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Most swimmers believe that stroke technique means "how
you push water back with your hands," and give that
motion most of their attention. Working on "technique"
therefore means tweaking the armstroke, and "power"
means putting more force and acceleration into it. Between
what instinct suggests, and traditional instruction reinforces,
the hands do seem to be 90% of swimming.
Most swimming books also share a keen fascination with
hand movements, reporting in staggering detail on angle
of attack, sweeps, pitches, vectors, lift forces, etc.
The hands of gifted swimmers unquestionably do
move in highly nuanced ways. But while that information
may have academic interest, its practical value is nil.
The movements described happen so quickly that no swimmer
can consciously control the adjustments needed to get
them just right. And elite swimmers don't get their wonderful
technique from reading those books; they just do what
feels best. And you can acquire a lot of that advantageous
feel by following the advice in this chapter.
But understand this: Even if swimmers did have the concentration
and precise muscular control to make the fine adjustments
to get the hand pattern just right, at the end of the
day it's still just a little hand pushing against water...trying
to propel a big body through a resistant medium. Always
minimize drag first.
Learn to "Anchor" Your Hands
My mentor, Coach Bill Boomer, once said: "Your
hips are the engine for swimming; your hands are just
the propellers." And one of the surest ways to disconnect
your propeller from its engine is overly aggressive stroking.
A "controlled" stroke, one that stays connected
to its power source through its full length, is one that
begins with an "anchored" hand.
On land, the power-producing kinetic chain starts from
a fixed (or "anchored") point – feet planted
on the ground. You begin by twisting the body away from
the intended direction of the movement – e.g., rearing
back to throw a baseball or taking a backswing in golf.
With the feet fixed in place, you get an effect known
as elastic loading, similar to stretching a rubber band.
The cocked hip then acts like a whip handle, throwing
energy upward through torso, shoulders, and arms, with
increasing speed and power.
With no foot-to-ground anchor, a swimmer’s hips cannot
act as a whip handle. But they can deliver power by working
as a unit with the torso and arms. Still, the process
must start with an anchoring point to create that fingers-to-toes
band of engaged muscle we used to such dynamic effect
on the playground swing. In fishlike swimming that power-linkage
starts with an "anchored hand." While your instincts
tell you to grab water and push it back hard, you
can actually tap far more effortless power by extending
your hand fully, and then just holding on to your place
in the water — as if grasping a rung on a ladder
—rather than hurriedly pushing back. Try to make
your hand stand still, then let the kinetic chain roll
you past the spot where your hand is anchored.
This was first observed in 1970, when famed Indiana University
coach Doc Counsilman filmed swimming legend Mark Spitz,
the world's greatest swimmer at the time, with an underwater
camera. Attaching tiny lights to Spitz's hands to highlight
their movements, Counsilman shot him from the side, against
a gridlike backdrop. When he viewed the film at slow motion,
Counsilman was startled to see that Spitz's hands exited
the water forward of where they had entered. Spitz
could not possibly be pushing his hands back, if they
came out ahead of their entry point.
Nor could Jackie Hatherly, a 35-year-old Ironman qualifier
from Toronto, who attended a TI workshop in April, 2000
and who quickly developed one of the most fishlike strokes
we've ever seen. Watching from the side on underwater
video on the second day, it was obvious that her hands
entered and exited at the same place, while her body slid
sleekly past their anchoring point on each stroke. Small
wonder that she swam 25 meters freestyle in 11 strokes,
after taking 17 strokes to swim the same distance just
a day earlier.
Learn to "Feel the Water"
Training yourself to make your hand stand still rather
than pushing it back does seem odd. How can your body
go in one direction unless your hand goes the other? Admittedly,
the water doesn’t offer a convenient grip. But when
you develop an acute "feel of the water," you
can use your grip on the water to move yourself forward
very nearly as a rock climber uses his hold on the rock
to move upward. Coaches often describe "feel of the
water" as a prize with a staggering price. They can't
define it exactly, but suggest you must have been
born with a gift for controlling elusive water molecules…or
must spend millions of yards patiently acquiring this
special knack.
There is no doubt that most elite swimmers have a variety
of gifts that help them perform on a higher plane, and
"feel of the water" is among the most important.
But it's not difficult to explain. It’s simply a
heightened ability to sense minute differences in water
pressure, and maximize that pressure with the body's propelling
surfaces while minimizing it with the rest of the body.
There is also no doubt that feel of the water can
be an acquired skill. And it needn't take years to acquire.
Here’s how you can get a better grip on the ability
to hold the water:
- Get
the catch right. Swimmers usually give about 90
percent of their technique focus to the armstroke,
and by now you know I think that's a poor use of your
brainpower, preferring you pay more attention to drag
because that brings faster, better results. But, when
you do focus on propelling actions (mainly
after you are balanced, tall, slippery, and moving
fluently), give 90% of that attention to the
"catch." Focus on your hands while they're
in front of your head (see below for guidance), and
once they've passed your shoulders, just let them
fall off your mental radar screen. Once properly initiated,
a stroke doesn't benefit from further guidance.
- Start
each stroke by making your hands stand still.
Your instincts tell you to grab the water and push
back. Ignore them. Instead, teach yourself to make
your hand stay in front while you bring your body
over it. Yes, this is a difficult goal, but work at
it patiently and mindfully anyway. Such efforts will
help you resist the urge to muscle the water back.
- Drill,
drill, drill. Learning a skill as elusive and
refined as this takes a lot of concentration,
the kind you get in drills, where you repeat simple
movements with full attention instead of trying to
tweak something that happens in a millisecond in whole-stroke
swimming. The "–Switch"– drills
in Lessons Three, Four, and Five teach you to connect
your hands to your core body, and move them in perfect
coordination. They also help you learn to anchor your
hands and bring your body over them. To multiply the
effect of any drills – but particularly drills
used to teach anchoring – do them with the fistglove®
stroke trainer (see Scott Lemley below).
- Swim
super slowly. Drills teach you how things will
feel when they're "right." When you begin
to apply what you've learned in drills, you'll retain
far more of that feeling if you swim verrry
slowly. The more slowly you swim, the more "concentration
space" you give yourself to cultivate a finer
sense of water pressure on the catch. Just be patient.
Leave your hand out in front of you. S-t-r-e-t-c-h
that moment, pressing gently on the water until you
feel the water return some of that pressure to your
hands (another awareness hugely heightened by fistgloves®).
And while you're swimming slowly...
- Count
your strokes. A reduced stroke count is a simple,
reliable indicator that you're not pulling
back. If you've whittled your count for a single 25-yard
pool length down to, say, 13 or fewer strokes, one
of the things you're likely to be doing well is holding
on to the water. As you go faster (and your stroke
count increases) stay hyper-alert to any sense of
water slippage, like a car spinning its wheels.
- Try
to have slow hands. Compare the speed at which
you sense your hands moving back, with how fast you
feel your body moving forward. Try to have "slow
hands and a faster body" or, at the very least,
match the speed of your hands to the speed of your
body. This is a great corrective any time you feel
your stroke getting rough and ragged.
- Last
but not least... Teaching and my own training
experience have convinced me that the most beneficial
tool for acquiring feel is the fistglove®
stroke trainer. I’ll let Scott Lemley, their
inventor, tell you about them.
The
fistglove® stroke trainer
How Those Little Black Gloves Can Lead to Huge Improvements
in Your Stroke
By Scott Lemley
Scott Lemley has been coaching and teaching swimming
for 20-plus years. He is currently head coach of the
Midnight Sun Swim Team in Fairbanks, Alaska. As a longtime
student and instructor in the martial art of Aikido,
Scott observed that the key steps to mastering any martial
art – finding your balance, focusing your mind,
and relaxing your body – are the key steps to mastering
any swimming stroke.
One aspect of martial-arts teaching that particularly
intrigued Scott was the practice of blindfolding students
to compel them to become receptive to sensory information
derived from sources other than the eyes, to develop
a whole-body sense of balance. Reasoning that "feel"
with the hands was the swimming equivalent of the perspective
gained through sight on land, Scott set about developing
"a blindfold for the hands." The result was
the fistglove® stroke trainer. Below, Scott explains
some of the many benefits of training with fistgloves®.
Before becoming a swim coach I taught Aikido, a martial
art that emphasizes relaxation. Aikido training taught
me that the more I relaxed, the more self-aware I became
and the more efficiently and quickly I could move. I
adopted these same principles to my swim coaching and
have made it a core goal to teach my swimmers to combine
the ability to focus mentally while relaxing physically.
I used fist swimming a fair amount, but also felt that
I could improve that practice by finding a way to swim
effortlessly with fists closed for longer periods without
having to expend either mental or physical energy. I
tested this theory on myself by duct-taping my hands
closed and warming up that way for 30 minutes before
swimming with "normal" hands.
As an unexpected benefit, for the first time I became
acutely aware of my lack of balance, the pressure of
the water on my forearms, and the "sharp edges"
I exposed to the water's resistance as I pushed off.
I also discovered that my hands became very sensitive
to pressure after I removed the duct tape,
allowing me to "hold on to the water" with
far more nuanced technique. After I began taping my
swimmers' hands, I observed that every swimmer gained
noticeable fluidity in their strokes. Instead of having
one or two "gifted" swimmers and a host of
dedicated but "less gifted" swimmers, I soon
had what I came to think of as a team full of dedicated
and gifted swimmers. After experimenting
with "taped" fists for 17 years, I finally
designed, patented, and began to manufacture a prototype
latex glove, which I named the "fistglove®
stroke trainer."
Fistgloves®: How They Work
One essential in the acquisition of improved swim
technique is our ability to change the way we interact
with our environment. Humans seem to be "hardwired"
to interact with the water in a particular way, but
I believe we can change that in very significant ways.
This is a constant theme underlying how I ask my swimmers
to train. Using fistgloves® has given them unprecedented
choice and control over how they interact with the water
I want my swimmers to be able to choose finesse over
brute strength. When they make this choice, they swim
best or near-best times with far greater consistency.
But finesse in the water must be taught; it rarely
comes naturally. Finesse has much to do with how we
feel "pressure" on our hands. Reading this
pressure is both a source of information and a distraction.
Because we’re instinctively "hand-dominant"
when swimming, most of us are so fixated on what’s
happening with our hands that we tune out other body
parts. As long as our hands feel the pressure of the
water’s resistive force, we figure we’re "good
to go" and proceed to push it toward our feet in
a way that satisfies our palms and psyches – but
often neglects our body position. Is our entire body
balanced and streamlined to avoid drag? It’s hard
to tell if we are thinking only about our palms. Add
to the hand-dominant theme our human proclivity to solve
problems with force, and it’s no wonder that we
see a lot of manhandling the water.
Another pitfall of being a swimmer who gets satisfaction
from feeling pressure against the hands (and the more
the better), is that it’s all too easy to think
that being unbalanced and unstreamlined is OK –
perhaps even good. After all, an unstreamlined
body will encounter massive resistance, and that resistance
will feel correct and productive to most swimmers. Pushing
against a substance as dense as water gives us a great
sense of accomplishment. All too often the only accomplishment
is to burn calories. To truly swim well, we must learn
how to "feel" the water with our entire body,
not just the hands, and learn to find our balance and
cease our endless struggling to plow ahead.
All humans have proprioceptors (specialized nerve endings)
in our joints, muscles, and skin that give us constantly
updated information on how our joints are angled, how
fast we’re moving our limbs, how our arms and legs
are positioned relative to each other, and the pressure
of the water against various body parts. This wealth
of feedback can overwhelm us if we don’t know how
to process it – or can help us achieve balance
and flow if we learn to organize it and use it correctly.
Usually our brain is so busy processing the information
coming from our eyes and hands that we’re not conscious
of being out of alignment or off balance in the water.
Wearing fistgloves® helps you make balance a priority.
Attempting to swim for the first time without the use
of your hands, you'll probably thrash around for 5 or
10 minutes, completely helpless. But your brain will
seek to solve this new puzzle by using other sources
of information and other means of locomotion. Almost
automatically, you'll start to swim with more finesse
and less brute force. With the fistgloves®, you
must learn to be balanced and streamlined; otherwise,
you'll make no forward progress in the pool.
After wearing the gloves for 30 minutes or so, swim
with open hands. You'll immediately experience what
we call the fistglove® effect – a rush of information
from your previously constrained, but now highly sensitive,
hands to your brain. The result is that you'll become
very discriminating in terms of how you angle your hands
against the water, instinctively choosing the angles
that give maximum purchase on what is a pretty slippery
medium. You'll also become ultra-sensitive to the importance
of "gripping" the water instead of "slipping"
through it.
The first 30 minutes spent wearing fistgloves® will
make you more aware of how balanced and streamlined
you are. The next 30 minutes swimming without
the gloves will help you learn to "hold" the
water better. Fistgloves® help us become more effective
on both sides of the equation. Give them a try. I think
you’ll enjoy the experience.
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