Swimming made easy
Page 12
General guidelines for head-lead drills include:
1. Practice for very short repeats - 25 yards or less - until they become "no brainers."
2. Try to master them without the aid of fins; the "fin effect" will tend to be too magnified when you don't have an arm extended.
3. Put no emphasis on speed in practicing head-lead drills. Your most important objectives are to do them easily, gently, silently, and with a sense of stillness. Of all the TI drills, these are probably the closest to a "Zen experience."
Drill #1.1: Basic Balance: Supine (On Your Back)
Why do this drill: This is the easiest way to learn ease and relaxation. Without the distraction of having to breathe, you can more easily learn how to get the water to support you. That sense of effortless support, stillness, and stability is the key sensation associated with balance; in subsequent drills we'll take it to other positions.
Follow this sequence:
1. Hide your head. Ears under the surface and only your face showing above it. Face parallel to the surface.
2. Lean on your upper back until your hips feel light and you feel totally supported by the water. A "dry patch of thigh" should clear the water with each kick.
3. Keep your flutter kick compact and silent, with your knees and toes submerged.
4. The test of true balance is being able to do nothing with your arms. If you feel as if you need to use your arms to "brace" yourself or scull, then you aren't balanced.
5. Just lie there, kicking gently and letting the water do the work. This feeling is the essence of how balance feels! Maintain this feeling in the other balance drills.
Drill #1.2: Basic Balance: Prone (On Your Stomach)
Why do this drill: You won't swim freestyle in exactly this position (you'll be rolling, not flat), but this does show you how easy it is to get the water to support you effortlessly when you keep your head and neck aligned and shift your weight forward. It also gives a dramatic lesson in what happens to your balance when you lift your head.
Follow this sequence:
1. Look directly at the bottom. You shouldn't see anything ahead of you.
2. Hide your head (just a sliver of the back of your head should show above the surface). Feel as if any wavelet could wash over the back of your head.
3. Kick with a compact, quiet, gentle flutter. The lazier the better. Moving quickly is not important at all. Balance - feeling supported by the water - is primary.
4. Lean on your chest until your hips float freely. (Don't try to hold them up; release them to the surface.) Ask someone to watch; they should see your suit just brush the surface. If they see an inch or more of "cheeks" above the surface, you're pressing too much. If they see an inch or more of water covering them, you're not pressing enough. Your hips should also rock gently back and forth as you kick; they shouldn't be locked in place.
5. Breathing forward upsets your balance, so you have two goals. Keep your kick so lazy that you don't have to breathe very often; this allows you to focus on feeling stable. Second, breathe with as little fuss or upset as possible, then rebalance after each breath.
Advance to the next drill when: You're relaxed, stable, and flowing with a sense that the water is doing most of the work and your gentle kicking is going entirely into propulsion, not into helping keep your legs afloat.
Drill #1.3 : Basic Balance: Side (Looking Down)
Why do this drill: You'll swim both long-axis strokes more on your side than on your chest or back. Now that you know how it feels to be balanced and supported, you'll try to get that same feeling on your side.
Follow this sequence:
1. Lie on one side, looking directly down. Your hip and shoulder point directly at the ceiling. Keep your head "hidden" — exactly as it felt in Drill #1.2.
2. Lean on your shoulder until your top arm is "dry" from shoulder to fingertips. You should feel air on your arm.
3. Kick from the top of your thigh and focus on keeping your bodyline long from hip to toes, but don't put much effort into pointing your toes.
4. Slip your body through the smallest possible "hole" in the water. Try to lengthen your line from head to toes and shape your body like a torpedo, arms hugging your sides.
5. To breathe, swivel your head to nose-up and roll back enough so that you can get air easily. Keep feeling like a long, balanced needle as you breathe, then return to the nose-down position.
6. When learning, practice for short distances so that you don't need to breathe more than once or twice. When you do need to breathe, just swivel your head from a nose-down to a nose-up position and roll back enough so that you can get air easily. Keep your head "hidden" as you breathe.
Advance to the next drill when: You feel comfortable and supported on either side. You should be able to balance and do nothing with either arm. The "dry" arm simply lies on your side; the "wet" arm hugs your lower side. Finally you should feel as if your kick moves you more easily and efficiently in this more slippery side-balance position.
Drill #1.4: Find Your Sweet Spot
Why do this drill: The Sweet Spot is your true side-balance position for all long-axis drills. The Sweet Spot is completely individual and almost never exactly on the side - the nose-down drill above excepted. Virtually all swimmers do "side balance" better in a position somewhat on the back. Mastering it is important because you'll start and finish every long-axis drill here. If you learn your Sweet Spot, you'll practice your drills with ease and fluency; if you don't, it means tension and struggle.
Follow this sequence:
1. Start as in Drill #1.3, balanced on your side, looking directly down, kicking easily with a long leg, and with your body shaped like a long, balanced needle.
2. When you feel balanced (head hidden, arm showing), swivel your head and roll back until you can breathe easily, then stay there for the rest of the length.
3. If you don't kdgreat, roll another 5 or 10 degrees onto your back, until you feel more comfortable and are able to keep your needle shape.
4. Once you feel balanced, practice slipping your body through the smallest bole in the water.
5. Focus on stillness. Imagine carrying a champagne glass on your forehead or shoulder.
6. Practice on both sides. You may not feel equally comfortable on both sides, but work mindfully at balance on both sides until you feel as relaxed as possible on each.
Practice Tips for Lesson One
This completes Lesson One - Basic Balance. All of your practice in this lesson should be at the easiest possible effort level until balance is almost automatic. Additionally, you should do about 90% of all Lesson-One drill practice in repeats of 25 yards or less, at least until you have achieved mastery of all the objectives outlined for the four drills above.
Two practice-planning ideas can be helpful in keeping your focus on bow well you practice, rather than on bow much or how fast. Rather than aiming for a certain number of yards in a practice, or number of repeats in a set, take more of a Zen approach. Practice mindfully for as long you feel fluent and controlled or for as long as it takes to get a sense that the movement is becoming "grooved." Alternately, you can practice for a given period of time, say 60 minutes, broken into 6 blocks of 10 minutes. Then do whatever number of repeats you complete in 10 minutes, before moving on to the next item in your practice.
For rest intervals, instead of using the pace clock, take a certain number of deep, cleansing breaths (or bobs, with your head sinking just under the surface after each in-breath) between the time you reach the wall and when you push off again. If I'm practicing 25s with great ease, I find that two to three cleansing breaths are ample recovery. If I do 50s or 75s, I might take four to five breaths before pushing off again.
And finally, your kinesthetic feedback should include your sense of how gently, silently, bubble-free, and splash-free you can make your practice. Once you have a good sense of doing the mechanics well, shift your attention to what your other senses are telling you.
When you practice long-axis drills for the first time, you'll discover that you need at least a moderate flutter kick to do the drills reasonably well. But at workshops we always emphasize that the kick should be incidental. The primary objective of Lessons One and Two is to improve your balance to the point where you can swim quite well with very little kicking.
The main contribution of your kick to long-axis drills is in maintaining some flow or momentum during the pauses that are integral to each drill. If you're not getting at least a bit of propulsion from your legs, your body simply stops moving, and drilling becomes a tiring, lurching affair. It's far easier to keep your body in motion than to restart it from rest. Your flutter kick helps maintain flow and ease, both of which are critical to successful, effective drill practice.
For those whose ankles are so rigid that legs-only forward motion is virtually hopeless, we recommend using Slim Fins, which we have found to be the most effective in providing an effortless, natural flutter. For those with just enough ankle mobility that there is some chance of a moderate, not-tootiring flutter, we usually find that they simply have to unlearn bad habits.
The most common bad habit is kicking from the knees, rather than from the hips. When your ankles won't flex, something else has to flex in flutter kicking. That something else is almost always the knee. Before long your kneeflexing, quadriceps-tiring kick (like running or pedaling) is laying down muscle memory for an ineffective kick. We have found VK to be the best quick fix. VK is better than prone or even side kicking for training your legs to move efficiently because it removes the influence of gravity, which often causes people to bend their legs too much when kicking on a board. VK also works because it leaves you no choice but to flutter efficiently. You can't do what I describe on the following pages without an efficient flutter. Within a few minutes you understand how that action should feel, and what muscles are working when you do it right. Once you understand that, it's much easier to keep kicking the right way while drilling.
For that reason, while you are engaged in mastering Lesson One, it's a good idea to do some VK in the warmup and at regular intervals throughout your drill practice sessions. Here are the basics:
1. Stay as vertical and as "tall" as possible with the longest possible line from the top of your head to your toes. Feel as if you're "sky-hooked" by a line at the top of your head. Avoid bending at the waist or leaning either forward or back.
2. If you've never practiced this before, cross your arms over your chest or even tuck a pull buoy under each armpit.
Your chin should be in the water with your mouth barely above the surface. Or your mouth may be just below the surface; if so, lean your head back slightly when you need a breath.
When working on the flutter kick, move your legs as a pendulum. Kick from the top of your leg, not from the knee. Rather than trying to rigidly point your toes, simply focus on a long leg line from hip to toes. A supple leg will bend just as much as needed.
The most efficient kick is the one that uses the least effort. Keep your kick fairly compact, as if within the body's "shadow." Aim for a feeling of light and steady fluttering with a sense of stillness and stability in your body position. A larger kick will feel labored.
Kick with equal emphasis both forward and back. Maintain intensity and tempo steady enough to hold your mouth just above the surface.
When you first practice VK, alternate 15 seconds of kicking with 15 seconds of rest (holding on to the wall or lane line, or treading water, or floating on your back). The object of this practice is to learn to hold a stable, aligned, vertical position with your chin right at the surface with the least possible energy expenditure.
As you improve at VK, begin applying what you learn to your chilling. You can do this in two ways. One is to start with 10 to 15 seconds of kicking in deep water, then, while keeping your kick steady, gradually lie back into a balanced supine position (Drill #1.1) and move down the pool. A second suggestion is to do a series of 50-yard repeats, starting from the deep end. Kick vertically for 10 to 15 seconds, then rest briefly and do one of your Lesson One drills for 25 yards, moving your legs exactly as you did while vertical, but with the lightest effort. Rest briefly before doing another 25 yards of the same drill or another Lesson One drill with heightened awareness of how you use your kick. Don't try to kick more. Just feel what happens naturally as a result of going vertical first.
Besides using VK to drill more efficiently, you can also use it purely as a kicking exercise - one far more valuable than kicking on a board. You can vary the intensity of the exercise in two ways - moving your amis higher or doing "fartlek" sets (alternating easy and hard). The best kickers may be able to briefly keep the head above water even with the arms extended overhead. Some coaches ask their swimmers to hold light weights (3 to 5 pounds) overhead while kicking. For a "fartlek" training set, kick with arms higher for 10 to 30 seconds, then lower them for a similar period.
And please remember: The greatest initial value of VK is not to help you kick faster. It's to allow you to maintain flow and momentum during drills while putting the least energy into your kick.
Lesson Two: Dynamic Balance
Each of the drills in Lesson One helps you become balanced (effortlessly horizontal) in a static position. The drills in Lesson Two will help you learn how to maintain equilibrium while moving among the positions mastered in Lesson One. This is called dynamic balance, and it's how you'll balance while swimming.
We'll continue using head-lead drills (arms at your sides) to cultivate the skill of using weight shifts, rather than your arms, to initiate rotation. These drills will also introduce long-axis rotation. We'll begin with very simple and basic LA rotation and gradually increase the skill level. The final drill will include LA rotation skills of a higher order than you'll need even while swimming.
Drill #2.1: Active Side Balance: Nose Up/Nose Down
Why do this drill: The Sweet Spot is the position in which you'll start and finish all long-axis drills, but the 90-degree position in which we practice side balance in Lesson One, Drill #1.3 is also critical and integral to all freestyle drills. There will be a pause in that position before rolling - or switching - to the other side. During that pause, you'll check your new position to ensure you're still on your side. You'll also use that moment to mentally rehearse what comes next. In order to do all the freestyle drills well, it's essential to be able to move easily from Sweet Spot to 90 degrees and back again. For freestylers, this is also one of the two best positions for kicking sets.
Follow this sequence:
1. Start by balancing in your Sweet Spot. Stay there, kicking gently, until you feel balanced and aligned...
2. ... then swivel your head to look at the bottom, rolling to 90 degrees as you do. While looking down, check to see if your "dry" hip and shoulder are pointing straight up. Also check if your head is hidden and your arm is dry from shoulder to wrist.
3. After a while (remain nose-down for as long as you feel comfortable, without trying to hold your breath), return to your Sweet Spot by swiveling your head to look up and rolling your body back to where you started. Take at least three "cleansing breaths" before you swivel/roll to the nosedown position again.
4. Practice on both sides until you can move easily back and forth between the two positions with economy and subtlety. While nose down, you should feel a more pronounced sense of going "downhill."
5. In both positions, continue to focus on your sense of slipping a long, clean bodyline through the smallest possible hole in the water.
Advance to the next drill when: You have a strong awareness of when you are in Sweet Spot and when you are at 90 degrees and can move smoothly between the two. Caution: Advancing to the next drill definitely does not mean putting this one behind you. This is one of the best warmup drills for a long-axis skill practice because it puts you in touch with the two key positions that launch every freestyle drill. It is also one of the mo
st valuable ways to practice flutter kicking, teaching far more than prone kicking with a kickboard.
Drill #2.2: Active Balance: Looking Up
Why do this drill: This is one more way to practice the skill of maintaining equilibrium while moving smartly among balance positions. It also introduces the exact form of active balance you will use when swimming backstroke and allows you to practice the stable-head/rolling-body that is critical to fluent backstroke.
Follow this sequence:
1. Start by balancing in your Sweet Spot. Stay there, kicking gently, until you are sure of your balance and alignment.
2. Keeping your head perfectly steady, roll smoothly to your other Sweet Spot. Stay there until you feel balanced and stable, before rolling back to your starting point.