Up to this point, we’ve focused on building a knowledge foundation that allows you to understand what constitutes good swimming and how you can swim better just by changing the shape of your “vessel.” Now that you’re book-smart about swimming, it’s time to move our classroom to the pool and begin teaching your muscles. Over the course of six Total Immersion “swim lessons” and other guidance on how to teach yourself successfully, you will learn to swim in a completely new way that will be faster, easier, and more enjoyable. I’ve prepared this lesson plan as if every person who picks up this book knows nothing at all about swimming. We’ve found that all of our students, no matter how much swimming they may already have done, progress much faster by starting with the most elementary skill and progressing logically through the whole sequence of TI drills. So let’s get right to it.
But First: The six lessons that follow contain exhaustively detailed instructions on how to do each drill in the TI learning sequence, complemented by illustrations of the key positions. Still, as one of our students said, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, video must be worth ten thousand words.” Short of being taught face-to-face by a TI Coach, the surest way to master all of the essential skills is to use the companion DVD, Freestyle Made Easy, as your primary guide to the fine points and desired movement quality. This video has been designed as the perfect complement to the information in this chapter. For info on the video, please refer to the resources section in the back.
Starting with a “Beginner’s Mind”
Next time you visit the pool, spend ten minutes watching other swimmers. What you’ll see—even if you watch someone for an hour—is that every stroke looks exactly the same. Which is just how you’d look to someone watching you. Your stroke is a habit pattern, deeply embedded in your nervous system by thousands or millions of previous strokes. The phrase “practice makes perfect” gets it only partly right. “Practice makes permanent” is far truer.
As we switch from theory to practice, you’re about to become your own coach and teacher. And your success will depend on practicing only the movements you’d like in your “muscle memory” and on scrupulously avoiding whatever you don’t want imprinted there. “Tweaking” your present stroke will limit your progress, because the imprint of millions of previous strokes is so resistant to change. Fortunately you now have a proven alternative.
Each year we teach about 1,500 students in TI workshops. Their average stroke count at the beginning of the workshop is 21 to 22 strokes for 25 yards. A day later that average has improved to 16 to 17 strokes, or an average efficiency gain of nearly 25 percent. This degree of improvement, following several hours of instruction, is stunning for people who may have swum five or ten years with little noticeable change. The two primary reasons for such transcendent improvement are “muscle amnesia” and “martial-arts swimming.” You can also create transformation by observing these two principles in your self-coaching.
Avoiding Struggle
After we videotape our students doing a length of freestyle on Saturday morning, they don’t swim another length of whole-stroke freestyle until the final ten to fifteen minutes on Sunday afternoon—by which time they’ve spent about six hours practicing efficient swimming movements without a single “old” freestyle stroke. By then, most have replaced their old stroke with a new, improved stroke. By teaching with movements their nervous systems don’t recognize as swimming, we’ve given them “muscle amnesia,” a blank slate for learning new skills and bypassing old habits.
The second key to success is the “martial-arts swimming” part. Formal swimming instruction has existed for only fifty years or so, while martial arts have been taught and practiced for thousands of years, giving martial-arts masters considerably more opportunity to learn the best way to teach movement skills. Their nonnegotiable rule is: “Avoid practicing movements you cannot perform correctly.” We’ve added our own nonnegotiable rule, which is: “Never practice struggle.” Martial-arts students always start with positions and movements that seem ridiculously simple and progress through more challenging movements by small steps.
As they soon discover, movements that seem the simplest eventually reveal great complexity and can be mastered on many levels. The more patiently and mindfully they practice each step, the more flowing and effortless they become at advanced skills. We’ll guide you through the same kind of progression on the way to being Fishlike.
Take a Break with “Yoga Breathing”
It’s culturally ingrained for most swimmers and coaches to do every-thing—including skill drills—faster or with less rest. They never cease worrying about “keeping up the yardage.” So let me clarify: The purpose of training is to maximize energy supply. The purpose of skill drills is to minimize energy cost. Energy conservation always produces greater improvement, faster. To reap all their potential benefits, you must practice drills patiently and mindfully. One proven way is to ignore the pace clock. When I’m most focused on movement quality, I never so much as glance at the clock. I’m solely interested in how easily and quietly I can slip through the water and how fluent and coordinated my movements feel.
But though I ignore the pace clock, I still want my students to get enough rest to keep their heart rate in a moderate aerobic state that allows attentive, meticulous movement. We do that by using relaxing “yoga breaths” for rest and recovery. They bring two restorative advantages: They normalize breathing, which helps keep your heart rate down. They also “center” you mentally, reducing distraction and improving concentration.
Recover During Each Lap
The technique is simple: Inhale slowly, then let your breath fall out. Relax a moment before inhaling again. You can regulate your rest easily by taking more or fewer yoga breaths before your next drill cycle or lap. While teaching, I recommend that students take at least three breaths while pausing between cycles in Sweet Spot (the built-in recovery pause in all TI freestyle drills; you’ll learn this in Drills 2 and 3), as they are learning the drills. Later, they can decrease to one or two yoga breaths in Sweet Spot to make their drill rhythm more “swimming-like.” Increasing the Sweet Spot pause to as many as five or seven breaths will turn any drill into a kicking exercise, which will be far more valuable than using a kickboard. If you take fewer breaths be careful not to reduce to the point where you feel rushed.
Recover at the Wall
We also use yoga breaths to rest at the wall between laps. I also recommend at least three yoga breaths between each repeat. Again, you can easily adjust your rest taken by taking more breaths. Are you feeling slightly breathless or fatigued? Just add breaths. On longer reps, say, 50s, rather than 25s, you might increase your rest interval from three breaths to perhaps five. Once you’ve had a chance to experiment with the yoga-breathing interval, you’ll find it the simplest way to adjust your rest period as finely as you want … while bringing the additional dividend of improved concentration to a style of swimming that always benefits from more acute attention.
If you’re like me, you’ll soon find yourself using breaths as your recovery device in other activities. I first learned the technique when taking yoga classes and quickly realized its value for swimming. Now I use them in all manner of exercise—from governing how long I hold a stretching position to varying my yoga practice from more meditative (more breaths in each position) to more dynamic (one breath in each position) to setting rest intervals between 500- or 1000-meter repeats on my rowing machine.
Take a Break with “Yoga Breathing”
It’s culturally ingrained for most swimmers and coaches to do every-thing—including skill drills—faster or with less rest. They never cease worrying about “keeping up the yardage.” So let me clarify: The purpose of training is to maximize energy supply. The purpose of skill drills is to minimize energy cost. Energy conservation always produces greater improvement, faster. To reap all their potential benefits, you must practice drills patiently and mindfully. One proven way is to ignore the pace clock. When I’m most focused on movement quality, I never so much as glance at the clock. I’m solely interested in how easily and quietly I can slip through the water and how fluent and coordinated my movements feel.
But though I ignore the pace clock, I still want my students to get enough rest to keep their heart rate in a moderate aerobic state that allows attentive, meticulous movement. We do that by using relaxing “yoga breaths” for rest and recovery. They bring two restorative advantages: They normalize breathing, which helps keep your heart rate down. They also “center” you mentally, reducing distraction and improving concentration.
Recover During Each Lap
The technique is simple: Inhale slowly, then let your breath fall out. Relax a moment before inhaling again. You can regulate your rest easily by taking more or fewer yoga breaths before your next drill cycle or lap. While teaching, I recommend that students take at least three breaths while pausing between cycles in Sweet Spot (the built-in recovery pause in all TI freestyle drills; you’ll learn this in Drills 2 and 3), as they are learning the drills. Later, they can decrease to one or two yoga breaths in Sweet Spot to make their drill rhythm more “swimming-like.” Increasing the Sweet Spot pause to as many as five or seven breaths will turn any drill into a kicking exercise, which will be far more valuable than using a kickboard. If you take fewer breaths be careful not to reduce to the point where you feel rushed.
Recover at the Wall
We also use yoga breaths to rest at the wall between laps. I also recommend at least three yoga breaths between each repeat. Again, you can easily adjust your rest taken by taking more breaths. Are you feeling slightly breathless or fatigued? Just add breaths. On longer reps, say, 50s, rather than 25s, you might increase your rest interval from three breaths to perhaps five. Once you’ve had a chance to experiment with the yoga-breathing interval, you’ll find it the simplest way to adjust your rest period as finely as you want … while bringing the additional dividend of improved concentration to a style of swimming that always benefits from more acute attention.
If you’re like me, you’ll soon find yourself using breaths as your recovery device in other activities. I first learned the technique when taking yoga classes and quickly realized its value for swimming. Now I use them in all manner of exercise—from governing how long I hold a stretching position to varying my yoga practice from more meditative (more breaths in each position) to more dynamic (one breath in each position) to setting rest intervals between 500- or 1000-meter repeats on my rowing machine.
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