Chapter 7 Come to Your Senses. Swim by Feel

If “sensory skill practice” sounds to you like an ad on late-night cable TV for an adult videotape, I need a minute of your time before we go any further.

Because SSP, as I call it, is actually something a good deal more important—well, more important to an improvement-minded swimmer, certainly. It’s nothing less than the capstone, the finishing touch, on the whole Total Immersion learning process. Each Total Immersion drill focuses on some aspect of swimming described in chapters 2 through 4. Each drill, in turn, heightens the kinesthetic, or sensory, experience of how “right swimming” feels. In SSP, we practice swimming while focused on that feeling.

In sensory skill practice you take all the ingredients of an efficient stroke, the ones you so meticulously developed in your skill drills and rehearsed in your drill-swim sessions, and make them permanent. Automatic. Yours. Good form that your body follows instinctively, free at last of those nagging reminder lectures from your brain. That daunting mental punch list—Am I pressing my buoy enough? Is my body long? What about hip roll? Did I reach for the far end?—is edited down to a simple and smooth body check: Does it feel right?

Teach your senses what “right swimming” feels like, you see, and they’ll take over and do more to help you hold good swimming form than a video camera ever could. Automatically and accurately.

The challenge is figuring out how to take full advantage of your new movements. At this point they’re like individual sheets of music that you can play well in whatever order they turn up on the music stand. But if they’re ever going to become a concerto, they must follow a certain coherent sequence.

So what we do in sensory skill practice is to arrange your skills in a logical order and “play” them that way, since some let you unlock others, like opening a series of nested Russian dolls. For though I preach consistently throughout this book that the way to become a better swimmer is to cut swim time and drill, drill, drill, there comes a point when you have to swim, swim, swim. But what a difference now! You’ve gotten over your black-line fever. The odometer no longer rules your life. It’s not how long or how far but how well. You finally know what it feels like when you’ve got it right. Your job now is to make sure it always feels that way from now on.

Don’t be surprised if your body at first has trouble trusting this “swim by feel” approach. After all, it’s just the opposite of what many of us were told to do by our school coaches. Back then, we worked on ignoring instead of paying attention. Face it: The way most of us were schooled, if you took athletics seriously you didn’t shrink from getting falling-down tired. And a good coach, in those days, was someone who could help your mind wander off to something other than how miserable you were feeling, to “disassociate” from the workout so you’d forget how exhausted you were and manage to keep on going just a little longer and a little longer after that. Like my peers—and probably like yours—when I paid any attention at all to what my body was doing, it began and ended with wondering how well I was using my hands to paddle.

So that was the extent of my technical focus when I came back to regular swim training in my late thirties. And today, it very probably is still yours.

When it gradually became clear that body positioning is so much more important to effective swimming than endurance or strength, I knew I would have to completely reverse my idea of training. Instead of telling my body what to do, I would start listening to it as it reported in from thousands upon thousands of nerve endings and informed the brain—as it had always tried to do—what was working well and what wasn’t. Now, though, instead of ignoring all this information, I would guide it into the smoothest possible technique and focus the lion’s share of that attention on my torso—the body’s power source— instead of my arms and legs.

My first sensory experiment was with pressing the buoy. As a coach I’d been teaching it to butterfliers for nearly twenty years. Leaning on the chest in that stroke made it conspicuously easier for them to bring their hips up. But it wasn’t until around 1990 that it occurred to me that the same principle of lifting the hips and legs to reduce drag might work in freestyle too. As a test, I asked a couple of new swimmers who were struggling especially hard to give it a try. The difference was immediate and so dramatic you didn’t need to be a professional coach to be impressed with the results. I realized that it could help my own swimming as well. And probably everyone else’s.

But the habits of coaches, even young ones, die just as hard as anyone’s. True, those first tentative shifts into greater torso awareness sparked an immediate improvement. But I’d already been swimming for twenty-five years, and long habit kept my mind drifting back to what those hands of mine were doing. The moment I lost concentration, I knew I had also lost body position. The sudden drag on my back half told me so. Obviously, if I wanted to hold on to this improvement, or any other improvement for that matter, I had to figure out a way of making it automatic and instinctive—“in the bank,” so to speak. Then I could go on to the next.

So I did what any good athlete would do: worked as hard as I could at nailing that improvement down. What I nailed down instead was the realization that long swims or hard swims simply break down the critical ability to concentrate. They actually give new life to old habits. The only thing that worked was short repeats where I ignored the clock, other swimmers, my hands, and what I might be having for dinner. Just one thing was allowed on the mental table: chest pressure for keeping the hips light. Total sensory absorption. And it worked.

Best of all, it continued to work for every piece of the skill puzzle I wanted to add. In the next two years I packed more efficiency into my stroke than I’d managed to eke out in the previous twenty-five years. You can do the same.

If It Feels Good, Do It. And Do It Some More.

The difference between sensory skill practice and drill-and-swim is the difference between cycling without training wheels and cycling with them. Drill-and-swim is training-wheel swimming: If you start to go wrong and lose your balance or form, you can fall back on the drills for support. Sensory skill practice takes the wheels off for as long as you can leave them off. It challenges you to pedal straight and true, as far as you can go, before starting to wobble again.

Here’s how it works. On each drill length, you zeroed in on one specific sensation—light hips and legs, longer body, weightless arm, rolling hips—then held on to it as you swam, like practicing a bar of music over and over. The more lengths you swam that way, the deeper that feeling sank into your neurological memory bank. Eventually, the feeling sank in deeply enough to become your natural stroke.

Or did it? Your objective in sensory skill practice is to find out. Take the same catalogue of desirable sensations and see how far or how fast you really can swim with one or another of them. Consciously practice skillful swimming—and nothing else. Instead of counting laps or racing the clock or another swimmer, you’re focused on using each lap and every stroke to imprint specific skills more and more deeply, more and more permanently.

In a sense, sensory skill practice puts the finishing touches on the learning process. In step one, you learned new ways of moving using drills. In step two, you integrated those movements into your swim stroke. Now you’re testing your ability to swim consistently better—with consistently less thought. It’s the drill work without the drills. Drills teach you what these sensations feel like; then you take them into your stroke and simply practice feeling like that as you swim.

But this is far more than just “mop-up” work. Many of these movements, remember, are alien to our nervous systems at first, so almost any workout will eventually break down your new and still-fragile form. Frankly, it will take all your patience and determination to make the new form natural and instinctive. But it will be worth it.

The best news is that you can count on the fingers of one hand all the drag-minimizing SSP movements you need to practice, as you’ll see in the following list of five. The “how-to” part sounds a lot like the drills, and it is. But now, you’re not drilling anymore. “This ain’t no practice run,” as the saying goes. This is taking the more efficient you and really swimming with it:

1. Swimming Downhill: This tests how well you’re able to press your buoy to improve your balance, bring your butt to the surface, and reduce drag. Learn to do it right, and improvement is instantaneous. Guaranteed.

HOLD ON TO THIS SSP FEELING: Just as you did on the pressing-your-buoy drill, tell yourself you’ve got to lean on your chest as you swim. You may feel as if you’re swimming downhill. That’s good. Other swimmers have said it’s like someone pressing down on their shoulder blades as they swim. And a runner recognized the feeling from her sport: She felt as though she were leaning forward slightly to balance and brace her body against a punchy headwind. When you get it right, your hips will feel lighter, your kick far easier. In fact, relax your legs completely so they can simply follow along. Keep leaning and skimming the water. If you do it consciously and religiously, you’ll eventually do it instinctively.

2. Swimming with a Weightless Arm: The key to front-quadrant swimming, which makes your body taller and faster in the water.

HOLD ON TO THIS SSP FEELING: When you swim downhill, putting all your weight on your buoy, your extended arm should feel virtually weightless as it practically floats out in front of you after it enters the water. Your fingertips thrust effortlessly toward the far end of the pool until you choose to apply pressure to your hand and begin the stroke. You also feel elongated—your weightless arm makes you taller each time you stroke, and even taller as you roll to breathe.  

3. Reaching for the Far Wall: This complements the weightless arm. Some swimmers can’t fight the impulse to dive right into the stroke as soon as their hand touches the water. Not good. It makes them shorter, makes them slower, and makes them unbalanced. This breaks that habit.

HOLD ON TO THIS SSP FEELING: If your hands stubbornly jerk down and back as soon as they enter the water, try this. Pretend every stroke is the last of your lap, the one where you reach out for the pool wall. Swim every stroke of the lap that way. Reach for the wall. As you’re reaching, feel your shoulder press alongside your jaw-line. (If it’s a breathing stroke, you should feel your ear pressing into the shoulder of the extending arm.) Then, when you can’t reach any farther, begin to pull. One more point: Reach slowly for the wall; your hand shouldn’t be extending any faster than your body is moving forward.

4. Hand Swapping: You’ve learned to extend your arm and lengthen your body, but how long should that “extender” stay out there before the other hand shows up? Hand swapping tells you when to begin stroking the extended hand as the recovery hand comes around.

HOLD ON TO THIS SSP FEELING: Does it seem like you’re waiting to start your stroke just a little longer than you’re used to? That’s it! The whole point, in fact, is to put off pulling with the extended hand until the other one is just about to reenter the water and take its place in front of your head. As we said, this keeps your body longer—and faster—for more of each stroke cycle. But you won’t be able to do it unless your extended arm is weightless, so go back and master that one first if you haven’t yet.

You may have to do a little drill to get hand swapping right. “Whoa. Back to drills again?” you protest. “Why are you making me repeat a grade in this swimming school of yours?” Don’t worry. This is the hardest to learn of all the sensory skill targets because it involves subtle stroke-timing adjustments, but it’s worth mastering because it can greatly increase your stroke length. Practice this sequence—in 25-yard increments—until it begins to feel comfortable.

1. Begin each new stroke when your recovering hand is between elbow and wrist of the extended hand.

2. Begin each stroke when your recovering hand is between shoulder and elbow of the extended hand.

3. Begin each stroke when your recovering hand passes your goggles.

4. Swim silently and count your strokes.

Initially, hand swapping feels exaggerated and unnatural. This four-step practice guides your body into gradually feeling at home with the movement. Cycle over and over through this sequence and you’ll soon pinpoint the “sweet spot” in your stroke timing.

5. Moving Your Midsection: If swimming on your side still feels awkward and your hips resist your brain’s message to roll, practice this one.

HOLD ON TO THIS SSP FEELING: Nothing ambiguous about what to do here. On every stroke, just point your belly button toward the pool side wall on each side. Not literally, of course—you’d need a ball-bearing-mounted spine to roll that far. But with that target, you will move better. And as increased roll begins to feel more natural, you can relax because you’ll be doing it without thinking. Just make sure you’re always shifting your midsection rhythmically from side to side. Now you’re swimming with your powerful hips, not your puny hands. When you want to swim more powerfully yet, put more snap into your hip rhythm. When you want to swim faster, put more speed into your hip rhythm. Keep it up until your whole sense of stroke rhythm is the rhythm of your midsection moving back and forth, not that of your arms churning.

The most powerful testimony I can give for the effectiveness of sensory skill practice is that I’ve actually seen it succeed where drill work stumbled. Despite all the wonderful things I’ve seen drills do for people, some swimmers just have a hard time with them. For one reason or another—poor kick, poor coordination, even anxiety about being in the water—they struggle when they drill, and unfortunately even begin to wonder if they’re swimming-student material.

Sensory Skill Practice: Easy Does It

1. Start by alternating SSP with drill lengths that broadcast the same message. The similarities between the two will give you a clearer and stronger grasp of the exact sensation you’re after.

2. Limit your practice to 25-yard (or single-length) repeats at first. Swim the first half-length without breathing—not to see if you can do without air but because your body will absorb the new sensation faster if it doesn’t also have to attend to the mechanics of breathing. Then segue smoothly into normal breathing but stay strongly and narrowly focused on the sensation.

3. Go slowly. Your body is more sensitive to new sensations when moving gently through the water. You’ll have plenty of chance to pile on speed later.

4. At the end of each length, stop and think a moment about what you just did. If you were swimming downhill, did your hips feel lighter and your kick easier? If you were reaching for the wall, did you feel your body lengthen? If not, go back to the related drill, which will accentuate and clarify the feeling you’re trying to create.

5. Do enough lengths for the sensation to settle in. You’ll know when that happens, but I’d look for it at around eight to ten repeats while you’re working on something new.

And when you’ve got all that under your belt, keep your momentum going by:

1. Gradually lengthening your repeats to 50, 100, perhaps even 200 yards. It’s not too ambitious to want to eventually swim a mile or more with your new efficiency intact, if that’s the length of a race you plan to swim.

2. Blending two sensations in one length (e.g., swim downhill with a weightless arm, or reach for the wall with a weightless arm, or swim downhill moving your midsection from side to side).

3. Alternating sensory targets on each length (e.g., on a series of 50s: swim downhill on the first 25, weightless arm on the second 25).

4. Pumping the throttle: swim a series of 50s: 25 slow/25 faster. Make the “faster” approximate (or build toward over the series of 50s) the effort level you’ll reach while swimming your race. How well can you keep your focus? Hold your form? That’s how well you’ll be able to stay efficient in races.

Of course they are. They just need a more customized curriculum. So what I do for these drill-resistant types is pull back on their drill work. We look for a minimum that just begins to cut the sensory groove for the needle, and we spend more time on the more conscious stroke modifications of sensory skill practice. They apply the same principles the drills teach, but they apply them directly and more quickly into the stroke.

Most everyone can learn the new sensations better, faster, and more clearly with drills. But if they’re not working for you, sensory skill practice may jump-start your progress.

 

Stroke Eliminators and Swimming Golf: Two Tests of Your SSP

The whole point of sensory skill practice, of course, is not to make you feel better but to make you swim better, to build a more efficient stroke. And a more efficient stroke, you’ll remember, is one that moves your body farther through the water so you need fewer of them to go any given distance. More work from less energy. Since fewer and longer strokes have been identified over and over as the consistent mark of the expert swimmer, the advantage is not merely theoretical. It’s what earns medals for the competitive and personal satisfaction for the rest of us.

Fine. But how do you find out whether you’re making any progress? Glad you asked. Our next two practice strategies measure just that.

STROKE ELIMINATORS

The first is called stroke eliminators because that’s just what it is— nothing fancier than simply disciplining yourself to use fewer strokes than you usually do.

It’s an effective tactic Alexander Popov has used to become one of the most efficient swimmers on earth. And it can work just as well for you—even if your numbers are understandably a little different. Popov, remember, has earned the title of being untouchable in the 50-meter freestyle, swimming’s version of a flat-out sprint. Race after race, he takes exactly 33 strokes to get from one end of the pool to the other. But to achieve that remarkably low count, he disciplines himself to do even better in practice, often forcing himself during 50-meter repeats to take an extremely stingy 24 strokes on each. By training his body to get by on those 24, the 33 he allows himself on race day (still three fewer than any of his rivals can manage, mind you) are a piece of cake.

If that nine-stroke spread doesn’t seem exactly stunning, try this for yourself. Find a true Olympic-size pool (50 meters or 165 feet, not the bathtubs that turnpike motels love to trumpet as “Olympic size”). First, see how many strokes it takes you to swim a slow length. Next, see how many strokes it takes you to swim a fast length. A huge difference, isn’t there? I thought so. You can start narrowing that down by doing a variation of a set Popov has perfected.

Its objective: to see how close he can get to his race speed without taking more than 24 strokes. He starts with a “slow” 50 meters (maybe 10 or more seconds slower than his 22-second race time) and on each successive repeat he goes a little faster. When he can’t go any quicker and still hold 24 strokes, he drops back to “slow” and works his way back up the speed curve again, trying on each round to eke out a bit more speed and get ever closer to his race speed without ever exceeding his 24-stroke allotment.

Now, that’s discipline. And it’s discipline you can try too, using a variation of Popov’s set. First, get an average stroke count for 25 yards (or whatever the length of your regular pool). Make it realistic, not what you need to do a single, perfect, well-rested length. Make it the count at the end of, say, the twenty-seventh length of a half-mile swim. You’ve been working a while, you’re getting tired, and your form is probably somewhere around “serviceable.”

From now on, that’s the number to beat, no matter how many lengths you swim. Take the pledge. Refuse, under pain of disgrace and dishonor, to take that many strokes for that distance again, for any reason.

Here’s how it works. If you normally take 21 to 22 strokes per length, your mission now is to do all repeats in 19 to 20 strokes and not one more. Seems simple at first, doesn’t it? You swim a series of ten 50-yard repeats, feeling fresh on the first few and easily holding the 19- to-20-stroke count. This stroke elimination’s a breeze!

Then, on the second length of the fourth repeat, you head nonchalantly down the pool, take your twentieth stroke, and uh-oh. How come the wall is still five yards away?

And what can you do about it? You’ve sworn not to take the twenty-first stroke, so there’s only one thing to do: roll to your side and kick to the wall. Hmmmmm. Evidently this stroke elimination business will take some work after all.

So as you begin your next length, and every one from now on, you become the miser of arm turnover, keenly aware of how you spend every stroke, making sure that you make twenty of them stretch 25 yards. The clock is forgotten. The rival in the next lane is forgotten. The only thing that matters is how you’re spending what you have to spend—which is how you learn to save. Just like real life.

Repeat after me: You’re working on how well you get there, not how fast. At first, a lower stroke count will slow you down. Expect that and don’t worry about it. You’ll also have to stretch and glide longer. That’s okay too. Your old count was “normal” for so long that it will take some time for your body to adjust. Eventually, the lower, more efficient count will become your “new normal,” and somehow, in all that obsession with strokes, your speed will have come back too while you weren’t looking. As good teachers have always known, discipline teaches what indulgence never could.

Twenty strokes per 25-yard length is a meaningful benchmark for where the swimming wheat and chaff are separated. If your count is higher, don’t slacken your stroke-eliminating efforts until you get there or below. When you can easily swim 25 yards in 20 strokes or less, try for 50 in 40 or less, then 75 yards in 60 strokes or less. But don’t blindly add lengths to your repeats if it means taking more than 20 strokes per length. The only way to become a consistently efficient swimmer is to refuse to practice inefficient swimming.

When you can routinely swim 100 yards—four lengths—in 80 strokes or less (Tom Dolan, the American record holder in the 1650-yard freestyle, took 56 strokes per 100 yards while setting his mile record), you’re ready to start building sets of 100-yard repeats on 15 to 30 seconds of rest. Once you can do eight to ten of those—and never take more than 80 strokes—you’ll have crossed an important threshold toward swimming success. You could certainly take that stroke to a triathlon or Masters meet and show it off with pride.

So discipline yourself to count strokes nearly every length until efficiency has become habit. Then, like Popov, you can begin to trade them shrewdly for speed. Spend the fewest strokes for the most additional speed, and if you’re not satisfied at the cost, try it again. Swim two or three 50-yard repeats at your lowest count. Then several more, each one a little faster, trying to reduce the “stroke cost” for each second of speed gain. Run through the cycle over and over. Get a better deal each time. Drive a hard bargain with yourself. As you master the 50-yard transaction, try it with your 100-yard repeats, which will give you a larger field on which to play the game. The game of golf. Swimming golf, that is.

SWIMMING GOLF

It’s possible to get too carried away with this business of eliminating strokes when you’re down to such a triumphantly tiny number of strokes that you’re taking forever to get to the other end. Clever types can also figure out a way to cheat the stroke-eliminator system so the numbers are better but the swimming is not—say by gliding or kicking half a length after pushoff. If the real point of all these efficiency gains is swimming faster, you want to know whether that’s happening. Well, just tee up for some swimming golf, the second strategy for increasing your stroke efficiency.

SSP: What Champions Gain by Swimming Slowly

When the Russian National Swim Team spent a month at the University of South Carolina training to beat the U.S. National Team, they could hardly keep any secrets from Bill Irwin. Irwin, my first real coach when I began swimming in high school, lives in Columbia, South Carolina, and swims every day at U.S.C. So he just camped out with the Russians each morning, eyes open, notepad in hand, video camera humming.

He didn’t see what he expected, Irwin admitted. Impressive swimming, yes, but not grueling nor even especially fast. “The whole month they hardly ever broke a sweat,” Irwin recalled. “They swam four to five hours a day, doing endless sets of easy freestyle repeats with a half-catch-up stroke.” (See the hand-swapping drill on pages 91–93.)

Easy, perhaps, but exacting.

Why, Irwin asked the Russian coach, did they do all that work on this exaggerated stroke? Because, came the answer, one of world champion Alexander Popov’s big advantages was his habit of always having one hand in front of his head to lengthen his body. So the coach wanted all of his freestylers to make that a habit too, and he knew it didn’t come naturally. They would simply have to make it natural, “burn it into the nervous system” by running that loop over and over for hours a day until each swimmer’s nervous system owned it. Whatever the Russian term for it may be, they devoted that entire month to practicing one form of sensory skill practice—hand swapping—with extraordinary patience. No question that it came before any hard or fast swimming.

Too bad one of the most gifted freestylers in the U.S. wasn’t there to watch. On the West Coast for a Total Immersion workshop, I had a chance to watch him train for thirty minutes, knowing that he’s raced with the world’s best, even swimming on world-record-setting relays, but that those great swims have eluded him for the past few years. He’s even talked of quitting, though still years short of his prime.

So I watched, curious, as he did a series of sprints alternating with easy recovery lengths. And what do you know? On each sprint, his body stretched out long and efficient. But on every easy length, he lapsed into sloppy form. Thinking only of physical recovery, he didn’t realize his easy laps were also training his nervous system to lapse into inefficiency whenever he got tired. In his mind, the hard effort—working the physiology—was the valuable part of the workout. But his careless training of his nervous system was completely undermining the aerobic work.

His slump no longer surprises me.

You don’t need a club membership, and the rules are simple. For a given distance, count your strokes and add that to your time in seconds. A reasonably good swimmer can usually swim the two lengths of a 50-yard repeat in 40 strokes and 40 seconds. That’s a score of 80. (Notice how conveniently the scores on 50-yard repeats approximate those on a golf round.) A “duffer” can usually aim for a score of 90, serious swimmers might be in the low 60s. Repeats of 50 yards are best because the numbers are easy to work with.

Always lower your score by reducing stroke count first and later by trying to swim faster. Just a few rounds should be eye-opening. You’ll be amazed how quickly a bit more effort can add a lot more strokes. If those strokes don’t translate into enough speed to lower your total score, you know right away how wasteful you’ve been. Remember, speed equals stroke rate (SR) multiplied by stroke length (SL), and just about everyone has enough SR. It’s your SL that needs work. Your golf score will be an unerring measure of how well you’re using SL to create speed. Fore!

We’ve finally finished drawing the Total Immersion learning curve. You now understand that technique, not sweat or muscle, is the foundation for the serious swimming improvement you’re about to embark on. It started with finding out how your body really moves through the water, the quickest and most dramatic changes you can make to improve that, the drills that start those changes happening, and finally how to practice the smoother and more satisfying swimming that the drills are helping you achieve so that your new stroke becomes second nature.

Now it’s time to get to the pool and start putting your new plan to work—getting fit by practicing proper technique. In chapter 8, we’ll get suited up, onto the deck, and wet. It’s time to start your “work-outs”—the new way.