• Patience Pays. Because your torso has much more mass than your arms, it can’t move as fast. One reason for emphasizing Patient Hands is that your hands need to wait until your core is in position for a weight shift. If they don’t wait, then your arms end up doing the work instead. In Freestyle and Backstroke, hold the extended hand in place until you feel the opposite side of your body poised to fall. In Butterfly and Breaststroke, hold your extended hands forward until your chest has fallen completely and your hips have reached their highest point.
• Send Energy Forward. With this focal point, gravity will do much of the work your arms and legs used to do. But gravity’s force is mainly down. To convert that into forward momentum, you need to spear or lunge or land forward with your hands during recovery. Where your focus in the past may have been to send energy toward your feet, now your focus will always be to send it forward. In Freestyle you spear forward with one hand, while holding on with the other. In Backstroke, you accelerate the recovering hand into the water, while the other holds your place in the water. In Breaststroke, you lunge forward with your hands – and in Butterfly land forward softly with them – as your chest drives down. Then hold the water there as your hips drive down and move toward them.
• Swim “Inside Out.” In Human Swimming, when you want to swim faster, you move your arms and legs faster. In TI Swimming, you learn to change speeds in your core and keep arms and legs in tune with how fast your core is moving. Remember, if you accelerate your armstroke, your core won’t be able to keep up and your arms will just get tired faster from having to do all the work themselves. If you speed up your legs…well, your entire body will get more tired with little to show for it. As I suggested in the previous chapter, you can add a little bit of speed while maintaining Patient Hands, by moving your core a little faster. Add speed in small doses, always focused on maintaining the same feeling you had before.
• What About Your Kick? A chapter devoted to kicking follows immediately. For now, I’ll say that the primary role of your legs in TI Swimming is to aid the action of your core body – not (with the exception of Breaststroke) to propel you in any significant way. So your focus with your legs is to integrate your kick with the movement of your core. Details to follow in the stroke-specific chapters.

This article has been excerpted from Terry Laughlin’s new book, Extraordinary Swimming for Every Body.


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