Let’s slow down for just a minute. Despite all our talk in the last chapter about fast training, speed isn’t everything when it comes to swimming well. There are times, in fact, when it’s not even a very good idea and can actually do you more harm than good. The way I teach swimming, you can’t become really proficient without a fair amount of slow—I prefer to call it effective —swimming.
Does that get your attention? It should. It’s not only good news, it happens to be correct despite the fact that, as I said in the last chapter, you sometimes need to get yourself good and winded to fill up your anaerobic fuel tank if you expect to be able to take it to the limit in a race. Also, as we’ll see in the next chapter, you must be willing to swim with one eye on the clock and the other on the lane lines. But in the Total Immersion system, nothing does as much for your stroke as careful, thoughtful practice at a pace that lets you stroke effectively and move efficiently. Learn to do that and speed will come more easily anyway.
That’s not a popular notion in the athletic profession, and you’ll have no trouble finding swim coaches who disagree with me. Too bad there’s such an abundance of people convinced you must train hard all the time to improve at swimming, people who have helped establish popular training gospel. When top swimmers get written up, their prowess is inevitably credited to a litany of extraordinary sacrifices and ferocious work habits.
But coaches don’t know it all. In fact, there’s more and more they can learn from the work of the swim community’s scientists. And one of the things they’re gradually learning—though they’re fighting it tooth and nail—is that easy swimming is a formidably effective training tool, even for top racers.
Take Alexander Popov—again. You don’t get to be indisputably the best in the world without knowing a thing or two about technique and how to get it. So what can we make of the fact that even though Popov’s best events are the shortest, fastest, most anaerobic in all of swimming, nearly 70 percent of his training yardage is below the so-called anaerobic threshold? If you said it must be because Popov knows it does him more good, you were right. He was breathing comfortably, patiently laying down tracks in his nervous system for an ultra-efficient stroke that will stand firm and propel him effectively during the precisely administered hard, fast work he also does.
Coaches can’t cling to the “no pain, no gain” defense anymore either. While they have always followed the gospel that more and harder are better, the physiologists have at least gotten them to admit that adding in some easier produces superior results. Until recently, in swimming especially, the recovery period was the best-kept secret in training. Recovery, you’ll remember from the last chapter, is when the adaptations you want—like your muscles growing stronger—actually take place. Too bad that for so many years most coaches, believing the only good time was work time, were reluctant to take a chance by taking it easy on their swimmers at regular intervals. Training policy was like the proverbial line in the sand: Can’t stand the heat? Get out of the pool. Philosopher Nietzsche, coaches agreed, knew how to shape a swimmer: “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Unless it makes you exhausted and weaker. Too much hard work results in what scientists call failing adaptation syndrome. The body, seeing no glimmer of light at the end of the hard/harder/hardest tunnel, gives up on ever getting a chance to adapt and just slowly collapses. Athletes grow tired, slow, and weak … if they don’t get sick or injured first. Some swim coaches accept this decline with their eyes open, counting on a precompetition taper to pull everything out of the fire. Beat ’em up bad, then rest the dickens out of them, and your swimmers will come through big time, eh, big guy?
And so they might. Their bodies are so grateful for finally getting a chance to catch their breaths (figuratively and literally) that they “superadapt,” as the scientists say, taking a big leap forward. Unfortunately, the coaches then give all the credit to the hard work, even though it may have actually pushed the swimmers perilously close to coming apart. And as traditional coaches, they’d never admit it was the rest that finally allowed the athletes to reach their true potential.
But the scientists have been talking a little louder lately, and they’ve begun to get through. “Uh, Coach, wouldn’t it make more sense to build your athletes up in a series of small steps? Work a little, rest a little, then work a little harder? Kind of ratchet them up from each level to the new one?” Makes more sense than drowning everybody in training, triggering a long stale period, then turning them loose with one big miraculous recovery at the end.
“And oh yes, your swimmers might enjoy it more.”
So coaches have grudgingly begun to accept the wisdom of training their athletes more scientifically, permitting more easy days, maybe even—subversive thought!—a whole week now and then of relaxed and low-key training. They grumble, mind you, over violating their dearest training commandment. Some even disdainfully call it garbage yardage. Most swimmers like it (others, the bedrock traditionalists, would still rather have Nietzsche running workouts), but many aren’t benefiting as much as they could because the coaches still see a day of easy swimming as a regrettably necessary “backing off.” They don’t understand it’s a major opportunity.
But champion Alexander Popov’s coach understood this long ago. It’s not just recovery, he knew, it’s a way to allow aerobic adaptations you’ve already earned—your very conditioning—to finally happen. It’s also the only good way to train your nervous system to use that conditioning in the most efficient possible way. When your heart’s humming along at 130 or 140 BPM, you can work on precise skills and techniques that are impossible when it’s pounding at 180. Things like stroke drills, sensory swimming, stroke-limited swims, and speed without “stroke cost.” And since your body’s ability to swim with maximum efficiency is far more critical than its ability to swim with maximum effort, it’s clear the time spent on easy laps is probably not just as important but more important.
And Popov will prove to be just the tip of the iceberg when the easy-training news finally gets around. In the mid-1990s, Russian swimmers held every freestyle world record from the 50 through the 400 meters. Inevitably, the coaches of America’s elite athletes got the idea too.
But cutting-edge training usually takes much longer to filter down to the self-coached adult. And if any one group of athletes needs the advice more than any other, it’s triathletes. Just think: three sports to push yourself to exhaustion in! Plus the fanciful cross-training notion that hard work in one sport somehow qualifies as recovery from hard work in another. So they hammer in running, hammer in biking, and hammer in swimming, then wonder why they spend half their lives nursing injuries.
Grinding out run and bike miles may do some good, since those less technical sports get a bigger boost from gains in basic physical prowess. But hard swim training makes no sense at all for the average triathlete whose best bet is to never, never, never swim hard. Figure it out. In the race itself, victory always goes to the fastest biker or runner, never (never, never) to the fastest swimmer. There’s even a word for triathletes who work hard during the swim leg. They’re called losers. These earnest types struggle to a small lead out of the water while everybody else sits back and comfortably drafts behind them, getting pulled along. The strugglers quickly get swallowed up on the bike and finally collapse altogether on the run. Everyone who coasted through the swim goes on to ride and run to glory.
So for the multisport among you, the bottom line is this: Since your smartest move in a triathlon is to keep your heart rate at 130 to 140 bpm for the entire swim, training at anything higher is a waste of time and energy. Your take-it-easy work will pay big dividends if only you follow these two points:
1. Remember our familiar rule of 70 (performance is determined 70 percent by stroke efficiency and only 30 percent by fitness), and take advantage of it against your competition. Only a tiny fraction of triathletes come from a competitive-swimming background. Most are former runners, who are generally very fit but who also have just rudimentary swimming skills. There’s your chance, and it’s a huge opportunity. Instead of working out, practice, using the Total Immersion methods I’ve covered in this book.
2. Remember too that swimming is the best way to speed up your recovery from hard work in other sports like biking and running. Dial down the swimming effort, concentrate on fine-tuning your nervous-system training instead of wasting work on your already superb aerobic machinery, and you’ll bounce back fitter and faster. That in turn will make you a stronger runner and cyclist, since those sports no longer have to share scarce aerobic-adaptation resources with swimming. This is not wishful thinking or clever wordplay. Triathletes have told me over and over that it happens to them once they adjust their training to the Total Immersion method. Did I give them secret tips about running or biking? Of course not. I’m a swim coach. But I could help them in those other sports nonetheless by making them smarter swim trainers.
And what about that other competitive group, Masters swimmers (technically anyone over nineteen, but in practice mostly swimmers from thirty to ninety-plus)? They too know that better swim times come from punching up their aerobic powers. Only one problem with that. Most are forty and over, and they’ve had plenty of time to work on their cardiovascular conditioning. And with nature beginning to lower the ceiling just a little anyway, pushing cardiovascular conditioning any higher—unless you’ve just been sitting around for a long time—is unlikely. So any future personal bests will come from better stroke mechanics, not from scaling some new training heights.
What if you couldn’t care less about racing in the first place? Does it really make any difference whether you try to blast from one end of the pool to the other or plan careful, measured practices? Indeed it does. And there are literally millions of people who need to know that. Considering that there are maybe 50,000 racers and somewhere between 4 million and 5 million fitness swimmers, about 99.9 percent of all swimmers have less interest in whether they’re swimming fast or slow than in whether they’re staying healthy and strong and having fun along the way. They need to know they can get 100 percent of the benefits and enjoyment they seek without ever breaking a sweat.
Why, even racers generally know that most of the changes in your body that transform you into an athlete occur at heart rates well below the so-called anaerobic threshold, the point where you get seriously out of breath. Your cardiac output improves more efficiently, you burn more fat, and you build more basic endurance at lower heart rates. And if that sounds like a complete list of the most important antiaging effects, that’s because it is. Your muscles get stronger in the bargain.
So what’s missing? Just the anaerobic training you need for racing. But if you’re not going to race anyway, who needs it? You can still steadily improve because your easy aerobic training will let you maximize your efficiency more and more and more. You’re less likely to suffer injuries or staleness and more apt to train consistently, since you don’t need the periods of rest and recovery demanded by hard training, and you’ll find it’s easier to make swimming match the schedules of your everyday life.
For all but the elite among us, I say haste makes waste. Speed up your swimming improvement by slowing down your training.
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