This post was previously published by Terry Laughlin on Aug. 7, 2015.

At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Stany Kempompo Ngangola gained a measure of fame for swimming the 100-meter freestyle.

Not for his speed, but simply for surviving.

Stany was among a small group of athletes—mostly from small underdeveloped nations–who are invited to the Olympics in hopes that the exposure will encourage sports development in their homeland. These athletes are exempted from Olympic qualifying times.

Stany was selected for this honor a year in advance and given assistance with preparation by coaches from advanced swimming nations. Unfortunately the training he was given focused mostly on conditioning with little attention to technique.

Swimming in the first heat, Stany relied on youth and strength to get through his first 50-meter length, but hadn’t gone far on the second length before the commentators began to express concern—shared by everyone watching–about whether he could make it safely to the far wall.

Here’s a picture of Stany—looking very athletic—in the air.

And here is Stany in the water, struggling to complete 100 meters.

What’s remarkable about Stany is how utterly unremarkable he is. I estimate that 95 percent of the millions who watched his struggles on TV would fare no better if put in that position themselves. You see, swimming, as an aquatic skill, is an ‘alien’ activity for land-adapted humans. Do you recognize the swimmer below? 

John Lennon… Human Swimmer!

Energy Wasting Machines

That’s why we say that it’s critical to recognize that—as inheritors of millions of years of adapting to life on terra firma—it is simply human nature to be an ‘energy-wasting machine’ in the water.

This was confirmed by a study done by DARPA in 2005 while designing a swim foil for the Navy Seals. They found that dolphins convert 80 percent of energy into forward motion. The humans they studied (lap and fitness swimmers—people who thought they swam ‘okay’) were only 3 percent energy efficient.

This bring us to Swimming Principle #1: Always focus on saving energy before increasing fitness. 

To apply this principle, do the following:

• When developing technique, master Vessel-Shaping skills (Balance, Core Stability, Alignment, and Streamlining, before propulsion skills (pulling and kicking.) Vessel-Shaping skills take little energy to perform and provide significant payback in energy savings. Propulsion skills require much more energy and power to perform.

• Propulsion A: When you focus on your pull and kick, pay attention first to how you use the arms and legs to minimize drag, before focusing on how you apply pressure to the water.

 • Job One for your arms is to lengthen your bodyline, since that reduces wave drag.

 • Job One for your legs is to draft behind your upper body—not to churn the water into a froth.

• Propulsion B: Strive to replace forces generated by your muscles with ‘available’ forces from nature—gravity and buoyancy.

• Swim farther by learning to swim a shorter distance almost effortlessly—rather than pushing to add another length.

• Swim faster by learning to swim at your current speed as easily as possible. Faster times will then come as a matter of course.

• Indeed, for any swimming set, task, or challenge, always start out with the intention to find the easiest possible way to complete it—rather than testing your ability to push through fatigue or discomfort.

Learn energy-saving techniques with our downloadable Ultra-Efficient Freestyle Self-Coaching Toolkit. The drills and skills are illustrated in 15 short videos. Guidance on how to learn and practice each drill effectively is provided in the companion Workbook.

The post Swimming Principle #1: Always Save Energy Before You Spend It appeared first on Total Immersion.

This post was previously published by Terry Laughlin on Apr. 12, 2011. The forum post mentioned is archived.

Few swimmers really pay attention. Opening – or closing – your eyes can change everything.

John shared an exciting discovery about breathing on the TI Discussion Forum:

I’m a bit reluctant to admit it took me a year to come to this insight, but perhaps it will help others. I’ve always struggled to find the right head position for breathing. Sometimes I feel I need to nearly submerge my head to feel balanced, but in that position I feel I can’t get air. I had an ‘aha’ moment last week, when I finally noticed that I close my eyes while breathing.  I began to consciously keep my eyes focused through the breath and it has made a world of difference. Now I can see precisely how far to rotate, when to inhale and when to stop. With my eyes closed, I would turn my head too far, lose balance and then need to recover.

Now, as I rotate toward air, I see the tint of the water change, watch one goggle clear the surface, begin inhaling and close my mouth just as the water closes over it. Suddenly I feel as if I have far more time to breathe and I stay better aligned and balanced. With eyes closed, I didn’t know what I was missing. Too bad it took me a year to figure out. Doh!

John, congratulations, on your invaluable insight – which came over 30 years quicker than it did to me! I can precisely recall the day I had a similar discovery. I was swimming at Lake Minnewaska on Labor Day weekend around 2003. It was chilly – about 54 degrees – and raining steadily. My friend Dave Barra and I were the only two people swimming.

After we’d been swimming about 10 minutes, looking for diversion, I began “scanning” with my eyes as I rotated to breathe. First I noticed that the underside of the surface was dimpled by the rain and found that almost mesmerizing.  Then I kept my gaze keen as my eyes and mouth broke the surface. Like you, I immediately realized this helped me sharpen the timing of the breath and make small adjustments to head position. That has stayed with me ever since.

While your insight will be of value to many, I think you also make a larger point  — The Value of Being Observant.  Paying attention, and consequently noticing things that usually escape your attention is relatively rare among swimmers. This is a result of the common focus on yardage totals, repeat times, intervals, etc. Tuning out to get through it also results when workouts are tedious or lack a clear purpose beyond “getting the yards in.” The fact that it took me 30 years to notice what you noticed after one year is evidence of how pervasive inattention can be.

Be Observant is just another way of saying Swim Mindfully.

And here’s the flip side to your discovery of the value of keeping your eyes open. Have you ever noticed yourself closing your eyes when trying to intensify your focus, usually on a subtle or elusive aspect of technique?

After I began swimming more mindfully, I noticed that during moments of especially keen focus I would instinctively close my eyes. It’s well known that people who lose their sight become far more attuned to sound and feel. For the rest of us, taking away visual input has the effect of making your sense of feel a lot keener. In water — which is literally a sea of sensation — anything that sharpens kinesthetic awareness is invaluable. You can experiment with brief periods of swimming with your eyes closed (when it’s safe to do so) to heighten your sensitivity to sensory input and increase your awareness of the subtleties in your stroke, including how you breathe.

In a previous post on breathing, I also wrote that many people have found it much easier to breathe when they realized they could both inhale and exhale just enough air, and didn’t need to either fill or empty their lungs. The point is really to notice things you may have ignored before. 

To learn more in-depth detail about the breathing mechanics of efficient swimming, check out our video “O2 in H2O: A Self Help Course on Breathing in Swimming”– available as a digital download or on dvd.
Nothing is more essential to a swimmer than air. Yet few swimmers truly understand how to breathe efficiently… not just to get air, but to integrate breathing seamlessly with the stroke. Breathing is sometimes viewed as a liability or inconvenience, but when you do it right, breathing can actually make your stroke better. This video shows you how, using water bowl exercises, shallow water exercises, skills in drills, and whole stroke breathing skills. Detailed studies with focal points for practice cover these three major strokes: Freestyle, Breaststroke, and Butterfly.

The post Sharpen Your Breathing Skills: Open– Or Close– Your Eyes To Heighten Awareness appeared first on Total Immersion.

A version of this article by Terry Laughlin was previously published on ivillage.com in Dec. 2011.

Total Immersion teaches swimming as a practice—in the spirit of yoga and Tai Chi– rather than a workout. The first principle of swimming as a practice is to let go of the usual goal of “Getting to the Other End.” Your new goal is to Be Aware of Every Stroke.  Another word for mindful swimming is intentional swimming. It works best when you target a single, highly specific element in your stroke. The foundation skill of effortless and enjoyable swimming is Balance–or feeling “weightless” in the water. This series of three focal points are designed to improve Balance in the crawl stroke.

Hang Your Head

While stroking “hang” your head– release its weight –until it feels weightless. Neither hold it up, nor press it down; just let it go.  When you release it, concentrate on feeling that it’s cushioned by the water.  Finally, notice if you feel a new relaxation— and maybe freedom of movement —in neck and shoulders.

Float Your Arm Forward . . . Slowly

Next focus intently on the extending arm. Feel the same “cushion” supporting your arm as you extend. Watch for— and eliminate –bubbles in your stroke (looking down, not forward.) Finally, explore how slowly you can float your arm forward . . . and try to extend slightly farther than usual.

Calm Your Legs

Your weightless upper body should help your lower body feel lighter than usual. Take advantage by “calming” and relaxing your legs. Instead of churning them busily and noisily, let them “draft behind” your upper body, in a slipstream. Strive for the easiest, quietest, and most streamlined movement possible.

Practice Tips:

1.) Before practicing the three focal points, swim a few lengths as you usually do. Count your strokes and rate your effort from 1 (Effortless) to 5 (Exhausting).  Repeat this exercise after each focal point to measure how they affect your ease and efficiency.

2.) Practice each focal point by doing a series of learning/familiarizing repeats followed by a series of practicing/memorizing repeats.

• Learning/Familiarizing  Swim a series of short (4 to 6 strokes, or 10 yards or less) repeats. Push off the wall, swim a short distance. Catch your breath and return to where you started. These repeats serve two purposes: (i) to break the habit of feeling obliged to complete every length you start; and (ii) to form a new habit of keen and undistracted attention.  Do at least four of these, but continue as long as you feel yourself discovering new sensations or nuances.

• Practicing/Memorizing Once you feel familiar with the new intention and sensation, swim farther— perhaps one, not more than two, pool lengths. Rest for 3 to 5 cleansing breaths after each. Continue visualizing your modified stroke as you do. Continue swimming the longer repeats as long as they feel as good or better than the shorter ones. If they don’t feel as good, resume shorter repeats to better imprint the new habit. Before progressing to the next focal point, count strokes and rate your effort. How do they compare to your former way of swimming?

This lesson is based entirely on whole-stroke practice. But most new swimmers experience find it much easier to learn Balance by mixing skill drills, like Superman Glide and Skate, with the short whole-stroke repeats described above. The next best thing to learning TI from a Certified Coach is to become your own best coach with the aid of our self-teaching tools.

Transform Your Stroke!

Learn guaranteed skill-builders with our downloadable Total Immersion Effortless Endurance Self Coaching Course! The drills and skills are illustrated in 15 short videos. Guidance on how to learn and practice each drill effectively, illustrated by clear pictures, are contained in the companion Workbook.

The post Your First TI Lesson Is Learning To Be “Weightless” in the Water appeared first on Total Immersion.

Last week’s post described the proven principles of swimming faster, using a specific algorithm for speed– if you’re wondering what this looks like in practice, this entry from Terry Laughlin’s 2015 training log models that algorithm in a practice set. Enjoy… and Happy Laps!

This article is an adaptation of an archived TI forum post from Terry Laughlin’s training log on Nov. 5, 2015.

On Tuesday (Nov 3.) I read “The New Yorker” magazine article, WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE RUN. In part, it was of “Poverty Creek Journal,” a collection of 51 brief reflections on a year’s worth of runs. The article also included a summary of a study published earlier this year in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Sports psychologists gave clip-on microphones to 10 distance runners and asked them to narrate their thought process during a run.

What did these runners think about?
How hard it was to move at their desired speed: “Come on, keep the stride going, bro.”
How soon they could stop: “Come on, you have enough energy for a mile and a half.”
And, quite often, about how miserable they felt while running.

The researchers summarized: “Pain and discomfort were never far from their thoughts.”

It made me wonder why people carry on with such a masochistic exercise. If they knew how it feels to practice Kaizen Swimming, would they give up running? Or would they run differently–the way it’s taught in ChiRunning?

In any case, the contrast between the runners in this study and the practice I’d done just one day earlier could not be more stark.

Before I describe my practice, I’ll review several principles of TI Fast Forward training methodology:
1.) Always focus on improving your swimming.
2.) Create a feedback loop– either subjective (Focal Points) or objective (Strokes Per Length/SPL, Tempo, Time). If the latter, use two metrics. Tempo+SPL or Tempo+Time or SPL+Time.
3.) To swim faster, design problem-solving exercises that strengthen your ability to hold Stroke Length, while increasing Stroke Rate. We call this the “Algorithm of Swimming Success.”

 Mon 2 Nov Approx. 3500 meters at Hampton Lido, London

Sean Haywood (he was among 27 members of a TI-UK training group who went to Ironman Mallorca the previous month) invited me to swim with him at the Hampton Lido, an outdoor 36-meter pool. We swam from 6:45 to 8:00 AM. Having never swum in a 36m pool, I went in with no idea what my SPL or pace might be. But that’s never a problem. I can “create meaning” in any pool, just by counting strokes during my tune-up, which I swam in the “medium speed” lane.

Swimming with a feather-light catch and barely-there kick, I took 24 strokes the first length, then added one stroke on each of the next three laps–reaching 27 SPL on the 4th. (I later did a calculation and found that the “Green Zone” for my 6-foot height in a 36-meter pool should be between 24 and about 28 strokes.) Then the tune-up effect began to take hold, and I shaved a stroke, bringing me to 26 SPL. I swam continuously for another 10 to 12 minutes, holding 26SPL pretty steadily (except when I overtook another swimmer and sped up to pass).

Feeling ready for a challenge, I moved into the “fast” lane and turned on my Tempo Trainer. It was set to 1.17 sec/stroke. I figured that was as good a place as any to start. I swam 4 lengths (144m) continuously and averaged 27 SPL. Armed with that information, I decided to swim a Tempo Pyramid, slowing tempo by .02 each 100 until my SPL returned to 26–or 104 strokes for the 4-lap swim. I reached that at 1.23– taking 25 strokes on the 1st length, 26 strokes on the 2nd and 3rd, and 27 strokes on the 4th.

Next, I would test how long I could hold this stroke count, while increasing tempo by .01 sec after each 144m rep. With a brief exception, I held this stroke count for 11 reps–to a tempo of 1.13 sec/stroke.

I missed my intended count on only one length, taking 27 instead of 26 strokes on the 2nd lap at 1.15 tempo. Because I was a bit too slow on flip turn and pushoff, I had to rush a bit to synchronize the hand entry of my first stroke to the 4th beep. I knew in that instant that the cost of the momentary lapse would be an extra stroke. This happens commonly because while each stroke must be only .01 faster, each turn must be .05 faster (.01 x 5 beeps from final stroke on one length and first stroke on the next).

I made my approach to the wall a little stronger and somersault a little faster on the next two turns and regained my target stroke count on the final two lengths, then held it for one more rep, at 1.14. At 1.13 I exceeded my target count again and knew I’d reached my limit. I then dropped down to 3-length (98m) reps and held my 26 SPL average (25-26-27 strokes) until I reached 1.09.

At 1.08 my SPL rose again, so I cut another length from my repeats, carrying on with 2-length (72m) repeats, holding 26 SPL to 1.06. Then I cut another length and finished my practice by holding 26 strokes from 1.05 to 1.02 sec/stroke. My final length was 27 strokes at 1.01.

If a researcher had given me a waterproof mic and asked me to record my thoughts between repeats, I’d have said that I was having the time of my life. I spent over an hour focusing on every single stroke–the definition of mindfulness–and consequently remaining completely absorbed.

As I solved the challenge of holding SPL as Tempo increased, I swam almost exactly one second faster on each rep (104 strokes x .01 sec). But the experience of swimming faster was enormously pleasurable. As I progressed through the set, my movement through the water felt better and better–more integrated, more fluent. And the overall effect produced a highly satisfying Flow State. Does it get any better than that?

Take Your Swimming to the Next Level!

Learn the Habits of Mastery and develop expert-level skills with Total Immersion’s 2.0 Freestyle Mastery Complete Self-Coaching Course. Do you love learning, practicing, and swimming the TI Way? Are you excited about attaining personal mastery in the most efficient and exacting skills available in freestyle? Have you mastered the TI Foundations in prior videos or the Effortless Endurance (formerly Ultra Efficient Freestyle) Self-Coaching Course? If yes, the 2.0 Freestyle Mastery Course is for you.

The post Terry’s Practice Log: A Detailed Sample Set of Strategic Speedwork appeared first on Total Immersion.

This post was originally published by Terry Laughlin on May 20, 2016.

There are two ways to try to swim faster. One way is what I call the “Limbs, Lungs, and Muscles” approach: Move your limbs as fast as you can. Put more muscle into your stroke. Hope that your fitness will outlast failing muscles and that you can “push through pain barriers” as coaches often say. For most, this approach is a path to failure and frustration.

Total Immersion teaches a second way— speed as a problem-solving exercise. The fact that you’re solving the most exacting problems in swimming can also transform this into a Mastery pursuit. The TI way to swim faster is based on three well-proven principles.  Although the success of these principles is widely-documented, I refer to them as the “secrets” of swimming faster because so few people take advantage of them.

1. Start with Stroke Length. The foundation for fast swimming is Stroke Length. For over 60 years, every authoritative study of factors that correlate with speed found that longer strokes matter most. This has proven true in all strokes and all ages—from 10 and under to 80 and up!

How far should you travel? For freestyle, from 55% to 65% or more of your height. We’ve converted that into Strokes Per Length (SPL), recorded on our Green Zone charts of height-indexed efficient stroke counts in any standard distance pool, available as a free download here.

When stroking at the lowest SPL for your height, your hand leaves the water– at the end of the stroke –pretty close to where it entered. In other words, most of your energy is converted into forward motion. When your stroke count is above the highest in your Green Zone, too much of your energy is moving water back.

Once you can swim your Green Zone counts with ease and consistency, strive to patiently increase the distance and/or speed at which you can maintain those counts. If you’ve been swimming at higher counts, try this simple exercise: Compare the speed of your arm moving back with the speed of your body moving forward. Slow your stroke until they match.

2. Train your Nervous–not Aerobic–System.

In 2005, just before I turned 55, I set several goals that were far more ambitious than any I’d contemplated before. I asked Jonty Skinner, Director of Performance Science for USA Swimming’s Olympic program, for training advice. Jonty said: “It’s neural conditioning, not aerobic conditioning, that wins races.”

Jonty meant that swimmers who trained to maintain a long stroke as they swam farther and faster would be much more successful those who simply focused on swimming longer or harder. Rather than train for the capacity to work harder, focus on creating and encoding the highest quality muscle memories—to make it easier to maintain longer strokes at faster rates. Not only will it require less oxygen to swim any pace, but cardiovascular conditioning still “happens.” Only it’s now specific to the stroke length and rate to which your nervous system is highly adapted— rather than to non-specific hard efforts.

3. Master the “Swimming Success Algorithm”

The term algorithm was coined in mathematics over 1000 years ago and has become widely familiar in the last 20 years due to its use in computer science. Its use in modern technology suggests something complicated, but it’s definition is pretty simple: An algorithm is “a process that solves a recurrent problem.”

A recurrent— indeed, nearly universal —problem in swimming is how to swim the fastest of which you are physically capable. The overwhelming majority of swimmers fall far short of their true potential (I was a prime example in high school and college) because they choose ineffective means to solve the problem— stroke faster and swim harder. This is what I did in high school and college. It led to frustration and a feeling that I lacked the “right stuff” to swim fast, whatever that might be.

Stroking faster isn’t so much a choice as a primal instinct, which is why so many do it. Fortunately there is a solution for this problem that is so foolproof– I call it the Algorithm for Swimming Success. It comes from 40 years of data collected by USA Swimming on their very best swimmers.

Since 1976, USA-Swimming has assigned staffers to sit in the stands and record the stroke count and stroke rate of every swimmer, in every heat, of every event at Olympic Trials— the most competitive meet in the US, and sometimes, the world. Every swimmer at this meet is hightly talented and supremely fit, but in each event only two competitors— of 60 to 70 entrants –will come away with the most precious prize of a slot on the Olympic Team.

USA Swimming collected this data to learn if there was some stroking or pacing pattern which maximizes a swimmer’s chances of being among the fortunate few.

After 40 years, the data shows most clearly that a rare and completely counter-intuitive skill is the key to success in swimming.  That skill is the ability to maintain Stroke Length while increasing Stroke Rate.

Why counter-intuitive? Well, what does everyone do naturally when trying to swim faster? Work harder and stroke faster— while ignoring Stroke Length! No wonder this virtually always leads to failure and frustration: They have it exactly backwards!

With this information, you can ensure that your efforts to swim faster will have a vastly greater chance of success. To do this, plan sets which:

1. Reveal your current ability to maintain one stroke count (say 18 SPL), while increasing Tempo.
2. Make a tiny increase in tempo (as little as a hundredth of a second) and count strokes. If your SPL holds, increase tempo and count strokes again.
3. Continue until your SPL increases.

When your SPL increases, you’ve discovered your current level of Conscious Incompetence at this combination of SPL and Tempo. Work at this level until you can easily and consistently swim this Tempo+SPL combo. Then raise tempo again until you find the tempo at which it’s a struggle to maintain your SPL.

Learn to swim with greater ease and speed in your “Green Zone” with our downloadable Ultra-Efficient Freestyle Complete Self-Coaching Toolkit.

Want to master the Swimming Success Algorithm? A Tempo Trainer is the essential tool. 

The post The Algorithm of Speed: 3 Proven Principles for Swimming Faster appeared first on Total Immersion.

This post was originally published by Terry Laughlin on May 9, 2011 and is a follow-up companion piece to an Apr. 2011 post from Terry that we published two weeks ago.

In my previous post, Stalled Progress? It’s Not a Plateau– It’s a Crossroads, I described the plateau encountered by most people soon after they begin swimming as the place where you can learn lessons and gain insights that will determine your ultimate level of accomplishment and satisfaction as a swimmer. The greatest danger is to assume you’ve gone as far as you’re capable of.

It happened to me 40 years ago, and it took me another 30 years to discover the way out. I started swimming competitively as a 10th grader and never quite escaped the literal slow lane of my relatively undistinguished high school team. I swam the longest event – 400-yard freestyle at the time – and while I wasn’t winning races, at least my times were improving.

When I began college swimming (in late 1968), the stakes and the training increased sharply. Over the next two years my time for the 1650-yard freestyle improved by almost 3 minutes. But in my third year, it improved by only 4 seconds. Going into my final season I resolved to work harder than ever, prevailing on our coach to offer double workouts twice a week. Even so, that year my 1650 time was 20 seconds slower and I fell out of the top 6 at our conference meet. I concluded I’d reached the limits of my ability and ‘retirement’ from competitive swimming came as a relief.

A quarter-century later, looking for lessons about skill-acquisition to pass on to “adult-onset” swimmers, I read several books about martial arts. The most influential was Mastery, the Keys to Success and Long Term Fulfillment by George Leonard. Leonard was a student of Zen who became an Aikido sensei despite beginning study at the advanced age of 47. Leonard writes that fulfillment comes not from achieving a goal but from choosing a challenge that requires your full devotion — which is precisely how I experience improvement-oriented swimming.

Value the Process
Those who decide to pursue Mastery most often do so as a result of encountering that initially frustrating first plateau. Where others may give up and pursue something else or simply accept ‘this is as good as it’s going to get,’ a fortunate few learn to Love the Plateau. After all, as Leonard writes, “If our life is a good one . . . most of it will be spent on the plateau.”  Therefore we should learn “to value, to enjoy, even to love . . . the long stretch of diligent effort with no seeming progress.”

Loving the plateau doesn’t infer complacency. Rather, it means coming to value the process over the product. In the previous article, I quoted a TI Discussion Forum post from “SG” who had improved in a matter of months from swimming two laps to three miles, then over a few more months improved his time for one mile from 40 to 33 minutes. When his progress stalled he experienced his first frustration — and a measure of doubt over whether he could swim any faster. When doubt intrudes, improvement — and commitment — become doubly hard.

As I responded to SG, if he were to improve to 32, 31 or 30 minutes, the thrill of accomplishment might last for 15 seconds after touching the wall and seeing the magic digits on the pace clock – and then be followed by 15 or more hours of practice before seeing another drop. 

The key to maximizing the body-mind-spirit benefits of swimming lies in applying the following five insights to those hours:

• Passionate Curiosity  “I have no special talents; I am only passionately curious.”– Albert Einstein    Are there aspects of swimming you take for granted, do by rote, or simply because you’ve seen someone else doing it? Do you know the  specific benefit of every technique or training method you practice?

• Pursue Improvement  Make it your goal to improve your swimming – not just to show up, check off an item on your to-do list, or complete a certain yardage total – every time you enter the water. If your goal is to get in 3000 yards, that’s all you’re guaranteed to accomplish. If you make it your goal to spend an hour purposefully focused on improvement, your chances of that get a quantum boost.

• Be Specific  The human brain dislikes generalities and thrives on specifics. So when you set an improvement goal, make it explicit. Is it your head position while breathing . . . seeing fewer bubbles in your stroke . . . imprinting a Mail Slot entry . . . or to keep your SPL below 17 in a set of 200s?

• Measure  “What gets measured gets improved,” goes the saying. When you set out to improve something how will you know you’re going in the right direction? Set up feedback loops to keep you on track.

• Trust  When your improvement curve flattens, it’s critical to understand that when you practice with specific, measurable improvement goals change at the cellular level (i.e. neurons in your brain and nervous system) – while not perceptible – is ongoing. At intervals that incremental change consolidates to produce a thrilling forward leap. Between those leaps, the pleasure of total immersion in practice is its own reward.

Take Your Swimming to the Next Level!

Learn the Habits of Mastery and develop expert-level skills with Total Immersion’s 2.0 Freestyle Mastery Complete Self-Coaching Course. Do you love learning, practicing, and swimming the TI Way? Are you excited about attaining personal mastery in the most efficient and exacting skills available in freestyle? Have you mastered the TI Foundations in prior videos or the Effortless Endurance (formerly Ultra Efficient Freestyle) Self-Coaching Course? If yes, the 2.0 Freestyle Mastery Course is for you.

The post “Love the Plateau” (If You Wish to Break Through!) and 5 Traits of the Mastery Mindset appeared first on Total Immersion.

This post was originally published by Terry Laughlin on Mar. 20, 2012.

Since January [in 2012] I’ve been teaching an Effortless Endurance class series at the Greenwich (CT) YMCA — a series of four 90-minute sessions on Saturday afternoons. Every fourth week we begin another series. I’ve benefited personally from repeatedly leading new students through the TI foundational skills, in being reminded of the common challenges facing adults learning to swim in mid-life.

Learning to control your body in the water is is a big one. Learning to control your mind is even bigger. Inez, a participant in the current series, emailed me to report feeling overwhelmed when she went to the pool yesterday to practice the skills we worked on two days earlier in the second session, during which we focused on a Rag Doll recovery, Mail Slot entry and using the extended arm to Separate Molecules. That’s a lot of thinking and coordination.

I wrote back that– when learning a skill as complex and counter-intuitive as swimming– feeling overwhelmed is normal. I felt it as well, back in 1990, when I first realized my stroke needed a complete makeover after 25 years of swimming the traditional way. I discovered then that I needed to learn a new way to think before I could learn a new way to swim.

Between 1965 and 1972, when I was developing my inefficient stroke habits, I did all my swimming in workouts– i.e. racing teammates for a couple of hours each afternoon. In 1990 I swam mostly alone, practicing the drills and skills I was teaching in TI clinics and camps. (Weekend workshops didn’t begin until 1993.) Learning to be alone with my thoughts, undistracted by teammates, was a new experience.

I began my stroke makeover with a focus on head position, which had been forward-looking for 25 years and millions of strokes. I quickly realized that before I could learn a new way to swim, I would need to learn a new way to think — specifically how to “Think About One Thing” and ignore or dismiss other thoughts.

I thought about little else but head position for three months, and didn’t feel that a neutral head position had become my “new normal” for six months. By then, I’d formed two invaluable new habits:

(1) To swim with a neutral head position.

(2) To always leave the wall with One Clear Thought about technique.

(PS: Inez went on to say that after returning from her “overwhelmed” pool practice, she reviewed the video I’d shot Saturday and posted online, and felt encouraged and calmed by seeing how much her form had improved from a week earlier.)

 Transform Your Stroke!

Learn guaranteed skill-builders with our downloadable Total Immersion Effortless Endurance Self Coaching Course! The drills and skills are illustrated in 15 short videos. Guidance on how to learn and practice each drill effectively, illustrated by clear pictures, are contained in the companion Workbook.

The post Your First Swim Lesson Isn’t How to Stroke– It’s How to Think One Thought appeared first on Total Immersion.

Editorial Note: This post from the old TI Discussion Forum is archived from 2012, but if you’d like to participate in the current TI Discussion Forum, it is now located on Facebook as “Total Immersion Swimming Technique Discussion Group.”

This post was originally published by Terry Laughlin on Feb. 11, 2012.

The TI Discussion Forum had a query from Werner this morning, who I’m guessing is from Germany. Werner wrote:

Hallo,
I’ve been “on the TI train” for 12 months. Thanks to TI and this Forum I was able to complete 1000 meters of continuous freestyle within six months. My anxious question is: Will it hold?

Is it like biking? My grandma didn’t ride a bike for 55 years but was able to do so again, when someone suggested she do so. So how long will my current swimming success hold?

Thanks for sharing your experiences,
Werner

Here’s my reply to Werner:

Welcome to TI and thanks for engaging with other members of this Forum. As you will soon discover, your fellow TI swimmers are a thoughtful, supportive and generous group and will eagerly share the lessons they’ve learned.

The simplest answer to your question is: No, it will not hold. Quite the contrary, it will improve. Continuously. And likely for decades, not just weeks, months or years. The key is to embrace the most important aspect of the TI philosophy and methodology — Kaizen [continuous, life-long improvement].

Here are 5 Core Principles of Kaizen Swimming:

1) Your goal in every pool session is to improve your swimming – not to complete a certain number of meters or raise your heart rate or any of the traditional goals. As I’ve written many times, “My main thought every time I enter the pool is to be a better swimmer when I leave it an hour later.”

2) Improve by finding and fixing weak points. Those will be more obvious — and easier to fix – in the early stages, and more subtle — and require more patience and more strategic thinking later.

3) Love the “plateau.” This will become more important a few months to a year after you start TI, as the improvements take longer to achieve. You’ll spend weeks, and eventually months, practicing without being conscious of any improvement. During these times, maintain faith that change IS taking place — at the level of neurons. After a period of time that change will consolidate and produce a thrilling forward leap.

4) Become passionately curious. Swimming is the most complex, challenging and non-instinctive of all physical skills. This is because it’s an aquatic skill, while humans are terrestrial mammals. If you tirelessly seek to expand your knowledge and understanding, you’ll enjoy swimming much more, make steadier progress, and be able to have great confidence in your choices.

5) Practice is its own reward. Whatever goals have motivated you to begin swimming, strive to progress to a point where those external goals — while remaining sources of motivation — essentially become beside the point. The motivation that brings you to the pool day after day, year after year, decade after decade is the knowledge that your practice is the high point of your day, it leaves you energized mentally and physically for everything else you do, and–over time–produces enduring positive change in body, mind and spirit.

Happy Laps,
Terry

Find more tips like this in the Ultra-Efficient Freestyle Handbook, a richly-illustrated, easy-to-read 140 page guide to understanding freestyle technique in depth. It comes along with 15 downloadable videos and a learning and practice workbook in our Self-Coaching Toolkit.

The post 5 Principles for Continuous Improvement… for Decades! appeared first on Total Immersion.

This post was originally published by Terry Laughlin on December 14, 2012.

In a post on the TI Discussion Forum forum [from the 2012 archive], Steve asked:

“My practices are limited to 100-meter repeats because I get too winded to swim farther. Though I can swim as much as 2000 meters in a pool session, I still need to stop and rest every 100 meters. How can I swim farther without becoming winded?”

Craig Arnold, a TI enthusiast from the UK replied:

“When swimming a longer distance, why don’t you call it a warm up? That way, you give yourself permission to swim more slowly. Swim with a balance focus, concentrating on a weightless head, then marionette arms, with no splashing or bubbles. When I start out that way, before I know it I’ve swum 1000 meters.”

Craig gives good advice, but his phrase “permission to swim more slowly” is especially powerful. Though I began swimming 47 years ago, it took me over 40 years to give myself permission to swim more slowly.

My good friend Amby Burfoot, the 1968 Boston Marathon champion, long-time editor in chief of Runner’s World for 30 years–and a TI swimmer since turning 60–revealed to me that world-class Kenyan marathoner runners typically warm up for a race at a pace of about 9 minutes per mile—barely more than half their racing speed.

Compared to the Kenyans’ ability to run slowly, I was pretty poor at swimming slowly. At that time, my racing pace for the 1650-yard free was about 1:15 per 100 yards. I realized I never swam at anything remotely close to 2:30 per 100. All of my swimming was in a narrow window between 1:15 and 1:30 per 100. Immediately I decided that henceforth, I would start most practices with up to 10 minutes of swimming at the e-a-s-i-e-s-t pace possible.

The effect was instantaneous. I felt and swam much better in everything that followed. As it happens, my “superslow” pace turned out to be only a few seconds slower. I was amazed how little speed I sacrificed when I went much easier.

Striving to achieve a state of profound relaxation at the start of practice resulted in several surprising benefits:

1. I became hypersensitized to the interaction of my body and the water. I felt as if I was aware of the water at the molecular level.

2. My balance and stability were far better tuned — and I could feel the difference at every faster speed.

3. To swim faster after those initial laps of deep ease, I didn’t have to push the throttle. My pace seemed to pick up effortlessly as I continued.

Within a few months I had swum the 1650 in a pace of 1:12 per 100. Giving myself permission to swim slower made a clear difference in enabling me to swim faster.

Teaching regularly in an Endless Pool, I’ve found it’s a rare student who knows how to swim well . . .  slowly. Students who would finish far behind me in a race cannot keep from crashing into the front of the pool when I set the current at moderate speeds. They find it eye-opening when I turn the current way down and swim in place with impeccable form and no interruption in rhythm.

I explain that there’s a wide spectrum of both power and tempo. The vast majority of swimmers constantly push the upper—or physical–end of the spectrum and ignore the lower—or artful—end. It’s at the lower end where you learn most about how to form a partnership with the water.

3 Specific Ways To Swim Slower

1) Observe your hand speed as you begin your stroke. Allow a moment-of-stillness after you reach full extension, then begin stroking at slowest possible speed and lightest possible pressure.

2) Explore how slowly you can bring your arm forward over the surface, without discontinuity in recovery or instability in balance.

3) If you swim with a Tempo Trainer, turn it down gradually. Can you maintain flow at a tempo of 1.80 strokes per second?

I promise you’ll discover these are exacting skills requiring great focus and great body control. And therefore invaluable to swimming any faster speed.

Find more tips like this in the Ultra-Efficient Freestyle Handbook, a richly-illustrated, easy-to-read 140 page guide to understanding freestyle technique in depth. It comes along with 15 downloadable videos and a learning and practice workbook in our Self-Coaching Toolkit.

The post Permission to Swim Slowly: 3 Ways to Artfully Cultivate Smart Speed appeared first on Total Immersion.

Photo credit: Bob Fagan and USIA Video

This post was originally published by Terry Laughlin on Mar. 22, 2011.

Like previous practices posted, this is another example of a technique-focused Mindful Swimming Practice. These are similar to a series of classes led by me and other TI Coaches at the Multisport World Expo [in 2011] for some 160 swimmers at MIT. All showed visible and measurable improvement– in some cases improving stroke efficiency by over 30%, in others improving 1500m pace by as much as 6 minutes – in just over an hour.

All attendees expressed enthusiasm for being exposed to a refreshing alternative to uninspiring workout formulas based only on how hard or long. One set of classes was based on thoughtfully choreographed series of Focal Points (Mindful Swimming), the other on using Tempo Trainer and Stroke Count exercises to discover combinations of Stroke Length and Rate to create faster paces with less effort. 

This practice is devoted entirely to increasing sensitivity and awareness of how your hands enter, extend and find a grip.

Warmup/Tuneup 300 “Add Fingers” 
Do a continuous 300 or 12 x 25 or anything in between. Do 2 rounds of the following series:

25 Fist, 25 1-finger, 25 2-fingers, 25 3-fingers, 2×25 Full hand.

Focus: Round 1, concentrate on improving your sense of holding water as ‘grip’ area increases. Round 2, you may count strokes instead. Or both.

Narrow Focus Swim 6 to 8 x 25 of any 3 of the following Focal Points. Practice those you choose in the order given.

• Hang Hands Keep hands relaxed (not stiff) with fingers loosely separated (not closed).
• Mail Slot Cut a ‘slot’ in the water with fingertips. Slip forearm through that slot.
• Bubble-Free Watch for bubbles as you extend. Try to eliminate if you see.
• Light and Lazy Hand should feel weightless as it floats ‘lazily’ forward.
• Wide Tracks After Mail Slot entry, extend your relaxed hand so outside of wrist and elbow bones are wide of your shoulder. Avoid the center.
• VW Beetle Visualize the hood of a VW Bug. Slide your hand across the hood and down to the bumper as you extend.
• Patient At full extension, pause hand for a nanosecond before stroking. Begin pressing back as slowly and gently as possible.

Combined Focus Combine your three focal points as follows:
2 rounds of [3 x 50 (50 of each) + 2 x 75 (25 of each)]
Test your ability to transition smoothly from one focus to another and sense a distinct difference in your stroke as you do.

Extended Focus
Choose favorite Focal Point and swim [4 x 25 + 3 x 50 + 2 x 75 + 1 x 100]
Test your ability to sustain both focus and an improved sensation for a gradually increasing distance or duration.

Optional: Do this set a second time with Tempo Trainer set at a tempo of your choosing. Rather than count SPL, do this to test whether the addition of Tempo beeps aid in maintaining focus.

See closeups of Mail Slot, Bubble Free, Light and Lazy, Wide Tracks, Relaxed Hands from :20 to 1:20 of this video:

The post PRACTICE SET: Guaranteed to Develop “Smarter” Hands and Improve Your Grip on the Water appeared first on Total Immersion.