Topic: Should I Recommend TI?
Conf: Freestyle
From: Gene Prescott
I have a friend who is a fitness swimmer. She has a TI book and DVD but has never seriously committed to TI practice. She normally swims an hour non-stop and thinks she could easily swim two hours without tiring. She is skeptical of "messing with her stroke" in fear of regression, especially as it relates to breathing. If she were swimming poorly, that would suggest she should pay the price of re-inventing her stroke. But in her circumstances should she attempt any radical changes?


From: Adam Honen
I think she should. Correct technique can lower the chances of injury. It can also allow you to use the correct muscle groups, giving you a better workout.

Swimming for one hour straight is more about mental toughness then physical superiority. We need rest and when we don’t get it we find ways to cheat ourselves. (Ever see anyone doing extremely fast stomach crunches? They have to cheat.) She might be a great swimmer, but more likely she’s average - good enough
to swim for that long, but so are many others.


From: Rhoda Potter
I could swim for about an hour before I got seriously into T.I., but not very fast and not very often or my shoulders started acting up. I'd played around a bit with the first TI book, so my form wasn't awful, but my SPL was 26 to 30. After taking some TI instruction, I could only manage a few lengths at a time. So, there is a possibility your friend would experience some awkwardness, but it does go away. This year I've begun seeing an improvement over what I could do before the T.I. lessons.

Everybody learns at a different rate. Maybe your friend would improve very quickly, maybe she'd be off kilter for a while. It's still worth doing. Swimming will just feel different after learning it.


From: Richard Skerrett
Most people I see at my local pool could do with a serious dose of TI, even those who appear to swim for a mile or so fairly easily if not effortlessly. They seem quite happy, though. There's a chap who comes regularly and swims this terrible breaststroke with a short rapid pull and a crooked kick and head out of the water all the time. He's quite fast and obviously pretty fit, but I often wonder what he would be like if he would just try a glide on every stroke. There are also freestylers who raise their heads to breathe on every stroke. Of course some very stylish ones, too, who obviously have studied somewhere.

I sometimes feel I should stand on the side of the pool like an evangelist and preach the TI message. Perhaps example is better than precept, though.


From: Angus MacGowan
The thing is, it is completely up to your friend. As regulars here will know, a few months ago I was training for a long open water swim and was pretty comfortable swimming for 2 or 3 hours. Without doubt, I was aerobically the fittest I've ever been. Now the longest interval I'm doing is 25m, do about 50% drills and swim so much slower that I don't even bother about looking at the clock.

I feel sometimes like I've "sacrificed" something at this stage whilst I try and learn to swim again from first principles. Upon reflection, I think that those of us who swim (or run, or bike) to gain fitness see it as something won by hard work and dedication. And it is. But as a result, it becomes something that is difficult to let go. Going back and doing drills is humbling. I get in the pool next to some swimmers who go faster than me, and as I glide up and down at a snails pace with my funny looking Fistgloves on, I want to yell out "Hey, I'm slower than you today but I swam a relay across the channel and you just don't know it and I reckon I'd be faster than you an' all!"

Which, obviously would be a stupid thing to do, if somewhat amusing to those watching.

Some posts here recently have referred to philosophies of learning that require you to embrace the fact that you will make mistakes or be awkward. That idea resonated with me.

It's a humbling experience starting from scratch, because you lose status. You have to demote yourself from the fast lane. You have to look a bit odd and clumsy. Your times disintegrate. In many subtle ways, “status” acts as a subconscious barrier to learning, by preventing us from being willing to take steps backwards in order to move further forward.

All these things come into play before one makes the decision to start drilling rather than just swimming "as normal". Considered in these terms, it is understandable why someone like your friend would elect not to change her stroke. I hasten to add, I'm not suggesting that she's a lesser individual for not changing - rather, she's taking a view based on factors that may differ from those that motivate regulars on this Forum.

From: Robert McAdams
A time-honored approach in music, when you're trying to learn a difficult passage, is to slow it down to a speed at which you can play it correctly. But when you do this, it doesn't usually work to just suddenly bring it back up to the proper speed. Instead, you need to gradually speed it up, making sure that you are still playing it correctly at each intermediate speed.

It occurs to me that perfecting your swimming stroke is like working a Rubik's Cube. When the Cube is thoroughly mixed up, it's relatively easy to make it look better. But the closer you get it to perfection, the harder it is and the more moves it takes to improve it further. And the really hard part is that when a Rubik's Cube is near perfection–when there are only, say, 3 cubes out of place – fixing it requires doing things that will temporarily make it look worse.

I have on a few occasions gotten a call from a parent whose son or daughter is getting ready for some big, important meet that's coming up in a week or two and who wants to know whether they can schedule a lesson so I can make some last-minute improvements in their child's stroke that will make the difference in their big race.

If it's a child I've worked with in the past, I have no problem with it, because I know that the lesson will be a checkup to make sure that they haven't gotten off track with any of the things we've worked on. But if it's a child I've never worked with before, I'm reluctant to do it because I know that most of the problems I'm likely to see aren't things than can be fixed in one lesson, and that if I try, the things we can get through in that one lesson may actually make them slower for their big race than if we did nothing at all.

Some swimmers actually develop a sort of an addiction to speed, in which seeing a faster time on a stopwatch gives them a kind of emotional fix. This can be detrimental to a swimmer's long term progress. It's important to recognize that the key to ultimately seeing faster times on the stopwatch may be doing things today that give you a slower time.

From: Terry Laughlin
This is one of the most interesting threads I have read on this Forum in a long time. It is really about motivation and expectation, not about whether to recommend TI to a friend. I’ve met hundreds of swimmers who say "I have your book" (or perhaps even “I love your book”) yet have done little more than read it. They haven’t ordered a DVD, taken instruction and possibly haven’t even done much drill practice. Still most tell me they enjoy swimming more as a result of reading it and I’m pleased at that.

At the other end of the spectrum are regular members of this Forum who have made TI practice an organizing principle for every minute of pool time, do every lap in an “examined” way, and have even seen TI positively influence other parts of their lives. Understanding the attitudinal differences between the people at each end of that spectrum is the real subject of this thread.

The thread "article on learning" from last summer described two fascinating articles on excellence and behavior: One, on Anders Ericsson, described the Expert Performance Movement, a group of scholars who have inquired into whether excellence in various fields - math, music, chess, sports - was a product of genes or effort. The conclusion was that the most influential factor in rising from "average" to "expert" was – more than sheer volume of practice – an inclination toward what they call "Deliberate Practice."

The second article referenced was "The Expert Mind" from the August issue of Scientific American. It described a study of how chess grandmasters differ from "good" chess players who are lower rated. The eye-opening conclusion was that average players tend to be satisfied once they reach a level of play they consider "good enough." Expert players are never satisfied…which is different from being "dissatisfied." It's more having a restless mind.

What would make a difference to Gene's friend would be if something shifted her from mildly curious to impassioned. Right now swimming in an "unexamined way" is meeting her needs. It would be utterly boring and unsatisfying to me. In fact it would cause me to quit swimming.

On the other hand, while I’m an avid outdoorsman, I'm incurious about nature. My sister, who was a forestry major in college and a National Park Service forest ranger, knows the phylogeny of nearly everything she sees outdoors. I "appreciate" nature esthetically, but it's all just bugs, bushes and trees to me. I can't think of what might change my attitude about that. In fact, sometimes while I'm out hiking, biking, or paddling in the most beautiful surroundings imaginable – which in New Paltz are right outside my door – my mind often drifts to swimming.

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