(Terry Laughlin and Shinji Takeuchi synch-swimming– Eleuthera, the Bahamas, December 2006.)

This post was originally published by Terry Laughlin on Feb. 12, 2011.

At the bottom of this post is video of Shinji [T.I. Master Coach and Head of TI Japan– read Shinji’s T.I. story in this 2012 blog interview] and I “synch-swimming” at TI Teacher Training in December 2010.  Here I’ll focus on WHY we practice Synch-Swimming.

Synch-Swimming started as an exercise I came up with about 10 years ago [circa 2001 at the time of this writing] to practice with friends (including TI Coaches Dave Barra, Greg Sautner and Hash al-Mashat) at Lake Minnewaska in New Paltz. At first we just practiced swimming two to six swimmers abreast along the 200-meter line, as a pacing exercise. Then we tried to squeeze the group as close together as possible, until our hands and forearms —  and occasionally hips and shoulders — were brushing lightly as we stroked.

We did this to simulate both the not-infrequent crowding and occasional physical contact of open water races. Our goal was to make this experience something we could accept, then even welcome. While most swimmers shy away from, or become anxious or distracted in such situations, we enjoyed it and were able to turn it into an aid to concentration.

Finally, we began trying to synchronize our strokes. This last piece was the icing on the cake. The experience of concentrating on your own stroke, while also being aware of other swimmers’ strokes — adjusting position, direction, length and tempo to theirs — proved so engrossing that we all experienced a powerful “swimmer’s high” in these practices. Synch-Swimming was so enjoyable and valuable it became a central  and distinguishing feature of all TI Open Water camps.

Now I try to synch-swim with every TI Coach– and many TI swimmers– I have the opportunity to swim with, in open water or the pool.

This video shows two forms: In Synch-Swimming, you match the timing of right-arm to right-arm. In Mirror-Swimming, you match the timing of the inside arms. Enjoy!

Editorial Note: To view Terry and Shinji’s archived 2011 discussion forum Q &A about this synch swim video, click HERE. 

Learn how to synch swim and other open water skills– including drafting, sighting, pacing, pack swimming, and more– in our video “Outside the Box: A Total Immersion Swimming Program for Success in Open Water”

The post VIDEO: Why Synch Swim? Terry Laughlin and Shinji Takeuchi Demo This Practice appeared first on Total Immersion.

Such a discussion could occur nowhere else but the TI Forum!

I should clarify that swimming more slowly isn’t the object. Rather it’s to improve at swimming with consummate ease and to explore your ability to slow particular aspects of the stroke, while maintaining overall flow and body control.

Martial artists have long known the value of moving as slowly as possible to increase awareness, control, fluency and integration. It’s a harder sell in the swimming world.

It’s also a much more exacting skill in the water, than on land. Slower movement highlights errors in Balance and Stability. Which makes it exceedingly valuable.

This morning, Ken B posted the following: I’m enjoying this discussion. I am 74, with the usual age related challenges. Continuing to swim with ease into my 80′s is my main mission. This winter I’ve been pushing gently off the end of the pool feeling the delicious, effortless glide then trying to maintain that feeling to the other end. If I achieve a clean well-timed catch and maintain my original long-axis posture ,and breathe with absolutely no head lift I can drift into the far wall with no energy used at all. I know I’m getting somewhere because I looked up this morning to find I had an audience.

Ken captured the spirit of this enterprise exactly. He recognizes that swimming this way is a highly exacting and very rewarding SKILL.

For the goals, priorities, and – yes - values Ken cites for his swimming, he could hardly make a better choice than this.

My goals are similar to Ken’s. I wish to swim well, enjoy it limitlessly and even continue improving for 25 to 30 more years — i.e. into my early 90s.

At the same time, I also maintain a vision of breaking the national 85-89 record for 2-mile cable swim, and contending for a FINA World Masters open water championship in the same age group in 20+ years. And hopefully repeating that in the 90-94 and 95-99 categories–which thus far no swimming-nonagenarian has yet attempted.

My initial lengths every day–I call it my Tuneup–is guided by exactly the thoughts and actions Ken describes. But with the addition of a  ’side game.’

While swimming as easily as I can, I also time myself, often for 100y/m repeats. When doing so, I always swim faster over a series of 6 or more 100s–even while trying to maintain my initial sense of relaxation.

While doing these, I often visualize how my swimming would appear to an audience–as Ken found himself with the other day.  This turns my Tuneup series into a Beauty Contest as well as an Exercise in Ease.

But even with far-off goals of breaking age group records or winning world titles,  the main reason I swim this way is that it feels so amazingly good — in both body and psyche — in the moment I’m doing it.

The video of TI Coach Shinji illustrates something like what I describe and strive for. But I try to make my 2-Beat Kick even gentler than you’ll see in the underwater segment. This is because I’m trying for maximum ease and relaxation, not minimum stroke count, in my Tuneup swims.

Happy laps!

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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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Few students come to us wanting to learn butterfly. Nearly all are pre-teen or teen competitors. A couple were 40-ish. I never dreamed we’d meet a 94 year old with that aspiration.

Betsy gave Paul a butterfly lesson, then alerted me we had a nonagenarian striving to learn butterfly. She wanted me to observe Paul’s next lesson and assess his form. Betsy also said Paul had a ‘pretty impressive’ freestyle which he’d taught himself, starting at 93!

I met Paul the following week. He related that he’d moved into a senior residence the previous year and, because it had a pool, decided he should learn to swim well. He ordered the TI Perpetual Motion Freestyle DVD and indeed the results were highly impressive. But when I saw him attempt butterfly I felt his body wasn’t sufficiently supple to permit progress toward a swimming style that would be an asset to his health. So I suggested backstroke as a better choice for a second stroke. And that has gone quite well.

I offered to work with Paul at at the pool where he lived, since it was better suited to his mobility. I expected I would enjoy Paul’s company and  learn something valuable about adapting our instruction for students of advanced age. We employed only two drills — Superman Glide and SG-to-Skate. Paul’s beautiful form is a product primarily of ‘rehearsals’ — practicing recovery and entry motions in a crouching position — and Focal Point practice. (See Focus = Bliss.)

I also anticipated how cool it would be to create a video of the two of us ‘synch-swimming.’

What sort of person aspires to learn butterfly at 94? After retiring in his mid-60s from a career as a pediatric cardiologist, Paul joined the faculty of Albany Medical School where he taught until age 93! He’d probably be teaching there still if his daughter hadn’t prevailed on him to retire and move closer to her. Paul moved into Woodland Ponds CCRC in New Paltz, found they had a pool and saw a learning opportunity. The same was true of their woodworking shop, where Paul has made some really beautiful pieces of furniture.  And last October when I said I’d have to miss one of our lessons while traveling to Turkey for a TI Open Water Camp, Paul said no problem; he had travel plans too: He would be traveling by himself to Atlanta to attend a cardiology conference.

One more thing: Last summer Paul passed the test to join Minnewaska Distance Swimmers and twice swam an open water 400 meters in Lake Minnewaska. Does anyone know of an older swimmer who has swum at least a quarter mile in open water?

Can you tell which swimmer is 95 and which 62?

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