Swimming doesn’t seem, at first glance, to have much to do with playing a musical instrument.  Swimming, after all, is a physical activity that is both a survival skill and a competitive sport, while music is an artistic activity that serves as a form of entertainment.  Swimming helps to keep us physically fit, while playing a muscial instrument isn’t likely to do that.  But music is a means of expressing ourselves, while swimming isn’t.

Swimming and playing a musical instrument, however, are both activities for which expert execution is essential to success.  And, of course, playing a wind instrument requires lung capacity and breath control that are comparable to those needed to excel in swimming.

The Secrets of the Musicians

For about a decade, I’ve played trombone in an orchestra with members who range in age from 12-year-olds to senior citizens.  We were trained in music at different times and places by different people, but when we’re rehearsing and come to a passage of music that we have trouble with, we always use the same remedy, and the director doesn’t even bother explaining it because all of us, no matter where, when, or by whom we were trained, are already familiar with it:  We slow the music down to a speed at which we can play it correctly, and then we gradually speed it up, while still playing it correctly, until we reach the speed at which it is supposed to be played.

All musicians use this remedy because it is the only way to learn precise, intricate movements that have to be executed quickly and flawlessly.  It’s true that if a musician is able to play a passage of music with just an occasional wrong note here or there, they may be able to perfect it while playing it at the proper speed.  But if any more significant corrections are needed, the only way to master it is by slowing it down.

Of course, in music, everyone realizes that the notes need to be played flawlessly, as well as at the proper speed.  But many people think of swimming speed as being purely a function of fitness, rather than technique.  In fact, the term freestyle suggests that it doesn’t matter how you execute the swimming stroke, provided that you stroke quickly.  The trouble with this is that water is a very dense medium (880 times denser than air), so all of the fitness in the world can’t compensate for a stroke that creates lots of drag and turbulence.

The Total Immersion drill sequence is designed to break swimmers out of the faulty techniques they have been practicing for years (or even decades) and to engrain new, efficient stroke techniques.  But swimmers don’t come to Total Immersion to learn how to drill – they come to learn how to swim!  So how do you make the new skills you have been learning in the Total Immersion drills a part of your swimming stroke?

Slowing Things Down and Speeding Them Up

Critics of Total Immersion have sometimes claimed that it teaches swimmers how to swim beautifully and elegantly, but not quickly.  But that is because they mistakenly believe that slowing things down is the end of the Total Immersion teaching process, whereas in reality it is only the first part of that process.  After slowing things down to perfect your technique, you then want to gradually speed things up, while still practicing flawless technique, until you reach race speeds.

Here are some practice plans that will help you to bring your fishlike stroke up to speed:

The Stroke Eliminator

For the stroke eliminator, you will need a pool and a means of timing yourself.  When I’m doing it, I use the SportCount Chrono 100, which fits on your finger like a ring and allows you to time up to 100 separate laps.  I leave the timer running between lengths (effectively treating each rest period as a lap) so that I can save all of my times and record them after my practice is over.

Begin by swimming a length of the pool while counting your strokes and timing yourself.  The goal is not to strive for any particular stroke count or time.  It is just to establish what your typical time and stroke count actually are.

Once you’ve done this, swim another length and try to reduce your stroke count by one while again timing yourself.  Don’t be discouraged if you fail to reduce your stroke count – just try again.  And, of course, it’s okay if you end up reducing your stroke count by more than one!

Keep doing this until you’ve reduced your stroke count as far as you can without distorting your stroke.  Remember that the important thing isn’t the actual stroke count you attain, which can be affected by things like your height, your arm length, and how far you streamline.  It is the reduction in your stroke count that is important.

When you’ve reached the lowest stroke count you can comfortably attain, try to increase your stroke rate a bit while still maintaining the same efficient feeling.  Don’t strive for any particular stroke count, but do count your strokes and time yourself.  You may find that it helps to start the length with the same stroke rate you used on the previous length and to gradually increase it.  Repeat this process on two or three lengths, trying to see how fast you can stroke before you start to become inefficient again.

You should find that the fastest times you attain are the ones you do during the last part of the set, when you are increasing your stroke rate.  But don’t be surprised if you sometimes see your times drop during the first part, when you are reducing your stroke count.  In order to reduce your stroke count past a certain point, you have to find a way to be more efficient, and that added efficiency will sometimes save you more time than you lose by eliminating a stroke.

It’s a good idea to keep a swimming notebook in which you record the things you learn in each practice.  Besides recording stroke counts and times, you should also keep a record of the things you changed to reduce your stroke count.  Before each practice, read your three most recent entries to refresh your memory.

Hitting It the First Time

When you’re at a race, you probably won’t have the luxury of spending a lot of time trying to reduce your stroke count before you begin the race.  So it’s important for your more efficient stroke technique to become so deeply engrained that you can do it the first time.

In the spring of 2008, I moved my swim practices from a 25 yard pool to a 25 meter pool.  When I began doing the Stroke Eliminator at the new pool, I would start with a stroke count of 18 or 19 and work down to a stroke count of 15 or 16.  Nowadays, I usually begin with a stroke count of 14 or 15 and work down to a stroke count of 11 or 12.

Doing It Faster

Once you’re able to hit your lowest stroke count right away, then all you need to do is keep pushing the stroke rate at which you can still maintain the same feeling of efficiency.  Resist the temptation to become impatient and move beyond the stroke rate at which you can maintain your efficiency.  If you feel your stroke becoming inefficient, or if you notice your stroke count skyrocketing without a corresponding reduction in your times, back off on your stroke rate again and spend some more time engraining your efficient stroke habits at the slower stroke rate before trying to speed things up again.

Doing It Longer

The same rules apply when you are trying to increase the distance you can swim efficiently.  First, find a stroke count that you can maintain over the number of lengths you are trying to swim (or find a pace that you can maintain against the Tempo Trainer over the distance you are trying to swim), and then gradually increase your stroke rate from one practice to the next.

The post Swimming and Musical Instruments appeared first on Total Immersion.

The Masters swim meet schedule is quite a bit different from a high school or college swim meet schedule.  All Masters meets are essentially invitational, you have to sign up for events in advance, and there are nearly always limits on how many events you can participate in at each meet.  Also, I am virtually always hoping to set a personal best time in each event, and there’s a practical limit on how many events I can do at one meet without jeopardizing my chances of doing that.

The combination of relatively few meets in a year, official and practical limits on how many events I can do at each meet, and a growing number of events I want to do in competition each year makes my participation in each meet important.  So I decided to go ahead with the meet and see what happened.

My first event of the day was 200 yard freestyle.  And during the first 25 yards of the heat, I became aware of a problem:  I didn’t feel like I was getting enough air!  This may have been because what was left of the cold made me need more air than usual.  Or it may have been because there was some residual congestion in my lungs that was causing me to get less air from each breath than I normally would.  Or it may have been both.

I realized that if I was feeling like I wasn’t getting enough air that early in the heat, it was likely to become a major problem by the end!  So I switched to a more complex breathing pattern.  During the early laps of a 200, I normally breathe every third stroke, though in the later laps, I’ll sometimes switch to a breathing pattern in which I breathe twice on one side, then twice on the other.  But in this heat, I switched, during the first lap, to breathing twice on my right (which is my more familiar breathing side), then once on the left, then twice on the right, and so on.

Although I am slightly more comfortable breathing on my right side than on my left, it became clear that my left side breaths were very important.  I spent many years swimming with poor technique and breathing only on my right side, so when I breathe only on my right side, those bad muscle memories reawaken.  But each time I took a breath on my left side, I could feel my swimming form snap back into place.

On the final lap, I was starting to feel winded, so I switched to breathing only on my right side.  And while I was getting more air that way, I could also feel that my swimming technique was not as good as usual.  My time for the event confirmed that feeling:  I was more than 8 seconds slower than my personal best time.

My next event was 50 yard freestyle, and even on that event I was forced to breathe more frequently than every three strokes (though I can usually make it the entire way breathing every third stroke).  My time for the event was more than 1.5 seconds slower than I had done six months earlier.

My final event of the day was 50 yard backstroke.  At that point in the year, I had already set personal best times in 100 yard and 200 yard backstroke, so I had really been hoping to set a personal best in 50 yard backstroke, so that I’d have set personal bests in all three backstroke events in 2009.

My backstroke heat went a lot better than the others, and I’m pretty sure that this was because my breathing difficulties weren’t as much of a problem in that stroke.  In the end, though, I missed setting a personal best time by 0.16 seconds!

That turned out to be an important experience, though.  I’ve spent a lot of time since that meet thinking about how short an interval of time a sixth of a second actually is.  And I think about it now every time I’m finishing a heat.  I can never know exactly how well I’m doing in a heat until I touch the wall at the end and look up at the scoreboard.  So I always imagine now that I’m a sixth of a second off a personal best time, and I swim as though that were true.

And that has already paid off!  In December, I was in another meet and swam 50 meter backstroke.  And this time, I did set a personal best time, knocking more than half a second off my previous personal best time in that event!

In summary: 

1) Don’t always swim an event the same way every time you do it in practice.  Experiment with varying things like your breathing frequency, so that you are prepared to be a little flexible during your race.

2) If you’re not at top of form on a race day, be sensitive to ways it may be affecting your swimming, and deal with them before they become serious problems.

3) Don’t be discouraged if you don’t perform as well as you normally do.  Just think of it as seeing how well you can do under adverse conditions.  Remember that the real test of champions often isn’t how well they can do on a good day, but how well they can do on a bad day.

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Except for backstroke, all of these events begin with what is called a forward start.  This start is normally done by diving from a starting block.  The rules for USA Swimming, U.S. Masters Swimming, and NCAA also permit a swimmer to start in the water with at least one hand touching the side of the pool, but I know of few self-respecting swimmers who would actually be willing to do this, since most of them would see it as a very visible way of advertising that they really don’t know what they’re doing (sort of like using a tricycle, or a bicycle with training wheels, for the biking part of a triathlon).

For more than a year now, I’ve been doing most of my practices alongside a kids’ swim team, and as a coach, I sometimes find myself observing what they’re doing, both from above and from below the water.  Here are some assorted things I’ve noted about forward starts:

> Swimmers who are learning to do forward starts, and who have no diving background, tend to want to enter the water like a partially open jackknife (i.e., they already have their head and arms down, but don’t find it natural to get their legs and feet up).

> Swimmers who are learning to do forward starts, and who have experience diving off a diving board, tend to want to enter the water as though they were going off a diving platform (i.e., they have no trouble getting their legs and feet up, but they find it natural to enter the water as though their target were the bottom of the pool rather than the far end of the pool).

> Swimmers who don’t get their legs and feet up enough make a big splash when they enter the water, get a red chest and belly, and also don’t succeed in really getting under the water, which prevents them from being able to streamline well.

> Swimmers who go off the blocks as though they were going off a diving platform go too deep, and end up having to climb back to the surface, significantly increasing the distance they have to travel, and costing them precious time.

> Until a swimmer hits the water, a forward start is sort of a cross between a standing broad jump and a high jump.  I suspect that dryland practice of these two types of jumps might improve a swimmer’s forward starts.

> There’s a similarity between a good arm entry in freestyle and a good body entry in a forward start.  In both, you want to strive for a "mail slot" entry in which your hand entry cuts a hole in the water and everything else slides in through that same hole.

> Having your head too high when you enter the water is as bad as having it too high when you’re swimming.  It is also possible, if your head is too high when you hit the water, for the impact of the water to give you two black eyes!  Enter the water in a tight streamline, with your nose pointed at the bottom.

> Many pools take it for granted that kids (even kids who have been swimming competitively for a decade or more) need to regularly practice their forward starts, but make absolutely no provision for adult competitive swimmers to do the same thing.  Why this is isn’t clear, but unless and until it changes, it’s useful for adults to look for a pool that isn’t too strict about enforcing its rules.

The post First forward starts appeared first on Total Immersion.

A similar problem exists in swimming.  Because water is 880 times denser than air, minimizing drag has far more effect on swimming speed than can ever be achieved by maximizing propulsion.  And because water isn’t a solid medium, improving your grip on the water can have more effect on propulsion than can be achieved by increasing your stroke rate.  Just as pilots who were used to flying in Earth’s atmosphere had developed instincts that didn’t work in space, so, athletes who are used to moving on land have developed instincts that don’t work in the water.

A company I used to work for went through some difficult times financially and had to do a couple of layoffs.  Someone in the company’s top management sent out a company-wide "belt-tightening" memo which stated, among other things, that everyone needed to adhere strictly to the company’s official work day of 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., and to the company’s official lunch break of 12:00 noon to 12:30 P.M.  While his intentions were good, he was apparently unaware of the fact that employees were sharing computer resources, and that having everyone work exactly the same hours would overload those resources during the company’s official work hours while wasting them the rest of the time, thereby reducing productivity just when the company needed to be increasing it.

Our land-based instincts can cause us to do something similar to this when we’re in the water.  Even if we’ve been practicing new, more efficient swimming habits at slow speeds, our minds can still retain their old concepts of what we need to do to swim fast.  Consequently, we may achieve disappointing times in competitions precisely because we are focusing on trying to swim fast, and our minds translate that into old, inefficient swimming habits.

I was rather startled several years ago when I began practicing the stroke eliminator drill (in which you try, on each successive pool length you swim, to reduce your stroke count by one), and found by using my SportCount lap timer that my time often went down when I reduced my stroke count.  In order to reduce my stroke count, I was focusing on increasing my efficiency in the water, and the increased efficiency more than made up for the reduction in stroke count, thereby increasing my speed.  This forced me to recognize that I moved faster when I was focusing on increasing my stroke length than I did when I was trying to swim fast!

I began using this new knowledge at meets by focusing on getting as much distance as possible out of each stroke rather than by focusing on swimming as fast as I could, and I did see improvements in my times.  But I subsequently realized that something more was needed.  My goal, after all, was not to take long strokes, but to swim as fast as I could.  My problem was not that I had been focusing on swimming fast, but that my brain had a distorted concept of how to do it.  So I began working on retraining my brain’s concept of what it meant to swim fast.

One of the most useful sequences I found for this retraining is what I call the Eliminator/Accelerator drill.  Here is how the drill works:

- Pick a distance (25, 50, or perhaps more) and swim it, counting your strokes and timing yourself.

- Swim the same distance again, trying to reduce your stroke count by one and timing yourself.  Did you succeed in reducing your stroke count?  Did your time go up or down?

- Keep repeating the previous step, trying to see how low you can get your stroke count while still feeling that you are smooth in the water.  If you don’t succeed in getting a lower stroke count, think about what you can do differently to make your stroke more efficient and then try it again.  I sometimes find that my time initially goes up when I reduce my stroke count (because I am reducing my stroke count by stroking more slowly), but then, when I try to reduce it further, something seems to "click" and my time drops (because further reductions in stroke count are forcing me to find a more efficient way to swim).  If you start to feel like you have to distort your stroke to bring your count any lower, don’t go any further.

- Swim the same distance again, trying to keep the same feeling you had the previous time, but gradually increase your stroke rate.  Keep counting your strokes, but don’t try for any particular stroke count.  See how much you can increase your stroke rate without losing the efficient feeling you had when you started.  How many strokes did you take?  How much faster did you swim?

You can repeat this process as many times as you like.  When you start each set, see how much your brain has retained from the previous set.  The first time you swim the distance in the new set, how do your stroke count and time compare to the first time you swam it in the previous set?  Can you bring your stroke count any lower before you start to distort your stroke?  The last time you swim the distance, can you build your stroke rate any more than you did on the previous set, or can you build your stroke rate any faster?  If you start to lose your feeling of efficiency during the acceleration portion of the Eliminator/Accelerator drill, try backing your stroke rate off a bit and see if you can find that feeling of efficiency again.

Timing yourself as you do this is the constant reality check.  The more your brain learns about how it feels when you are swimming fast, the more you will be able, during a competition, to simply focus on swimming fast, letting your new instincts do the work of translating that into the appropriate movements in the water!

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