hull" is as efficient as it can be, it's time to put the engine in and find out how to run it with the same, smart efficiency.
Drag As A Training Tool?
Training that increases drag on swimmers has always been in vogue to some degree. One of the most common ploys is having swimmers wear clothes sometimes T-shirts and shoes, sometimes pantyhose, but more often "drag suits" resembling today's billowy basketball shorts. A surprising number of adult swimmers come to TI workshops in long, voluminous trunks, possibly thinking it's good training, possibly thinking they're not "good enough" or "serious enough" to merit a racing brief.
The practice seems to be spreading. More and more coaches are intentionally having their swimmers wear drag shorts in practice, primarily to make them work harder. (Harder is supposedly always better, remember?) More drag should develop more strength, the thinking goes, and when the suit comes off, voilal More speed. Plus, the sensation of "feeling" faster racing in a brief as opposed to spinnaker-like pantaloons is expected to give a psychological lift. But suppose bad habits, developed while wearing the "drag suit," cause whatever strength the suit helps you gain to be used ineffectively? Not much advantage there, right? Well, truth to tell, that's just what happens in most cases.
"Drag training" has seldom been examined critically. The reality the coaches who use it may be missing is that, as 1 have just explained, every swimmer - even shaved-down swimmers in space-age bodysuits — already experiences plenty of drag. And it's the instinctive efforts of these swimmers to overcome that drag that damage their fluency and efficiency, making them "practice struggle" in various ways. Not what anyone intends, obviously, but in the vast majority of cases, that's exactly what happens. And because drag can square (or even cube!) as velocity increases, the resistance the water throws at you will always be ahead of the strength you've built to overcome it. Efforts to increase power will always help less than efforts to reduce drag.
It takes a special kind of strength, skillfully applied, to overcome the water's resistance. So even swimmers who have already made great strides in drag reduction need to approach power-oriented training with care. Does the artificial drag develop muscles that help produce a long, smooth, efficient stroke? Or, like drag suits and most other clothes, does the equipment not only hold you back but also weigh you down, so you end up strengthening the muscles you use struggling to stay horizontal and not sink? That's a perfect way to do your stroke more harm than good. Remember, for an unskilled swimmer — which includes most folks who come to TI workshops wearing
baggy shorts — absolutely nothing is more important than learning basic balance. Loose suits that drag down the hips just make that tougher. My advice: Stick with a racing brief.
But let's say you've finally crossed the threshold. You're now one of those practiced, enviably efficient swimmers who are discriminating enough to be helped and not harmed by training with increased drag. What can you do? Three things:
1. Just swim faster. Since drag increases with velocity, the simplest way to add drag is to add velocity—swim faster. Any under-distance repeat that allows you to swim faster than your race pace will do. For distance races (800 meters and up), brisk, strong, 100-yard/meter repeats will work. For a middle-distance swimmer (200 to 500 yards). 25- or 50-yard repeats, swum faster than race pace, are the ticket. And sprinters (50 or 100 yards/ meters) can do ultra-short repeats—perhaps as few as three to five stroke cycles — at top speed. But always keep strokes as long and smooth as possible, even though you're taking them at a higher stroke rate. If you discipline yourself to do these shorter repeats at two or three fewer strokes/length, than you take while racing, you'll be using the V = SL x SR equation to great advantage, practicing superior Stroke Length, combined with a Stroke Rate high enough to move you faster than race speed. That will produce some really valuable muscle memory.
2. Use paddles or fins. They increase the area of your propelling surfaces so your hand or foot meets more resistance as it moves through the water. Plus, they help you move faster, and more speed, remember, means more drag. Again, shorter repeats will help you gain the greatest benefit because you can swim at higher speed, for a shorter time, and mininiize form breakdowns. The key, once again, is
to count your strokes. Keep the count much lower (perhaps 20% to 30%) than when you're swimming without fins or paddles to ensure that the muscles you build are "long stroke" ones.
3- Try a swim tether. Anchoring yourself to one wall with latex tubing, then swimming away against the growing resistance of the tube, may be the purest way to subject your stroke to muscle-building drag. Simple guidelines: Count your strokes, and keep your form smooth no matter how tough it gets to move forward. And the payoff— being pulled back down the pool at high speed by the recoiling tether — is not only a fun ride, but instructive as well. It can glaringly reveal which areas of your hotly arc guilty of the most resistance.
Chapter 6
Engaging the Kinetic Chain: How To Turn on Effortless Power
So far, our strategy for mastering smooth and fast "fishlike swimming" has focused on ways to make your body more slippery by minimizing the resistance water throws in its way. At TI, we always teach these so-called "eliminating" skills first because common sense, and our coaching experience, have shown us convincingly that this is how swimmers improve most. Right from our first workshop in 1989, we noticed that when we help swimmers become more slippery, we also see a dramatic improvement in their stroke length. When we teach them to propel better, the gain is far more modest. Yet as we've said, the average swimmer seldom thinks about slipperiness and its flip side, drag, and most coaches and teachers hardly mention it. So the biggest potential improvement breakthrough just gets ignored.
But once you've eliminated all the drag you can, it's time to turn onto the more familiar path of improvement: how you propel yourself through the water and, more important, how to tap an effortless power source as you do.
That's not to imply, however, that eliminating drag and increasing propulsion are unrelated. They're not. If you were truly a "vessel" we could discuss them separately because, with a boat, what minimizes drag — the shape of the hull — never changes. And whether the propulsion is an engine and a propeller, sails, or oars, the hull shape stays the same.
But you're not a sloop or a rowing shell, you're a swimmer, and for better or worse you cannot separate the act of propelling from the act of eliminating. The stroking and kicking movements that move you through the water also constantly change your shape, and that means form drag is constantly changing, too. Wave drag can also vary significantly, depending on how rough or smooth, how hurried or controlled, your propelling actions are.
Actually, it's a good thing that "eliminating" and "propelling" skills aren't separate and distinct, because you don't have to do two separate and distinct types of training. You will learn the "propelling" skills of being more fishlike by focusing on many of the very same skill objectives you used to "eliminate," but you will think about them differently. Though most of your concentration will still go toward the skills of staying slippery, simply because those skills are less intuitive, they will gradually grow into habits. And as they do you'll be able to concentrate more on making your propelling actions smooth, controlled, and fluent. Most of all, you'll learn to instinctively use the most effortless and powerful motor you have: your core body.
Want a quick and exciting preview of how to do that? Visit an aquarium. Watching fish from under water leaves one powerful impression: The best "engine" for propulsion in a fluid is the core body. Lacking arms and legs, fish cannot propel themselves by pulling and kicking as humans do; they use rhythmic body undulation to move. And as we all know, they move with stunning speed and hypnotic grace and ease.
Watch the world's best swimmers from poolside at an elite-level meet and you'll see much the same thing. Their strokes are a virtual symphony: the torso sets the rhythm, the arms and legs move in harmony. Then drop in at the local Y to watch average swimmers during lap-swim time, and you'll see just the opposite: arms flailing, legs churning, and the core bodies in between uselessly locked in place.
So, let's get to work on a whole-body tune-up of the power train — engine to propeller.
The Kinetic Chain: Your True Source of Swimming Power
It's only natural to think of our arms and legs as the "engine" for fast swimming. And virtually all of us instinctively move our arms and legs faster when we want to go faster. The countless yards that swimmers devote to pulling with a foam buoy immobilizing their legs, or kicking with arms holding a board, are powerful evidence of our ingrained belief that it's important to work, really work, on strengthening our pull or our kick. And the concept is ingrained not just in our minds, hut also in our nervous systems and muscle memory. For that reason, the shift from arm-dominated to core-based propulsion will take time, patience, persistence, and attention. But I promise you that the rewards will be more than worth it.
If you really want to learn to swim more like a fish, consider again how fish actually swim. They scoot through the water in the most uncomplicated way imaginable, simply by rhythmically oscillating or undulating their entire body. That produces tail-whip, and off they go. Fishlike propulsion for humans is based on the same principle: core-body rotation for long-axis strokes, undulation for short-axis strokes.
In an ideal world it wouldn't be necessary for a swimmer to learn hip rotation. Rolling from side to side is, after all, the most natural way for your body to accommodate the alternating-arm actions of freestyle and backstroke. Prove this to yourself by standing in place and moving your arms as if swimming freestyle. Swivel your hips and you'll move your arms far more freely; keep the hips immobile and you'll feel restricted. Because rolling is a natural tendency, a freestyler must actually expend energy to remain flat (usually by splaying their arms or legs). In most cases this is not intentional or even conscious; "flat" swimmers remain flat because they haven't mastered side-lying balance. As soon as they become comfortable with side-lying balance, something that is not natural or instinctive in most people but that can be learned, they stop fighting themselves and roll more freely.
Though coaches speak of hip rotation as a way to swim more powerfully, in truth it has an even greater advantage: Your body slips through the water more easily in the side-lying position. And remember: Techniques that reduce drag are always more beneficial to speed than those that increase power.
But that doesn't mean you turn down more power when it's handed to you on a plate, and that's just what hip roll does. For once you have become more slippery by gaining the freedom to take advantage of your body's natural roll, you also gain access to an incredibly powerful "engine" for swimming propulsion — the kinetic chain. That's just a technical way of saying that the power we use in, say, our pitching arm actually originates as far away as our feet. It gradually gets magnified as it travels up the chain for delivery, ultimately allowing us to uncork a blistering fastball.
The world's best swimmers have an instinctive awareness of the power of the kinetic chain and how to use it. While we typically muscle our way along, using our arms and shoulders to do most of the work of swimming, superefficient swimmers get their power in the torso and use their arms and shoulders to transmit this force to the water. Great technique can be a great equalizer. Mastery of the kinetic chain is what allows Tiger Woods, for example, to drive a golf ball farther than rivals who are far bigger and stronger.
The kinetic chain is not a complicated concept. In fact, you and I both learned to use it, probably as preschoolers, the first time we figured out how to propel ourselves on a playground swing. I can't recall the learning process precisely, but it probably started with vigorous leg kicking, which just made the swing shake a bit, but certainly not soar. But I can vividly recall how satisfying it was when I got it right and experienced, for the first time, the effect of engaging every muscle in finely timed, coordinated action. This happened when I figured out that if I leaned forward slightly, that made the swing move back a little. As gravity pulled it down again, I helped it along by leaning back. Each time gravity reversed us, we added enough leverage to make it go a little farther. And farther. And farther. The most satisfying moments of all? I
don't know about you, but I remember them well. It was when I reached the apogee of the backward swings, having figured out how to put all my muscle and mass into a perfectly linked series of arcs. The simple desire to go higher and faster taught me to pull on the chain with my hands and tighten my stomach muscles to link the tension of my backward-pulling arms all the way to the stretching toes of my forward-straining legs, and time it all to add my power to the accelerating force of gravity. The skill, simple enough to be learned by any child, produced a breathtakingly fast and powerful swoop through space, with such marvelous efficiency that I could continue endlessly without tiring. The kinetic chain, I had found, is a remarkable force. Just imagine what it can do for your swimming when you learn to use it fully.
Effortless power for fishlike swimming is produced in much the same way. Energy for the most powerful movements doesn't start and stop in any one joint, but ripples through our bodies like a cracked whip until it finally arrives at the point where it's released. In freestyle and backstroke, body rotation provides a big chunk of the power — as it does when we throw a rock, a javelin, or a karate blow. In all these cases, the legs and hips power the torso, which drives the arm. In the body undulation of butterfly and breaststroke, the arms are powered simultaneously by a "force coupler" in which core muscles link hips and shoulders in the same way as when you're doing a pull up, double-poling on skis...or soaring on a playground swing.
Chapter 7
Developing an Effective Pull: It's All About Holding Patterns, Not "S" Patterns
Swimming made easy Page 7