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.

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.

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.

Terry leaps off a cliff in Eleuthera, the Bahamas, December 2006 (photo:

Continuing with the theme of goal-setting, which we explored in last week’s post– “Strategies for Achieving Your Breakthrough Season: Success is Not the Result of Luck!”– this week, we revisit Terry’s December 2015 blog on the pursuit of accomplishing “audacious” swimming goals and the vital importance of consciously mastering one’s mindset in such endeavors. In this article, Terry discussed how visionary goals which imbued him with a deep sense of purpose enabled him to accomplish all of the following within a year:

• Complete a second Manhattan Island Marathon Swim
• Win his first National Open Water Championship
• Break a National Masters Record in open water
• Win a World Masters Championship Medal in the 3K Open Water event

And more importantly, he shared his approach in order to demonstrate that these strategies for success can work for any of us, if we choose to cultivate these habits of excellence:  learned optimism, seeking “flow” states,” following a path of mastery, choosing an approach of “deliberate practice,” setting meaningful goals, and finding worthy challenges even in adverse circumstances.  Enjoy… and Happy Laps!

12/21/15

Ten years ago, several months before my 55th birthday, I set a group of BHAGs or Big Hairy Audacious Goals. The term comes from the book Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, who studied businesses that had maintained influence and excellence over many decades. BHAGs focus on enduring and meaningful impact: Henry Ford set out to democratize the automobile;  in the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs talked of putting a computer in every home–40 years later there’s a computer in everyone’s pocket!

BHAGs embody visionary thinking. In 1960, JFK  proposed to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. This achievement, fulfilled in 1969, remains a defining and uplifting moment in American history–and, well, “a giant step for all mankind,” as Neil Armstrong put it.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Like the moon mission, BHAGs usually take a decade, or decades, to achieve. But I aimed to fulfill mine within a year.  They included:

• Complete a second Manhattan Island Marathon Swim.
• Win my first National Open Water Championship.
• Break a National Masters Record in open water. (I’d never even set a team record in  high school or college.)
• Win a World Masters Championship Medal in the 3K Open Water event.

Happily, I did achieve all of those and more–winning four national championships, at distances from 1 mile to 10K, and breaking two national records for the 55-59 age group, the 1- and 2-Mile Cable Swims.

My greatest benefit was gaining a sense of having a mission to accomplish, which lasted for nearly a year from the time I conceived of them. Not a single practice during that time ever felt like a check-off in my daily routine. They all felt important–even urgent. The imprint of a ‘year of high purpose’ endured well beyond that period and has had far-reaching impacts.

While I couldn’t have achieved my goals without a highly-efficient stroke, even more critical than how I swam was how I thought. For a decade previously, I’d become increasingly interested in Positive Psychology–the study of thought processes displayed by high-performing individuals.

I learned about the traits, behaviors and mindsets of such people in books such as Learned Optimism by Dan Seligman, Mastery by George Leonard, Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi PhD, and the principles of Deliberate Practice by Anders Ericsson PhD.  Setting such galvanizing goals provided an ideal opportunity to test these principles.

By applying these lessons I achieved far beyond what I’d always thought was possible. As a result of that experience, Total Immersion has emphasized effective thinking as much as effective movement.

Goal-setting with the Flow

As I approached my 60th birthday in 2011, I faced physical challenges that limited what I could accomplish athletically. In my late 50s, I began to experience fatigue and chronic musculoskeletal pain associated with the autoimmune syndrome, Polymyalgia Rheumatica (PMR). I also began to suffer foot and calf cramps after barely an hour of swimming–an effect of arthritic narrowing in my lower spine.

Between them, my training was significantly limited compared to previously. If I swam a bit too long or hard, I could be left feeling drained for hours after.   And my feet and calves often began cramping after little more than 2000 yards.

Yet though my training was likely to be quite limited, I still craved the sense of purpose and urgency I’d experienced five years earlier. Going with the flow means seeking opportunity in adversity. So I decided to Goal-set with the Flow.

My mid-50s accomplishments  had been in my lifelong strong suit, distance freestyle.  At 60 I decided to strike out in a new direction, emphasizing events outside my comfort zone–shorter distances and the other strokes.  I’d swum only freestyle for most of my life and had only begun to focus on other strokes a few years earlier.

As well, the limitations on how long or intensively I could train resulted in two surprising developments:

1. Knowing that I had a practice ‘budget’ of 2500 yards made every lap seem far more precious. I would allot time only for activities proven to improve performance.
2. Needing to be careful about intensity, pushed me to rely less than ever on power and muscle, and find the easiest way to accomplish any task.

The results were thrilling and have transformed my approach to practice and training.  In 2011, at Masters Nationals I entered every discipline but backstroke–and medaled in all four! In 200 Butterfly, I even did a lifetime best, swimming faster than I had at 55 when I was in the midst of achieving BHAGs in distance freestyle.

Briefer, More Focused, Better Than Ever

Finding opportunity in adversity has led me to embrace practices that emphasize focus over duration.  I seldom swim beyond an hour; many of my practices last just 40 to 50 minutes. What I love most is how keen my focus remains for that duration–quite literally from first stroke to last at times.

I include only two to three sets or activities in most practices. In each I’m either trying to perform a subtle skill better than I ever have in my life. Or ‘solving problems’ related to controlling stroke count, while swimming faster–on the clock, or on my Tempo Trainer. I can succeed at most tasks only by giving it my full attention. Moments of Flow have become more routine than ever before.

Practicing this way has produced surprising–even thrilling–breakthroughs in awareness or control each year. My pull, kick, and breathing are all strikingly more efficient than they were before I turned 60–a development confirmed by comparing recent video with video shot in my 50s.

And it my stroke doesn’t just look better. It feels amazing almost every day–better than it ever has. Twice in one recent week I posted this on the TI Facebook page: “I felt fantastic in the water today–I’ve never felt this good before.” Not an insignificant claim after 50 years of swimming.

I’ve never looked forward to swimming as much as I do now, nor have I felt a greater sense purpose and flow. I still have PMR symptoms; I often feel achy and mildly flu-like as I get in the water. But within minutes I  feel indescribably great. Swimming has always been known for its unique healing properties. I seem to have tapped into something beyond.

In three months I’ll enter the 65-69 age group. As I did at 55 and 60, I plan to attend Masters Nationals in the spring to get a concrete gauge on my performance capabilities. In early November I wrote out my goals for the next six months. As I was writing them, I felt the familiar sense of purpose and urgency, and I’m more grateful than ever for how central swimming goals have become for my life.

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

The post Going with the Flow: Audacious Goals & Seeking Opportunity in Adversity appeared first on Total Immersion.

You can read more here.

I’m sure I’m not alone with the challenges that I face in giving myself permission to fail constructively. I would love to hear how you all approach and tackle this.

The post There’s no such thing as bad weather … appeared first on Total Immersion.

If you’re not sure whether to be a neurally- or aerobically-oriented swimmer consider this: If you emphasize aerobic training, you have no assurance that your brain will be stimulated in a way likely to promote brain health. And there’s a pretty good chance you could compromise the quality of brain stimulus. But if you emphasize neural training, you always receive quality aerobic training.

I’ll illustrate by giving examples of typical sets of both types, and describing their effects.

Aerobic Set Swim 12 x 200 on 30 seconds rest

An average pace for a 50-ish swimmer on a set like this might be around 3:00 per 200. With a 30-second rest interval, the set would take 42 minutes to complete, at a a work-to-rest ratio of 6:1 (3 minutes swim, 30 seconds rest). This combination of relatively long overall duration and relatively brief rest intervals would be good for metabolic endurance and a healthy heart.  You could develop a bit more aerobic power or oxygen uptake by shifting from a steady pace to a varying pace with some repeats easier and some faster — perhaps descending 1-6 and 7-12, or alternating one cruise with one brisk.

The shortcoming of such a set is that too many swimmers are likely to shift into mental autopilot state or let their minds wander to deal with the tedium produced by doing a relatively unvarying activity for 42 minutes. Once you’ve gotten started on your first repeat, there’s little else to do but count down repeats until you’re done.

Neural Training Set: Swim 4 rounds of [3 x 200 on 30 seconds rest]

Rounds 1 and 2 (or 1 and 3): Swim 1 x 200 each with these Focal Points: Weightless Head — Align Body on ‘Tracks’ — ‘Patient’ Lead Hand

Rounds 3 and 4 (or 2 and 4): Swim 1 x 200 each at these stroke counts: 13 to 14 — 14 to 15 — 15 to 16 (OR  1 x 200 each at these stroke tempos: 1.15, 1.10, 1.05)

In this example you’d be required to pay close attention on every lap and every stroke. In the case of swimming with Focal Points,  to assess the sensation in each stroke and compare it to the ‘mental blueprint’ you form for each thought. In addition, you’ll be ‘wiring together’ cognitive and motor neurons. In the case of swimming with Stroke Counts, you’ll have to calibrate your Stroke Length on each stroke, then recalibrate it on each subsequent 200.

Because the overall set duration and work-to-rest ratio in the Neural set remain the same as in the Aerobic set, you would receive precisely the same metabolic endurance/healthy-heart benefits. But by giving your neurons a mission, you would also build more Cognitive Reserve which neuroscientists tell us is the best thing we can do to increase our chances of having a razor-sharp mind in our 80s and beyond.

Mens sana in corpore sano. It’s an ancient Latin quotation, taken from pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, meaning “A sound mind in a healthy body.”  If you’re a neurally-oriented swimmer, it’s not just a slogan.

The post Strong Body, Sharp Mind: How swimming can give it to you appeared first on Swim For Life.

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