I wasn’t always smart about swimming. In fact, like most everyone who competed in college, I spent four years doing it all wrong—though nobody realized it was wrong back then. No pain, no gain, we were warned. So hour after wearying hour, we put up with the pain. Some of us got results; many of us got more than a little frustrated from time to time. The problem was simple: We were working very hard to accomplish the wrong things. And to this day, too many people are still putting themselves through that dead-end kind of drudgery.
It happened like this. Early in my freshman season—still a stranger to serious daily training—I was timed for my first 1650-yard swim, swimming’s so-called metric mile. It took me about twenty-two minutes. The top swimmers in our conference were a good four minutes faster, so if I wanted to get anywhere in distance swimming, I had my work cut out for me. And the only way I could figure out to do that was to speed up my stroke—exactly what most improvement-minded swimmers think even today. Hands move faster, body goes faster. What could be simpler? Besides, nobody bothered to disagree.
So each afternoon, my practice strategy was as simple as it gets: move the arms as fast as I could for as long as I could. Makes you tired in a hurry, I quickly found out, but I figured that by doing it every day I’d get used to it—you know, teach my body to laugh at fatigue. And there was a certain medieval logic to it anyway. After diving into this punishment for two hours and 240 laps every afternoon in practice, race day felt like a breeze. It was over in under twenty minutes and 66 laps. What a snap! Call it primitive sport psychology, but I hadn’t a doubt in the world I was doing the right thing.
And sure enough, within two years I had achieved my goal: swimming 18 minutes, to score in the Eastern Collegiate Championships. Victory! As I dragged myself out of the pool after finishing, the timer in my lane exclaimed, “I’ve never seen anyone move their arms that fast for that long!”
“Thanks,” I muttered.
Neither of us understood at the time that it was not a compliment.
But I eventually found out. Because even though at that point I’d been training seriously for only two years, I never swam any faster. I had wrung all the potential out of my strategy. There was noplace else to find more speed.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time—still doggedly determined to find some way to work harder yet—I had crashed into the limits of the most basic rule that governs how you produce swimming speed: V = SL × SR. Velocity (V) is a product of how far you travel on each stroke (stroke length or SL) multiplied by how fast you take each stroke (stroke rate or SR). As you begin to approach the upper limits of how quickly you can move your arms, you can usually speed them up even more only by decreasing your stroke length. So it’s a zero-sum game. Increase one and decrease the other by the same amount and your product—velocity—doesn’t budge. Worse yet, you’re burning up much more energy to achieve nothing. During my final two years of hard work in college, I perfected that frustrating formula.
But all that was about to change. The summer after graduation, I took my first coaching job. 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.
The eggbeaters churning busily were all in the slower lanes, struggling in the wake of people who seemed to glide almost casually up and down. Could I have actually looked like those ineffectual water choppers? No doubt. So I staked out my first mission as a coach: to save my swimmers from repeating my mistakes. Instead of simply driving them to work as hard as possible, I would try to figure out what allowed my best swimmers to make it look so easy, then teach it to everyone else.
I operated on that instinct for the next twelve years, and it worked. Then, in 1984, we began to find out why. In a study conducted at the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials, Bill Boomer and some sports science colleagues from the University of Rochester filmed every length swum by every swimmer in twenty-six men’s and women’s events over six days, a total of more than seven hundred demonstrations by some of the world’s best of how to swim as fast as a human can.
Over and over, what they found was that 80 percent of the time, the fastest swimmers took the fewest strokes. And it was no fluke. Four years later, a similar study by Penn State researchers at the 1988 Olympics produced the same result. The swiftest swimmers were always the most efficient.
So how could anyone learn to swim better and faster? We now had the answer: Work longer, not faster, strokes. In my own practices today, three decades removed from the disappointments of my college days, that’s why I care less about how many yards I total than about how many yards I travel on each stroke. And that’s why I never judge myself just by the pace clock when I’m trying to swim faster. Instead, I also measure how many additional strokes I need to gain that speed. In other words, what’s it costing me?
So goal one for anyone who wants to swim better and faster is a longer stroke. This can happen in two ways: (1) more push—using your hands and feet to thrust your body farther through the water by making each stroke as powerful as possible; and (2) less drag—shaping your body so it’s more friction-free, allowing it to travel farther with the power each of your strokes is already producing.
Of course, in the water your instincts “know” just what to do. Pull harder, kick harder, spin your arms faster. All wrong, of course. That’s how I squandered four years of college swimming. Too bad I didn’t know then what twenty-five years of coaching has taught me about how the world’s best swimmers actually produce their speed. Most of it comes from how well they shape and position their bodies to eliminate drag and become more “slippery”—relatively little from how they use their hands and arms to push the water around.
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 100-ton blue whale, cruising at 20 mph, should require some 448 horsepower, according to the calculations of Georgia Tech physics professor Vincent Mallette, but in fact gets by with fewer than 70. A dolphin also uses only about one eighth 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 eight times as much power output. To swim but 10 percent faster requires a 33 percent increase in power. In the water, drag is everything. Active streamlining— avoiding water’s drag—is the marine mammal’s secret. And that, by shaping and positioning the body sleekly, rather than trying to pull powerfully, is the easiest way for humans to become more fishlike. In fact, kinesiologists estimate at least 70 percent of your swimming performance is determined by how well you streamline your body and only 30 percent by how fit or powerful you are.
So now we can begin to make that swimming-speed formula, V = SL × SR, work for us instead of against us. First, you have to learn how to position your body so it moves as far as it possibly can with each stroke (SL); then you have to get fit enough to take those strokes at a higher rate (SR). But not too high.
Virtually every swimmer I see already has all the SR they’ll ever need; it’s the SL they’re lacking. They always make their most dramatic improvements when they give up a bit of their SR in order to gain a lot of SL. So I always counsel swimmers to work on their SL first. Besides, energy consumption increases as a cube of muscle movement speed, so stroking twice as fast burns eight times as much energy. Not a great return on your investment.
I spent four years of college swimming trying to maximize SR and ignoring SL. No wonder I hit a speed ceiling. SL goes up when you use your brain. SR can only improve when you work on brawn, so its improvements are short-term and certainly can’t go on forever. If you not only want to swim well but expect to do it for a lifetime, just look at the balance sheet. Then tell me which part of the swimming-speed equation you’d rather work on:
- SL is skill-oriented. You get better by improving your body’s position or profile.
- SR is training-oriented. You have to work hard to build up your muscles and energy systems to make those limbs move fast.
- SL improvements depend on brain-power. You use your knowledge, body awareness, and concentration to maintain sleek, efficient positions in the water. That’s nervous system—instead of aerobic system—training. The energy cost is minimal.
- SR improvements depend on working your heart and lungs harder— much harder.
- SL can be improved at any age. There’s no such thing as “too old,” because it’s skill-oriented, and our ability to learn or improve SL remains acute far into our seventies, allowing smart swimmers to gain speed well into middle age and beyond.
- SR is age-limited. Eventually, your muscles just won’t move any faster. The fuel for a high SR is provided by your aerobic capacity—the total amount of oxygen your muscles can burn to produce energy—which usually peaks at about age forty. That means your ability to increase your SR peaks too.
- SL improvements are permanent. Skills, once learned, become permanently imprinted in our “muscle memory.” Invest time and effort in improving your SL and you won’t lose it when you take a break from training.
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SR improvements are temporary. They demand fitness and fitness is transient, as anyone who’s had to quit working out for a couple of weeks can tell you. Stay away just a little too long and you’re right back where you started, forced to do the work all over again to rebuild that capacity.
The best—and smartest—of the world’s elite swimmers try to eke out further speed increases with the least effort by splitting the difference. If your stroke gets longer but the rate stays the same, you will swim faster. If your stroke rate goes up and you manage to keep the length the same, you will also swim faster. But if you increase both by just a little bit, you will swim much faster. They establish SL first, then try to gradually increase SR, giving up the least possible SL in return. It’s a delicate trade-off and one that the most successful swimmers practice unrelentingly.
Let’s go back to that little speed statistic I mentioned earlier, the one about 70 percent of your ability to improve your stroke length coming from eliminating more of the water’s drag on your body. It’s not only true, it’s the key to how great swimmers make their remarkable speeds look so graceful and effortless. That’s no illusion. Relatively speaking, they are effortless. And learning to glide as far as possible after each stroke is the single most powerful skill they know. So we clearly want to devote the majority of our time and effort to becoming better “eliminators” when we swim.
It’s a two-part strategy. First, play the game below the average speed line on your velocity curve (see illustration). Though you probably don’t realize it, your body doesn’t move at a constant swimming speed. During every stroke cycle, you accelerate and decelerate like a driver gently pressing and releasing the gas pedal. As you begin your stroke, the position of your arm and shoulder offers little leverage or power. Pull farther under your body toward your hips, and your arm moves into a much more effective position, one where the powerful torso muscles begin to help out. Up goes your speed. Then, as you finish the stroke and slice your hand out of the water, you begin to lose speed again. And you’ll continue losing it until your other hand starts the next cycle.
Most people strain to swim faster by pulling or kicking harder or turning their arms over faster. They’re trying to push the top of that speed curve a little higher before it slopes back down on the other side. Very wasteful. But if they worked on another part of the curve instead, they’d get where they’re going faster and with much less exertion.
True swimming speed, of course, is not the top of the curve at all but the line that runs through the curve midway between the peaks and valleys—the average of your fastest and slowest progress during each stroke cycle. 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. Look at the illustration. Where is your body moving slowest, which is just where you can most easily add speed? Right. During the recovery. 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.
It’s welcome—and extremely unexpected—news to people who all their lives have been told that pulling and kicking harder and faster is the way to gain swimming speed. When I spring this fact on swimmers at my Total Immersion adult swim camps, they realize that what we’ll be learning there, just as we’ll learn in this book, is an assault on the conventional wisdom of swimming. It does nothing less than turn upside down and inside out the common understanding of what good swimming is all about. Great swimmers move so fast and take so few strokes not simply because they stroke powerfully but because their bodies keep slicing forward—quickly—for a long time after each one.
And it’s an ability all of you can improve, whether you’re headed for the Olympics or just for the Y. You may have a perfectly fine stroke and still take too many, because your body lurches too abruptly to a halt after each one. You have no choice but to keep those arms turning over because you don’t conserve the momentum you do create.
You need to learn a few tricks that will make you more slippery. They come naturally to fish, but the rest of us can pick them up too, once we know what they are. By the end of the next chapter, you will.
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