— Introduction —

Let me ask you three questions:

1. Does swimming make you feel good—both physically and in overall satisfaction?

2. Do you feel you know what it takes to get better—not guesswork, but guaranteed?

3. Are you progressing steadily—even if slowly—toward greater efficiency and understanding?

If you can’t answer yes to all three questions, if you feel any discomfort, frustration, or confusion about swimming, if you’ve ever had an unsatisfying experience with swim instruction or coaching, it’s not because there’s anything wrong with you. The way you were taught— indeed, even the way you’ve been led to think about swimming—is to blame.

Virtually everyone—the tiny percentage of “natural” swimmers excepted—has had similar experiences. The problem is that while fish and aquatic mammals are ideally designed for moving through water efficiently, we’re not. Virtually everyone’s first swimming attempt is a near-death experience, with a real prospect of drowning if you’re not successful. And it doesn’t get much better after that: Despite the fact that swimming is an essential life skill, it has never been taught correctly. Traditional (i.e., Red Cross) instruction teaches you to not drown rather than to emulate what works so well for fish. If you continue reading, all that is about to change for you!

How Total Immersion Revolutionized Swimming

The first edition of this book was published in 1996. Within months, with neither fanfare nor advertising, it became the world’s best-selling book on swimming. The reason? Everyone who read it began to swim better, and to enjoy swimming more, immediately. They finally understood what really matters in swimming. And they found themselves making steady progress for the first time ever. In the past six years, I’ve heard from thousands of readers, all expressing these sentiments: “Thanks for writing about swimming in a way that makes sense and for making swimming a truly pleasurable activity.”

These messages have been enormously gratifying, as I had really hoped to provide a swimming-improvement method that anyone could understand and follow. Moreover, by practicing what I teach, I’ve reached a personal nirvana where every lap I swim feels blissful. Because I’ve never been a gifted athlete, I became convinced that the joy of swimming well is attainable by everyone, rather than a gift reserved for a talented few. My mission as a teacher has been to bring that gift to as many people as possible.

Enthusiasm for the TI approach—from all manner of swimmers, from novices to national champions (and coaches and teachers, too)—confirms that Total Immersion works! It doesn’t matter if you’re age three or forty-three or seventy-three—or whether you’ve never swum before or have set bushels of records. Total Immersion can turn anyone into a swimmer or make you a better swimmer than you are now.

In the past few years, TI has become a “movement.” Virtually everyone who has been introduced to TI, after reading the book, attending a TI workshop, or even watching a TI swimmer glide back and forth in the local pool has recognized that, as the title promises, it’s revolutionary. Dan Schaffer, of Brooklyn, New York, recently wrote me that after his first experiences of teaching TI, the unvarying enthusiasm of his students convinced him that “fifty years from now, if someone decided to write a definitive history of swimming, your book would be cited as the main influence for when swimming changed.”

Total Immersion teaches swimming in a way that no one ever has before. We call the TI method Fishlike Swimming, and the way swimming is usually taught Human Swimming. Conventional teachers and coaches focus on pulling, kicking, muscling your way through the water and endless laps to condition you for the ordeal of more and more laps—activities that mainly reinforce all that is wasteful about Human Swimming. TI instructors teach you to be balanced, slippery, and fluent—and to devote your pool time to thoughtful practice that turns these efficient movements into rock-solid habits.

Here is how TI will change your swimming:

• You’ll learn to be Fishlike. Rather than churning out endless laps of pulling and kicking, you’ll learn to swim with the effortless grace of fish. You’ll feel the difference from your very first lap of intelligent, purposeful TI practice.

• You’ll learn the qualities of beautiful swimming as well as the mechanics. While your initial goal is probably to swim faster, you’ll quickly realize that it’s far more important—and more satisfying—to swim with grace, flow, and economy. Speed will surely follow if you first master ease.

• You’ll achieve transformation along with fluid strokes. TI, alone among all swimming-improvement programs, teaches swimming as a practice—in the same mindful spirit as yoga or tai chi. By swimming the TI way you’ll sharpen the mind-body connection leading to heightened self-awareness and self-mastery, and greater physical and mental well-being.

• You’ll master swimming as an art. TI emphasizes the same studied precision and refinement taught by martial-arts masters. You’ll start with simple skills and movements, will progress by small, easily mastered steps, and will thrive on the attention to detail and the logical sequence of progressive skills.

Overnight your swimming will be transformed from “following the black line” into a “moving meditation” that always feels good and is as mentally engaging as it is physically pleasurable. That’s important because if you swim for the sheer pleasure of it—rather than from a sense of obligation—you’ll swim for life. And as we’ve found, even if your primary reason for swimming is to win races, the movements that feel the best are also those that help you swim your best.

What’s New in This Edition?

The book Total Immersion, as originally published, has worked wonderfully for thousands of swimmers. Yet the process we use to teach Fish-like Swimming, as described in chapter 8, has been dramatically refined as the result of thousands of teaching experiences since 1996. By 2001, our instructional sequence had become easier for every student to learn and the progression from basic drills to advanced drills to whole-stroke swimming had also become far more seamless. Only two of the twelve steps described in the original chapter 8 remain in the fourteen steps of the updated sequence. Our new learning sequence was working so much better that I thought it essential to update this book.

Chapters 1 to 7 remain unchanged from before, as they still explain simply and clearly why swimming lap after lap has done little for you and why slipping your body through the smallest possible “hole” in the water has far more of an impact on your swimming than how you use your hands to push water toward your feet. Once you’ve read chapters 1 to 3, go ahead and dive right into Lessons 1 and 2 in chapter 8. These body-balancing-and-streamlining exercises are the foundation of everything to come. The skill drills in chapter 8 are so simple you could really start doing them without any preparation, but they’ll mean more— and possibly work faster for you—if you understand why they work, how they’ll feel when you get them right, and how you’ll gradually integrate them into your regular swimming, which is covered in chapters 4 to 7.

Once you begin swimming in a new way, you should practice differently, and part 2 shows you how, explaining how and why “conditioning is something that happens to you while you’re practicing good technique.” You’ll see that from now on, “mastering flow and eliminating struggle” always comes before “muscle power."

Fishlike Swimming is something people want to enjoy for a long time, and the advice in part 3 on strength training, weight loss, and injury prevention will help make that possible. So will the exciting possibilities for doing things you may never have tried—from swimming in open water to competing in Masters Swimming or a postal meet where you mail in your times.

The message is simple: Forget everything you’ve heard about swimming; the old way is difficult to follow, frustrating, and wastes your energy and time by concentrating on the wrong things. To become a good swimmer you need neither brawn nor youth, neither great athleticism nor impressive endurance. You need fluent movement and an intelligent, thoughtful approach to making Flow a habit. With this book as your guide, you’ll have both.