By now, it’s probably clear that if you expected this book to give you one “workout of champions” after another, you’ve come to the wrong place. In fact, as a professional swim coach, I can tell you this: If there’s one thing practically guaranteed to break down your form and bring improvement to a halt, it’s a workout.
Think about it. Workouts, by conventional definition, mean working harder or longer to train your heart and lungs and muscles to ignore exhaustion. That means more laps, or harder laps, or both—fatigue by design. The point of these conventional workouts is to do all you can to tire yourself out; then, when you’ve succeeded in making yourself tired, all those crucial refinements you’ve been working on so consciously to balance, streamline, and lengthen yourself go right back out the window. The moment your concentration wavers or your resolve weakens even a little bit, you’re back to just churning along.
When it comes to your swimming, you can change a poor stroke only by refusing to swim that way even once more. Not one stroke. Ever again. But the change doesn’t come naturally. So even though the Total Immersion program doesn’t throw workouts at you, you can be sure there’s still plenty of work to do. That’s because, as we’ve already said, the techniques you’ll need to make a dramatic difference in your swimming—dynamic balance, front-quadrant swimming, swimming on your side—are things you just don’t do naturally or instinctively. You have to make a conscious decision to swim that way, and even when you have, they’ll still be foreign sensations, alien commands traveling along your nervous system, movements that feel funny at first. Your challenge is to change that, to make them second nature. This means that if you want to go beyond just understanding how to swim with maximum efficiency, if you want to make it the way you swim all the time, an absolute habit, you have to practice specific stroke modifications. And practice, and practice. Think of it as a new kind of training, training that targets the nervous system instead of the aerobic system.
Don’t worry. This isn’t a thinly disguised “consolation prize” alternative for people without the youth or the power or the genetics or the hour-upon-hour of time to do “real” workouts. It is, in fact, the way the true champions who understand their sport train themselves. And Alexander Popov, the fastest swimmer in the world today, has used extraordinary efficiency to continue winning world championships for an unheard-of eleven years, as he won two world titles in 2003.
For nearly five years, from 1988 to 1992, the American swimmer Matt Biondi had a hammerlock on that title. He deserved it. Biondi swam more efficiently than any of his rivals and was undefeated in his specialty events. During the 1992 Olympics, with Biondi having already announced it would be his last meet, Popov seemed the heir apparent. For several years his coach had videotaped and studied Biondi, using the champion’s stroke—the world’s most efficient—as a model for his rising star. Coach and swimmer worked tirelessly to master Biondi-like movements.
The showdown came in Barcelona, in the final of the 50-meter free. That event is the ultimate efficiency laboratory, the purest sprint event of them all—one length, no turns, over in maybe 20 seconds. Popov and Biondi stood on the blocks in adjacent lanes in the middle of the eight-man final heat, the gun went off, and the field streaked down the pool. Popov touched first in 21.8 seconds, Biondi right behind at 22.0 seconds. A new Olympic champion had been crowned. But what most amazed analysts was that Popov had not only beaten Biondi by a comfortable margin, he had beaten him thoroughly at Biondi’s longest suit—stroke efficiency. Popov had taken 34 strokes, Biondi 37. The time gap may have been just 1 percent, but the three-stroke difference, an efficiency gap of nearly 10 percent between the world’s two best sprinters, was nearly inconceivable.
It was just the beginning of a new efficiency standard. In the years since, Popov has continued to dominate the sprint events, raising the bar again and again for efficiency and speed. No swimmer on the horizon threatens his stranglehold on the sprint because Popov can swim at startling speeds with much less effort. While everyone else is working furiously, the supremely efficient Popov just seems to be gliding majestically along.
The lesson this champion can teach the rest of us is that it might not have happened at all. Had he simply swum as others did, obsessed with moving briskly up and down the pool for several hours a day— working out—he would have developed less efficient stroke habits and turned into just another swimmer in the pack—albeit a very good pack. Instead he was trained to practice precise technique so it became utter habit. On race day, as his oxygen debt mounts, heart rate soars, and muscles throb, along with his opponents’; everyone else’s form breaks down—if only a little bit; his doesn’t, and even that modest edge is enough to win every time. His sterling performances are proof of the victory of practice over training, of having a nervous system that’s at least as well trained as your aerobic system—working smart rather than working out.
Learning Versus Training: How We Build a Skill
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 them best—in small pieces. As far as your body is concerned, the job of pumping up an arm muscle is altogether different from teaching that arm muscle to move in an efficient swimming stroke. Skills involve feelings, habits, movements that feel awkward at first and must be made to feel natural. So learning a skill is best organized into a step-by-step process that breaks the big job down into bite-size parts, then recombines them so gradually that each step is easy to master. 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 to 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.
However, just doing the same thing over and over won’t make you an expert at anything either—including the freestyle swim stroke. We’ve all heard of the hapless gentleman wandering aimlessly down New York City’s 57th Street carrying a violin case, finally stopping a passerby to ask, “Excuse me, but how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
The sardonic reply: “Practice! Practice! Practice!”
Snappy but only half true. Suppose he did practice, but without hearing. What if he just scraped his bow over the strings each day no matter what squawks came out, happy that he was getting his arm muscles in shape so he could spend even more time scraping out ugly sounds the next day?
Ridiculous? Don’t answer until you’re absolutely sure that’s not how you—and probably most of the people you know—have been practicing your own swimming for years. Musicians dedicate 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. Practice, we must come to understand, merely makes permanent whatever you happen to be practicing. Good or bad.
If you’re like most swimmers, making deposits in your aerobic bank account is your main concern. And of course you know that you do that by keeping your heart working in the aerobic range, usually for an hour or so. In essence, a swim workout creates extra heartbeats. If your aerobic training range is 120 beats per minute and your walking-around heart rate is 80, an hourlong workout will create 2,400 extra heartbeats. A perfectly good return on your investment in a nontechnical sport like running. But not in swimming.
In the water, you’re ringing up a far more important tally during the course of those 2,400 heartbeats, and that tally is the 2,000 or so strokes you take. Each one leaves a faint impression on your central nervous system, forming a pattern of movement—a habit. If you’ve been swimming for a few years, those stroke habits have become pretty strong. Now stop and think: Since the 2,400 “fitness” heartbeats impact only about 30 percent of your swimming performance while the 2,000 “skill” strokes affect about 70 percent, as we said earlier, which one deserves more of your attention? Right. You’re beginning to think like a Total Immersion swimmer already, and you’re getting ready to see swimming as a matter of muscle memory, not muscle power.
Muscle memory is what coaches call familiar, habitual patterns of movement. Thanks to muscle memory, you can ride a bike, tie your shoelaces, and type on a computer without stopping and thinking about it. Once you learn a skill well, you can just let your muscles take over. Unfortunately, they’ll take over just as aggressively if you’ve learned a skill badly. And if you think they’re interested in giving up those habits, think again.
Muscle memory is like an old vinyl LP that has been played hundreds of times. The stylus, tracking in the record’s 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 immune. But it can be done. What it takes to break old, inefficient habits so new, efficient ones can take their place is the determination to first erase, then replace. You have to make sure that every one of those 2,000 strokes in your workout hour is as much as possible like the economical strokes of skilled swimmers. Settle for less and you’re training to become a less accomplished swimmer.
So why do most lap-and-fitness swimmers—and even medal-hungry competitive athletes with coaches—spend most of their pool time working out, trying to improve their physiology with more laps or harder laps or less rest between repeats? They’re on a downhill road. Faltering concentration, fatigue, trying to keep pace with the clock or keep up with another swimmer, will all gradually erode their efficiency. They end up practicing their mistakes.
Start your change today. Begin your transformation from a strictly workout swimmer to a practice swimmer. As a workout-only swimmer, strokes were just something that got you from one end of the pool to the other. Laps were the point. The tally was sacred. As a practice swimmer you’ll realize that each stroke is an investment in your swimming future, each lap a chance to either build your stroke into a well-oiled machine for carrying you fast and far or to break it down into a laborious mess. A practice swimmer works no harder, instead squeezing more good out of the same—or even less—effort.
And while all this is going on, a curious thing will happen to your muscle strength, just as it happened to Alexander Popov’s. Even though strength is no longer your holy grail, it will grow, but it will be the muscles that move you most efficiently growing stronger. Popov got to be the best in the world by practicing. And while he was doing that, his muscles grew fit enough to break world records. To get the most from your physiology, be less concerned with how many yards you swim and more concerned with how many yards your body travels each time you take a stroke. You’ll still get the extra 2,400 heartbeats and your muscles will still get a workout. What can you lose?
Make Those 2,400 Heartbeats Work for You
During TI Weekend Workshops, after patiently explaining for hours that swimming is 70 percent mechanical 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. Someone always asks: “Yeah, but how many yards a week do I need to be ready for a 1500-meter triathlon swim leg?”
Fitness is important, we tell them, very 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—so you can keep using your high-level technique over longer distances, at higher speeds and higher heart rates. That’s the reason our program starts in the easiest possible way: with efficient movements, over short distances, at low speeds, and at low heart rates. You gradually build your capacity to hold that form longer, harder, and faster. Sounds a lot like race preparation, doesn’t it?
So the big role of fitness is to help you hold your form. But all fitness is not alike. I compete in Masters swimming on a semiregular basis. When I do, I usually target a regional or national open-water championship in the summer, devoting several months to intense, focused preparation. After the summer I cut back on my swimming and start running several times a week for a change of pace. And every time I do, no matter how hard I’ve worked and how well-conditioned I’ve gotten myself in the water, my muscles rudely remind me that as a runner, I’m a rookie.
It’s the same thing that happens right in the pool when you switch strokes. If I’ve done mostly freestyle training, I’ll be lucky to feel good for the first half of a breaststroke race. The second half crumbles into a desperate struggle against muscle fibers that are quitting one after the other because they simply haven’t been trained. Breaststroke muscles are different from freestyle muscles. If they’re new to the job, they won’t do it for very long.
Now let’s cut the distinction finer still. You even use different muscles for swimming freestyle with good form than you do with poor form. Train sloppily and your better-conditioned poor-form muscles will be in great shape. You can guess what happens next.
Come race time—or even a longer-than-usual workout—your well-intentioned brain will give your body the right pep talk (“Okay, now, let’s really hold good form here!”), but if you haven’t trained the muscles it’s talking to, their answer will quickly be “Forget it.” You’ll be stuck with “sloppy-swimming” power.
Nobody can get away with that whether they go for speed or distance. Neither top speed nor effective endurance can be achieved with pinch-hitting stand-in muscles. If you swim the 100-yard freestyle in a Masters meet in 60 seconds and would like to do it in 58, your primary goal is to train yourself to stay efficient as you move everything faster. You’ll get those two seconds and more. Or say you do a 1500-meter triathlon swim leg in 36 minutes and would like to do it in 30. Now the strategy is to stay efficient longer. If you used to get a shaky stroke at around 300 meters, and can now hold form right through the final 1200, you’re going to make a serious dent in that finishing time. None of that happens unless, like Popov, you program your muscles to do it.
And more than your muscles are working to form every stroke. What do you think fires them in the first place? Right. The nervous system. And though this part of the training process is almost always overlooked, the nervous system also stores away everything you do during that hour or so you’re in the pool. Lap after lap it selectively recruits muscle “motor units” to move your arms and legs in certain ways, learning as it goes. Just as with the muscles themselves, you’re either training it to be habitually efficient or habitually inefficient. Routinely let your efficiency slip over the course of an hour and that’s just what your nervous system will be ready to do for you next time and the time after that. It will remember. You need to make sure it remembers what you want it to.
Learning Skills with Success Drills
New triathletes are often amazed that they can pick up a bike after a cycling layoff of twenty years and feel like they never missed a day. No rustiness, no relearning—zoom! Off they go. That’s because the ability has been there all those years; it’s just been in storage. The skill comes out again easily because it’s fairly simple—cyclical, rhythmic, hands and feet fixed in place. You don’t have to repolish much besides your balance and steering, and that doesn’t take long because all the time we spent doing it as kids left a powerful and permanent imprint on our nervous systems. The neural groove on your bike-riding LP is already deep. The needle never jumps. And it’s a much simpler tune to play.
Swimming, of course, is nothing like that. Neither is tennis. And though on the surface there seems little to unite those sports, they have far more in common than most athletes—and most of their coaches— realize. In fact, the way to understand how the body best learns a skill and why the Total Immersion training system is so effective at speeding that process along is to watch someone with a good coach learning his or her way around the tennis courts.
First, the basics. Tennis and swimming are both motor-skill sports that also take strength and endurance for success. In swimming, skill and stamina combine to move you up and down the pool faster, farther, and easier. In tennis, skill puts the ball right where you want it, while stamina chases down the return and holds stroke-crippling fatigue at bay.
So you’d think swimmers and tennis players would learn useful training techniques from each other, but they don’t. You’d think they’d realize their practices are a lot alike—or should be. But they don’t. Swimmers try to improve just by swimming more. But they don’t.
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.
So they sign up for lessons with a tennis pro. “Pro,” after all, has a nice, crisp ring that sounds so …well, so professional. “Coach,” as in swimming coach, implies someone who just tells you how to sweat. Too often, both implications are on target, to the great advantage of the tennis player.
The tennis pro understands that the most important thing to do for his or her students is teach them, not train them. They need to master skills that will make them competitive on the court, and the pro needs to help those students learn faster and with the least possible confusion. That means starting off with the simplest possible movements— small segments of the basic strokes. In the forehand lesson, for example, the student simply stands with his feet planted in one spot, racquet held back, while the teacher lobs the ball so that it bounces up softly at waist height and practically into the strings of the racquet all by itself. A successful return is guaranteed.
Even so, the first ten or twenty are awkward, mechanical, erratic. Gradually they grow smoother, more accurate, more consistent. The learning and sorting-out have begun as muscles and nerves catalogue and memorize the difference between swings that work and swings that don’t. If a ball flies out of bounds, the student “erases” that swing from muscle memory. If it ends up just where she wants it, she replays that one over and over. Not only can she see her successes and failures, she can feel them. The jolting thwwoong of a vibrating mis-hit rockets right up her forearm, while the precise pongof the racket’s “sweet spot” feels and sounds solid and true. Each time, the experience is “written to disk” in the nervous system where, eventually, hundreds and thousands of such “experiments” in movement skill begin to build a vast neuromuscular database of experiences. Only one or two of those resulted in hitting a good ball, of course, so gradually the student’s muscles figure out how to do just those. That’s when the pro sees something especially rewarding: The returns are now virtually automatic. Step one is complete. The basic forehand has become encoded in muscle memory.
Learning any new motor skill is a similar problem-solving, trial-and-error exercise. But too much error can be so discouraging that enthusiasm goes right down the drain, and with it the chance to improve. The secret is to practice something you can do, not something you can’t. An easily mastered basic skill becomes the springboard for a more advanced one, and so on. You see results every step of the way.
That’s why the pro waits until step two to hit the ball around, making it seem a little more like a real game of tennis. This should be fun, the student thinks, until her nice, new, smooth, and coordinated basic stroke turns to shreds again as she now tries to second-guess where the ball is going to be before she can figure out how to meet it with her racquet. Think for a minute what’s behind just getting to the ball. Mind and muscles watch the ball’s trajectory and direction, compute where it’s going to land, rush to that spot, and get the feet and torso into position to swing before the ball arrives. Only then do they get to use that now-familiar basic skill—returning the ball. Moreover, they now need a unique program for each shot depending on where the ball lands and how fast it’s going. It may take dozens of such lessons just to develop a rudimentary tennis game. Obviously, the only way to make sense out of the wilderness of skill building is by a stepwise system of learning, and practice that’s organized to take the student through it.
Which is exactly what’s been missing from most swimming instruction. Swimming coaches spend so much time training and so little time teaching that few have ever really thought about how to break down their equally complex sport into a series of fundamentals that can be taught step by step. Instead, their stroke advice comes in scattershot bursts, not in a series of “success lessons” that can be mastered quickly and that automatically lay the groundwork for the next skill. Their swimmers spend too much time swimming the whole stroke, never quite able to achieve fluency in all its parts. With Total Immersion, we teach like the tennis pro instead.
With one important difference. Tennis players have a big advantage over swimmers: They can see their results, and they can see them right away. Ball goes right or ball goes wrong. Swimmers have nothing that obvious to guide them. Unless someone is standing poolside bellowing at you like a coach as you swim, you have to rely on how things feel inside your water capsule. So your skill-building drills must be designed with “feeling feedback,” letting your nerve endings be your coach.
Let’s go back to the most critical improvement you can make—getting your body balanced and stable. It doesn’t come naturally, it doesn’t feel natural, and new swimmers who balance by instinct are as rare as a balanced federal budget. It takes most people years of trial-and-error practice to figure out balance on their own, if they ever do. Our skill drills skip trial and error entirely and, by telling you what feeling you should aim for, put you through each critical step of the process quickly. You can learn balance, for instance, in thirty minutes or less. Drill by drill, cutting out hour after hour of dead-end experimentation, we put the whole learning process into high gear.
So that’s swimming, the Total Immersion way. Realizing now that your skills carry you a lot farther than your fitness, you don’t work out anymore—you practice. And you repeat to yourself as often as necessary: “Fitness is something that happens to me while I’m practicing good technique.” And practicing, and practicing, because now you also know that old habits die hard, especially old muscle habits. If you’ve been swimming without instruction for several years, in fact, you’ve probably had so much practice at inefficient swimming that your body is an absolute champion at it. To learn a better way of swimming, you have to unlearn the one you’re stuck with, which means never doing it again. Every length you swim with poor form makes it harder to improve.
And the way we’ll make sure you’ve swum your last length with poor form is to use the same step-by-step strategy that tennis pros perfected long ago. There’s no reason for racquet sports to be any better than water sports at helping athletes build good technique. Tennis players may have gotten wise sooner, but with Total Immersion, swimmers are now there too.
The tennis program works so well because it meters out a series of easily mastered mini-skills that gradually link together into a smoother, more powerful game. Efficient swimming can now be taught in the same logical, step-by-step process. It all starts with the best friend your swimmer’s nervous system ever had: the skill drill. It makes the complex simple, the intimidating comfortable, and the difficult easy. In the next chapter, the mini-skill finally arrives at the pool.
Good-bye, “coach.” Welcome to your first lesson with the “swimming pro.”
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