Swim Training

From: totalswimm@aol.com (Terry Laughlin)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.triathlon
Subject: Total Immersion Smart Swimming Lessons

1 Why Technique Matters More Than Fitness

It's the water that makes swimming different. Water robs the swimmer of energy and efficiency. With every stroke you take, the water is applying the brakes, trying to drag you to a halt, stealing energy from you.

Think about it this way: If you stand on the ground and jump into the air, you burn about 10 calories. Nine of those calories went directly into getting you off the ground. One was lost to the slight inefficiency of the muscular exertion. Because muscles contract by a racheting mechanism and that racheting action causes friction which creates heat--the reason we sweat when exerting ourselves--some of our calories are thrown off as waste heat. If on the other hand, you jump in the pool and swim a few strokes, burning the same 10 calories, only one of those calories would go directly into moving you forward; the other nine would be lost as waste energy because of the action of water drag.

Water is a frustrating medium for the person trying to move through it, and the nature of that medium makes the swimming puzzle far more difficult to solve than running and biking. Let's compare it with running. A runner, with each stride, gets to push off solid footing while moving forward through thin air. The swimmer, on the other hand, with each stroke has to push against a liquid that seems to do nothing but swirl away when you try to push against it. And to compound your difficulty, in propelling yourself forward, you have to thrust your body through a medium that is a thousand times denser than air. For a runner, this would be like trying to run across a field of Jello into the teeth of a gale-force wind.

Water is so effective at robbing us of efficiency that scientists estimate that even world-class swimmers are probably only about 9 percent mechanically efficient--91 of every 100 calories being robbed by water drag and the difficulty of pushing a hand against liquid. The novice swimmer may be only 1 or 2 percent efficient, as many as 99 of every 100 calories being stolen by the water.

Because stroke efficiency is such a big factor, the great performances of world-class swimmers are approximately 70 percent due to the efficiency, economy and coordination of their body position and stroking movements, and only 30 percent a factor of their power and physical conditioning. For the less experienced and less skilled swimmer, perhaps 90 percent or more of your performance will be determined by how efficiently or inefficiently you move through the water, while less than 10 percent will be determined by how fit you are.

Therefore, if you can swim a quarter-mile in 10 minutes, but would like to improve your time to nine minutes, only about five to 10 seconds might be gained by getting in better shape, while 50 to 55 seconds will come from learning how to move more efficiently through the water.

Greater stroke efficiency is a combination of two efforts: minimizing drag and maximizing overall propelling efficiency. Our next swim lesson will discuss why minimizing drag is the more important of the two.

Happy Laps!

Certainly coaches reinforce that idea. Nearly every swim coach or instructor teaches swimming the same way, by telling you how your arms need to pull and legs need to kick in order to move your body down the pool. But the armstroke--where the hands go, how deep they pull, which direction the palm is facing, etc.--actually has only a minimal impact on how fast you swim. If a swimmer with a totally incorrect pulling pattern learned a nearly perfect pull, they might see a 5 to 10 percent improvement in their time. But because water is 1000 times denser than air and can throw huge drag forces against a swimmer who doesn't know the tricks of becoming slippery, learning how to minimize drag has a far greater impact than maximizing propulsion. A swimmer who learned to significantly improve their body position or alignment might see an immediate 20 to 30 percent improvement in their speed or stroke efficiency, a phenomenon I see occur over and over at my swim camps.

Improving drag reduction starts with what I call ``Inside-Out'' thinking. Get the head and trunk centered and balanced first. Don't worry about perfecting the armstroke until much later in the process. If your body isn't balanced, streamlined and stabilized, even the most powerful and effective pull will go to waste trying to overcome drag forces that could be easily eliminated with simple adjustments in body position. Moreover, you can't maximize the power in your armstroke unless the body is balanced and stabilized first. So the keystone to the whole enterprise is getting the body in balance. Nothing else you can do in the pool will make as much of a difference for your efficiency and speed.

Getting balanced in the water is a matter of overcoming a physical fact of life: The human body is adapted for balance and mobility on landlong legs and lots of mass below the waist, mostly volume above it--the lungs, after all, are just bellows. (Fish have the opposite problem--designed ideally for balance in the water, but consider what would happen if you tried to stand one up on its tail.) In the water, we're pretty buoyant between the armpits, rock-like below the waist. Naturally everyone's longer, heavier end wants to fall, not just yours.

And it has less to do with body fat than you think. I hear from a lot of triathletes and cross-training runners that they think they'll probably never learn to swim well because they have so little body fat. ``I'm a sinker; I'll never have good body position,'' they say. But Olympic swimmers are just as lean as runners and triathletes and they have perfect body position. They'll ride higher in the water than most of you because they swim faster, but any swimmer can learn to be just as well balanced, and swim much faster with much less effort as a result.

Most novice swimmers try to compensate by kicking harder. Wasteful. Especially if you're swimming the first leg of a triathlon. The last muscles you want to tire while swimming are the ones you'll use to pedal or run. But what if you could balance the body just as you do a see-saw, by lengthening and adding weight to the front end to effortlessly lift the back end? That's ``Pressing the T.'' Follow instructions and your butt will soon be gliding effortlessly along the surface, not dragging you down: 1. Use your head. Connecting your head to your spine and hips adds about 12 inches and 14-16 lbs. to your front end. So first, imagine that a straight iron bar joins the top of your skull, spine, and hips. Lift your head even a little bit off that line (as many novices do to breathe), and your hips will sink. Don't do it. 2. Press the T. If you draw a vertical line from your chin to your sternum and a horizontal line from one shoulder to the other, they intersect at your ``T.'' Add valuable weight to your front end while swimming by leaning on it (like someone's pressing on your shoulder blades as you swim). Keep the T-pressure steady even as you roll and breathe.

That's usually all it takes to get the body in balance, using no extra energy and eliminating annoying lead-butt. Use the following partner drills for learning how to press the T before getting into the water.

Stand facing each other on deck, arms at your sides, your partner's inside wrist against your chin and the inside of your partner's elbow against your sternum. Lean forward trying to distribute pressure equally between chin and sternum, your partner telling you how well you're doing. Keep straightening up and rebalancing until you get it right.

Remember how it feels on deck because you want the same feeling in the water. Leaning on your chin while you swim sounds like a demonstrably silly thing to do, but steady pressure there, just as you practiced it on land, is the key to in-water balance. Now, use it to release your hips and legs to the surface where they belong, with just the skin of your suit at the buttocks at the surface. Your partner watching to help you adjust position, kick lightly on your stomach, arms at sides, head in line with spine and hips, leaning on chin and sternum. It's an alien feeling at first, so you'll probably need to press harder than you think you should. Just don't bury your head.

Now you're ready for balanced kicking for short distances (25 yds. or less) on your stomach, holding steady T-pressure. Every time you lift your chin to breathe you'll lose T-pressure and balance, and get the chance to practice re-balancing. Practice this for at least 10 minutes before experimenting with it in your stroke.

Finally, once you're a T-pressing ace, alternate kick and swim lengths with it, thinking of nothing else but getting the force right. Short distances (25 yds.) only. Your hips should now feel light and your legs relaxed. The main sensation you should get when swimming with ``t-pressure'' is that of swimming downhill. (One triathlete described it as similar to the feeling of leaning into the wind while running into a strong wind.) Keep the pressure steady as you swim, as if someone was pressing down on your back between your shoulder blades while you swim freestyle. And if you're swimming on your back, then you lean on the back of your head and shoulder blades, but without putting your head back--keep your chin slightly tucked while swimming on your back.

It's not a big project. Most Total Immersion campers master T- pressure in about an hour.

Happy laps!

I quickly decided that if my greatest asset as a swimmer was that I was relatively tireless, then the more tireless and relentless a stroker I became the more successful I'd be. That became my guiding principle throughout high school and college. In college, my best race was the mile, 66 lengths of a 25-yard pool. When I first swam it in 1968, my time was about 22 minutes. By 1970, I was swimming it in 18 minutes. The American record at the time was about 16 minutes. Though I swam it for 2 more years in college I never went any faster. But that experience taught me something that I later used to coach a swimmer who went 15 minutes.

As a college swimmer, I never received any technique coaching, but I was given long hard workouts. So I was a well-conditioned, but inefficient swimmer. Where I now take about 17 strokes per length, then I took 24-25 or approximately 1600 strokes in my mile race. My logic was that to swim the race faster, I'd better condition myself to take those 1600 strokes faster and harder. No one ever suggested to me that I'd have a better chance to go faster by, say, learning to swim the race in only 1100-1200 strokes (as I do now).

So every day I went to practice with a single goal: to swim as hard as I could and turn my arms over as fast as I could for 6000 yards, figuring that the better I became at that task and the more pain I could condition myself to tolerate, the better I would do when I could concentrate all that effort into only 1650 yards. And I got pretty good at that. More than once other swimmers told me after a race: ``I've never seen anyone move their arms so fast for so long without getting tired.''

That approach worked pretty well for several years until I hit a physiological wall. Years of sheer effort had gotten me into the best condition I was capable of. I'd reached the limit of how hard and fast you could stroke while swimming that distance. At the same time, I had a teammate who swam backstroke. I always thought him lazy because, while I was stroking furiously, he moved up and down the pool at what seemed a leisurely pace, stroking long and easy. Now and then, he'd tell me ``I don't know how you work so hard,'' and I'd think ``Just imagine how fast you could swim if you just worked harder.'' But oddly enough, his best times qualified for Nationals while mine never came close.

There was a lesson in that, which I never learned until I began coaching. It's longer strokes, not faster strokes, that make a better swimmer. Two separate studies have proven it empirically. A Penn State biomechanist did a computer analysis of every swim in the 1988 Olympics. And a research group from the University of Rochester analyzed the results of every race of the U.S. Olympic Trials the same year. Both studies were looking for what distinguished faster from slower swimmers (faster and slower being relative terms; all of these swimmers were elite level.) Both studies reached the same conclusion. In each race, the fastest swimmers took the fewest strokes.

But taking fewer strokes is not a simple matter of ``subtracting'' strokes. These swimmers were able to swim faster on fewer strokes because they figured out how to make their body travel further every time they take a stroke. There are two ways to make that happen: one is to ``thrust'' your body further through the water by maximizing the propulsive power in each stroke. That's called CREATING propulsion. The other is to ``allow'' your body to travel further with each stroke by minimizing or ELIMINATING drag.

Of the two, ELIMINATING provides about 70% of your opportunity to increase stroke length while CREATING offers only 30%. So in looking to improve your swimming, you should always look first to the eliminating side; changes in your ability to create should always be secondary. Yet we usually approach swimming technique in the opposite order.

You improve your eliminating skills by focusing on changes in body position. Creating skills tend to focus on how we paddle with the hands (though much of your ability to maximize power actually is found by learning to use trunk muscles to work in better coordination with arm muscles). When we think about our swimming technique, we always think first about the paddling actions of the hands.

Eliminating drag is improved three ways:

1. By balancing the body. Our feet and legs tend to sink because of body composition, an effect called ``body torque.'' For every increase in torque there's a linear increase in energy cost for swimming, which causes the greatest amount of drag. So the greatest opportunity to reduce drag is by reducing torque, or balancing the body so the hips and legs ride as high as the upper body. (see lesson #2 on pressing the T to learn how to do this.)

2. By making the body longer. Any time you increase the length of a vessel at the water line, you reduce drag. (see lesson #4 to learn how to do this.)

3. By turning the body on its side. A body on its side allows the water to slip by more easily than a body on its stomach, again reducing drag. (Lesson #5 will cover this.)

Happy laps!

The classic built-for-speed vessel is the racing shell because its human cargo is also its engine. Even though it has only an 8- human-power engine, compared with the thousands of horsepower driving the tug, the crew shell really flies across the water. Now what about that shell's design? Not only is it needle-like from stem to stern, but it has an awful lot of length both in front and back of where the crew sits. There's a lesson in that for swimmers.

In the 1830s and 1840s, there was a fever among clipper ship owners to break the speed record for various ocean crossings. Because they had only sail power to rely on and couldn't simply install a bigger engine, the only way to gain speed was to change boat design. A naval architect named W. Froude tested various vessel shapes in a water tank to figure out what ratios of length, width and draft would produce the fastest boat.

Froude's critical discovery was that, all other things being equal, the best way to reduce drag was to design the boat to be longer at the water line. To this day, ``Froude numbers'' are used in boat design, and if you look at any boat-built-to-go-fast, from the racing shell to an America's Cup yacht, they all have the same long, sleek shape.

What's the implication for the vessel that carries you up and down the pool? Many swimmers assume that the best way to go faster is to make the engine (muscles and CV system) bigger. They hit the weight room, pull with paddles or do more yardage (to increase the engine's available fuel--heartbeats and calories). But any potential increase in engine power will always be puny in comparison to the amount of drag faced.

So vessel design that reduces drag will clearly have a far greater payoff. Froude told us that drag and the power required to overcome it are greatly reduced when you increase the length of the vessel. If you put a 12-foot and a 16-foot canoe in the pool side by side and push both away from the wall with equal force, the 16- footer will always go farther, faster and truer. Okay, I understand that if my body was longer I'd travel through the water faster and further on every stroke. But I'll never be taller than 6-feet, so how does that apply to me?

Well, when I extend an arm overhead I'm nearly 9-feet long from my fingertips to my toes. And Froude's research showed that a 9-foot vessel would travel nearly 25% faster than a 6-foot vessel. There's a simple experiment to test that. Push off the wall as hard as you can with your arms at your sides (the 6-foot position) and glide as far as you can. Then go back and do it again, but with your arms streamlined overhead (the 9-foot position). You'll glide a lot farther.

Conclusion: One way to swim faster with no more effort is to keep your body as long as possible for as long as possible during each stroke cycle. There are three ways to do that:

1. Make sure that you extend your hand fully (forward not down) when it enters the water. Swimmers who think the hand is used only for pulling usually cut the extension short so they can begin pulling more quickly. They think reaching further is a waste since it doesn't propel them. All they're doing is making their body shorter and reducing its speed potential. Swimmers who realize the more critical function of the hand is to extend the body line reach out all the way and increase the body's potential for speed.

2. After you stretch your hand out, wait a moment before beginning to pull back. At my swim camps, I analyze every swimmer with underwater video. When I see someone start pressing down and back as soon as they enter the water, the pulling hand is usually back under the hips before the other hand enters the water in front. They spend far more time in each stroke cycle as a 6-foot vessel than as a 9-foot vessel. When I see them pause and glide a moment with the hand extended before beginning their pull, the recovering hand has a chance to catch up a bit and enters the water overhead by the time the pulling hand is passing the head. They spend far more time in each stroke cycle as a 9-foot vessel.

3. Roll to your side as you enter and reach. Another simple experiment: Stand facing a wall with your right arm stretched overhead. Leave your hand on the wall and turn your body so the right hip and shoulder face the wall. Your hand will stretch 4 to 6 inches further up the wall because you become ``taller'' when you turn to your side. Same thing applies in the pool. Roll to your side as you stretch your hand on entry and stay in that full- extended, sidelying position for just a split second longer in each stroke cycle.

Happy laps!

An obvious question that never seems to get asked: If hard-training athletes are forever being urged to use swimming as a recovery workout, what do hard-training swimmers use? Auburn University head swim coach Dave Marsh knows. And if his simple answer pinpoints one of the best recovery workouts you can do in the pool, perhaps it pinpoints one of the best recovery workouts for anyone.

Marsh tells his top freestylers to turn over on their backs, following a hard training set in their main stroke. His reason sounds simple enough. ``Swimming backstroke gives them a chance to work the kinks out of their tired freestyle muscles with some active rest swimming.'' But there are several big ideas embedded in that little prescription, all of which can work just as well for cross-trainers who want a quicker recovery from land-based workouts as they do for people who spend almost all their athletic time in the water anyway.

Understandable that Marsh has given the subject some thought. Auburn's swimmers, currently ranked second in the NCAA, cover six to ten miles a day in training--a healthy load even for a runner, never mind the swimmer, whose body interprets it as the equivalent of a marathon or more six days a week. Add two to three weekly sessions in the weight room for good measure and it's obvious the team's recovery training had better be good. That's what the backstroke is, and not just for swimmers.

The reason is that while freestyle and backstroke are both ``long axis'' strokes, meaning they share the same pattern of body rotation--and use many of the same muscles, they use them in slightly different ways. In both you lie prone in the water and rotate the hips around the spinal or long axis while stroking with an alternating arm pattern.

And though you swim backstroke with many of the same muscles as freestyle, the movement is reversed, so easy backstroke swimming can ``massage'' tired freestyle muscles. The ones that were contracting are now lengthening and vice versa. Besides, in freestyle, the simple act of breathing correctly is a technique and many people tense up if they don't have it just right. Backstroke is more relaxing for them because they can breathe any time they want. On top of that, you get to loosen up and take the session with something less than deadly seriousness. A slightly sloppy stroke technique can be harmlessly brushed off a lot more easily than it could in what most triathletes, swimmers and cross-trainers consider their primary stroke. The idea is to use ``non-prime'' strokes for warming and loosening, as in a recovery workout, and save your prime stroke for fast swimming with good form.

And even if swimming is just a sport for your ``off'' days, you can get a lot out of facing the ceiling instead of the pool bottom. If you're swimming to recover, you should know that backstroke, thanks to its natural loosening properties, may work even better as a general recovery stroke than freestyle. And if you're into more serious water work, say training for a triathlon, open water or Masters swimming event, you undoubtedly swim mostly freestyle and can use backstroke as a restorative just as Marsh's troops do.

So why don't more people swim inverted if it's so great?

1. the disconcerting sense of being upside-down and going backwards, and,

2. difficulty in staying afloat.

1. Get your bearings. Use a line of tiles or lights or other markings on the ceiling to help you set a straight course. Failing that, just hug the lane line. Most pools have a set of colorful pennants hanging across the pool near each end wall. Swimmers call them ``backstroke flags'' because they warn you that the wall is 5 yards (three to four strokes) away.

2. Balance your body on your back. On your back, you keep your butt from sinking by leaning on your shoulder blades and the back of your head. (This is ``T-pressing'' inverted.) Don't put your head back; keep your chin slightly tucked, as if you were holding a golf ball between your chin and throat. That will keep your hips near the surface and you'll ride the waves like a pro, relaxing as you go.

Kickboards, those tombstone-shaped foam slabs, are a common torture device self-inflicted by people willing to endure kicking laps like medicine in the mistaken belief that it will help them swim better. Their poor kick is holding them back, they reason, and they suppose that they need to strengthen their legs with those mind-numbing laps on the board. No matter that when they grip the board and churn away they go nowhere--except for a few who travel backwards. They keep plugging grimly along, clinging to the hope that clinging to the board will eventually do them some good.

It probably won't, for two reasons. First, whether you swim every day or just when the weather's too lousy for running or cycling, chances are your kick isn't what's holding you back. Your hips and legs are dragging, and that's no good, but it's not your kick that's letting them sag. That's from poor balance, probably the most common and most easily corrected stroke error of them all. Instead of hours on the board, it's effectively fixed by redistributing your weight, making the front end of the body ``heavier'' by leaning on your chest (``pressing the T'') while swimming. Like a seesaw, your rear end will ride up where it belongs. Even a weak kick, my students are delighted to discover, can't hold back a balanced body.

Where a stronger kick does come in handy is in gaining speed after you've improved your balance. This means not just muscle strength, but flexibility, something we all can use, whatever our sport. Many elite swimmers can sit on the deck, legs out in front and knees straight, and touch their toes to the floor in front of them. Most novice swimmers are lucky if they go half that far. Hyper-mobility (unusual ranges of flexibility) in any joint comes at the cost of diminished joint stability, and a highly flexible ankle on a runner is a sprain waiting to happen. So even though step one to kicking better is ankle stretching, don't overdo it if you run or play squash or tennis or basketball.

But what if you're concerned with leg strength in or out of the pool? That's step two, but again kick sets gripping the board aren't the answer even if swimming is your prime sport. For one thing, they throw your balance off. How can you lean on your chest and kick correctly while your arms are propped up on a board?

Second, gripping the board freezes your hips. You can't rotate them and rhythmic hip and trunk rotation integrated with your arm stroke are where the power comes from in each stroke cycle. The kick is an integral part of that rolling action since it both provides the external torque for hip roll and acts to counter- balance trunk rotation. Kick on a board with hips locked in place and you lose the whole dynamic. The interaction of hip and leg muscles is changed enough that whatever leg strength you do gain is different from that which helps you swim faster.

The best way to put muscle in a weak kick? Fins, for two reasons. First, ankle flexibility. The extra pressure created by the blade as you kick down on each beat stretches the foot more than a ``naked'' kick. Second, improved leg strength. Again the blade gets the credit. The increased surface area of the blade puts a greater load on your leg muscles like a wet weight workout. Drilling with fins can work even better, since drills force you to use your legs than you do when swimming. They'll not only get stronger but it will be strength you can use when swimming because the drill closely mimics the way the body moves in swimming. And you'll kill two birds with one stone because you'll be improving your stroke efficiency while strengthening your legs.

Try kicking on your side with one arm extended out front. Roll and change arms several times each length. When kicking on your side, neither fin blade will break the surface, giving your legs a higher quality workout. You can get a similar effect by kicking underwater. The increased water pressure adds load to your leg muscles.

Finally, wear fins on some of your swimming sets. Most of us don't kick very much when we swim, and the farther we swim the less we kick. But when you wear fins, your kick improves enough to make kicking worth the effort and you end up using use your legs more. Naturally this gives the highest transfer of strength because you're strengthening your legs exactly as you use them.

And what kind of fins should you use? Many new swimmers and cross-trainers have been attracted to the new cut-off, so called ``speed'' fins or Zommers. This fin works best for those who already have good ankle flexibility and a strong kick. Less skilled and less experienced swimmers and those who need to develop ankle flexibility and a stronger kick will do so much faster using a bladed fin. The extra surface area of a full blade is valuable. Of the bladed fins, my favorite is the Slim Fin. It gives your legs more of a boost, while reducing leg fatigue. They're hard to find, but if you want info on them, e-mail me your postal address and I'll send mail order info.

So, if all you want for your time today is a good leg workout, you'd be better off on an exercise bike. But if you're looking for strength that could help move you down the lane smoothly, where do kickboards fit in? In the pile on the deck.

Happy laps!

Of course you're not happy with your swimming. You didn't know that ``The most effective applications of propulsive force occur when the insweep and upsweep are made on a diagonal of 50 to 70 degrees...the patterns range in depth from 61 to 74 cm and in length from 29 to 45 cm.'' Well there you are. Now go try it.

That's a quote from a discussion of the freestyle armstroke which plunges on that way for 18 (yes!) pages. It's in a volume entitled, with inadvertent humor, Swimming Even Faster by Ernie Maglischo, considered the premier source book on technique. Some of you have probably even tried to read it. The volume is loaded with, among other things, minutely detailed descriptions covering every angle, degree and inch of movement as the hand travels through water. Then Maglischo continues over the next 30 pages to discuss kicking, timing of arms to legs, breathing and 20 different possible stroke faults, before dispensing with body position--much simpler to teach and with far more improvement potential--in a cursory paragraph or two.

No wonder so many adult athletes are put off at the thought of regular swim workouts. The advice they get makes efficient swimming sound like rocket science. Swim coaches for adults are in short supply, leaving many would-be swimmers struggling to extract their technique tips from books like this. But even athletes with coaches can be swamped. As one complained recently to me, ``I've been told a thousand different things about how to improve my stroke. How can you ever hope to do them all well?''

You can't of course, unless you do some weeding. Most books and articles, treat swimming as simply a matter of getting in shape, telling you how to swim laps rather than how to swim them better. Even Masters coaches are known more for giving workouts than for instruction. But when they finally do turn to technique, wow! An admittedly demanding motor skill becomes a complex sounding as nuclear physics. You can see the athletes' minds working. ``If it's technique I need to get better, not lots of laps, and if technique is that, well, technical, I'm outta here.''

Wait! Come back. I teach technique to hundreds of adults each year, and I usually have just Saturday and Sunday to get them swimming smoothly and ready to coach themselves. We have time for what really matters, nothing else. And each year I've been coaching, a funny thing has happened: I've I taught less than I did the year before, and my hundreds of newly hatched swimmers have improved more after the streamlining. Here's some common stroke trivia you're better off without:

Is your arm is at a 30 degree angle as it enters the water?
How do you pitch your hand as you make the catch?
How high is your elbow as you begin your outsweep?
Are you making a good sculling motion on the insweep?
Do you have the coveted ``S-stroke'' yet?
If so, does your pull cross the body's centerline?
Is your hand at least 61 but no more than 74 cm deep as you pull, using your triceps to extend all the way with your hand to finish the stroke?
Are you accelerating your hand through the stroke?
Where is your palm facing as you take your hand from the water?
Where is your elbow relative to your hand as you recover?
Where should you look while breathing?
Are you kicking with a 2- or 4- or 6-beat kick and how is the timing of your arms to your legs?

Come back and try this. Focus on the simpler and far more critical job of adjusting your body position to minimize drag. In the scheme of speed things, it's at least twice as important as how your hand pulls you through the water.

If you get your body balanced (see my earlier posting on ``pressing the T''), then rotate your trunk and hips as you stroke, you'll move through the water pretty well, flawed stroke or no. Students at my camps have improved their speed and efficiency as much as 30% in two days, making scarcely any changes in their arm movements.

Here's the stroke-made-simple lesson: Slice your hand in as soon as it passes your shoulder, extend it to the front as far as you can, take your time about beginning your pull, and pull straight back under your body, neither too deep nor too close to your trunk. Then take your hand out of the water and do it again. You're swimming fine. Put away your metric tape measure.

Are there useful refinements beyond those mentioned? Of course. But they pay off far more if you're eyeing a berth on the Olympic team. Consider this: the typical novice is maybe 10 to 20 percent as efficient as a world-class swimmer, but can close most of the gap--to maybe a 20% spread--by simply improving body position, rotation and alignment. Working on just that can easily deliver a year's worth of progress. Then you can begin to think about your hand pitch and path, which may grudgingly yield another 5 or 10 percent gain after just as much work.

Basic, sound swimming comes down to this: Lean into the water with your upper trunk (to balance) so your suit is just breaking the surface; rotate your hips around your spinal axis (to propel), getting them completely out of the way as each hand passes through; and think of your arms more as extenders for increasing the length of your body line--which automatically makes you faster--than as pulling tools. Any questions, e-mail me.

Happy laps.

As they swam a few lengths I saw all the telltale signs: churning up a useless froth with their legs, wiggling as they stroked, the big kick burning lots of energy but producing no propulsion, the wiggle adding drag. Another case of lead hips. Fixing their strokes would have been like removing an appendix to cure a gall bladder infection.

They needed instead to ``press the T.'' The easiest way to swim faster, especially in the beginning, is by improving your body position. And nothing else you can do in the pool will make as much of a difference as this drill.

It's a way of overcoming a physical fact of life: The human body is adapted for balance on land--most of our length and mass below the waist, mostly volume above it (the lungs, after all, are air pumps). So in the water, we're pretty buoyant between the armpits, rock-like below the waist. Naturally everyone's longer, heavier end wants to fall, not just yours.

Most novices, and even some experienced swimmers try to compensate by kicking harder. Wasteful. But what if you could lengthen and add weight to the front end and automatically lift the back end? That's ``Pressing the T.'' Follow instructions and your butt will soon be gliding along the surface, not dragging you down.

1 Use your head. Connecting your head to your spine and hips adds about 12 inches and 14-16 lbs. to your front end. So first, imagine that a straight iron bar joins the top of your skull, spine, and hips. Lift your head even a little bit off that line (often happens as you breathe), and your hips will sink. Don't do it.

2. Press the T. If you draw a vertical line from your chin to your sternum and a horizontal line from one shoulder to the other, they intersect at your ``T.'' Add valuable weight to your front end while swimming by leaning on it (like someone's pressing on your shoulder blades as you swim). Keep the T-pressure steady even as you roll and breathe.

Stand facing each other on deck, arms at your sides, your partner's inside wrist against your chin and the inside of your partner's elbow against your sternum. Lean forward trying to distribute pressure equally between chin and sternum, your partner telling you how well you're doing. Keep straightening up and rebalancing until you get it right.

Remember how it feels on deck because you want the same feeling in the water. Leaning on your chin while you swim sounds like a demonstrably silly thing to do, but steady pressure there, just as you practiced it on land, is the key to in-water balance.

Now, use it to release your hips and legs to the surface where they belong, with just the tops of your butt surfacing. Partner watching to help you adjust position, kick lightly on your stomach, arms at sides, head in line with spine and hips, leaning on chin and sternum. It's an alien feeling at first, so you'll probably need to press harder than you think you should. Just don't bury your head.

Now you're ready for balanced kicking for short distances (12-25 yds.) on your stomach, holding steady T-pressure. Every time you lift your chin to breathe you'll lose T-pressure and balance, and get the chance to practice re-balancing. Practice this for at least 10 minutes before experimenting with it in your stroke. Finally, once you're a T-pressing ace, alternate kick and swim lengths with it, thinking of nothing else but getting the force right. Short distances (25-50 yds.) only. Your hips should now feel light and your legs relaxed. It's not a big project. My two students mastered T-pressure in about an hour, and finally left the mud behind.

Happy laps.

It's a stubborn and particularly condescending myth that learning to swim, like bearing a child, is subject to some kind of biological clock. There it was again in a recent issue of SWIM magazine, a star swimmer on the Masters circuit, suggesting that the age of 40 was some kind of watershed governing whether or not a new swimmer could develop a good stroke and learn to swim comfortably.

As myths go, it plays to an especially credulous audience--new triathletes and hopeful runners checking out alternative pool workouts that won't punish their legs after one too many training injuries. In they jump and down they go exhausted, wondering where all their fitness went. They don't understand what's happening.

I do, because in capricious moments, I'll go out for a run with friends who are serious about running. Despite my Clydesdale figure and modest mileage (over 200 in lbs and under 200 in running miles per year) I can hold on for several miles with accomplished athletes who are kind enough to ease their normal pace a bit. I certainly do well enough to finish a road race in the middle of the pack.

My running friends, who log as many miles in a month as I might in a year, can't move as easily into swimming mode though. They'd never think of joining my swim workouts, and entering a Masters or open water race would be more unthinkable yet. Then they hear, from an ``authority'' that to learn all the subtle motor skills of swimming really well you have to start as a kid and the say ``Well, no wonder!'' and walk out of the pool forever.

Bad move. Exercise physiologist Dr. Dan Rooks is a researcher in the effects of exercise and aging on motor control and learning. In his view, ``There's no reason older muscles can't learn sports skills fine movements at a similar rate as younger muscles. The circuits that run them don't change appreciably over time.'' So there may be reasons for an older swimmer to develop a fine stroke slowly, but age is not one of them.

The primary reason that swimmers can run a lot better than runners can swim is that we all learn to run fairly well as kids-- there's not that much to it--while swimming is a much more complex skill that many Masters athletes are only now getting serious about. If you didn't swim competitively in your youth, your swim skills will usually leave a lot to be desired now.

But the legions of highly successful Masters swimmers who didn't get serious about the sport until their 30s or later prove it's not impossible. The key is understanding that learning to do it well takes everyone time--whether they start at 10 or at 50.

For the first 16 years of my swim coaching career I worked mainly with young age group teams. When new swimmers joined at age 8 or 9, we explained to their parents that their first four to five years would be devoted primarily to learning the basic skills for all the strokes. In their early teens, we'd shift toward training and conditioning, but they would continue refining those basic skills into their late teens. In teaching them, I got to write on a ``blank slate,'' teaching kids their strokes from scratch. The kids learned them correctly right from the start and with constant guidance as they went.

The hundreds of adults, I now work with at camps and clinics each year are different. They face the same four-to-five year basic learning span as kids. But they don't do it as cheerfully. When kids go to practice, they take it one day at a time, they just do what the coach tells them, and they're with their friends. To them, it's just playtime in a more structured environment. Adults view it as work. Many, particularly triathletes, feel pressured to swim better in a hurry. And, if they've been trying to swim on their own for several years, there are layers of bad habits on the slate to overcome.

But there's one great equalizer. Adults are rapt and absorbed pupils, far more dedicated students than are most kids. And attention and motivation are the most important ingredients in learning new skills. Frankly, I'd find it very difficult to go back to coaching kids again because I've become spoiled by the quality of mature students and how much they learn in just a few days. They've had to carve precious time out of busy schedules to spend a few days with me, and they're intent on getting the most out of it.

Does it matter? It does to Norton Davey, a 75-year old triathlete from Oceanside CA, and two-time age group Hawaiian Ironman champion, who improved his swim speed by 30 percent after three days of instruction. Just try telling him the only time to learn better strokes is when you're young.

Shortening the learning curve is as easy as 1-2-3.)

1. Get some coaching. Swim skills are complex. With instruction adults often make more progress in hours than could in years on their own.

2. Limit skill drills to 20-30 minutes. Most of the positive imprinting from any drill takes place in the first 20 minutes or so of practice. After that, even the most attentive pupil's mind wanders. Execution falls off, and bad habits creep back in.

3. Work on one aspect of skill at a time. For instance, you can concentrate effectively on extending your hand farther in front or on rolling your hips as you stroke, but not both at once. Better to do one thing really well for 20 minutes, then something else not requiring great concentration for 20 minutes, then a third 20 minutes concentrating on something else again.

That's because we confuse elite athletes with the rest of us. Elites don't have much choice. Because there are so many motions to coordinate perfectly, it takes countless hours of practice to refine them and reach a high enough skill level to be a top contender. So many hours, in fact, that the grooming of an Olympic- level swimmer usually begins in early childhood, perhaps at the age of 7 or 8. Several years are invested in nothing more than learning basic skills. Only then does the maturing swimmer turn the training focus more to building strength and endurance, probably for another 5 to 7 years. But even then the skill-polishing process goes on and on. Coaches guide the process every step of the way.

Adult swimmers don't have that luxury. Without professionals to guide them and with few scarce hours, never mind years, to invest, they usually just swim and swim and hope that as their mileage piles up, their strokes will improve. Instead they're making it worse, ``practicing their mistakes'' and getting better at them all the time. The more they swim and the longer this continues, the harder it gets to reverse the cycle. One of my students jokingly called this state ``terminal mediocrity.''

Usually, the only way to break such bad habits is to find a coach. But not everyone can do that. If you know how, you can turn things around and begin learning improved skills all by yourself. And the quickest and most effective way to do that is the skill drill. It's the same method I used for two decades to teach high school and college students how to swim efficiently. But I've modified it over years of teaching adults at swim camps, so the drills can be used easily for self-teaching.

They work by speeding up the learning curve. Efficient swimming has a flow that gives great swimmers an effortless grace in their strokes, but they usually develop that flow over many years, consciously and unconsciously experimenting with different styles, sometimes with a coach's guidance, often without. Those experiments, over time, allow them to experience moments where the stroke feels just right, moments which the body seizes and stores in a catalogue of similar, related experiences.

Total Immersion takes this haphazard and painfully slow process and organizes it into a step-by-step learning system of drills selected to create these moments in an organized and reliable way. It brings to us those elusive feelings of being ``in synch'' instead of making us stumble onto them ourselves. It lets us reproduce them at will and practice them.

When you go back to swimming the full stroke, after improving individual parts of it with drills and learning what each one feels like when done fluently, your body re-assembles them into a much- improved whole. Your senses have done your learning for you, hugely accelerating your progress by taking ``snapshots'' of sensations that great swimmers feel consistently as they knife through the water.

In a matter of a few hours, swimmers who have been frustrated for years by poor technique can dramatically improve their swimming, a process that is virtually impossible by plodding mindlessly up and down the lanes--practicing your mistakes. Even with conventional instruction, this learning process usually consumes many tedious and frustrating months. The irony is that while Olympic-level swimmers often devote as much as 20% of their pool time to drills, most adult swimmers, with far more potential for improving, do little or no drill work. So of course they get little or none of its miraculous results.

Skill drills are the best way to improve your stroke because they take advantage of four powerful physical facts:

1. Your muscles need a dose of amnesia. Muscles have memories. Habits are powerful, and that's just what the stroke you've been using for years has become--a habit. Not a good one, either. Because you've been struggling for so long, your muscles have become very good at moving like that.

Muscle memory is like an old record that has been played hundreds of times. The needle, tracking the grooves over and over, gradually wears them deeper. In sports, your muscles and nervous system become more and more ``grooved'' to automatically execute a movement the same way. Fine, if your stroke is efficient. Not fine if it's not. Practiced for long enough, a bad stroke becomes almost immune to change.

Almost. Stroke drills are powerful enough to break that cycle because they're disguised, different enough from your normal motion that your muscle doesn't ``recognize'' the movement and try to do it in the same old way. You practice new skills on a neuromuscular ``blank slate,'' without having to erase anything first.

2. Small pieces are easier to swallow. Stroke drills are ``bite- size'' skills. Because the whole stroke is made up of so many finely coordinated parts, it's impossible to swallow the whole thing. You can't concentrate on and improve it all at once. Drills take a complicated movement and break it down into a series of mini- skills, each of which can be quickly mastered. Then you simply reassemble these building blocks into a new, more efficient stroke. If each drill addresses a key skill, and you do them in the order the body best understands, it's just like putting up a building. The first drill is the foundation, each succeeding drill adds another floor.

3. Instead of trial-and-error, it's trial-and-success. Drills provide lots of positive reinforcement. You can master them quickly, so you can begin practicing smooth movements right away. The more you practice a drill, the more it becomes your new habit and crowds out the sloppy patterns living in muscle memory. The more time you spend drilling, and the less time you spend swimming with your old stroke, the faster your muscles will learn how to move you in a new, more efficient way.

4. It's language the body understands. Skill drills are a ``natural'' learning experience. Conventional stroke instruction tries to get at the muscles through the mind. First, you hear or read a description of what you have to do. Next, you try to figure out what the movement will feel like when you're doing it. Then you instruct your muscles to imitate that feeling. Finally, you see whether you got it right.

And the beauty is, they're self-adjusting. The more you need skill drills, the better they'll work for you. I often recommend that swimmers with the most ground to cover spend 80 percent or more of their water time doing drills if they expect to make headway against years of ingrained bad habits that are grudgingly resistant to change. For them, drills are not only the best way to root out stubborn stroke patterns, they may be the only way. And though every swimmer is different, drills often work with incredible speed. Everyone I've taught them to has improved. I can't think of any other swim instruction method that can say that.

Among the literally dozens of movements you can practice in the pool to improve your swimming, I teach a sequence of five in every Total Immersion Swim Camp I give whether it's a one-day clinic or a comprehensive week-long program. Once campers master them, they're amazed at how different their swimming feels right away. They've launched the progress process: knocking down bad habits and building good ones.

Sure drills are practice, sort of like playing your scales on the piano when you'd rather be tackling the whole sonata. But remember: You're finally practicing your successes, not your failures. Drills are the best investment you can make in your swimming tomorrows.

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