Chapter 1 - True Confessions: If I’m So Fit, Why Is Swimming So Hard?

Every Saturday morning, somewhere in the USA (or Canada, the UK, Europe or Australia) 30 hopeful and somewhat apprehensive athletes, mostly triathletes and tri-wannabe’s, gather in a classroom and talk about why they’d like to swim much better. It may sound like group therapy; but it’s actually the orientation session of any Total Immersion weekend workshop. Some athletes confess that they can ride 60 miles or run 10 before breakfast yet gasp for breath after two laps in the pool. Others say they are tired of finding their bike standing alone when they finally stagger into the first transition — despite hour after hour of training laps in the pool.

Their frustration is simple and incredibly widespread. What is it about swimming that reduces otherwise fit and accomplished athletes to the point of needing TI “group therapy?” Why do all those tedious hours of repeats, laborious laps with kickboards, and wearying sessions with paddles and pull buoys never seem to produce improvement or yield results that are far too modest for the time and energy invested? Time on your feet and time in the seat work for running and biking. Why not for swimming?

The answer is that water is a completely different medium from air, and swimming is a completely unnatural activity for most land-based humans. In water, the rules are different. If you try to improve by swimming more and harder (an approach that comes naturally for cyclists or runners), you’ll mainly make your “struggling skills” more permanent. If you seek instruction, you’ll find that few coaches or teachers know how to teach you the skills and awareness that really make a difference. If you join a Masters swim team, your training program will be more organized than if you swim on your own, but unless you have the great fortune to be training with a coach who is just as good at teaching as training, you’ll be a fitter flailer, but still not a good swimmer. Until you become a good swimmer, you’ll always limit your potential as a triathlete. That’s because you need to have a certain level of efficiency to get results from all your hours of training.

The solution is not elusive, costly, or time consuming. You can become a good enough swimmer to hugely improve your performance, potential, and fulfillment in triathlon. What it takes is a little knowledge and a willingness to practice swimming in a completely different way from how you train for the other two disciplines. Running and cycling are sports. Swimming — at least as you need to do it to be the best triathlon swimmer you can be — is an art. It’s a movement art just as rigorous and exacting as gymnastics or martial arts. In order to succeed in it you need to do two things:

1. Become your own swimming coach.
2. Practice mindfully, patiently, and intelligently.

This book will give you the information and guidance to do both well.

Why Inefficient Swimming Is Limiting Your Triathlon Success

Success in triathlon obviously depends greatly on sheer fitness. Thus, 95 percent of your energy as a triathlete is usually devoted to maximizing your aerobic potential. Because you have to squeeze in three sports around work and family, you can’t waste time on unproductive efforts. Yet until you become an efficient swimmer, you cannot realize the hard-won aerobic potential your training has earned you. Poor swimming not only puts you far back in the pack before you get to your strengths but also prevents you from spending your aerobic resources wisely and optimally. If you’re a poor swimmer, you lack control over how hard you work in the water.

It’s fairly simple to ration energy wisely while cycling and running. On the bike, you even have gears to help you maximize speed while minimizing effort. For a poor swimmer, there is no choice. For a large percentage of triathletes, simply making it through the swim is a survival test. If that’s you, you have to flail and churn the whole time — an effort that doesn’t earn you anything approximating a good swim time. It just allows you to finish wearily and far back in the pack.

Considering how little of the overall race distance and time swimming takes up, it consumes an extravagant amount of the energy available for the entire race. If you’re like the great majority of triathletes, you aren’t concerned solely about how slowly you swim. You probably worry more about how hard you work to swim that slowly. The most important message I give triathletes at Total Immersion workshops is this: Your primary goal is not to swim faster. Focus first on swimming easier, and let more speed be a natural product of your increased efficiency. You will improve your overall performance far more by saving energy for the bike and run than you will by swimming faster. But, better yet, as you become an efficient swimmer, you will also swim faster.

What It Takes to Be a Good Triathlon Swimmer
Unless you are an elite athlete, your smartest goal on the swim leg is to exit the water with a low heart rate. The swimming leg is too short for a speedier swim, by itself, to make a significant difference in a race that usually lasts for hours. If you do work hard enough to pick up a few minutes in the swim, that effort can easily cost you many minutes back on land. Conversely, many triathletes who have taken the TI workshop have found that their newfound efficiency, while it may have shaved just a few minutes off their swim time, resulted in substantial time drops for the rest of the race, simply because they were much fresher entering the first transition.

So your first goal as a triathlon swimmer is to gain the freedom to swim as easily as you wish — to be able to virtually float through a mile of swimming if you choose. To be able to choose how long or fast you stroke. And to be able to adjust both with the same ease with which you shift gears on your bike.

Your starting point for accomplishing these goals is to develop four foundation skills: balance, body alignment, body rotation, and coordinated propelling movements. The key is to have a relaxed, low-drag, fluent stroke at low speeds and to maintain all of those qualities as you move through your “swimming gears” to go faster. For most triathletes, swimming speed will probably never be essential (I’ll explain the exceptions in a later chapter). Swimming ease, however, is a non-negotiable skill for every triathlete. Ease means efficiency, and efficiency leads to speed. And for those of you approaching the elite level, you must learn to swim fairly fast, without exerting yourself so much that you blow up on the run. And the same fundamentals that let the beginner acquire ease also let the more advanced athlete develop efficient “gearing” for swimming faster when necessary.

Your essential goal as a triathlete is to have more control when swimming — more ability to decide how hard to work, how much stroke length and stroke rate to use at any moment, and the skill to find the most efficient way to go faster when needed. Let’s begin learning how to gain that control and why, as a triathlete, you have plenty of company in figuring out The Swimming Puzzle.

Chapter 2 – Two-Dollar Gas: The Secret of Economy

Whenever the price of gasoline nears $2.00 per gallon, SUVs and other gas-guzzlers lose a bit of their popularity, while car pooling and public transportation gain ground. I drive a gas-sipping Saab, but my response is to drive with a lighter foot, avoid nonessential trips, and combine errands. As a triathlete, your training time and energy are two-dollar gasoline and there’s no strategic fuel reserve to lessen the cost. Triathlon is a demanding discipline. Most triathletes cannot make a full-time job of training; thus, economy is the smartest success strategy of all.

By economy I mean: (1) efficient use of your limited training time and (2) efficient use of your body so that your available energy goes into forward motion and not struggle. If you take to heart the lessons of this book, you’ll need to spend less time in the pool…and will accomplish more than in your current program. If you get excited about shaving minutes off your bike time with an expensive set of wheels, think how you’ll feel if you spend almost nothing to learn how to swim with such ease that you might cut an hour or more from your total Ironman time (as has
happened to more than one Total Immersion alum).

Your constant goal as a multi-sport athlete is to develop the capacity to go farther and faster and, more important (because most triathletes are in their 30s or older), the capability to do both without breaking down. Faster race times are the motivation for training. Therefore you need to be rigorous in spending your precious training time wisely so that it brings clear benefits to race time. Training simply to prove that you can endure prodigious workloads would make sense if places were awarded to those with the most impressive logbook. But most triathletes have job and family responsibilities, and the best training program is one that produces the fastest race times with the least time and effort. And, as you’ll learn, training intelligently is even more critical in swimming than in the other two disciplines.

Economy
In the physiology lab, economy is measured by how much oxygen you use while exercising, because oxygen consumption is the best indicator of how much muscle fuel you burn to go a given distance at a given speed. In the pool or on the road, heart rate is the most practical marker for economy because it helps trained athletes develop an acute sense of how hard they are working at any given moment. If a competitive swimmer spends fewer heartbeats (i.e., consumes less oxygen or fuel) to do the same work — let’s say, to swim 100 meters in 1 minute, 20 seconds—she has two choices for how to use the energy surplus she’s created. Sprinters can swim the distance faster, perhaps improving their 100-meter time to 1 minute and 15 seconds. Longer-distance swimmers can choose to maintain the same speed for longer, swimming 200 meters in 2 minutes, 40 seconds, or 400 meters in 5 minutes, 20 seconds. And perhaps ultimately 1500 meters in 20 minutes. Tri-swimmers have a third option — for most the smartest one — to save much of that surplus for cycling and/or running.

The longer the race, the more important economy becomes. When swimming a short distance — 50 to 100 meters — you could conceivably muscle your way through it. But there is no sprint distance in tri-swimming. Even a “sprint” triathlon starts with a 400-meter swim, which is a long way to be wasting energy. And the 2.4-mile Ironman swim is 250 percent farther than any Olympic swimming event. The opportunity to waste energy — to misspend heartbeats you badly need to bike 112 miles and run a marathon — is astronomical. And as we have heard countless times from TI workshop alumni who have chosen to apply most of what they learned from us to swimming easier, rather than faster while their times for the swim leg have indeed improved markedly, their race splits in cycling and running have also improved dramatically, because they “save heartbeats” in the water for use on land.

From a tri-swimming perspective, in this book I’ll show you how to:

1. Drive with a lighter foot (swim with a lower HR and energy cost).
2. Avoid unnecessary trips (get more benefit from fewer and easier swim-training laps).
3. Acquire a “smart” car (retool your stroke for efficiency)

The effect of all three will be to turn the “cost of fuel” — your time and energy — back to those halcyon days of 30-cent gas.

Chapter 3 – How to Start Swimming Better Immediately

Perhaps you didn’t start out thinking “I’d like to be a swimmer,” but as soon as you mailed your first triathlon entry, swimming became a necessary evil. Or as most triathletes perceive it: “something I have to endure in order to do the two other sports I find much easier and more satisfying.” And you probably began by applying what you had learned from cycling or running: mileage equals improvement. You may even have seen some modest progress in the beginning. But if you’re like 98 percent of triathletes I’ve met, you soon reached a state one described as “Terminal mediocrity: no matter how much I swim, I never get any better.” There’s a logical reason for that. Unlike running or cycling, which you probably did reasonably well from age 7, with little instruction or “practice,” swimming well requires lots of both. Thousands of athletes who can run or bike long distances with ease, find themselves exhausted after a few laps of swimming. They know they’re in shape, but swimming seems to require its own special kind of fitness. So they do yet more laps, hoping it will come. But if you’re an unskilled swimmer, all those laps do is make your “struggling skills” more enduring. No matter how many laps you do, you’ll never have enough fitness to compensate for the energy you waste.

This is why triathletes have responded enthusiastically to the simple logic of Total Immersion. We explain your difficulties in a way that makes sense. We suggest simple approaches that even inexperienced swimmers can confidently practice in a way that they know will make a difference. And, finally, we’ve replaced boring workouts with purposeful and interesting practice. The result is a style of swimming that, among its many virtues, always feels good. It looks good, too. TI swimmers are instantly recognizable to other swimmers by their unusual flow and ease.

The Water Is Your Swimming Problem
The reason you’re not swimming as well as you’d like is because you’re a land animal in water. Humans are “hard-wired” to fight the water rather than work with it. There are literally only a few dozen people on the planet who have almost totally solved this. Swimmers such as Ian Thorpe (and former Olympic medallists such as Sheila Taormina) have learned to overcome the “human-swimming problem” because:

a) they’re gifted with a rare sense of how to be one with the water (coaches call this “feel of the water”) and b) they’ve spent millions of yards (typically guided more by that intuition than by their coaches) developing a preternatural grace and economy.

You, on the other hand — along with virtually everyone else on the planet — probably swim more like “Eric the Eel,” the athlete from Equatorial Guinea who won our hearts and admiration at the Sydney games for finishing the 100-meter freestyle, despite the fact that every stroke seemed like agonizing struggle for him. Human swimming looks like this mainly because water is an unnatural, even threatening, environment. Our bodies were not designed to travel easily through it, and our basic instincts as land-based animals cause us to fight it, not work with it. Our discomfort creates tension; we respond with turbulent churning. Both keep us from moving freely and fluently. Since water is a fluid, flowing freely through it is essential to efficiency. Any swimmer can learn how to do this. The first step is to understand what’s holding you back.

Three Mistakes Every “Human Swimmer” Makes:
Chances are, you’ve thought there was something wrong with you because:

1. You think you’ll sink. Fighting “that sinking feeling” is something all humans do from their very first stroke. After a very few additional strokes, the struggle to stay afloat becomes a habit. The result? Most of your energy and too much of what you hope are propelling actions (i.e., your pull and kick) are spent keeping you from sinking, instead of acting to move you forward.
2. You try to overpower the water. Water is 800 times denser than air. In essence, it’s a wall. If air can feel so resistant at 20 miles an hour on a bicycle, then imagine how much resistance the water throws at you at even the slowest speeds. As you get a little faster — particularly if your legs tend to sink as you swim, drag goes up to almost inconceivable levels. Want to better understand how that wall of water reacts to your body? Next time you go to the pool, try walking half a lap. What you feel is drag. Next, try running the same distance. Ouch! And how do we instinctively respond to resistance? Mainly by pushing harder. But all that does is increase drag still more.
3. You churn your arms. The medium that was too solid when you tried to walk through it suddenly becomes very elusive when you look for a handhold to support or propel yourself.

When you try to push on it, it just swirls away. Compared with running, in which we move through thin air and propel by pushing off solid ground, swimming is like running through a Jello swamp. And because the water offers neither support nor traction, our natural response is turbulent churning, like wheels spinning on ice. This increases energy cost and the extra turbulence increases drag. A double whammy.

The 5-Step Swimming Solution
The reason TI methods create such fast transformation is simple: They’ve had to. By teaching hundreds of workshops that last just a weekend — rather than lessons that go on for weeks — by having hours to teach fluency, not months or years as most coaches do, we’ve learned to eliminate wasted steps. And since many of our students are inexperienced, we’ve done away with all of the technical mumbo-jumbo. Our instruction is simple and clear. And virtually everyone who follows five basic, but non-negotiable, steps learns to swim better with almost ridiculous ease.

1. Learn balance. Balance — the feeling that you are effortlessly supported by the water and free to devote all of your efforts to efficient propulsion — is what makes Ian Thorpe and other Olympians swim as beautifully as they do. Lack of balance — the sense that you must constantly fight that sinking feeling — is what made Eric the Eel swim as he did. In the TI program, mastery of balance is the non-negotiable first step: You do nothing more difficult until you have learned to be effortlessly horizontal and completely supported in a few basic positions. And you continue practicing these positions until balance feels completely natural. When you learn balance first, you not only stop fighting the water and wasting energy, you also learn comfort and ease, which allows you to master every other swimming skill much faster...and ultimately will let you virtually glide through a triathlon swim of any distance.
2. Unlearn struggle; learn harmony. Being able to relax and enjoy the support of the water is just the starting point of a series of sequenced movement skills. At every step, it’s critical to remember that your human DNA, combined with your history of “practicing struggle,” makes you incredibly vulnerable to regressing. The great advantage of the TI process is that it starts with simple movements and positions and progresses in small steps. At every step, you have the opportunity to eliminate struggle and let fluency replace it as a habit. When you master basic balance, and move on to active balance and beyond, remember that the qualities of fluent movement you will be practicing are just as important as the mechanics of drills and skills.
3. Learn to roll effortlessly. Human swimming propulsion instinctively starts with arm-and-leg-churning. What that does best is make waves and create turbulence. Fish propel by undulating their bodies. Scientists have yet to puzzle out how, with little “horsepower” and resisted by drag, fish can reach speeds of 50 mph and beyond, without ever seeming to try. That effortless power is produced by core-based propulsion. You’ll learn to tap effortless power when your rhythms and movements originate in your core body, not in your arms and legs. Those core-body rhythms release the energy and power that subsequently become a strong, economical swimming stroke. You learn them by advancing from static to active (rolling)
   balance drills.
4. Learn to pierce the water. Torpedoes, submarines, and racing boats are sleekly shaped for the same reason fish are: to avoid drag. Because drag increases exponentially as speed goes up (twice the speed equals four times the drag), drag reduction pays off exponentially as you swim faster. That’s why humans who learn to slip through the smallest possible hole in the water see such rapid and dramatic improvement. Slippery swimmers need far less power or effort to swim at any speed. Awareness of slipping through the smallest possible hole in the water is maintained at every step of our skill-building sequence.
5. Learn fluent, coordinated propelling movements. To most swimmers, technique means “how you use your hands to push water toward your feet.” That’s the starting point and remains the primary focus of conventional instruction and stroke drills. In the TI approach, arm stroking is among the last things we teach: First, you acquire a long, balanced, needle-shaped, and effortlessly rotating core body. Then you link your pull and kick to the body’s movements and rhythms. As your propelling actions, practiced first in “switch” drills, gradually grow into “strokes,” we maintain a focus on keeping them coordinated and integrated with core-body rhythm. Our slogan is “swim with your body, not your arms and legs.” And the moment your speed, effort, or fatigue causes you to feel “disconnected,” it’s time to slow down and regain your flow. Never... ever... “practice struggle.”

But remember: None of these positions or skills is natural or instinctive. You must apply yourself to learning them. The clear and logical course of instruction in the chapters that follow should put you on the path to better swimming immediately. But first I’ll ask you to forget everything you “know” about swimming so you can learn a completely fresh way to move through the water, a way I guarantee will make more sense, feel better and make improvement easier than anything you’ve tried before.

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