Here’s another excerpt from my upcoming book on open water swimming, Outside the Box, which complements our DVD of the same name. You can read all of Chapter 3, from which this is excerpted on the Discussion Forum.

I’m posting it here because it also answers a common question: "What will I learn at a TI Workshop and how is it different from conventional instruction?"

Traditional instruction  teaches you to pull and kick. TI teaches you to save energy. This blog explains why and how.

In November 2007, Popular Mechanics published an article about what a group of physicists and engineers learned while designing a swim foil for the Navy Seals. After comparing the swimming efficiency of humans with dolphins, these researchers calculated that human swimmers average only three percent efficiency! I.E. 97% of our energy and "horsepower" gets diverted into something other than forward motion.

For comparison, elite swimmers are less than 10% efficient — that’s right, even Michael Phelps wastes over 90% — whereas dolphins are 80% energy efficient.
What we should take from this is the invaluable awareness that the opportunity to gain endurance (and speed) by saving energy is far greater than what you can gain by getting fitter. Put another way, if you can improve your energy efficiency from, say, 3 percent to 4 percent, that translates into a 33% energy gain for you. From 4 percent to 5 percent is a 25% improvement. Efficiency improvements in this range can often be attained in 10 to 30 hours of focused practice while it would take many months to raise your fitness by a similar amount. (But even when you do, well over 90% will go to waste.) Fortunately the virtually universal causes of inefficiency are easy to understand and thus allow for relatively straightforward solutions.

Three Solutions to Energy Waste

Energy Problem #1: Help, I’m sinking!
Actually, sinking is normal (even helpful as I’ll explain below.) The natural position for a human body is 95% underwater. The only naturally-buoyant part of the body is the chest cavity; your lower body tends to sink. As gravity drags your legs down, buoyancy pushes your lungs up. That "uphill" position hugely increases frontal resistance, or drag. Even worse, our brains interpret that sinking sensation as life-threatening causing you to do whatever it takes to stay afloat. "Survival" strokes are exhausting and massively inefficient – and they cause muscle tension that magnifies your sinking tendency.
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Energy-Smart Solution #1: Cooperate with Gravity
Gravity is an irresistible force, so it makes far more sense to use it than fight it. Do that by relaxing into the water. When you do, you’ll discover that you feel more comfortable, and can even move more easily: Not only will you save energy, but there’s less drag below the surface (where fish swim) than at the surface (where humans try to swim.) Here’s how:
1) Let yourself sink. Instead of fighting to stay on top, let yourself sink into a more horizontal – and lower drag – position. When you relax your buoyant upper torso into the water – while extending your bodyline from fingers to toes — your hips will respond by rising a bit. And as we’ve often seen when teaching novices, as soon as they stop fighting gravity, the resulting relaxation increases their general buoyancy. The ability to "swim relaxed" helps explain why elite swimmers, even with low body fat, have great body position.
2) "Hang" your head. When you release your head’s weight into the water, it will naturally sink into a neutral — aligned with the spine — position. This reduces drag in two ways: (a) as your head sinks, your hips should rise even more, and (b) positioning your head to travel through the same "water space" as your torso, reduces water resistance a bit more. Relaxing your head tends to spread relaxation into shoulders and upper back, which helps in many ways.

Though I’ve emphasized that "cooperating with gravity" reduces drag, for many novice swimmers, an even greater impact is the reassuring sense of support that transforms a harrowing experience into confidence and comfort…even optimism! It breaks the survival- stroking cycle, and gives you the freedom – and presence of mind — to use your arms and legs more effectively and efficiently.

At the workshop, the Superman Glide, Superman Flutter and Skating drills teach you to Cooperate with Gravity. 

 

Energy Problem #2: Water is a wall.
The "aero" positions of bicycle racers and the shape of bullets and bullet trains tell you how essential avoiding air resistance is to moving fast and efficiently through "thin air." Now consider that water is almost a thousand times denser than air, and ponder how much thought you’ve given to "active streamlining" vs. pulling-and-kicking in your swimming.
What every low-drag body, from NASA rockets to barracuda, have in common is a "fuselage" shape — tapered in front, sleek behind. The pointy leading edge gradually separates air or water molecules before the thicker part comes through. When the leading edge is blunt, or the body unsmooth, the molecules move crazily, creating waves, turbulence and momentum-sapping eddies.
A fish body — unitary, balanced, propelled by oscillation or undulation – is perfectly designed to minimize turbulence. A human body – independent head and limbs, protruding shoulders and hips, flexing elbows/knees/ankles – is almost perfectly designed to maximize it. Our swimming style – head-whipping, arms-windmilling and legs-churning — not lack of fitness, is the prime reason we swim slowly and tire too easily.

Energy-Smart Solution #2: Take the path of least resistance

From our very first attempt to get from this end of the pool to that end, our most basic thought is about pulling and kicking. And in Red Cross lessons, what we were taught was mostly how to kick and pull. Thus our traditional concepts about "freestyle technique" can be summed up as "Arms pull me forward. Legs kick me forward." This creates an upper-body/lower-body division.
Total Immersion technique emphasizes active streamlining via a core concept for freestyle swimming of Right-Side-Streamline alternating with Left-Side-Streamline. Visualize parallel "tracks" extending forward of each shoulder. Spear your arm forward along its track then align torso and legs to follow it through that "channel." Active Streamlining shifts your focus from pushing on the water molecules behind you to separating those in front of you. When you do , you’ll swim farther and faster…easier.

At the Workshop, we use the Skating and Spear-Switch drills teach Active Streamlining. 

 

Energy Problem #3: No traction.
Water may act like a "wall" when you try to move a poorly-streamlined body through it, but it just swirls away when you try to push it back. And your hand is puny compared to the body mass it’s trying to propel. Even when you do it perfectly, pushing water back is a terribly inefficient form of propulsion: Propeller-driven boats run circles around paddlewheelers. And finally, the arm-and-shoulder muscles we use to push water back are highly prone to fatigue.
When you combine the challenges of a sinking, unstable body, high drag, poor traction, and fast-fatiguing muscles, swimming is like trying to pedal a bicycle up a ski slope. At best, pulling and kicking offer poor solutions to those challenges. At worst – when done by low-skilled swimmers – even the minimal efficiencies that are possible are undermined by energy diverted in the wrong direction – downward and sideways, rather than forward and back.

Energy-Smart Solution #3: Swim with your body.
Traditional thinking about technique (an "arms department" that pulls you forward and a "legs department" that pushes you forward) turns the torso into inert "baggage" to be dragged through the water. In the TI method, you swim with your body, instead of your arms and legs. Here’s how: (1) Your left arm is poised for entry. You’re mentally "aiming" it down its track. (2) Your left side is rotated slightly above the surface. (3) Use your "high" (left) hip to drive that arm down the track. (4) As you do your left side gets longer and sleeker – like a human torpedo. When you shift your thinking from "use my lead hand to push water back" to "drive the high side down" you combine gravity, body mass and every-muscle-in-the-body-working-together in a powerful movement that uses remarkably little energy. Harnessing "free" energy creates what we call Perpetual Motion Propulsion.

At the Workshop, we use the SpearSwitch and ZenSwitch drills to teach you to Swim with your Body. 

 

Improve your stroke first.
While these solutions may seem straightforward, it’s essential to understand that each is counter-intuitive. I.E. It’s a rare swimmer who will instinctively let themselves sink, or separate water molecules. Second, changing habits imprinted by millions of "human-swimming" strokes over years or decades won’t happen easily or quickly. And finally, each of the three solutions is built on several foundational skills. For most people these skills have been acquired via a patient and devoted effort, employing drills and focal points in particular sequences, which are most often learned from a TI Coach or from our self-coaching videos.

You can also teach yourself these three energy-saving solutions with our Easy Freestyle DVD.  Lessons 1 and 2 teach you to Cooperate with Gravity. Lessons 2 and 3 teach you Active Streamlining. Lessons 3 and 4 teach you to Swim With your Body.