Health & Fitness

Basic Swimming Made Easy

Why swimmers should practice ‘martial arts’ to transform frustration into flow

by Terry Laughlin

Dear Sue:

Yes, you can figure out the swimming-improvement puzzle AND have fun doing so! You have difficulty with swimming — and not with other sports — for this reason: You have human DNA; other sports come more easily to you because they don’t happen in the water. Your coach’s frustration is likely because he’s guided by traditional “human swimming” principles that haven’t changed much in 50 or 60 years. The old way of thinking goes like this:

1. Swimming is an ordeal; if you get tired, then you need to train more and harder to survive it.
2. Technique — if you get around to working on it — mainly means how you use your hands to push water toward your feet.

Swimming as a Martial Art
Next time you visit the pool, spend 10 minutes watching other swimmers. You’ll see that every stroke looks exactly the same. Your stroke is a habit pattern, deeply imprinted in your nervous system. The phrase “practice makes perfect” gets it only partly right. “Practice makes permanent … whatever you happen to practice” is far truer.
When trying to improve your efficiency, your success depends on practicing only the movements you’d like in your muscle memory and on scrupulously avoiding whatever you don’t want imprinted there. Normal swim repeats will limit your progress because the imprint of millions of previous strokes is so resistant to change.

Avoiding Struggle
Each year we teach about 1,500 students in Total Immersion weekend workshops, swimming instruction workshops. After we videotape our students doing a length of freestyle on Saturday morning, they don’t swim another length of whole-stroke until Sunday afternoon — by which time they’ve spent six hours practicing efficient swimming movements without a single “old” freestyle stroke. By teaching with movements their nervous systems don’t recognize as swimming, we’ve given them “muscle amnesia,” a blank slate for learning new skills and bypassing old habits.

The second key to success is “martial arts swimming.” Formal swimming instruction has existed for a few dozen years, while martial arts have been taught for thousands of years, giving martial arts masters considerable opportunity to refine the best way to teach movement skills. Their non-negotiable rule is: Never practice movements you cannot perform correctly. So they start with movements that seem ridiculously simple and progress by small steps. The more patiently they practice basics, the more fluent and effortless they’ll be at advanced skills. Total Immersion employs the same kind of progression.

Essentials for Achieving a Swimmer’s High
Because of your human DNA, the skills that make you more economical won’t come naturally. You’ll need to make a mindful, organized, patient effort to make them as instinctive as the inefficient habits they’ll replace. Here are the guidelines for success at swimming:

1. Saving energy is more important than getting in better shape. If you’re fit enough to run a mile, you’re fit enough to swim a quarter-mile nonstop; if you can’t it’s because you spend too much energy making waves and creating turbulence, and too little moving you forward. The typical novice swimmer wastes as many as 97 of every 100 calories. If you can increase your energy efficiency by just a little bit, you could swim lap after lap with little fatigue.
2. Get rid of that sinking feeling. When hips and legs sink, surface area creates drag. When swimmers feel themselves sinking, most of the energy they put into stroking is actually devoted to not sinking. Working on your pull is fruitless until you learn to achieve an effortlessly horizontal position. Balance drills are the fastest way to begin saving energy.
3. Pierce the water. Because water is 887 times denser than air, drag is the main reason you can’t swim as far or fast as you’d like. By learning to slip through a smaller “hole” in the water, you’ll immediately go farther and faster with less effort. Two things make a big difference: Keep your head in line with your spine and use your hand to lengthen your body line; let pushing water back take care of itself, while you focus on extending the other hand.
4. No more bubbles, noise or splash. Water is a fluid; thus, any rough or rushed movement is hugely penalized while smooth movement is hugely rewarded. Listen for noise or splash and watch for bubbles in your stroke. Do whatever it takes to eliminate them. You’ll immediately feel a lot better.

Photos courtesy of Total Immersion

Your goal with every length, should be to not only move through the water better but also enjoy it more. In fact, make it a primary goal to feel good every time you swim. This can help create and sustain what we call a flow state, an almost euphoric condition, similar to the runner’s high, in which you virtually lose yourself in the satisfaction of the activity. Start with simple movements and drills and with just a few movement cycles. Progress gradually and patiently to longer distances and more advanced movements.

Eventually your nervous system will have taken so many snapshots of smooth swimming movements, that it becomes easy for you to assemble them into a complete movie. And because humans’ natural efficiency in water is so limited to start with, there’s virtually no improvement ceiling when it comes to good technique. Whether you’re a beginner learning basics or swam competitively in your youth, if you practice mindfully, there always will be some new breakthrough in store.

This article is excerpted from the book Triathlon Swimming Made Easy. For information visit www.totalimmersion.net. Questions on swimming? Send them to Terry Laughlin at totalswimm@aol.com.

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