Sometimes I think that if we left it up to the experts, the only people who’d dare to get into a swimsuit would be elite athletes with burning Olympic aspirations and children too carefree to have any aspirations at all. Because the “experts” all warn us: An efficient swimming stroke is a prize with a staggering price. So many motions to coordinate! So many ways to go wrong! No wonder it takes countless hours of practice to reach a decent level of skill and smoothness. Why, the grooming of an Olympic-level swimmer usually begins not long after kindergarten—at the age of seven or eight! And even then, for maybe five years, the basic skills are hammered in over and over before the first hints of training for strength and endurance.
Rubbish. For an Olympic aspirant, maybe that’s what it takes. But it doesn’t have to be that way for the rest of us. And for adults, who generally haven’t had that kind of time since they were kids themselves, it simply can’t be that way. So without professionals to guide them and with few hours to invest, grown-up swimming hopefuls usually just plod through the laps, hoping that as the mileage piles up their strokes will improve. Instead, as we said in the last chapter, they’re making things worse by practicing their mistakes. And the more they swim this way, the harder it will become to snap out of it someday. They may finally reach a state that one of my campers wistfully called “terminal mediocrity.”
It used to be that your only hope for breaking out of those bad habits was to find a good coach. Not anymore. There are ways you can turn things around and begin learning improved skills all by yourself, methods we’ll teach you in the next few chapters.
It all starts with what I call the stroke saver, otherwise known as the skill drill. Think of the skill drill as your personal and powerful Batman against the Joker of bad swimming habits, able to root them out thoroughly, replacing them with sound, new ones almost automatically. The skill drill is—no exaggeration—the quickest and most effective path to masterful swimming. Skill drills are the core of the successful method I’ve used for over two decades to help swimmers of all ages to improve dramatically. One of the reasons is that the drills are so easy to learn that even inexperienced swimmers can become their own best coaches.
I don’t care if you’ve been frustrated for years. You can dramatically improve your swimming in just hours with these technique drills, a process that has no way of happening when you plod mindlessly up and down the pool practicing your mistakes.
With conventional instruction, the learning process can consume tedious and frustrating months. Drills work by speeding up your learning curve, and that’s no small feat. Even excellent swimmers who look like they must have been born with their effortless grace have probably invested months, or more likely years, in polishing that smooth, almost balletlike way of moving. Sometimes a coach’s guidance did the trick; in other cases their exceptional intuitions were enough. But either way, the process is the same: Over time, they’ve hit on breakthrough moments when their stroke feels just right, moments that the body immediately seizes and—just like the body of our tennis pupil—stores in a catalogue of similar how-to-move experiences. Eventually, the catalogue becomes comprehensive enough to produce an extremely smooth and highly efficient way of swimming.
It’s a process that never really ends—which is one of the most exciting things about swimming. There’s virtually no improvement ceiling when it comes to good technique. Whether you’re a beginner just “getting your stroke wet” or an expert looking to medal at a national meet, there’s always something left to work on. The refinements just become increasingly subtle. After winning an astounding seven Olympic medals in 1988, Matt Biondi admitted, “I still see every practice as a learning experience because I’ve come to realize that even now, I only understand about ten percent of what efficient swimming is all about.”
But trial and error is a very time-consuming way to pick up an involved skill like swimming—as any self-taught tennis player can tell you. So the Total Immersion method takes this haphazard and painfully slow process and organizes it for you. The result is a step-by-step system of drills selected so any swimmer can re-create, in an organized, convenient, and reliable way, his or her own “flashes of learning” to put into the catalogue. Suddenly you can capture those elusive feelings of being “in sync” whenever you want instead of stumbling onto them now and again by accident. Best of all, you can practice them again and again.
Still, as all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and Humpty-Dumpty all found out, parts are just parts until you put them back to gether again. When you go back to swimming the whole stroke after polishing pieces of it in your drills, your body reassembles them naturally into a much-improved whole. Your nerve endings have done your learning for you by taking “snapshots” of sensations that elite swimmers feel consistently as they knife through the water, and assembling them into a complete photo album: your stroke.
Now, if you suspect that we’re really just drawing out the learning process with all this pulling apart and putting back together, I’ll let you in on the four powerful physical facts that make skill drills such a potent stroke-improvement tool:
1. Fact: Your Muscles Need a Dose of Amnesia. Muscles have memories, as we said. Habits are powerful. And that’s just what the stroke you’ve been using for years has become—a habit. Probably not a good one either. And because you’ve been struggling for so long, your muscles have become very good at moving like that. They’d prefer to keep right on doing it, in fact.
Stroke drills are powerful enough to break that cycle because they’re disguised. They’re so different from your normal motion that your muscle doesn’t recognize the movement and insist you do it in the same old way. You practice new skills on a neuromuscular blank slate without having to erase anything first.
2. Fact: Small Pieces Are Easier to Swallow. Learning specialists tell us we pick up skills faster by breaking a complex movement series into manageable segments for practice. Because the swimming stroke is made up of so many finely coordinated parts, it’s virtually impossible to digest the whole thing. So our Total Immersion stroke drills are “bite-size,” reducing the whole stroke into a series of mini-skills, each of which can be quickly mastered. Then you simply reassemble these building blocks into a new, more efficient stroke. Each drill teaches a key skill, and we present them in the order the body best understands. It’s like putting up a building: The first drill is the foundation, each succeeding drill adds a floor, and mastery of each step gives you the key to solving the next one.
3. Fact: Instead of Trial and Error, It’s Trial and Success. Drills stack the learning deck completely in your favor. You can’t lose. Because mini-skills can be mastered quickly and easily, you begin practicing smooth movements right away. The more you practice each smooth movement, the more it becomes your new habit and crowds out the sloppy old one. And the less time you spend swimming with your sloppy old one, the faster you learn to swim better. That string of successes boosts your motivation and self-confidence—and studies have shown that happens faster when you believe in what you’re doing.
4. Fact: It’s Language the Body Understands. Telling a muscle what to do is a little like teaching French to your poodle: You get rapt attention but not much retention. Conventional stroke instruction suffers from the same weakness. It’s too rational. It tries to get to your muscles through your mind, even though muscles really don’t respond all that well to being lectured. Think about it. First you have to hear, or possibly read, a description of what you’re going to attempt. Next, you try to figure out what the movement will feel like. Then you instruct your muscles to imitate that feeling. Finally, you ask yourself if you got it right. If you didn’t, you try it again a little differently. Drills bypass all those vague translations. They simplify—and accelerate—the learning process. From the very beginning, you teach your body how it should feel when you swim well.
The great part is, skill drills are self-adjusting. The more you need them, the better they’ll work for you. When beginners practice them they learn basic skills in big chunks and rough edges get smoothed off quickly. Experienced swimmers, doing the same drills, tune in naturally to far more subtle refinements, bringing a higher degree of polish to skills they already have.
And the more you have to learn, the more you should drill—up to four times as much as your normal swimming if you really have your work cut out for you. It may be the only way to make headway against bad habits so hardened through the years that they’re all but concrete. Think of it this way: Every lap of drilling, which you can learn to do well quickly, is positive reinforcement for your swimming. Every lap of swimming may pull you back toward old habits. I tell my workshop pupils to ask themselves: “How much swimming can I suffer, as I try to teach my body new skills?”
And though every swimmer is different, drills work for most with incredible speed. Everyone I’ve taught them to has improved. I can’t think of any other swim instruction method that can claim that. And they’ll work even faster if you:
1. Think Before You Swim. Every drill is a problem-solving exercise, and nothing beats the old-fashioned virtues of patience and persistence when you’re trying to solve a problem. With each new drill—and every time you do refresher drilling the first month or two following this program—take these steps: First, a few repetitions just to remind your muscles of the problem the drill is meant to solve, such as moving your head and torso together as you roll your body to breathe. Next, several repetitions to work out the solution. Finally, several more repetitions spent “memorizing” that solution so it comes naturally. Now you “own” it.
2. Do It with Feeling. These drills get your muscles talking to your brain instead of the other way around. If your brain is listening, it’s going to learn what the motion or skill you’re practicing feels like when it’s done right. And when it learns that, it can start to replay it automatically. Feels right, is right; and the mind-muscle connection begins to work more smoothly. So the first few times you work on any new drill, stick with it for at least ten to fifteen minutes to firmly imprint the new sense into your memory so the brain can eventually go by sensation rather than by thought. Don’t be rigid. Experiment with subtle adjustments. See how much control you really have and what happens when you alter these new movements even slightly. Eventually you want your body to take over from your mind, automatically doing what at first required all your concentration.
3. Don’t Drill Yourself into a Hole. Marathon drill sets can easily do more harm than good, a case of too much of a good thing. If you’re tired and can’t concentrate, you won’t drill well, and drills build good skills only when they’re done well. Practice them in 25-yard repeats, resting ten to fifteen seconds between. Every rep should feel a little smoother and more relaxed, a little more precise and economical. If not, reread the instructions or go back to the previous drill and polish that one up before returning to the one that’s giving you trouble.
4. Take Your Drills Out for a Test Swim. Work no more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time on a new drill. Then alternate drill lengths with swim lengths, trying to make each swim length a little more efficient— taking fewer strokes—and a little easier. Compare your drill and your stroke. What felt better in the drill? Good. Try to get more of that feeling into your stroke. When you’re pressing your buoy, for example, your hips and legs will suddenly feel light as they skim the surface instead of dragging along behind you. Focus on that. See how much of it you can feel when you’re swimming. Think of it as your chance to do a virtual-reality lap with a Popov stroke. And keep at it. Lasting improvement won’t happen instantaneously.
5. If the Fin Fits… Here’s a paradox. Drills are designed to get your body so well balanced that you won’t need much of a kick to swim well. A weak kick won’t slow you down anymore. But you will need a bit of propulsion from your legs to drill well. Your body’s moving slower—and lower in the water as a result—while drilling than when you swim. A bit of kick helps compensate. If yours is weak, you’ll waste so much energy struggling for the right body position that you won’t have much left to drill with. Slip on a pair of fins, and you’ll be able to pay attention to what matters—the fine points in each drill. By the way, for skill work bladed fins are far better than the cut-off, so-called speed fins, particularly if your ankles don’t flex easily yet.
Drill-and-Swim: Some Assembly Required
In my program, skill drills are little short of magic—absolutely the best way to improve. But they can do that only if you fit them properly into the puzzle of the whole swimming stroke. And just as particular puzzle pieces have to fit into the whole in a particular way, drills don’t go just anywhere in your swimming workouts. Drill without a plan and you could miss the whole point.
Drills, you see, can be the potato chips of swim training: so addictive you begin to lose your appetite for other things. Things like swimming. I’ve seen people become absolutely terrific drillers and do little to nothing for their swimming stroke in the process. They’ve let good drilling become an end in itself.
That’s not necessarily bad if all you want is to be fit. Drills can be a workout all by themselves, sometimes more of a workout than swimming would have been. In fact, you could easily stay in great shape doing nothing but drills without ever taking a single conventional stroke. But wouldn’t that be a little like carefully assembling all the parts to a classic MG and then never building the car? Yes, drills can be fun, and they do offer scenic byways to the monotony of the turnpike— swimming the black line back and forth and back and forth—but let’s not get carried away.
Drills build skills, but they build them best if you integrate and alternate them with swimming in an organized way. Remember, drills are: (1) the simplest way to teach your muscles new movement patterns; and (2) the best way to turn up the volume on feelings that tell you when you’re swimming well. Alternating with swimming will give your drills the most powerful influence over your stroke. They’ll give you a sensory target, a feeling you’re looking for. And when you have a feeling you’re looking for, you can better focus your practice.
Your progress in this program will be steady and reliable because we’ve organized those sensory exercises into logical sequences, just the way your body wants to learn them. Each sense skill builds on the one before it. You can’t lengthen your stroke, for example, until you’ve first gotten yourself balanced.
Be patient. Drill-swim will work. It can’t fail, in fact, because it employs natural learning methods. Your body is a brilliantly intuitive instrument, with a faultless sense of what it needs—given enough information. As you drill and swim, you’ll sense what works best and gradually capture that and make it your own. But remember: This learning instrument works best when allowed to learn at its own pace. You didn’t pick up all your bad habits overnight and you’re not going to pick up new ones overnight either. Just one repetition of a new drill may start the learning process, may even begin tracing a faint neurological imprint that will make the next repetition easier and more natural. But real skill requires that the groove be cut deeply through many repetitions, each done the same way.
So don’t try to force-feed yourself. Patient, persistent repetition of the drills to get the feeling right, alternating with swim laps where you take that feeling and put it right into your stroke, is the best way to let drills work their magic. Use short repeats and short sets. Fresh muscles train well. Fatigue—mental or physical—brings sloppiness. And sloppiness is what you’ll be practicing once you’re tired or bored. Just 25 yards of a drill, followed by 25 yards of swimming, followed by a short rest, will give you the highest-quality practice. Give it all you’ve got for maybe ten minutes or so. Then give your brain a rest by doing something that requires less concentration—a few laps of stroke counting, for example, to see how much more efficient you’ve become.
And as judges are fond of reminding lawyers, you need to keep to the point. Don’t work on one thing in your drill and drift off into thinking about something else during the swimming you do right afterward. Focus, focus, focus, in drills and in swimming. If you worked on pressing your buoy while drilling, don’t start thinking about hip roll on your swim length. You’ll never finish anything.
And I’ll go even further. Your drill guidelines in this book’s swim lessons suggest five or six points to concentrate on in each drill. That’s about four or five too many to do all at the same time. You can think about exactly one, and one only, with enough clarity and focus to do it well. Get greedy, go for two or three at the same time, and they’ll all get fuzzy. You won’t do any of them well as your concentration leapfrogs all around. Instead, force yourself to do a little drill triage, with my permission. Decide which points you clearly feel make the greatest difference in your stroke and spend more drill lengths thinking about those. Keep the exact same point in mind on your next swim length. (See the appendix for sample practices that do this.) Focus, focus, focus.
And gradually, when you’re ready, wean, wean, wean. Stretch farther and farther the distance you can swim with better form before heading back to the drills for a reminder. For that is how it will happen, maybe three steps (or strokes) forward, one step back. In the beginning, you see, that neurological tracery is still faint. It may take you three or four drill lengths to even get a clear sense of what it is you’re practicing, and it may be all you can do just to hold that sensation for one full swim length once you get it. So your ratio of drill lengths to swim lengths could easily be as high as 3:1 or 4:1. As you continue practicing, though, your body will get it faster and faster. Eventually, one drill length might groove that feeling back into muscle memory firmly enough to shift right over to a swim length.
Little by little, you’ll work up to two lengths before your form begins to wobble and need a drill refresher. Then three lengths. Then. … But be patient at stretching the distance. Eventually, you’ll be able to take the new, improved you for much longer cruises. Feels good, doesn’t it? Well, congratulations. Your old habits are on the run, your muscles are now beginning to remember the right stuff, and the stroke that was holding you back is losing its grip on you. Now it’s time to pry loose a few more of its fingers. Hang on to your concentration but take off the training wheels. Let’s start some full-stroke swimming.
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