Chapter 4 Tuning the Engine: Finding—and Using—Your Swimming Power

“If your body were a motorboat, your engine would be in your hips. Your hands are actually nothing more than the tips of the propeller blades.”

I learned that from my mentor Bill Boomer, and at first it sounded backward to me too. After all, I’d directed countless swimmers to spend hours in the weight room building powerful arms and shoulders. And now a coaching maverick was trying to tell me I’d had it all wrong? That they’re not what moved me through the water in the first place? That I’d essentially been misleading my swimmers?

Well, yes, that’s almost exactly what he was saying. When I paused to think about it, I realized that what he was saying made perfect sense even though, at the time, virtually no one else saw it that way. “Swimming is the rhythmic application of power” was another Boomer aphorism, an innocent but actually quite seditious statement, since it meant that rhythm (which swimmers seldom worked on), not power (which they worked on all the time), is what’s actually at the heart of creating propulsion in brilliant swimming. Good body rhythms give you the power that the arms and shoulders simply deliver. And rhythm movements must originate in the body’s center or core, not at the extremities (the arms and legs)—just the opposite of how swimmers have always tried to do it.

Boomer had seen to the heart of swimming propulsion, understanding the underlying physics of swimming while the rest of us were still just slapping the water. Propulsion—how we produce the force that actually moves us through the water—did not work the way we all thought it worked, Boomer told us. But few were open-minded enough to listen at the time.

You may be wondering, freshly convinced from the previous chapter on streamlining, whether your shape and balance might be all that really matters. But stop and think: Even though 70 percent of your potential speed improvements will indeed come from learning to slip through the water more easily using the techniques in chapter 3, that still leaves another 30 percent you can tap. And that 30 percent comes from learning a more economical and effective style of creating propulsion.

It’s the second half of what I call the eliminate/create process: First eliminate drag, then create more power. That’s exactly how you should work on it too. Start by understanding what it feels like to be in harmonious balance in the water, then shape your body so it evades frontal water pressure well, then learn to apply rhythmically powerful movement. We’re now about to start installing the engine on your seaworthy vessel.

Not only does this put first things first, it saves the easier work for last. For while reducing drag is certainly not complicated, improving propulsion is simpler yet. If you’ve ever despaired of mastering all the seeming rocket science of “S-strokes,” hand shape, and pitch or vortex patterns recounted in other swim books, we’re about to make it much simpler and more lucid.

Better yet, the whole propulsion process follows from the techniques you’ve already learned to reduce drag. You’re still swimming “inside out,” first generating power by rolling your body from side to side and only then using your hands to deliver that power to the water. Once you master “eliminating,” you’re already doing most of what you need to do for “creating.” So it’s not a new course, just the second semester of the one you’ve already grown familiar with.

Get Hip to Your Swimming Power

I’ll start off by telling you something that, at first glance, may make little sense: Your arms are not that important. Well, not the way you may think. Power in most sports—swimming included—originates much lower down in your body. In most cases, the arms are just the “delivery system.”

Picture the smooth arc of a Tiger Woods drive off the tee. Or the explosive serve of a Serena Williams. Or the powerful crack! as Barry Bonds drives yet another one out of the park. Then think of the power it takes to slam a ball over 300 yards, or blast one over the net at 130 mph, or send it arcing 450 feet or more into the stands. What arms, eh?

Well…no. Arm swing may be what is most visible to us, but it’s not what’s doing the work. Arm swing is actually the last—and least powerful—of a linked series of actions, each of which takes its momentum from the one before. As the pitcher releases the ball, the batter’s first action is to cock his arms and shoulders away from the ball (a so-called plyometric contraction like winding up a spring, storing energy that will later be released in the opposite direction). Then it all begins to unwind. He starts by stepping toward the pitcher as his hips take up the rotation and in turn power the torso around, which drives the shoulders toward the pitch. The shoulders pull the upper arms through, adding speed. The upper arms pull the forearms, and only after the forearms have gotten up to speed do the wrists snap, completing a crack-the-whip chain that finally drives the ball. Huge forces are generated by a combination of powerful muscles—mostly in the butt and torso—moving a maximum amount of mass with perfect timing.

So why do the same people who would go to their hips for their power if they were standing at home plate or on the tee think they ought to swim by spinning their arms like a windmill? A powerful stroke, like the one that results in a home run, should be driven by rhythmic rotation of the body starting, as does the batter’s, at the hips. Remember the last technique we covered in chapter 3, the drag-diminishing body roll? Well, the same roll that lets water slip around you also conveniently produces virtually all of your stroking power. Yes, it’s all in the hips, and you’ve already begun to direct them into purposeful rotation. When you do this, you’re using the body’s most powerful muscles, the gluteals (the butt muscles), to move your center of mass from side to side. And powerful muscles moving a large mass generate impressive force.

The arm and shoulder muscles don’t really amount to much by comparison, so why struggle to use them as your engine? You wouldn’t try to move your car with your windshield-wiper motor, would you? Those arm and shoulder muscles are, however, superb stabilizers, and the way to take advantage of that is to use them to hold on to the water.

If nothing else, muscles that hold on don’t get hurt like muscles that are trying to act like workhorses. Think of your arms and shoulders as the engine, and invariably you’ll push them too hard. The best you can hope for is wearing yourself out too soon, and you will. Your arms quickly lose their punch because they’re doing way too much, while the true workhorse muscles lower down are loafing along. Worse, you could be heading for an injury. 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, like a Mississippi River sternwheeler. 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.

Tap the power in your real power source, however, and watch what happens. Where did all this fitness, this feeling you could go on forever, this freedom from fatigue, suddenly come from? Even the previously exhausting little trick of trying to accelerate your hand during the second half of each stroke—something all swimmers have heard of and at least have to try—seems easy now.

How come? Because swimming with just your arms makes as much sense as trying to swing a bat with just your arms instead of winding up the rest of your body first and  then unleashing all that momentum. Do the latter and you’d be lucky to manage a feeble infield grounder. Home runs come from the hips. So do swim trophies. And the energy that powers the process in swimming comes from a simple trick of coordinating that whip-cracking energy chain as it unfolds. Let me explain.

A little formula from your high school physics class, F = M × A, probably went right out the window after your final exam. Well, it’s time to get it back. When you do, you’ll have a new source of swimming power that won’t cost you any energy.

“Force equals mass multiplied by acceleration” is what the equation tells us, and back then even those dozing in the back of the room knew that if either value on the right side of the equals sign went up, the resultant force would go up too. So in this case there are two ways to increase the force. One is by keeping mass the same and increasing 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, since energy expenditure balloons as a cube of any increase in muscle speed. To move your arms twice as fast takes eight (2³) times more work.

But what if you turn this around? What if your stroke power could somehow go way up and the effort stay pretty much the same? Couldn’t you swim much faster without getting tired? You could and you can. It’s done by increasing the M in the formula. Simply move more of your body mass all at once when you stroke. Your arms go at the same speed (perhaps you can even slow them a bit), but now your entire torso is powering them. Feel that new force. Make your hips the first part of the body to move in each stroke, and watch your power grow.

In other words, let your hips set your stroke rhythm, since they’re the core of the movement when you’re doing it right. Try to set it with your arms instead and they’ll quickly go off on their own, breaking the chain and essentially disconnecting themselves from their engine. If you were a car, your transmission would be gone. Lead with your hips instead, and your stroke will be both rhythmic and powerful. Your arms will be happy to follow.

They’re Not Hands Anymore: They’re Anchors

“Well and good,” I hear the mutters, “the hands aren’t important. They don’t pull us along through the water the way we’ve been taught since grade school. But they must do something. What?” Don’t worry. I’m not advocating hands-free swimming. But since they account for perhaps as little as 10 percent of your overall efficiency, I’ve left the hands for last. As I’ve said over and over, swimming isn’t complicated. Swimming instruction is complicated. And that’s partly because it’s usually delivered by the dumptruck load, all at once and with no priorities. Try to concentrate too early on what your hands are doing, for example, and you’ll divert concentration from the far more important body movements. Once your streamlining and balance and rhythmic power are well under way, however, you’re entitled to wonder how to best use those appendages out on the ends of your arms.

The best thing you can do is leave them there—not only on your arms but in the water. Several times earlier, I challenged the outmoded notion that you pull water back with your hands. You don’t. Now’s the time to reply to the obvious question: Then what do you do with them? And my answer is, make them stand still. Anchor your hands in the water, which is precisely what all great natural freestylers do.

Alexander Popov, since 1992 the world’s most dominant sprint freestyler, does even better than that. On every stroke, he takes his hand out ahead of where it entered. After he slices his hand in, he grabs and holds the water, using his “grip” to slide his body past his hand, almost as if he had grabbed a rung on a submerged ladder. Making the hand stand still in the water is one of the key “creating” skills of world-class swimmers, many of whom appear to be born with it. But it’s nothing the rest of us can’t learn.

I’m sure by now you’re not surprised to hear that this too starts with hip roll. But now things get more interesting. Power is power only when it has something to act against, and the hips couldn’t roll with nearly as much force if your hand didn’t first stabilize your upper body at the beginning of each rotation. So the combination of stretching your arm forward at the beginning of the stroke and leaving it there actually does more than “make your boat longer.” First, it keeps you from wasting energy in the puny stroke you’d be able to manage with only weak shoulder muscles to pull and no other power or leverage to speak of. Second, it lets you “load the spring,” storing up the energy that you’ll release in the stroke to come. Remember that batter cocking his arms and shoulders, coiling away from the pitcher before leading into his swing with a hip turn? The golfer’s and tennis player’s back-swing is the same kind of energy bank, storing muscle tension in the torso that will later be released in the swing, like pulling a bowstring taut before shooting the arrow.

Same thing in your stroke. Your hand enters the water and reaches forward just beneath the surface—and I mean reaches, like stretching for something barely beyond your fingertips on a high shelf. Next, with your hand as far out as it can possibly go and your body rolling onto its side, your arm anchors itself into position. Now, with the torso moving and the arm fixed, your upper body becomes increasingly taut, just like the golfer’s backswing. And just like the golfer, you’re storing up that energy for the action to come—the drive off the tee, the roll of the hips.

Alexander Popov knows just what it feels like. And if you’ll walk over to the wall for a minute, you can too. Face the wall and reach up with, say, your right hand, sliding it as far up as you can. Now rotate and lift your elbow slightly off the surface. You’ll feel a stretch in the muscles surrounding your armpit. Turn your left hip and shoulder about 45 degrees away from the wall and you’ll feel tension building in the powerful latissimus muscle (in your back, below the armpit)—not on the weak shoulder muscles. That’s Popov beginning his stroke.

And that’s why you grab the water and hold on, just as you resisted the air on your hand out the car window. With practice, you can keep that sense of pressure constant and steady throughout the whole pull.

So there you have it. Jerk your hand back immediately after plunging it in and you’ve started an exercise in futility as it slips water from one end of the stroke to the other. Bald tires on an icy road. Instead, slip your hand in, anchor it to get ready for the pull, and keep your grip as you move your arm down and back using robust body-roll muscles, not weak shoulder muscles. Welcome to the world of studded snow tires, a V-8, and four-wheel drive to boot.

But still, watch your traction. Tune in to how fast your hands are moving as they pull. Compare the speed of your hands pulling back with the speed of your body moving forward. If they’re going faster, you’re slipping, not gripping. Your hands should never move faster than your body. Keep practicing until they don’t.

One final heresy. Your hand gets from here to there just fine by following a straight line. So if any of the white-coated swimming theoreticians come after you with their clipboards and pointers, sputtering about “S-strokes” and “insweeps” and “outsweeps” and “pitches,” tell them you don’t sweep and you’re not a pitcher. Tell them you simply pull your hand in a straight line back under your body (right down the center of the body, of course) and through the hips. If it was good enough for Johnny Weissmuller, it’s good enough for the rest of us. Don’t even bother about slicing your hand back outside the hips as you finish. Just press straight through. If your hips are moving as they’re supposed to, they’ll just roll to the side, conveniently out of the way.

But remember: first a sleek boat, then a powerful engine, and only after that a good propeller. Don’t spend more than 10 percent or so of your available training time fussing with perfect use of the hands. They’re a footnote at the end of the line, and you want to start at the beginning where the most important action is. And conveniently, that’s how the drills are organized for you. First things first.

So let’s have a look.