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 blog was originally published by Terry Laughlin on Aug. 24, 2015. 

The primary reason the average swimmer converts only 3 percent of energy into forward motion is that our swimming actions are so strongly influenced by basic self-preservation instincts. Concerns about choking and sinking are so primal that they continue to affect how we swim long after we’ve lost our conscious fear and even after we’ve become quite accomplished.

What else could explain why Sun Yang lifts and cranes his head, noticeably twisting his body even while setting a 1500-meter world record?

Though this ungainly moment passes so quickly that you probably wouldn’t notice it on the surface, he repeated this several hundred times during his 1500m world record. How much time might it have cost him to distort his bodyline over and over?

Why does he still do that? It’s most likely this habit began to form when he was still a new swimmer, perhaps 6 years old. Eventually he hid it well enough that his coaches overlooked it. But if a world record holder can still waste energy in such an obvious way, how likely is it for the rest of us to avoid doing so?

My post Most of What You ‘Know’ about Swimming is Wrong! explains how most of the advice we receive about swimming is likely to reinforce our existing wasteful instincts. We’re less likely to critically examine questionable advice when it agrees with what our own instincts already incline us toward.

The converse of this is: Actions that can significantly improve your swimming are most likely counterintuitive. As examples, consider five common myths and their non-instinctive counterpoints.

Myth: To swim fast, you must ride high on the water.

This myth arose because elite sprinters seem to have more of the body out of the water. In fact, hydroplaning occurs only at speeds of 30mph or greater, while no human has ever swum faster than 5mph. What we’re actually seeing is the swimmer cutting a deeper bow wave. This requires so much energy that it’s almost impossible to sustain for more than a minute.

Fact: On average, a human body, rides 95 below the surface. (How much of Sun Yang’s body is below the surface in the picture above ? As he swims 1500m faster than anyone in history!) We swim through, not over, the water. Consequently drag avoidance, not power production, is our most important strategy for swimming faster.

Myth: Keep the water at your hairline. Partially due to influence from TI, this formerly universal notion is finally changing. Why did coaches teach this for so long? They said it would . . . help you ride higher on the water. In fact, the opposite is true.

Fact: The head represents about 8 percent of body mass. So if most of it is above the surface, other body parts must sink. This causes us to kick more, greatly increasing drag and energy waste. Because the head has many cavities, it is quite buoyant. Focus on feeling that your head rests on a ‘cushion’ of water and aligns with your spine —a universal principle of good biomechanics, demonstrated by Katie Ledecky at the World Championships in Kazan Russia.

Myth: Push water back (past your thigh . . . and/or faster in the last third of your stroke.) Various versions of this encourage you to focus on pushing back—whether farther, harder, or faster. For the vast majority of swimmers these actions create far more turbulence than propulsion. They also make you tired because they put the workload on using arm and shoulder muscles, rather than tapping core power.

Fact 1: The most important contribution of the hand and arm is to reduce drag. To accomplish this, focus on using your arms to extend your bodyline and separate the molecules in front of you, rather than on pushing on the molecules behind you. This reduces wave drag–the most significant limiter of Stroke Length and speed.

Fact 2: When focused on propulsion, use your hand to hold your place, instead of to push water back. The world’s best swimmers move the body past the hand. (In fact when Doc Counsilman filmed Mark Spitz in 1968, he was astonished to see that Spitz’s hand exited the water ahead of where it went in.) They can do this because they (i) excel at ‘active streamlining;’ and (ii) apply pressure with great precision–but surprisingly little force–as shown by a study of 1992 Olympic swimmers.

Myth: Kick to keep your legs from sinking. Kick even more to swim faster. Because of our survival instinct to churn the arms and legs, we need little encouragement to overdo this. Nonetheless we hear advice from all sides to kick more and harder. From the swim instructor who hands us a kickboard at our first lesson, to coaches who believe no workout is complete without a set devoted to pushing a kickboard up and down the pool, there’s a universal mania for kicking.

Fact: The legs are awesome at burning energy and creating drag, but almost pathetic at creating propulsion. Doc Counsilman (again) studied the effects of kicking among elite swimmers in the 1960s and found that kicking increased drag, and contributed nothing to propulsion at speeds above 5 feet per second—a thoroughly pedestrian pace for top swimmers. Like the arms, your legs make their greatest contribution by drafting behind the upper torso. Unless your goal is to sprint a short distance, you can hardly go wrong by kicking less. You’ll not only reduce drag and save energy. You also allow your legs to be drive more by core-body action than by fatigue-prone thigh muscles.

Myth: Stroke faster to swim faster. Like each of these myths, I subscribed to this as a young swimmer and it took me more than a decade—from age 38 to about 50–to fully undo the habit. We churn the arms from our first lap. Instinct also seems to suggest that the ‘obvious’ way to swim faster is to stroke faster. Then there are seemingly authoritative voices who tell us that top triathletes or open water swimmers stroke 70 or more times per minute and therefore we should too.

Fact: Swimming speed is determined by a simple equation: Stroke Length times Stroke Rate equals Velocity (SL x SR = V). You need both to swim faster but SL has conclusively been shown to be the foundation–the measure that correlates most strongly with performance.

To swim faster, first establish your optimal SL (measured by strokes per length or SPL and indexed to your height). Reducing drag is the easiest way to do so. Then incrementally increase SR, while maintaining an efficient SL.

The most precise and controllable way is by using a Tempo Trainer, increasing tempo by as little as one-hundredth of a second to ease adaptation. Increase tempo a tiny bit; maintain your stroke count. When that feels natural and easy, make another tiny tempo increase. Before long the cumulative increase in speed—with a long, relaxed, efficient stroke—will be quite significant. And sustainable.

Be Mindful . . .

As each of these stroke thoughts/skills are counter-intuitive, remember that habit, instinct—and most influences you encounter—will pull you back toward wasteful actions. Making these changes permanent requires conscious, purposeful, and mindful practice.

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 The Truth about 5 Common Swimming Myths appeared first on Total Immersion.

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

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

How To Swim Efficiently

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

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

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

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

Seeking Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Groundbreaking Way to Learn Efficiency

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

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

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

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

1) Could be standardized for many swimmers

2) Would quickly solve significant challenges

3) Be simple enough to follow on their own

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

The Pyramid of Skills 

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

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

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

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

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

Immediate Energy Savings

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

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

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

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

Put the Odds in Your Favor

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

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

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

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

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

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

A still from “Cheetahs on the Edge: Groundbreaking Footage of the World’s Fastest Runner”

The key elements of the T.I. approach– balance, streamlining, and propulsion– are based upon the physics of how bodies move through water, a combination of the principles of hydrodynamics and the principles of biomechanics. It’s interesting, then, to see how these key elements of movement science that we emphasize in swimming efficiently can be observed in parallel examples in other areas of life, be it in other sports or in nature. Inspired by the incredible slow-motion footage of cheetahs captured by photographer Greg Wilson in his award-winning video (video embedded below), this December 2012 blog from Terry Laughlin is an insightful analysis of what humans can learn from the world’s fastest runners about cultivating efficient speed– and how there are analogous connections between the natural speed of cheetahs and the consciously-cultivated speed of T.I. swimming. Enjoy this rare footage… and Happy Laps!

Cheetahs on the Edge–Director’s Cut from Gregory Wilson on Vimeo

Technique Tips from the World’s Fastest Runner

Balance and Stability

The cheetah’s head is amazingly stable.
The cheetah’s head-spine line is always moving in the direction of travel

Streamlining 

The cheetah achieves full extension of its bodyline in every stride.
The cheetah uses a compact, relaxed “recovery” (bringing fore paws forward close to the body).

Propulsion

The cheetah runs with its whole body, not its limbs.
The cheetah places its fore paw with striking care — even delicacy. The equivalent in T.I. Swimming is relaxed hands, patient catch, and “gathering moonbeams” (taking care in initiating pressure).

The Lesson

The cheetah sacrifices none of these qualities at its highest speeds and stride rates. In fact it seems to do them most exquisitely when it is moving at maximum speed. It reaches its Maximum Stride Length when it’s also at Maximum Speed — which is, of course, the secret to being the fastest runner on the planet. As we know, human swimmers do exactly the opposite when striving to swim fast. We sacrifice Stroke Length as we increase Stroke Rate– sometimes quite radically. Alain Bernard, while anchoring France’s 4×100 relay in Beijing, being a high profile example; Usain Bolt, in contrast, ran as the cheetah does, achieving his Max Stride Length at max speed. Cheetahs run fast by nature. We must swim fast mindfully.

Additional info about “Cheetahs on the Edge” from director Greg Wilson:

-Winner of the 2013 National Magazine Awards for best Multimedia piece of the year-

Cheetahs are the fastest runners on the planet. Combining the resources of National Geographic Magazine and the Cincinnati Zoo, and drawing on the skills of an incredible crew, we documented these amazing cats in a way that’s never been done before.

Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, the team captured every nuance of the cat’s movement as it reached top speeds of 60+ miles per hour. The extraordinary footage that follows is a compilation of multiple runs by five cheetahs during three days of filming.

For more information about cheetah conservation, visit causeanuproar.com/Director, DP, Producer – Greg Wilson

The post VIDEO: Swimming Lessons From The World’s Fastest Runner appeared first on Total Immersion.