Let’s face it: The human body wasn’t designed for swimming. Human beings were not intended to leap headlong into a river and chase after their dinner. God gave the greatest of the apes the power of reason and thus the fly rod came to be. If a person should fall into that river, the instinct to lift his head toward the heavens, thrash about wildly, and scrabble his hairy carcass back onto the shore would serve immediate survival needs well enough. The advance of civilization, however, has allowed those of us at the top of the food chain to spend our idle time tinkering with nature. As such, we have made modest progress in the area of aquatic travel.
By far, the most popular swimming stroke is the freestyle stroke. In competitive swimming, there are four regulation strokes—butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. The first three have very specific and constraining rules that govern how you perform the strokes. In contrast, according to the rules, a freestyle event may be swum in any manner the swimmer chooses as long as she or he completes the distance without using the bottom or sides of the pool or the lane ropes for propulsion.
Most swimmers choose some variation of the crawl stroke for freestyle events. This is because, when swum properly, the crawl is the fastest, most efficient method of moving through the water. Thus, the term freestyle has become the standard term for the crawl. In addition to being the fastest stroke, freestyle is the easiest to learn and is therefore the overwhelming favorite of fitness swimmers. I concentrate entirely on refining and training the freestyle stroke in this book. Nevertheless, many of the concepts, fundamentals, and drills that I describe and build into the workouts in this book also apply to one or more of the other three strokes.
Running and, to a large extent, cycling involve relatively simple and instinctive patterns and ranges of motion. Athletes have found that in both sports, speed, endurance, and technique all improve dramatically by simply training more or harder. This is why most running and cycling training regimens concentrate chiefly on conditioning rather than on technique. Swimming is an entirely different animal. It involves a complex set of repetitive, rhythmic motions. The level of coordination required to execute fluid, efficient swimming strokes is almost beyond comprehension. And because swimming motions and positions are by no means natural, we find that “just doing it” isn’t enough to improve technique.
When we watch athletes perform, our eyes, and thus our attention, are naturally drawn to where we see the largest motions—a pitcher’s throwing arm, a golfer’s arms and club, a karate master’s arms and legs. As a result, we tend to describe and then learn these sports using the appendages as a starting point. Yet in each of these sports, the most critical actions and postures begin in, and radiate from, the body’s core. Without mastery of central-line posture, balance, and coordination of the appendages relative to the core, the pitcher tosses cream puffs, the golfer slices short into the weeds, and the karateka winds up on the mat. Similarly with swimming, we tend to focus almost entirely on the motions of the arms and, to a lesser degree, the legs. Thus, most self-taught swimmers tend to swim by focusing on just their arms and legs. They yank their arms backward through the water with the hope that this will move them forward; they rely on their kick to push them forward like a motorboat and to haul their torso along like cargo. The result is usually an effort-filled struggle down the lane rather than a flow of graceful strokes.
Part II employs an inside-out approach to teaching highly effective swimming. In chapter 4, you’ll learn how to use your core muscles to organize your critical body masses into a water-worthy vessel. Next, you’ll learn and master fully-supported aquatic balance in a variety of positions and through a variety of motions. You’ll learn how to drive the fundamental motions of freestyle swimming with the largest muscles in the body. Chapter 5 introduces full-stroke swimming and provides drills for building your stroke. This approach lays down a foundation of concepts and skills, then builds on that foundation in a logical sequence of manageable steps.
Carefully practicing the skills of swimming allows you to continually improve, while conditioning becomes a by-product of the effort spent practicing those skills. In contrast, mindlessly plodding back and forth between the end walls is like trying to improve your tennis game by simply running back and forth between the baselines of the court. You know intuitively that in order to become an excellent tennis player, you need to practice backhand drills, forehand drills, shot-placement drills, serving drills, and then to use those skills as you play the game. So too with swimming.
My conditioning program is built around practicing drills and exercises that become increasingly complex with each chapter but that condition the muscles and ranges of motion that are required for repeating those skills over long distances. Each drill has one or more feedback tools that will help you determine whether you are doing the drill correctly.
In this part of the book, I also use numerous focus points, each of which distills a complex concept down to a few words. Pay special attention to these points, because I refer to them repeatedly throughout the text and workouts. The concepts will be important not only throughout the rest of the book but for as long as you continue swimming.
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