“Before Terry Laughlin, it was just a matter of getting in the water and getting it done. When I was in BUD/S training, my instructors taught us the way they learned it from their instructors. Now, that’s all changed; technique is everything. If they can master these techniques in the water, we can dramatically get their swim times down. The staff here at BUD/S can be a very skeptical bunch. We tend to resist anything from the outside. But when our personal swim times came down using Laughlin’s methods, well, we knew this was good information. We try to do as much teaching as possible here in Indoc—help them improve their technique. For some of them, this training will make the difference between making it to graduation or washing out. We’ve been able to cut swim drops by twenty-five percent– this stuff really works.” — Navy SEAL Instructor Tim King in Dick Couch’s “The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228″

It’s a little-known fact about Total Immersion–  it’s not even listed in founder Terry Laughlin’s bio — that our methodology was adopted as part of official Navy SEAL swim curriculum after Terry trained their instructors in the late 90’s and re-designed the way the combat stroke was taught, in order to be more efficient. And it’s also true that even 30 years after T.I.’s founding, there are still many detractors in the competitive swim world who remain skeptical of our methods and prefer to stick with “traditional” training methods (i.e. just kick harder, pull harder), claiming that “T.I. doesn’t work for fast swimming.” Or T.I. is “only for beginners.” Or “better suited for triathletes.” Certainly, no one can argue that the U.S. military isn’t also deeply bound by tradition and the most rigorous training in the world– even more so than the world of competitive swimming– and yet, the Navy has recognized the value of changing their swim training with a method that is effective and proven. To reiterate Instructor King’s point: This stuff really works. The SEALs wouldn’t use it if it didn’t. The U.S. Navy completely changed the way they taught combat sidestroke based on our sound principles of efficient technique– and T.I. ‘s influence is embedded in the updated stroke training that the SEALs have taught for the last 20 years. Navy SEALs need to swim fast and efficiently under grueling conditions not to win a race, but because it’s their job. Speed matters to them– not to make a PR, or win a medal, or even break a world record. Speed is a matter of life and death. 

During the same era that Terry was training SEAL instructors to teach swimming differently, he was also coaching sprinters at West Point, who achieved extraordinary success at the Patriot Leagues. Terry’s group of sprinters included Joe Novak (Army West Point 1995-99) , the only three-time winner of the Patriot League Swimmer of the Meet award, who captured the honor in consecutive seasons from 1997-99. Novak also helped Army West Point capture the Patriot League title in his first three seasons from 1996-98, and was named to the first-team All-League squad three times. Novak earned a spot on the Patriot League All-Decade Team. He won the 50 free, 100 free and 100 fly in each of his seasons as Swimmer of the Meet. Joe has attributed much of his success in swimming to training with Terry using T.I. methods.

                                                            Terry coaching in 2016

So there’s ample evidence that:

1) T.I. technique is effective for long distances, when efficiency and speed matter tremendously.

2) T.I. technique also produces fast times for highly competitive and accomplished swimmers– yes, even sprinters.

Another interesting fact: if you click on Wikipedia’s entry for combat sidestroke, you’ll clearly see the foundational technique principles of T.I. highlighted– Balance, Length, Rotation. 

At this point, some of you may be wondering… “Well, I’m not a SEAL, nor am I aspiring to that– why the heck should I care about the combat sidestroke??” And it’s a reasonable question, given that most T.I. swimmers are primarily interested in improving their freestyle. But here’s why it matters:

1) The combat sidestroke is a hybrid of sidestroke, freestyle, and breaststroke and demonstrates that the principles of biomechanical and hydrodynamic speed and efficiency are universal to swimming any stroke well. Technique matters, whether it’s freestyle or the combat stroke. 

2) The combat sidestroke offers an excellent adaptive stroke option for swimmers who are limited in mobility or range of movement, either from age, injury, or disability. Freestyle is notoriously the most technically challenging stroke to master, particularly because of bilateral breathing and complex, asynchronous timing of the arms (and the 2-beat kick, for non-sprinters). Some might argue this point– however, fly and breast have a front-facing breath and stable head position, as well as a stroke where both arms move synchronously with the same timing. (Breaststroke is the first stroke many beginners learn, simply because it’s easier to breathe.) The combat sidestroke incorporates an easier style of breathing and stroking, making it an ideal option for swimmers who are looking for an adaptive swim stroke. [See DEMO of the stroke at the bottom of this post.]

Wikipedia’s entry for “combat sidestroke” reads:

Combat sidestroke or CSS is a variation of the side stroke that was developed by and taught to the United States Navy SEALs.

The combat sidestroke is a relaxing and very efficient swim stroke that is an updated version of the traditional sidestroke. The CSS is a mix of sidestroke, front crawl, and breaststroke. The combat side stroke allows the swimmer to swim more efficiently and reduce the body’s profile in the water in order to be less likely to be seen during combat operations if surface swimming is required. The concept of CSS has been that it can be used with or without wearing swim fins (flippers), the only difference being that when wearing swim fins the swimmer’s legs will always be kicking in the regular flutter kick motion without the scissor kick. This stroke is one of the strokes that can be used for prospective SEAL candidates in the SEAL physical screening test (PST), which includes a 500-yard swim in 12 minutes 30 seconds to determine if the candidate is suitable to go to the Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEAL school.

The entry even mentions a term Terry used in the early years of T.I. (and in his popular first book in ’96) to describe poor balance: “swimming uphill.” While Wikipedia has no citation for the influence of T.I. methodology on the combat stroke, we fortunately have a documented account of Terry’s primary role in revolutionizing SEAL swim training in the book, “The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228″, by NY Times bestselling author and former Navy SEAL Platoon Commander Dick Couch. It is this book which features commentary from SEAL Instructor Tim King on the effectiveness of T.I. methods. The book’s description reads:

“‘The Warrior Elite’ takes you into the toughest, longest, and most relentless military training in the world. What does it take to become a Navy SEAL? What makes talented, intelligent young men volunteer for physical punishment, cold water, and days without sleep? In ‘The Warrior Elite,’ former Navy SEAL Dick Couch documents the process that transforms young men into warriors. SEAL training is the distillation of the human spirit, a tradition-bound ordeal that seeks to find men with character, courage, and the burning desire to win at all costs, men who would rather die than quit.”

The article below is a brief excerpt from Chapter 1 of “The Warrior Elite,” which details Terry’s influence on SEAL swim training. Enjoy… and Happy Laps!

The teaching begins in the pool. “You have to be good in the water,” Instructor Tim King tells Class 228. Like Reno, King is a short, powerful man. And like many enlisted SEALs, he has a college degree; Tim King’s is in criminal justice. “This is what separates us from all other special operations forces. For them, water is an obstacle; for us, it’s sanctuary.” I noted many changes at BUD/S [Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training] since Class 45 graduated, but the most dramatic are in the swimming curriculum. In the past, it was simply a matter of showing the trainees a basic stroke and making them swim laps; kick, stroke, and glide. Now it’s all about technique. The instructors begin with teaching buoyancy control and body position in the water. The basic stroke is a modified sidestroke that the trainees will later adapt to the use of fins. Much of what is taught is taken from the work of Terry Laughlin and his “Total Immersion” training technique. Laughlin is a noted civilian instructor who developed innovative long-distance swimming techniques for competitive and recreational swimmers. A few in Class 228 were competition swimmers before coming to BUD/S, but most are not. All will learn the Laughlin method. According to Laughlin, it’s all about swimming more like a fish and less like a human. The instructors say it’s like swimming downhill. It has to do with making one’s body physically longer in the water and reducing drag.

The post Swim Like a SEAL: How T.I. Revolutionized Navy SEAL Swim Training appeared first on Total Immersion.

An exclusive excerpt in an ongoing series of material from Terry’s forthcoming final book, Total Immersion: Swimming That Changes Your Life    

Over the last year, this blog has released several excerpts from the unpublished draft of Terry’s final book, of which he was nearing completion when he passed away in October 2017.  It is currently being edited– for anticipated release sometime in 2019– and this week’s post is another exclusive excerpt from his book. This post is adapted from an early chapter of the book, entitled “How To Swim Efficiently.” In this piece, Terry details the origin and evolution of T.I. techniques; their foundations in the laws of physics, fluid dynamics, and biomechanics; the characteristics of an efficient swim stroke; the T.I. “Pyramid of Skills”; and how our approach has been refined over 30 years and thousands of swimmers. Terry also discusses the ease and grace that is typical of the T.I. stroke, noting the popularity (9+ million views) of a YouTube video of TI Japan Founder and Master Coach Shinji Takeuchi demonstrating T.I. freestyle. If you’ve never seen this remarkable video, we’ve embedded it– and another brief video demo by Terry of the “Elements of Effective Swimming”– within this article as vivid illustration of impeccable technique.  Enjoy… and Happy Laps!

How To Swim Efficiently

Five-time Olympic running coach Bobby McGee refers to running as “primal” – something we do well by nature. ChiRunning founder Danny Dreyer talks of helping runners rediscover the instinctively relaxed and efficient way they ran as children.

Swimming is precisely the opposite: As you read in the last chapter, in the water we become energy-wasting machines. To develop a high-efficiency stroke, you must make a conscious choice to eliminate energy waste—and renew that choice every time you swim. You’ll need patience and persistence to resist a return to old habits so that new ones can take root.

This chapter details the origin and evolution of TI techniques; their foundations in the laws of physics, fluid dynamics, and biomechanics; and how they were refined over 30 years and thousands of swimmers.

While the efficiency principles described here apply to all strokes, this book focuses primarily on freestyle.

Seeking Grace

When you’re at the pool, what kind of swimming catches your eye? A swimmer going fast, or one who swims with consummate ease and grace?

On YouTube, the most popular swim video [embedded below] is T.I. Coach Shinji Takeuchi’s “Most Graceful Freestyle,” which has been viewed more than 9 million times since it was posted in 2008. In second place, with some 5 million views, is a video of Michael Phelps which was posted a year earlier. 

Why are so many more people interested in watching an unheralded, middle-aged man than the most decorated swimmer ever? Could it be because grace is a much rarer quality in swimming than speed? And yet—as Shinji, and thousands of other TI swimmers, have shown—grace is attainable, while Phelps’s kind of speed is available only to those with youth, strength, and special talents?

You’ll see countless references to efficiency in these pages. Think of grace as a warmer word for efficiency—and one that’s more accessible. While few of us feel qualified to assess a swimmer’s efficiency, we know it when we see it because all of us feel comfortable recognizing graceful movement vs. ragged or ugly movement.

With human’s baseline efficiency at just 3 percent in swimming, there are nearly limitless opportunities to improve it—with the result of swimming any distance with far more ease and enjoyment, while taking far fewer strokes.

Saving energy will take you almost effortlessly from first strokes, to first comfortable lap, to first mile, and even to a faster mile. When you swim your first continuous mile—and feel energized upon finishing— your stroke is likely to display these characteristics:

Balanced: You feel well-supported by the water—even weightless. This is the characteristic that enables those that follow.

Long: You travel more than the length of your body on each stroke cycle (right plus left arm). When you do, your hand will exit the water, at the conclusion of each stroke, about where it entered.

“Slippery”: You fully extend your bodyline on each stroke, and minimize bubbles, noise, and splash in your stroke.

Integrated: You take each stroke with your whole body—limbs, head and torso–working in seamless coordination, not disconnected parts.

Relaxed: You appear relaxed—never strained–even while swimming at a brisk pace.

And finally, you always feel great while swimming—and better after swimming than before.

A Groundbreaking Way to Learn Efficiency

Prior to 1990, I spent nearly two decades coaching club and college swimmers in their teens and early 20s. My highest-performing swimmers-–especially those who won national championships or achieved world rankings—had the best-looking strokes. That motivated me to prod all my athletes to swim with the best form possible at all times.

In maintaining high technique standards for my athletes, I had the luxury of coaching a group of just 15 to 25 swimmers six days a week. And finally, these swimmers were all from the rarefied group “inside the bubble” who—seemingly from birth—were very much at home in the water.

In the early 1990s, I faced a challenge for which all these years of experience had left me unprepared. At each T.I. weekend workshop, some 20 or more inexperienced and mostly self-coached swimmers showed up seeking instruction. We had just two days to prepare these new swimmers to successfully coach themselves.

This required an entirely new way of teaching swimming technique—a process that:

1) Could be standardized for many swimmers

2) Would quickly solve significant challenges

3) Be simple enough to follow on their own

Using Bill Boomer’s insights as a starting point, T.I. workshops became a laboratory for refining an all-new approach to improving technique.

The Pyramid of Skills 

Learning three skills—in a particular order—has proven to be virtually a sure thing in learning to be efficient. It helps to view these skills as a pyramid.

Balance provides the body control and mental calm essential to learning every skill that follows. Learning Balance replaces the sinking sensation with a comforting sense of feeling ‘weightless’. You accomplish this by working with—instead of fighting—gravity.

Streamline skills come next because water is 880 times denser than air. Why waste energy trying to overpower water resistance when you can reduce it quickly and with relative ease?  You accomplish this by shaping your vessel to slip through a smaller ‘hole’ in the water—and by using your limbs as much for minimizing drag as for creating propulsion.

Propulsion skills follow the others because they require a stable body, a high level of coordination, and keen self-perception. Yet you can learn them with striking ease after establishing Balance and Streamline skills. You accomplish this by originating power and rhythm in the core and by propelling with your whole body, not your arms and legs.

Besides offering a proven way to become efficient, this sequence of skill acquisition offers these advantages:

Immediate Energy Savings

As energy-wasting machines, we must consider the energy cost of every aspect of swimming—starting with our learning process.

Balance skills focus on relaxing, floating, and extending. These require virtually no energy and lead to immediate, significant energy savings. As well, balance is the key to swimming at the equivalent of a runner’s easy “conversational” pace. You could well be swimming farther after 10 to 20 hours of balance practice than following months of endurance training.

Streamlining skills—lengthening and aligning the body– require only slightly more energy than those for Balance. And, because drag–and the power needed to overcome it–increases exponentially as you swim faster, minimizing drag will make your energy savings exponential.

Propulsion actions—those that move you forward—indeed have a greater energy cost than those we use to balance and streamline. We reduce that by using natural forces—primarily gravity and buoyancy—before generating force with our muscles; and by propelling with the whole body, rather than fatigue-prone arms and legs.

Put the Odds in Your Favor

The Balance→Streamline→Propulsion pyramid increases your odds of success in two ways:

• Avoid Failure Points.  One of Tim Ferriss’s key strategies for meta-learning is to avoid common “failure points” at the start. For newer swimmers, the two aspects of swimming most likely to defeat you before you’ve barely begun are kicking and breathing. T.I. technique is explicitly designed to minimize reliance on kicking. And we introduce breathing only when you have the body control and comfort in the water to handle it with aplomb. 

• A Glimpse of Success In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg writes that, to replace an undesired habit with an improved one, experiencing a “small win” early provides motivation to persist through challenges you encounter later.  The T.I. learning sequence starts with Balance skills, which reveal how it feels to glide weightlessly and effortlessly. For adult novices, that experience is liberating– even thrilling—and comes as a ray of hope for those who had felt hopeless before.

In the next chapter, let’s move straightaway to learning complete details of the three essential aspects of T.I. Swimming: Balance, Streamlining, and Core Powered Propulsion.

Glad you enjoyed this sneak peak of Terry’s final book– you can learn all the skills of efficient freestyle with the Total Immersion Effortless Endurance Self Coaching Course!

The post How To Swim Efficiently: An Excerpt from Terry’s Final Book appeared first on Total Immersion.

My first year at Kings Point, I was only 21, the youngest head coach in the NCAA. I felt blessed to have discovered, so early in life, work for which I had a real love and for which I appeared to possess better instincts than I had enjoyed as an athlete. My main motivation as a coach was to find the answer to what had puzzled me as a swimmer — why I had never been able to rise above an average level of performance, despite a willingness to sacrifice and work extremely hard, and why some swimmers were much faster than me, despite always making it look easy.

From Day One, I had a suspicion that the answer was to be found more in the aesthetics of swimming, than in “how much and how hard.” Good swimmers simply looked better and I had the intuition that teaching less-gifted swimmers to look that way might succeed where sheer hard work had failed me. That approach proved more successful than I would have dared to hope it would. In my first season, I earned recognition as Coach of the Year in our league and knew I had found something I could do with distinction and real enthusiasm. Over the next 16 years, my athletes won 14 individual and relay titles at NCAA Division III, National YMCA, and U.S. Junior National Championships and every team I coached performed far better than they had before. I also qualified swimmers for Olympic Trials in 1980, 1984 and 1988 and produced a number of world-ranked swimmers.

Following Olympic Trials in 1988, I stopped coaching age group swimming, partly from swim-parent-fatigue and partly to find out what else I could do well. For the next four years I earned my living primarily as a writer. But because I loved teaching, I decided to keep my hand in swimming by offering camps for Masters swimmers the next summer at Colgate University in Hamilton NY. I adopted the name Total Immersion from some popular foreign language courses of the time, thinking it ideally suited to swimming.

How the TI Approach Developed

In 1988 I had the good fortune to meet Bill Boomer, who planted the intriguing idea that the “shape of the vessel” might have just as much influence as the “size of the engine” on a swimmer’s performance. I had been teaching balance in an instinctive way — and with exciting results — to butterfliers and breaststrokers since 1978. Also in 1978, while watching my swimmers from an underwater window, I had realized that swimmers moved fastest while just gliding in streamline after pushoff. Once they began kicking and stroking, far more of their energy seemed to go into making bubbles than into effective propulsion.

Boomer’s theories about “vessel-shaping” and balance supplied a name and rationale for both those insights and I became excited about experimenting with them. The early TI Masters camps provided the perfect laboratory for investigating why swimming efficiently was such a daunting challenge to most humans and for seeking solutions to “the human swimming problem.”

TI camps provided a dramatically different set of coaching challenges than I had faced in coaching young people for 16 years: (1) Young people learn swimming skills almost spontaneously and (2) I had months or years of daily practices to work with them. Adults must apply themselves in a dedicated and focused way to overcome years of bad habits or self-doubt. And we had only a few days to give them the tools for success in swimming. Those challenges turned into distinct advantages, as they influenced the nature of TI instruction in ways that helped differentiate us from all previous approaches:

1. We had to make our presentation so simple and clear that anyone could understand it.
2. We had to focus rigorously on outcomes, searching tirelessly for approaches that produced more improvement in less time.
3. We had to refine every TI learning progression into a reliable and repeatable process so that, after just a few days, our students would be prepared to be “their own best swimming coach.”
4. We focused on teaching the person, not just the mechanics, seeking to turn swimming into a “flow activity” and a means of pursuing self-mastery.

TI Today

The puzzle of how to make swimming easier and more enjoyable to master is still deeply fascinating to me and I consider myself incredibly fortunate that, over 30 years after I began coaching, I still wake up every morning excited about teaching and coaching swimmers. Fortunately our students have provided us with a constant stream of new questions and challenges for which the TI process always offers solutions. The essential lesson we’ve learned is that a human body moving through water always retains the same properties and is subject to the same physical laws, no matter whether your goal is basic learning, high level performance or wellness/therapy.

This means there can be a unified logical thread for every possible form of teaching or coaching. From a 5 year old child’s first lesson, to the coaching that can help a swimmer win an Olympic medal, to guiding a 75-year old through a swimming-therapy program, the principles will all be the same. Total Immersion’s mission today is to disseminate knowledge of those principles as widely as we can, so that all swimmers can have better experiences and outcomes.

The post History appeared first on Total Immersion.