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.

The following article is excerpted from Terry Laughlin’s book “Extraordinary Swimming for Every Body: A Guide To Swimming Better Than You Ever Imagined.”

Unless you have all the air you need, you’ll be too distracted to concentrate on other skills during drill practice or whole stroke swimming. Being mindful of the following will be helpful as you rotate from nose-up to nose-down and back again:

• Don’t Hold Your Breath

Begin exhaling immediately. Exhaling with slow quiet nose bubbles is a good way to regulate your breathing and to avoid inhaling water or choking as you breathe. 

• Relax Into the Water

If you lift your head, it will be harder to get to air. If you keep your head low, it will be easier. And stay relaxed whenever you are rolling up to get air or back down. Moving abruptly in either direction will make your body position less stable.

Rhythmic Breathing

Three tips for fitting a seamless rhythmic breath into your stroke, while maintaining good balance and a patient catch:

• Follow Your Shoulder

As you spear one arm forward, the opposite shoulder moves back. Just follow this shoulder with your chin and the rotational energy of spearing will make it easier to get air.

• Stay Low

Practice this in three ways: (1) Relax into the water as you breathe; (2) Keep the top of your head as close to the surface as possible, while rolling to breathe; (3) Look back slightly over your shoulder as you breathe.

• Stay Tall

Give extra care to keeping the lead hand “patient” as you breathe, stroking only after you inhale. And if you keep your fingers tipped down, your next stroke will be far stronger.

Breathe Two Ways

Alternate-side or bilateral breathing promotes symmetry better than single side breathing. If you breathe only to one side, it’s likely that you’ll veer off the “tracks” in that direction. I try to breathe as often to one side in practice and when racing. Breathing to your unfamiliar side may feel awkward at first, but patient practice will gradually reduce that awkwardness. As well, all the T.I. drills improve symmetry and build a better foundation for efficient bilateral breathing. 

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 Get The Air You Need: A Focal Point Checklist for Breathing 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 demonstrating focal points for the timing of the weight shift, Feb. 2016

This Dec. 2015 photo-illustrated article from T.I. Founder Terry Laughlin is a thorough breakdown of how one can apply several core fundamentals of T.I. technique to a practice session. With great detail, he describes the step-by-step tactical approach of a lesson he conducted with two students. Below, he recounts how he guided his students’ practice with targeted focal points– or “mini skills”– to test how well they could maintain efficiency as they moved from drilling to more seamless whole stroke swimming. Terry’s account of this T.I. practice session with students is an excellent example of how you can integrate foundational technique skills into your own swim practice. Enjoy… and Happy Laps!

December 11, 2015

Two days ago I brought two students, Dmitry and Sergey, to Bard College to guide them through a practice that was 100% focused on increasing efficiency  via improving technique. They had just completed two days of instruction–four 90-minute sessions in the Endless Pool at our Swim Studio. During the final session, they said they’d like to extend their stay and squeeze in one more session.

Both had radically transformed their strokes during the previous two days. But such rapid transformation isn’t always easy to maintain–especially after returning to the very different environment of a lap pool, and to a setting where the pull to resume old routines may be strong. If we did another session in the Endless Pool, I wouldn’t attempt to introduce anything new–only to review and deepen the skills they’d already learned.

But I felt there could be even more value in testing the new skills in the same environment to which they’d be returning.  I proposed we go to Bard College the next morning, where I could guide them through their first post-workshop ‘real world’ practice.  The experience turned out to be as valuable for me as for Sergey and Dmitry.

We began by reviewing the first and most ‘non-negotiable’ skill of efficient swimming: Establishing a neutral–and weightless–head position.  I had them repeat Superman four times. Glide five yards from wall to backstroke flags. Stand for a breather and return.

On the first two reps both were holding the head slightly elevated. I lightly wagged the head to reveal that they were maintaining slight neck tension. On the next two reps, their heads were fully released and aligned with the spine. The visual cue–shown below–is that only a small sliver of the back of the head is visible above the surface.

Ready for the next step: Add a few strokes to test whether they could continue resting their heads on the water. Would I still see that same small sliver of head as they stroked?

We did four reps of Superman plus 4 to 5 non-breathing strokes. I asked them to assess whether their head position felt the same–with same degree of relaxation in neck muscles–after they began stroking. They passed that test, so we advanced to a slightly more demanding skill.

Could they maintain this new skill for a full 25 yards–14 to 17 strokes rather than 4–and while breathing. I instructed them to push off in Superman, establish the weightless head sensation, take four non-breathing strokes, then breathe bilaterally the rest of the way. Could they maintain a neutral, weightless head while breathing–as shown below?

Sergey succeeded. Dmitry lifted his head while breathing. I asked him to tune into the feeling of having the head rest on the surface during the non-breathing strokes, then check whether he felt the same sensation as he breathed. While he didn’t fully correct this error, it was valuable information to identify this as a problem to be solved in practices that followed. I made a mental note to finish the practice by having Dmitry review the TI “Nod” drill–shown below–which can correct head-lifting in as little as 10 minutes.

Nodding to the left

Following the same sequence, we cycled through several foundational mini-skills. For each cycle, choose ONE Focal Point or Mini-Skill while doing the following:

1. Do several reps of a standing rehearsal or drill–depending on the skill.
2. Swim several short reps, transitioning seamlessly from the drill to 4 to 5 non-breathing strokes.
3. Swim 4 to 8 x 25 to test the durability of the new mini-skill with more strokes and while breathing.

The second cycle was most instructive for all three of us. In our first cycle, I’d observed that  both Sergey and Dmitry looked a bit tight, and uncertain, during Recovery. To address this, I instructed them to lightly Paint a Line on the surface with fingertips (hanging from a Rag Doll arm).

First they rehearsed Rag Doll/Paint a Line– as shown below.

Rehearsal: Paint A Line and Rag Doll with right arm

Then they tested their ability to do it while stroking. It should look like this:

In this case, it was Dmitry who succeeded. Sergey’s hand was a bit too close to his body–increasing tension in his shoulder. It was also several inches off the water– an occasion for energy waste, especially when multiplied by the thousands of strokes he would take in a triathlon or open water swim.

A much more important revelation was the keen degree of attention required for new skills that call on fine motor coordination–requiring the cooperation of multiple small muscles. This was an opportunity for a critical takeaway about the Skill of Focus.

Just as with motor skills, one must begin developing mental skills with relatively undemanding tasks. E.G. For just 4 to 5 strokes, can you lightly trace a wide straight line on the surface with fingertips. There’s no point in going farther–either a more complex skill, or swimming a greater distance–until you succeed at this.

To develop the ability to perform complex skills, one must first achieve consistency–and a degree of effortlessness–in a series of much simpler mini-skills.

To acquire the capacity for laser-sharp and unwavering focus– e.g. to remain calmly observant in a chaotic-seeming environment like the start of a triathlon swim– one must first be able to concentrate on doing one simple thing for 25 yards or even less in a quiet pool.

During our practice I was able to not only make corrections to form, but also to leave a much larger lesson: Your goal on each rep is not only to improve a motor skill; it’s to strengthen your capacity to hold one thought.

By the way, my own swimming received a striking benefit. When I wasn’t observing, I swam behind Dmitry and Sergey, practicing the same skills and testing my own focus. (I [passed that test–a result of tireless practice.)

At the beginning I took 13 strokes for 25 yards. Then my count improved to 12 strokes. And a few times I crossed the pool in 11 strokes. Before we got out I had to test this efficiency on a continuous 50.

First 25, 12 strokes. Flip turn and pushoff. 2nd 25, 12 strokes for a total of 24 strokes for 50 yards.

I hadn’t swum 50 yards in fewer than 25 strokes in several years. I was so pleased I immediately swam another to see if I could repeat it. Voila, I did.

Very happy laps indeed.

All skills and Focal Points mentioned in this post are shown and described in the downloadable Effortless Endurance Freestyle Complete Self-Coaching Toolkit. 

The post HOW TO PRACTICE: Terry’s “Mini-Skill” Focal Point Progression from Drills to Whole Stroke Swimming appeared first on Total Immersion.