Teaching Like Never Before:
60 Days in the TI Swim Studio

By Terry Laughlin

As a proponent of Lifelong Learning, I’m a believer that you should learn something new every day. My experiences as a TI Teacher have borne that out, as have my experiences as a TI Swimmer. I continue to discover new things about my relationship with the water – and how to teach it to others – regularly enough that I’m in a pretty steady state of excitement about both, even after swimming for 40 years and coaching for 33.

But when I first taught TI in an Endless Pool (EP), in 2001, I was so impressed by how much faster I could convey important skills to a student who remained in place, inches away from me, rather than moving down the pool at some distance that I decided when we opened our first swimming center, it would feature EPs, rather than a conventional pool.

Since we finally opened the first TI Swim Studio in New Paltz on August 1, teaching in the specialized Studio environment has transformed my teaching more dramatically than anything else I’ve done since I began coaching in 1972. I'll summarize the most prominent reasons, moving from novice swimmers to advanced.


Teaching Beginners. If you’ve reached your adult years without learning to swim, it’s pretty clear that learning “stroke mechanics” isn’t the issue. The essentials for transforming a nervous adult into a confident, graceful water creature are: (1) learning to relax and overcome fear; (2) making “aquatic breathing” matter-of-fact, and (3) eliminating distractions from the learning process. The intimate environment of a 7 x 14 pool, with 90-degree water and privacy, has proven ideal for all of that. And as I wrote in Breathe: It’s Job One for New Swimmers in the last issue of Total Swim, constant proximity to our students revealed how fundamental simple breathing skills are to success. Being in the water with the student, we can clearly observe whether they're holding their breath underwater or releasing it evenly. We have them check the mirror for bubbles from the nose, as well as examine when they begin bubbling and how large the bubbles are. By manually assisting in rotation from nose-down balance positions to nose-up breathing positions, we can eliminate the balance-destroying head-whip of the nervous breather and replace it with the unhurried, aligned, balanced rotation of a confident breather in a matter of minutes. On a more advanced level, we've also found exciting ways to help students transition from “yoga breaths” in Sweet Spot to rhythmic "bite of air" breaths by lightly holding the extended hand in the proper anchor position until just the right moment. After 10 to 30 "assisted" strokes, our students can do it on their own. A skill that has taken some workshop grads months to master is now learned in minutes!



Babies and Kids Instruction. The Studio is fast becoming the "in" place for kids' instruction in New Paltz for two reasons: (1) Kids are always comfortable in the small warm pool and think the current is extremely cool - we let them do a few minutes of "surfing" with the current turned up to max at the end of the lesson; and (2) They're learning. Kids who have taken lessons for months elsewhere with little or no progress to show for it are progressing at an astonishing rate. Their parents are ecstatic. Ria McKay and Cari Laughlin will write a more extensive report on teaching children at the Studio in the next issue.



Stroke Improvers. For the mix of improvement-minded triathletes and fitness swimmers who typically attend TI Workshops, we've accelerated the learning process by a factor of two to three, through a combination of our ability to make instant correction to a swimmer-in-place, the current and the mirrors as explained above. The heightened sense of resistance from the oncoming current also lets them know instantly when they've made the right or wrong choice. With the right choice, they can stay in place over the mirror with noticeably less effort. With the wrong one, they have to work harder or instantly slip backward. But an additional benefit has been the availability of a way to measure their efficiency with great exactness, and to teach and evaluate skills for fast explained more fully below in Verifiable Metrics.


Elite Athletes. With the EP's current velocity meter we now have an unmatched tool for working in a highly controlled way on the speed goals of high-performing triathletes and swimmers. We described our first such experience in the last issue of Total Swim in the articles On Becoming a Mighty Fish and Solo Swim Camp: One Week with an Elite Triathlete.



Workshops. We now conduct "weekend workshops" - with just four students in two pools – in one day in the Studio, getting outcomes far superior to those in regular workshops. Besides the reasons I cited just above, we are also getting results that are demonstrably more meaningful: In our weekend workshops our students achieve an average improvement in stroke efficiency of 20% to 25% as measured by 25-yard stroke counts. However, we have long recognized that the meaningfulness of that measure is somewhat compromised by (a) the folks who are semi-drilling or stretch their pushoff, and (b) most swim somewhat slower on the 2nd test. Read on to see how we’ve made our improvement metrics completely solid in the Studio.


Verifiable Metrics. Last week in the Studio, I had two 90-minute sessions with a triathlete from Manhattan, a former college swimmer who has been an age group champion in several prominent tri races. As accomplished as he already was, he still improved his Stroke Length by over 50% in just three hours, improvement that was 100% meaningful.

Because we can't count strokes per distance, our benchmarking process involves a Stroke Rate test at three current speeds. The first is chosen by the swimmer, aiming to approximate normal training speeds. The second is 10% higher and the third is 20% higher. We time 10 strokes (five cycles) at each speed, to test how their Stroke Rate is affected by velocity. When current is increased 20% does their SR increase by 30% (not great) or by 4% (great)? And by multiplying current speed in meters per second by the number of seconds it takes them to complete 10 strokes, we can calculate how far they would have traveled during those 10 strokes.

His time for 10 strokes at a current speed of 1 meter/second was 11.7 sec, which translates to traveling 11.7 meters in 10 strokes. After three hours of coaching, when we tested again at the same speed, it took him 17.7 sec to complete 10 strokes which means he traveled 17.7 meters in 10 strokes, an improvement of over 50% in his Stroke Length at a constant velocity. Seeing a student who’s been swimming for 30 years or more achieve that kind of transformation in just three hours is pretty exciting stuff.

Watch for more reports from the Studio in future issues, and read about our 1-day Studio Workshops here.


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