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.

One of the most distinctive and effective aspects of the T.I. approach to swimming is not merely our focus on efficient technique– it’s the way in which we approach the learning process itself. “Meta-learning”– or learning how to learn– is a key element of how we pursue swimming as a path for kaizen mastery (continuous, life-long improvement). We set clear intentions through deliberate practice of specific and discrete skills, and every feature of practice is purposeful, designed to sharpen our mastery of even the subtlest movements within a swim stroke. The complex movements of whole-stroke swimming are deconstructed into its simpler skill components (“mini-skills”) for ease of learning and practice, building the stroke piece by piece, from the ground up. Teaching though this building-block method has always been an integral part of the T.I. process and our swimmers’ success, as each drill and skill in our learning progression builds upon the previous drill and skill. A credo Terry often quoted from the U.S. military is the philosophy that “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”– it is imperative to learn and master foundational skills at slow speeds in order to perform them impeccably at faster speeds and in more complex movements. This September 2016 post from Terry is an in-depth look at how T.I. applies the specific learning strategy of “chunking”– breaking a component into smaller “chunks” of related information– to the practice of swimming, and how this approach is a key to your success in swimming mastery.   

 September 13, 2016

At some point, all kaizen swimmers employ a learning strategy that cognitive scientists refer to as “chunking.” Chunking refers to grouping separate pieces of information together to facilitate learning by remembering the groups as opposed to a much larger number of individual pieces of information. The types of groups can also act as a memory cue. In TI we group by body segment (head, torso, arms, legs) and skill type (Balance, Core Stability, Streamlining, Propulsion).

We learn to read via a chunking process. First, we learn the sounds of individual letters which assemble into words we generally know before beginning to read. Three individual letters (d-o-g,  c-a-t) form a group that represents a family pet.

Next, we combine a series of words into a phrase or sentence. Via several additional chunking steps we may acquire the skill of speed reading, in which we rapidly scan pages of text, identifying key phrases which convey the main ideas of what we’re reading.

Chunking is a key strategy for learning complicated physical skills such as swimming. In T.I. methodology, we call this approach “Blend-and-Harmonize”– as in, blend several discrete mini-skills, then bring the new skill set into harmony with the whole stroke.

Long before I knew of it as a learning strategy, I instinctively employed a chunking process to learn new skills. This first occurred nine months before the first T.I. camp, before I’d chosen the name Total Immersion, or even thought of offering a swim camp for adults.

The first skill was Balance, to which I was introduced by Bill Boomer. Bill taught me to align my head with my spine and shift weight forward to my upper chest. We called it “swimming downhill.” Practiced together, these two skills (aligning head and spine; shifting my weight forward) made my legs feel light, something I’d never experienced in almost 25 years of swimming.

From the start, I realized that I couldn’t fully concentrate on both of these new thoughts or sensations at once. So I’d spend 10 to 30 minutes concentrating on feeling a straight line from the top of my head to the base of my spine. Then I’d focus on leaning on my upper chest (we no longer teach balance this way) for a similar duration. This particular approach is called “Block practice.”

After several weeks, I felt sufficiently familiar with both sensations to begin alternating them—focusing on head-spine alignment one length and swimming downhill on the next length. This approach is called “Random practice.” (Note: I also practiced a head-lead balance drill—similar to today’s Torpedo—that highlighted both, giving me a heightened sensory benchmark to aim for in whole stroke.)

After another few weeks, I began to blend the two thoughts. One length focusing on head-spine alignment, one length on swimming downhill, and a third length blending the two thoughts/skills. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Now I was “Chunking.”

I learned later that sequencing Block, Random, and Chunking practice (the names for which I didn’t even know when I began doing that) accelerates transfer of skills from conscious to autonomic control. Or to use a more familiar phrase: Forming a Muscle Memory.

It took me about five years of similar experimentation to achieve Balance in even a rudimentary way –it felt great at the time, but I didn’t yet know how much better that sensation would become in the years ahead. Over the next 10 years, I continued to discover new mini-skills—like the Mail Slot entry and reaching below my bodyline–that improved my sense of weightlessness in the water.

But the bottom line is that Balance originally occurred to me as several discrete skills, which I focused on and sensed individually. After the passage of time– and without my realizing consciously what had occurred– the multiple, individual sensations consolidated or “chunked” into a single awareness I call “Swimming in Balance.”

When Balance became a single, seamlessly-integrated “sensory package,” that freed up mental bandwidth to add new skills—Stability, Streamlining, Propulsion, and Breathing.

It would be many years before I read about chunking as a learning strategy and I could apply that term to what had occurred to me– finally, I could articulate the theoretical framework to describe how I’d intuitively been practicing all along. Both before learning about chunking, and since then,  I’ve developed countless skills by the same process.

For instance—as outlined in the 1.0 Effortless Endurance Self-Coaching Course—I achieved a far more refined and efficient freestyle recovery by breaking it into three discrete mini-skills, each of which occupy only a micro-second in the stroke—Elbow Swing, Rag Doll Arm, and Paint a Line.

As brief as these mini-skills are, I have a keen awareness of each, acquired by applying the proven sequence of Block, Random, and Chunking (or “Blend-and-Harmonize”) practice to them.

Fast forward to the present day: I have a far more expansive and holistic “chunk” to which I could give the term “My Utterly Blissful Freestyle,” which integrates six to eight sizable chunks of skills that I’ve developed over the years.

Accessing such high level sensation used to be hit-or-miss. It often took 30-60 minutes to “find” the peak feeling I’d acquired at that point. Now those high quality sensations are absolutely dependable—always there–and I can consistently access them within just a lap or two.

Learn all the skills of efficient freestyle with the Total Immersion Effortless Endurance Self Coaching Course!

The post PRACTICE STRATEGY: Learning How We Learn Any New Skill Is the Key to Kaizen Swimming Mastery appeared first on Total Immersion.

This week we revisit one of our most popular blog posts from 2016– a post from Terry on the metacognitive aspects of skill acquisition (i.e. “learning how we learn”) and how that relates to Total Immersion’s mindful, kaizen approach to swimming. Below, Terry explains the stages through which we all must progress in learning any new skill, and why it’s so critical that the final two stages become an endless loop of skill mastery, as we pursue a deliberate, lifelong path of continuous improvement. Naturally, this approach applies to mastering any skill in life, so it’s not surprising that this article struck a chord with so many readers! Enjoy… and Happy Laps!

4/15/16

The Four Stages of Learning emerged from the field of psychology in the 1970s, and has since become widely familiar and accepted. It identifies four levels of competence one must experience in learning any new skill.  Also known as the “conscious competence” learning model,  it describes “the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill.”

According to this model, we generally start out with a blind spot: “We don’t know what we don’t know.” We must recognize our deficit to progress further. Next, we must consciously acquire the skill, then consciously use it. By doing so, we gradually acquire the ability to use the skill somewhat automatically.

The four stages are called:

1. Unconscious Incompetence We fail to recognize that a higher skill level exists or that it has value. You may have escaped this stage quite early in your swimming experience. I didn’t do so for 25 years, until almost age 40. Until then, I believed my swimming potential was limited by a lack of ‘genetic’ traits. That notion was dramatically dispelled—in less than 10 minutes–when Bill Boomer taught me a balance drill, and I recognized I had a serious blind spot in my knowledge of technique… even after coaching with great success for nearly 20 years!
2. Conscious Incompetence Like most TI swimmers, the first skill deficit I identified was balance. For 25 years, I’d thought I had ‘heavy’ legs and the only solution was to kick harder. When Boomer taught me to align my head and spine and shift weight forward, I was stunned at how my legs automatically—and effortlessly—lifted to the surface.  That remains my single most transformative moment in 50 years of swimming.
3. Conscious Competence For the next six months I thought of almost nothing but maintaining a straight line between head and hips, and leaning on my chest (a technique called Press Your Buoy which we taught until the late ‘90s), fearful that—after 25 years of unbalanced swimming—I would lose this magical feeling if I wasn’t explicitly focused on it.
4. Unconscious Competence When I finally trusted that balance had become a moderately-durable habit, I immediately adopted a new skill goal—Swim ‘Taller,’ which I’d learned would reduce drag. This change was just as challenging: For 25 years I’d focused exclusively on pushing water back. Now I had to train myself to ignore the hand pushing back and focus on the one going forward.

This amounted to a dramatic change in a pretty fundamental values system of traditional swimming—that I should place a higher value on extending my bodyline, than on pushing water back. The fact that I felt markedly better convinced me. Swimming Taller kept me occupied for several more months—during which I regularly made time to check on head-spine alignment.

As soon as Swimming Taller began to feel consistent and more natural, I again chose a new skill focus—Holding My Place. After reaching forward, my focus would be to consciously hold my place with the lead hand—then spear the entering hand past it. This was a more complex and challenging skill that the first two I’d tackled. Fortunately I was prepared—in two ways.

If I hadn’t already learned balance, it would have been physically impossible to Hold My Place. As well, when I began to concentrate on aligning head and spine, it was my first experience in trying to hold a single ‘stroke thought’ for an extended period. That was surprisingly hard at first, but got easier over time, as those skills moved into the level of Unconscious Competence.

When I tried to Hold My Place, I could feel my hand moving back. I had to learn to resolve the conflict between my intention and what I experienced. Fortunately, I was prepared for this far more demanding level of Conscious Competence, by nine months of prior conscious skill practice.

That occurred in 1989. In the 27 years since, I’ve never lacked for a new skill goal to maintain in Conscious Competence, which illustrates a critical distinction between the TI view of the learning stages, from that which is commonly taught.

The Kaizen Continual Loop

In the kaizen approach to mastery, learning is not a stairstep progression from Unconscious Incompetence, ending in Unconscious Competence, as shown in this illustration.

Rather, one’s goal should be to maintain a continual loop of mastery. Upon moving from Conscious to Unconscious Competence in one skill, immediately identify a logical next step. Recognize your Conscious Incompetence at a related, slightly more challenging skill and bring it into Conscious Competence, then work consciously on it until it happens more autonomously. Then start the process all over again, as illustrated here.

Here’s one more thing:

This process actually involves a change in the physical location in the brain where we process cognitive and motor skill. During the Conscious Competence stage, we process in the cerebral cortex, an area with especially dense neural connections. The cerebral cortex consumes a lot of energy; the same energy—oxygen and glycogen—used by the muscles.

When we achieve Unconscious Competence that activity is run by the cerebellum, which uses far less energy. Each time we learn a new skill this way, we not only increase our mechanical efficiency, we also increase our energy efficiency in a surprising way.

Learn the skills of Efficient Freestyle with the Total Immersion Effortless Endurance Self Coaching Course!

The post The 4 Stages of Skill-Learning– and the critical Kaizen Loop of Continuous Mastery appeared first on Total Immersion.

I ordered Tim’s most recent book The Four Hour Chef the day it was released five months ago. Partly because I’m an avid cook. Preparing and eating good food closely follows swimming among my enthusiasms.

And partly because my curiosity was piqued by the subtitle The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, LEARNING ANYTHING [both caps and much larger font size on the cover] and Living the Good Life. For over a dozen years, we’ve given equal emphasis to teaching the behaviors and mindsets of expertise and mastery as to teaching skillful swimming.

As soon as the book arrived, I leafed through it and, as I related in the blog  META-Learning: Who Would You Rather Have As A Teacher–Phelps or Shinji? was surprised to find on p. 31 a familiar picture—a screen shot of TI Coach Shinji Takeuchi’s #1-ranked youtube video, above a screenshot of Michael Phelps’s #2 rated video.

How to Learn ANYTHING

The book’s first section is a guide to what Tim calls Meta-Learning – greatly accelerating the process for learning nearly anything by uncovering clever shortcuts and avoiding failure points that impede and dishearten most people. That Shinji who only took up swimming at 37, gained more followers on youtube than Michael Phelps, who began swimming at 7, makes him a great example of Meta-Learning.

Tim invited those who were eager to begin cooking to skip ahead to the next section where he begins to present cooking skills. I took him up on it after writing the blog about Shinji. Yesterday I returned to the Meta-Learning section to read it in full.

And again, to my great surprise, on p. 62 I found this series of five pictures of me, taken from screen shots in the TI DVD Self Coached Workshop: Perpetual Motion Freestyle in 10 Lessons.

Accompanying it was text, in which Tim extolled TI as an example of a Meta-Learning program – and this section explaining how learning to swim with the help of a TI DVD made him feel like Superman. Here’s the excerpt:

Despite having grown up five minutes from the beach, I could never swim more than two laps in a pool. This was a lifelong embarrassment until I turned 31, when two catalysts changed everything.

At the end of January 2008, a friend issued me a New Year’s resolution challenge: he would go the rest of 2008 without coffee or stimulants if I trained and finished an open-water 1-km swim during the year.

Months after this handshake agreement, after many failed swimming lessons and on the cusp of conceding defeat, a former non-swimmer Chris Sacca, introduced me to TI.

Total Immersion offered one thing no other swimming method had: a well-designed progression.

Each step built upon the previous and eliminated the usual failure points—like kickboards.

The first sessions including drills like pushing off in shallow water and gliding for 5 yards or so, at which point you simply stood up. Practicing breathing came much, much later. Learners of TI, by design, dodge that panic-inducing bullet when they most need to: in the beginning. The TI progression won’t allow you to fail in the early stages.  There is no stress.

The skills are layered, one-by-one, until you can swim on autopilot. “

[Summarizing the next part: Tim cut drag by 50% in his first self-coached practice and had more than doubled the distance he traveled on each stroke by his fourth. Within 10 days he’d increased the distance he could swim nonstop from 40 yards to 400. Note: A 1000% increase! In 10 days!]

Several months later, at my childhood beach, I calmly walked into the ocean, well past my former fear-of-death distance and effortlessly swam over a mile—roughly 1.8 km—parallel to shore. I only stopped because I’d passed my distance landmark, a beachfront house. I felt no fatigue, panic, fear—nothing but the electricity of doing something I’d thought impossible.

I felt like Superman.

And here’s Tim telling the same story at a TED Conference

More posts about Tim Ferriss, TI and Meta-Learning

How Tim Ferriss Learned to Swim in 10 Days

Could Tim Ferriss turn The Situation on to Swimming?

How to Build World Class Muscle Memory

META-Learning: Who Would You Rather Have As A Teacher–Phelps or Shinji?

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