Resistance—it’s just what you want in the weight room, but it gets in your way in other sports. If you’ve ever struggled to bicycle straight into a 30-mph headwind, you know why tapered helmets, Aerobars, even aerodynamic water bottles, were invented: to make you as compact and slippery as possible. The less surface area the air has to push on, the easier you move.
And in swimming you move through a medium that’s 1,000 times denser than air! So while the need to become as streamlined as possible in swimming may be less evident because of the slower speeds you attain, it’s actually more important. All efficient swimmers—which means nearly all the fast ones—seem to have a more instinctive sense of how to keep their bodies in the best position for slipping easily through the water, gliding as far as possible with the least possible effort.
I talked with Rick Sharp, Ph.D., the director of the International Center for Aquatic Research in Colorado Springs. He told me that his lab’s research had turned up a surprising result, one that proved eye-opening to even some of the world’s top swimming researchers. “We’ve discovered that the fastest swimmers generally produce less propulsive force than sub-elite swimmers,” Sharp explained. “Obviously they’re capable of producing more propulsive force, but they don’t need it to go fast.” In other words, they’re faster not because of how powerfully they stroke but because of how slippery they make their bodies. For these elite swimmers, learning how to achieve this level of efficiency was a trial-and-error process, but the “secrets” of how anyone can do it have been around for …well, forever.
That surprises a lot of people who tell me they’ve finally come to one of my workshops because “I need to learn the new techniques. I started swimming back in the fifties and the strokes have all changed since then.” So it comes as a nice surprise when I tell them that good swimming form is not like hemline lengths or tie widths—subject to today’s fashion and tomorrow’s obsolescence every time a new “discovery” comes along. There are principles of efficient swimming that can’t go out of fashion because they’re based on the permanent laws of physics, on how your body will always interact with the water.
What probably seems new to some people is that, remarkably, these principles have never really been explicitly taught until now, even though they were discovered long ago by naval architects who had to find ways to design the fastest and most easily driven ships of all time. These nautical scientists did all the work. Today, all we have to do is get into the pool and use what they found out, which, when applied to human rather than naval vessels, comes down to three cardinal rules for going faster:
1. Balance your body in the water.
2. Make your body longer.
3. Swim on your side.
They sound like contortions. But they work like a charm.
Better Balance: The Biggest Energy Saver of All
Whenever a swimmer comes to me complaining that she needs to develop a stronger kick, I recall what I learned my first day on in-line skates not long ago. Like thousands of other people, I took up “blading” because it looked like a really fun way to get an outdoor aerobic workout. It turned out to be no fun at all, at least not the first time.
After maybe fifteen minutes, I had to turn around and struggle home, confused. A dull ache in my lower back was bothering me so much I had to quit. That’s odd, I thought. My legs are doing all the work.
I resolved to keep plugging away at this “tough” new workout, adding more distance to each session until I’d whipped those flabby back muscles—Rollerblading muscles, I presumed—into shape. But the next time I laced on my skates, I found out it wasn’t weak muscles but poor form that caused my fatigue. Some skaters, I noticed, flowed along like syrup, their speed seeming to come from effortlessly swaying side to side. Others lurched along with choppy, labored thrusts. From a distance, I suddenly realized the difference was not back or leg muscle strength but weight shift. The good ones knew just when and how to transfer their weight from one foot to the other.
A smooth skater would lean all his weight on the left skate and then, at just the right moment, shift it all over to the right. Like all other lurching skaters, I hadn’t caught on to this technique. My two-hundred-pound bulk would teeter out way too far beyond my center of gravity, and those weary back muscles would have to snatch me back before I fell. Eventually, of course, they would have grown strong enough for the job, but by then I’d merely have turned into a strong, bad skater instead of simply a bad one. Smarter to learn balance.
Many frustrated swimmers make the same mistake. They know their hips and legs are dragging along far below the surface, and if they’re lucky they also understand it’s not only the most common stroke flaw but the most serious as well: It saps their energy faster than anything else can. So they grab a kickboard and grimly start churning out the endless laps they hope will strengthen their “problem” legs.
Only their legs aren’t the problem.
That’s because a poor kick isn’t what’s keeping them from swimming better. It’s poor balance, just as I found that day on my blades. But in the pool it can be corrected practically on the spot. And when it is, these swimmers happily discover that a “weak kick” is no longer a problem. In fact, properly balanced, they hardly have to kick at all!
But proper balance in the water is not a gift of nature. It’s something we earn through practice. The human body, you see, simply wasn’t designed to float efficiently in the water. Evolutionarily speaking, we’re put together to function well on land, where our long legs and low center of gravity are perfect for stability and mobility. Above the waist, we’re mostly volume; the lungs, after all, are just big bellows. That means 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. And it’s the surest path to a poor triathlon, by the way, where the last thing you want coming out of the water— facing a bike ride and a run after that—is pooped leg muscles.
What you really need is a better way of getting those hips up where they belong.
And there is one. I call it “pressing your buoy.” Here’s how it works.
What happens if you push a beach ball into the water? Right. The water pushes it right back out. You have one place on your body that’s buoyant like that—the space between your armpits. Call it your buoy.
Press your buoy into the water and the water will press back. But keep pressure on that buoy and you force the water to push your hips up instead. Just what you want. Simply letting water pressure ease them to the surface takes far less energy than trying to prop them up by churning away with your legs.
And you can help yourself by using the weight of your head like a counterweight. Remember, your body in water is like an unbalanced seesaw, its fulcrum somewhere between your waist and your breast-bone. The longer, heavier end wants to sink. But use the weight at the opposite end and it levels off nicely. You do that by acting as though a steel rod ran from your waist through the top of your head. Keep that “connection” intact and you help your hips pop to the surface. Break the connection—lifting your head to breathe instead of turning it with your body roll, for example—and gravity will drag your hips and legs right back down again.
Later on, in chapter 8, you’re going to learn the simple pressing-your-buoy drill that makes all this automatic. You’ll also start “swimming downhill,” leaning on your chest as you go. With just a little practice, you’ll discover that by pressing your buoy as you swim, you can make the water support more of your lower body’s weight. Your suddenly lighter hips and legs will be effortlessly skimming the surface just where they belong. You’ll actually feel as if you’re swimming downhill.
The illustration below illustrates the difference between what your body looks like when it sinks unevenly, hips and legs dragging, and what happens when you balance evenly by pressing your buoy.
I don’t promise it will come easily for everyone. The less buoyant among us (usually those uncommonly lean triathletes and runners) find it a little tougher to get their hips all the way up. If you’re among them, don’t worry if your body rests an inch or two below the surface. You are not trying to float like a cork. You are trying to get your upper and lower body lined up nearly horizontal to the surface, with your hips and legs as close to it as possible. Do that and you’ll cut drag enormously. Reduce drag and watch what happens to your speed.
The most prominent benefit most swimmers will feel from learning balance isn’t necessarily a stunning increase in speed. They’ll be more likely to just feel more relaxed in the water. Once they realize that pressing the buoy causes the water to support more of their body weight, swimming becomes much less laborious. And a relaxed swimmer can do surprising things. One of my students, fifty-two-year-old Don Walsh from New Jersey, became so adept at swimming relaxed that after completing the Swim Around Manhattan in nine hours, he related, “I felt good the whole way and was never tired during the entire swim.”
Longer Boats Are Faster. Longer Bodies Are Too.
When I was still pretty green at the coaching business, I was lucky enough to have two very gifted swimmers on my team and smart enough to realize I could learn more from them than they could from me. The first thing I noticed was that no matter how fast they swam, they made it look relatively effortless. That didn’t come as such a surprise—I’d observed this in accomplished swimmers before— but why did they also somehow look taller in the water than everyone else?
The best swimmers, I’ve noticed over the years, always do. And it has little to do with their actual height. A skilled swimmer who is only 5'10" looks taller in the water than an unpolished swimmer who is 6'2", and it’s no illusion. Better swimmers do “swim taller”—something anyone can learn—and because they do, they go faster. It’s one of the fundamental principles naval architects have been using for over a century to design fast ships.
In the 1830s, a fever broke out among clipper ship owners to shatter the record for the fastest ocean crossings. The boats had only sails for power and couldn’t simply install bigger engines, so more speed had to come from better hull design. W. Froude, a naval architect in England, tested various vessel shapes in a tank to learn which would produce the fastest design. His key discovery was that, all other things being equal, a vessel’s drag decreases as its length at the waterline increases. Translation: Longer boats go faster—and easier. To this day, his calculations, known as Froude numbers, are used to predict the potential speed of various vessel designs.
What applies to clipper ships applies to you. In the vernacular of naval architecture, your body—along with racing yachts, rowing shells, or canoes—is a “surface-penetrating moving body” subject to many of the same laws. If a longer vessel can go faster, a taller swimmer can too. And taller swimmers do. In the 100-meter freestyle, swimming’s premier sprint event, the fastest men in the world average about 6'6".
There are ways you can swim tall too, regardless of your height. And they are important to learn because they put mathematics powerfully in your favor. Take a hypothetical six-footer who swims the mile in 25 minutes. Feed him some growth hormone so he sprouts up to nine feet. He doesn’t train any longer or harder, he doesn’t get any stronger or fitter, he doesn’t change his stroke in any way. He just gets taller. But his improved Froude number predicts that he can probably do the mile in 18 minutes!
Fine. But what if you’re “only” 6'0" and at thirty-something quite likely to stay there? Well, as far as the water is concerned you can still grow, stretching your six feet to nearly nine feet from fingertips to toes by simply extending your arm overhead. And if you can stay in that extended—taller—position for more of each stroke cycle, you improve your own Froude number enough to go much faster on the same amount of energy.
Here’s a simple experiment to prove it. Under water, push off the pool wall as hard as you can with your arms at your sides (the six-foot position) and glide as far as possible until you surface. Then do it again with your arms straight and streamlined overhead (the nine-foot position). See how much farther you go?
That’s also the secret for swimming taller, what my mentor, Bill Boomer, calls front-quadrant swimming, or FQS. In the illustration below, consider the waterline as the x-axis and an imaginary vertical line through the shoulder as the y-axis. The two lines divide the swimming space into quadrants, the front quadrant being the one in front of the shoulder and under the water.
FQS swimming means always keeping one or the other of your hands in that front quadrant. (At the beginning of each stroke, of course, both hands are there.) It’s really just another way of saying “swimming tall,” of lengthening your body line and making you taller than you really are. Leave your right hand out in front while the left is stroking, then begin stroking the right just as the left returns to the front quadrant, and so on. One hand doesn’t start until the other one’s nearly back. Leaving each in place just a split second extra can make a big difference in your Froude number.
Common sense? Well, actually not so common. Why else would almost all the swimmers in my weekend workshops show up the first day as rear-quadrant swimmers? Why else would I have worked so hard when I was in college at being a rear-quadrant swimmer? Because it’s easy to fall into the trap: “I move my body by pulling my hands back, right? To get it going faster, then, I just move my hands back faster, right? Gliding along with hands stretched in front? All that will do is slow me down!”
So my college swim strategy was like a bathtub windup toy: Dig in and pull back as soon as my hands touched the water. Unfortunately, it guaranteed that I would spend precious little time with either hand out in front of my head. I swam short, and it showed. I took 24 to 25 strokes per length, compared to the 14 or 15 I now use in my early fifties. Stroking fast was making it harder to swim fast.
Some people, as I was, are rear-quadrant swimmers by intent. But others can’t help it—as soon as their hands enter the front quadrant, they’re driven down and back. Their arms are “heavy” because of the weight they’re supporting, weight that would be distributed elsewhere if their balance were better. Face it: You just can’t be an FQS swimmer unless you’re also a well-balanced swimmer. But whether or not your rear-quadrant tendencies are intentional, FQS is something no one does naturally. You have to know it matters, then consciously work on making it a habit, confident that you’re taking another important step to becoming a faster and more efficient swimmer.
Done right, FQS is nothing less than a revolutionary way of thinking about what your hands do for you when you swim. Suddenly, you understand they contribute far more to your speed when used as body line extenders than when used to push water back. Once you’ve discovered that, you can use them more effectively to make you taller in a couple of ways.
First, use your hand to lengthen your body line before using it to stroke. This should be a true reaching action, like stretching up to a high shelf for something just out of your grasp. It should be as easy as extending your hand all the way forward first—not down—when it goes into the water. But for some people, it’s not that easy. As soon as their hand hits the water, years of bad habits take hold and the arm automatically heads right for the bottom. It does, that is, until I ask them to pretend they’re reaching for the wall as they would on the last stroke of each lap. As far as the muscles are concerned, that’s different—now the arm goes out nice and straight and long. And the body glides along more easily behind.
Don’t rush the process. Leave your hand extended before starting to pull back. Don’t be in a hurry to start stroking. Chant silently, if it helps: “Enter, e-x-t-e-n-d, pause, and pull.” Just let your hand keep gliding forward out there, reaching as long as possible before you begin stroking.
Second, make your arms better body line extenders by taking aload off them—literally—so they feel weightless. If you’re pressing your buoy as I told you to, and if you’re keeping your head’s weight supported by the water and in line with your torso, you’re already there. But if you are there, you’re in the happy minority of the already balanced. If not, you’ll want to work on a weightless arm using the specific drills in chapter 8, before trying to actually swim with one.
When you do, you’ll find that the weight of those heavy arms and hands usually comes from one of two places:
1. You haven’t put all your weight on your buoy, so some of it has gone back to your hips and legs, and they’re sinking. To compensate, you’re driving your hand and arm quickly down and out of the front quadrant. You’re becoming shorter.
2. You’re lifting your head—even the littlest bit—as you breathe. That shifts more weight to your hand, which has to support it. Down it goes too fast, over and over again, every time you breathe.
I promise it will take you a fraction of the time to learn that it took me. Swimming is not only my livelihood but my love, and I’ve been working on my stroke efficiency for years. But I was looking for speed in all the wrong places, minutely examining every movement of the hand through every centimeter of the stroke, and feeling lucky to shave maybe one stroke from my average every two years. Then I hit on the weightless arm and lopped off two strokes in just a matter of weeks. Then another after that. Believe me, when a professional coach’s count per 25 yards tumbles from 16 to 13 strokes after almost thirty years of trying, he practically wants to tattoo instructions for the technique onto anyone who’ll stand still. I’m that convinced.
So is coach Jacki Hirsty. Hirsty, a Masters swimming world record holder in the women’s 35 to 39 age group, had been coaching with me on and off for five years. But it wasn’t until we taught a Total Immersion workshop together in Boston that she heard about the weightless arm, a technique I’d finally polished up enough to share with students. The day after the workshop she tried it herself. She cruised through a set of 400-yard repeats faster than she had in several years, and on top of that her stroke count was actually lower.
Don’t Swim Flat; Swim on Your Side
There’s still another lesson swimmers can learn from boat designers: how to make their bodies fly like racing yachts instead of plowing along like scows. What are the fastest sailboats you can think of? Maybe the America’s Cup contenders? With only the wind for power, they go like, well … like the wind. What’s the slowest powered boat you can think of? It has to be the cargo barge. Load it up with as much horsepower as you want and it will still crawl. Well, we all have the choice of swimming like barges or America’s Cup yachts.
One of the most enduring myths about our sport is that the correct position for swimming freestyle is lying on your stomach, turning your head to the side when you need a breath. Red Cross–trained instructors have taught millions to swim that way. And the few the Red Cross missed automatically swim that way too, because they just feel more comfortable and secure flat on their stomachs.
But it’s wrong. You don’t swim freestyle on your stomach if you want to be any good (and by the way, you don’t swim backstroke on your back either). The fastest, most efficient swimmers in the world cut the water on their sides, rolling from one side to the other with each stroke and staying on each side for as much of each stroke cycle as they can. The advantage is simple to understand: You slip through the water more easily that way than on your stomach.
Let’s go back to naval jargon for a moment. You’ll recall that your body—along with yachts and barges—is a surface-penetrating moving body, and that all of those are subject to the same physical laws because they all slice the surface as they go. (Submarines, torpedoes, and fish— as well as butterfly and breaststroke swimmers—hang out below the surface and are subject to slightly different hydrodynamics.) One of those laws is that drag or resistance goes up by the square of the distance the water travels to get out of your way. Twice as far equals four times as hard. So would you rather swim like a barge, pushing water in front of you, or like a yacht with the fluid slipping easily around you? Dumb question.
And you’ve actually understood this principle since you were a little kid, holding your arm out the window of the car. When you held it straight up, palm flat against the airflow like the traffic policeman’s stop signal, the wind pushed it hard. Then, you bent your elbow so the palm faced down, fingertips pointing forward. Wow. Hardly any pressure.
Same thing applies to your (surface-penetrating) body in water. As you swim, water goes mostly around you to get out of the way. Very little slips underneath. On your stomach, you’re like a barge with its “broad shoulders” forcing the water to move so far that it’s constantly pushing along a huge volume of water in front. Yachts, on the other hand, even if they’re broad in the beam, are knifelike up front, so it’s easy for the water to go around, as shown in the illustration below. When you swim like a yacht, cutting water on your side, drag may be half as much as when you swim like a barge.
I know. You can’t stay on your side forever. But you can roll from one side to the other as you stroke. The most efficient way to swim freestyle is to roll rhythmically until your shoulders and hips are a bit less than perpendicular to the water and to try to spend just a bit more time on your side in each stroke cycle.
Rolling also helps make your body a little longer. Prove it to yourself this way: Stand facing the wall closely, one arm straight overhead, palm flat against the surface. Leave your hand where it is, and turn your body to the side, then back again several times. Notice how your hand slides up as you turn, and down as you turn back, making you “taller” each time you turn sideways and “shorter” as you turn back to face the wall? Same thing when you roll to your side: You swim taller.
Given all these advantages, you obviously want to roll on every stroke, ending up as close to a side-lying position as possible at the end of each one. The smartest thing you can do then is stay right where you are—on your side—as you return your arm to where it will reenter the water. As a consequence, you glide in the fast-moving side-lying position the whole time you’re not stroking. And you glide farther and faster because you’re not pushing all that water in front of you.
Done this way, freestyle becomes graceful, powerful, a feat of intelligent body engineering instead of a tiring exercise in plowing through the water. It becomes a series of long glides linked by quick rolls as you stroke and change sides. Each time, your body has a working side—the one you’re pulling with—and a sliding side—the one that’s making your body longer so the pull delivers all the speed and distance it can. The longer you stay on your side in each stroke cycle, the farther and faster your body will travel. Swimming also becomes much more restful and a lot less work. It even looks easier.
And that may drive some people crazy. While traveling to one of my workshops not long ago I was a guest at a Masters group’s workout. After a single set, one of the swimmers in my lane came over to me and, with just a bit of an edge in his voice, said, “I can’t figure out how you’re keeping up with us. You don’t look like you’re doing anything.” Well, compared to everyone else, I wasn’t. They were churning their arms steadily, splashing mightily, and “getting the work done.” I was like a sailboat, quietly gliding and resting on my side between strokes— and staying right up with them. Without roll and glide, they had no choice but nonstop arm turnover if they didn’t want to stop dead in the water between strokes. Of course, my swimming didn’t look like a lot of work. Compared to theirs, it wasn’t. It may even have looked like cheating.
So why doesn’t everyone swim this way? Are they gluttons for punishment? No. But even if most swim instructors didn’t actually discourage people from something as valuable as rolling—which they do— you’d still see more “flat” swimming than anything else because that’s how we feel more comfortable. Rolling to the side makes us feel unsteady, tippy, out of control. So we barely tip to one side or the other, and we certainly don’t stay there a nanosecond longer than we have to. Facedown just seems right.
It’s that old bogeyman, bad balance, and if learning to do it flat on your stomach took some practice, wait until you have to balance on your side. It’s not natural, it’s not instinctive, and it’s difficult to learn without concentrated, conscious effort. But until you have it, you’re going to avoid rolling and you’ll settle for being a barge. And you don’t have to settle, not when the skill drills in chapter 8 give you a step-by-step approach to ultimately feeling as slick as a racing yacht.
When I first said that streamlining your body probably accounts for about 70 percent of your potential swimming improvement, I expected those raised eyebrows. I always get them in my swim clinics too— until we jump into the pool and start shedding resistance-causing bad habits left and right. “I’ve never seen the bottom slide by so fast,” some one will say, or someone else will report that they’ve just cut six strokes from their normal count for 25 yards. The drills we use are the same ones you’ll find in chapter 8. Your results should be just as exciting.
But even I have to admit one thing: You can’t glide if something didn’t push you along in the first place. That’s called propulsion, and just because I think it’s overrated doesn’t mean it can’t be dramatically improved. First, though, you must forget the idea you probably have of needing powerful shoulders to drag the rest of your body down the pool. Then I’ll tell you what really does the job, and how you can make it happen more powerfully.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий