Total Immersion Swimming

By Louis Tharp

While a third of the country was watching and listening to a football game, a muted video helped teach Michael and Joe to swim better.

I love the words that serve me as a coach, but I love more a soundless video and a wet swimmer on deck with eyes glued to a fresh replay of the last 100 yards.

Swim. Watch. Swim better.

My job is to handle the Coach Cam - yes I still use the Coach Cam instead of the little hand-held digital toys - and, when viewing the playback, to ignore all but one technique issue. My job is to pick the technique miscue that will result in the most significant improvement and then explain how body management responds to visual cues and requires visual confirmation.

Then it's a matter of swim, watch, swim better.

Tonight's technique topic was anchored arm and hand. Anchored when gliding - the easy part - and anchored when breathing - the part we think is easy. It's a body management issue that improves with visual guidance, not verbal. Not all body management issues do.

Ignoring every other technique issue is important to successfully modifying one. It is too easy to give the swimmer five technique issues to work out, and too hard for each of you to keep from being frustrated and angry when none of them is.

Simplicity rules with visual communication. We don't understand how a swimmer can look at a video and then change movement in the water one minute later, but we know keeping it simple allows the process to work.

Video isn't the answer to all technique issues. You can't watch a fast swimmer on video and then swim fast. But you watch yourself, focus on one issue, and then change what you do in the water so you can become better.

Focus on anchored hand with arm at a 45-degree angle when measured against the water's surface - that's what Michael and Joe did tonight. That was all they had to do, but they also stayed engaged and had fun. (Except for one part where Joe had a Tempo Trainer tantrum and ripped it out of his swim cap the way Tom Hanks ripped the heart and respiration suction electrodes off his chest before he brought Apollo 13 into the Earth's atmosphere.)

So, how can you have fun focusing on anchored hand? I know, and the swimmers I coach know. I can't speak for anyone else. But then I can't understand how you can drive a Toyota Camry and stay focused and have fun - oh yea, you can't.

But what I really don't know is how you have fun and stay focused on Sunday sitting in front of the television watching somebody else earn a living by playing the sport you used to play when you were fit? Have you ever thought about ball sports and how they are the sports you play when you are young? And they are the sports you play that tear up your body? And they are the sports you stop playing and start watching so you eat and drink and put even more distance between you and your wife, and your 80th birthday?

Ball sports aren't good for us, even if they include the chance to hear the Constitution read aloud before the Super Bowl on Fox. (Rupert Murdoch is the only person who would unapologetically inject politics into sports. Oh yea, Hu Jintao, president of the People's Republic of China during the Bejing Olympics did it, too. Hu, meet Rupert. Oh, you've already met.)

OK, even for me, this is digression.

Michael and Joe became a better swimmers tonight. And they can tell you what they learned during practice. This puts them in the 99th percentile of adult athletes, and if you're an adult athlete, you're in the 99th percentile of humans - probably higher. That's more exclusive than Fisher Island, and you don't have to be part of the lucky sperm club (calm down - that's a trust-fund baby) to belong.

To make it more difficult and imprint the sense of muscle stretch and position, the anchor drill is three strokes and then glide with head up. Then roll to all the way to your back with your arm remaining in the original anchor position.

Yea. I hear you. "Roll to back? Have you lost your mind? That is a sure way to ensure over-rotation while swimming. Why would you imprint a roll-to-back in the middle of a swim drill?"

Relax Doris. I think the kinesthetic feel of the body begging that arm to move, and the brain saying "no," is worth it. The brain has to control muscles because fatigue is a muscular symptom.

We have to teach swimmers how to override muscle with brain or they'll be slaves to their chiseled abs which say uncle long before the brain says stop.

Actually, if there is over-rotation - a negative word I don't use with swimmers - we work on high elbow/high shoulder, and it goes away, and they never knew they had it. You don't over-rotate if you have a high shoulder at the body-end of a leading anchored hand unless you work for Cirque de Soleil, and then what you do with your body is between you and steel cylinder you just wiggled into or out of.

So, out of 111 million people who watched the Super Bowl Sunday, only Michael and Joe became a better swimmers.

And I became a better coach.

And that's a home run.

 About:

Louis Tharp is a competitive age-group swimmer and a TI triathlon swim coach who is currently taking a few semesters off from West Point coaching in order to work one-on-one with Nicholas Sterghos, an '09 West Point graduate and pro triathlete.

Louis Tharp's book, "Overachiever's Diary, How The Army Triathlon Team Became World Contenders" is available from Total Immersion.

Read a sample chapter and reviews from the top triathlon and swimming media at Overachiever's Diary.

Buy Overachiever's Diary by Louis Tharp on TI. Read a review of Overachiever's Diary at active.com

His home pool is Club Fit, Briarcliff in Westchester County, New York.

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