Finally I could analyze swimming from a comfortable position on the deck, a vastly improved perspective to determine what makes people fast in the water over what I’d had as a swimmer, frothing up and down the pool in a haze of pain. And from day one, it struck me plain as day: The fastest swimmers made it look the easiest.
A freestyler sprinting at world-record pace puts out over a thousand watts of power to “streak” down the pool at a paltry 5 mph. Yet fish have been clocked at 68 mph — as fast as a cheetah can run — with amazingly little energy expenditure. A dolphin also uses only about 1/8th of the power that simple physics says it should.
The human being, land-adapted for millions of years, struggles awkwardly when trying to propel himself through a substance 1,000 times denser than air. Every movement is bought at an extravagant cost in energy. To double speed in the water requires 8 times as much power output. To swim but 10 percent faster requires a 33 percent increase in power. In the water, drag is everything.
The amount of drag the water throws against your body is determined, in part, by how fast you’re moving, and drag is much higher at the top of the velocity curve than at the bottom. So if you try to gain speed at the top of the curve, you bang up against a figurative brick wall. But there’s far less resistance to speed improvement at the bottom, making it a smarter place to get faster.
That’s why what you do between strokes is actually more important than how you take the stroke. So keep your body long, balanced, and sleek during the recovery, and you’ll boost performance far faster than anything you can do at the moment with your hand.
- Balance your body in the water.
- Make your body longer.
- Swim on your side.
Above the waist, we’re mostly volume; the lungs, after all, are the just big bellows. That means that we’re most buoyant between the armpits, rocklike lower down. It’s only natural that our longer, heavier end wants to sink.
Churning your legs hard to compensate for the way nature put you together will wear you out. Worse, it’s useless against the imbalance that’s slowing you down.
What you really need is a better way of getting those hips up where they belong. And there is one. I call it “pressing the buoy.”
FQS swimming means always keeping one of the other of your hands in that front quadrant. It’s really just another way of saying “swimming tall,” of lengthening your body line and making you taller than you really are.
FQS is something no one does naturally. You have to know it matters, then consciously work on making it a habit.
Don’t swim flat; Swim on your side.
Mother Nature really wanted your shoulder muscles to simply hold together and stabilize the joint, setting your arm in a maximum-leverage position where it can better hold the water against the powerful forces developed by your body roll. She never envisioned them driving your arms through the water by the hour. So make this joint do most of the work moving you down the pool, and sooner or later Mother Nature is going to send you a big error message.
So in this case there are two ways to increase the power. One is by keeping mass the same and increase acceleration — in other words, don’t put more of your body into it, just move your arms faster. If you want to waste energy that’s the very way to do it.
Or you can increase the M in the formula. Simply move more of your body mass all at once when you stroke. Lead with your hips instead, and your stroke will be both rhythmic and powerful. Your arms will be happy to follow.
The Total Immersion learning system has outperformed all other methods of teaching adults to swim because it’s the only one that teaches new skills the way we learn the best — in small pieces.
And the most effective way to tell if you’ve got it all right is by feel. Every movement you’ll be asked to practice in this program is designed to give even the newest swimmer a taste of what the key parts of the swimming stroke feel like to an elite athlete. Up now, every swimming expert has told you how the strokes of an Olympic swimmer look. But looks are hard to mimic. Feelings are much easier.
Musicians dedicated monumental amounts of rehearsal to produce beautiful sounds, but the quality of their practice time matters to them far more than the quantity. So it should be for swimmers.
Each one leaves a faint impression on your central nervous system, forming a pattern of movement — a habit.
During TI Weekend Worship, after patiently explaining for hours that swimming is 70 percent efficiency and only 30 percent fitness, that practice is more valuable than workout, and urging participants to regard fitness as “something that happens to you while you’re practicing good technique,” we still expect curiosity over just how fit a swimmer needs to be.
Fitness is important, but not for the reasons you’ve probably thought. The reason you want to be in the best possible shape is not to be a powerful athlete but a precision one n— so you can keep using your high-level technique over longer distances, at higher speeds and higher heart rates.
Tennis players wise up faster. Many start the same way by “just doing it,” digging up a tolerant partner and smacking the ball back and forth. They usually don’t get very far that way. In the beginning especially, they spend more time chasing down wayward balls than hitting rallies. It soon dawns that they won’t improve much if they can’t even keep the ball in play.
Other swimmers have said it’s like someone pressing down their shoulder blades as they swim. And a runner recognized the feeling from her sport: She felt as though she were leaning forward slightly to balance and brace her body against a punchy headwind. When you get it right, your hips will feel lighter, your kick far easier. In fact, relax your legs completely so they can simply follow along.
Pretend every stroke is the last of your lap, the one where you reach out for the pool wall. Swim every stroke of the lap that way. Reach for the wall. As you’re reaching, feel your shoulder press alongside your jawline. Then, when you can’t reach any further, begin to pull. One more point: Reach slowly for the wall; your hand shouldn’t be extending any faster than your body is moving forward.
Why, Irvin asked the Russian coach, did they do all that work on this exaggerated stroke? Because, came the answer, one of world champion Alexander Popov’s big advantages was his habit of always having one hand in front of his head to lengthen his body. So the coach wanted all of his freestylers to make that a habit too, and he knew it didn’t come naturally. They would simply have to make it natural, “burn it into the nervous system” by running that loop over and over for hours a day until each swimmer’s nervous system owned it.
In watching underwater video of thousands of “human swimmers” over the years, what I notice first is how completely their arms and legs are occupied with trying not to sink. They may think what they’re doing is “stroking,” but virtually none of their energy is producing propulsion. Instead, most of it goes into fighting that sinking feeling. Until you learn to balance effortlessly without your arms helping, it is simply impossible to drill or stroke efficiently.
Your most important task here is to learn the right way — patiently and mindfully — to practice all skill drills. Give yourself unlimited time to acquire effortless ease. You are not on a schedule to advance to Lesson Two. If you cultivate these attitudes and habits in Lesson One, your skills will be stronger and sounder at each subsequent stage.
The least effective (but most instinctive) response to a nonpropulsive kick is to kick harder.
In order for the kick to be propulsive, something has to flex, in order to move the water, similar to the pitched blades of a propellor. When your ankle refuses, it’s only natural for your knee to substitute. That only makes the problem worse.
- Practice each drill with no set time limit or number of repetition in mind.
- Stay with it until it becomes effortless.
- Then continue a bit longer until you are “bored” (you can do it without mental effort).
- Only then should you progress to the next drill or skill.
Make a commitment to avoid “practicing struggle” at any stage. Any time you feel yourself losing control, stop and rest, regroup at the prior drill or skill, or do both. If you don’t, you’ll simply end up imprinting struggle in your muscle memory and your body will naturally revert to inefficient patterns whenever you get a bit tired.
Most adult swimmers kick too much, not because they want to but because they feel their legs sinking. This kicking is not only nonpropulsive and energy-wasting, it also wrecks your rhythm and any chance of achieving fluency. The ideal kick for most people is one that is nonovert and nearly effortless. Your drills are the perfect device for helping you replace an energy-wasting kick with an economical kick, called a two-beat kick.
Be “patient” on your switches: Wait for the recovering arm to reach your ear before you start to “pull” with your extended hand. Make the switch just before your hand enters the water.
Stress and organism and it breaks down a little, then builds itself up slightly better than before. Give a muscle a heavier weight to lift than it’s used to and it has to work harder.
The shorter the race, the more anaerobic it will be. In a race of 50 yards, about 90% of your energy comes from the anaerobic fuel tank. But in the mile race, more than 90% of the energy will come from your aerobic tank.
The longer I worked with swimmers, though, the more I understood how complex the real training puzzle actually is, how desperately muscles need rest to improve since that’s when they do their rebuilding, and how training the nervous system to swim more economically is far more useful than beating up the body anyway.
Races are simply different from workouts. Most of us go all out when we race (after all, it’s a race!), but we train at a less punishing pace.
When your heart’s humming along at 130 or 140 BPM, you can work on precise skills and techniques that are impossible when it’s pounding at 180.
But hard swim training makes no sense at all for the average triathlete whose best bet is to never, never swim hard. In the race itself, victory always goes to the fastest biker or runner, never to the fastest swimmer. There’s even a word for triathletes who work hard during the swim leg. They’re called losers.
Since your smartest move in a triathlon is to keep your heart rate at 130 to 140BPM for the entire swim, training at anything higher is a waste of time and energy.
Perhaps it’s because of the need to such fierce concentration on keeping your stroke efficient, with every lap feeling harder than the last. But whatever the reason, this race tests it all: your mental focus, the staying power of your efficiency, and the quality of your conditioning.
If your core isn’s strong, then neither are you, because your torso is the force coupler that transmits power from legs to upper body. Abdominal exercises of all sorts, and particularly Pilates exercises develop core power.
An essential insight for mastering any challenging skill is that every brief, but thrilling, spurt forward will be followed by a much longer plateau slightly higher than the previous one. True masters learn to “love the plateau,” continuing to practice enthusiastically even was they seem, on the surface, to be stagnating.