easy-freestyle-manual.pdf

Easy

Freestyle

by Terry Laughlin

A Total Immersion Instructional Manual

mechanical, including photocopying, printing, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Total Immersion,

Inc. For information, contact Total Immersion, Inc., 246 Main Street, Suite 15A, New Paltz, NY 12561. Revised: December 16, 2003 Total Immersion, Inc.

SWIMMING YOU LOVE

Total Immersion literally means “to go beneath the surface.” Its other literal meaning is “to do with complete

engagement.” In swimming, as in any endeavor, total immersion is a prescription for loving what you do. Easy

Free is nominally intended to improve your Freestyle technique, but the true intention of every TI book or

video is to help you discover a passion for swimming.

When you practice total immersion, you’ll swim with a sense of purpose, commitment and optimism that

virtually guarantee your success in achieving any goal. You’ll enjoy every minute, experience “epiphanies”

regularly, and eagerly anticipate each practice. Experiences like those will result almost inevitably in

continuous improvement. That’s Kaizen Swimming.

What keeps many from experiencing passion for swimming is a combination of frustration or boredom.

Frustration, if swimming is difficult to master or understand. Boredom, if: (1) You feel there’s little to

stimulate – or even distract – you while your face is in the water; or (2) You’ve reached the state of

“Terminal Mediocrity: No matter how much I swim, I never improve.”

Easy Free will help you love swimming by:

Providing clear and explicit priorities for improvement: saving energy and reducing drag.

Illustrating and explaining a learning sequence in which every step (a) contributes in specific ways to

saving energy and reducing drag, and (b) prepares you for the next step while teaching a skill that will

be essential in the whole stroke.

Leaves no stone unturned in providing you with the tools for understanding and action that will allow

you to coach yourself – and even friends and family – effectively. As we promise, Easy Free will be the next

best thing to having a lesson with a trained TI coach.

Easy Free is designed for:

New Swimmers because the first step requires nothing more complicated than floating and the progres-

sions from one “mini-skill” to the next are clearly outlined and highly achievable. Master each step at your

own pace and build from the simplest movements to a full stroke of rare fluidity, ease and grace.

Experienced Swimmers because no matter how long you’ve been swimming, it’s likely your prior coaching or

practice has not given sufficient attention to energy savings, drag reduction and integrated movement. If

you’ve become stuck on a plateau in improvement or enjoyment, Easy Free will uncover a broad range of

unexplored possibility for greater understanding, efficiency, endurance and speed. It will also help you enjoy

swimming more.

Fitness Swimmers because the efficient, fluent, whole-body movements taught at each step of this learning

sequence are best for your body and will also allow you to swim longer and farther without fatigue. As well,

the improvements and enjoyment it will bring will increase your motivation to enjoy healthful swimming more

often.

Competitive Swimmers because the primary impediment to swimming as far and as fast as you would like is

drag and energy waste. Easy Free is the first freestyle-improvement program to give its primary attention

to minimizing drag and saving energy.

Coaches and Teachers because the progressions illustrated in this DVD will give you a broad range of new skills

and fine points to teach your athletes and students. As well, the graphic enhancements we’ve included, and

right/wrong comparison video will help you identify and correct the most common errors and inefficiencies.

Gain Speed and Endurance by Saving Energy

Three Percent. That’s how much energy and “horsepower” the average human swimmer converts into for-

ward motion. In other words, 97% of our energy gets diverted into something other than propulsion. (For

comparison, elite swimmers are just 10% efficient – that’s right, even Michael Phelps wastes 90% – whereas

dolphins are 80% energy efficient.) This eye-opening intelligence comes from a group of engineers and

physicists who made these calculations while designing a swim foil for the Navy Seals. (Read the entire arti-

cle here. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4223354.html)

If you ordered the Easy Freestyle DVD in hopes of swimming farther or faster, your most valuable takeaway

will be increased awareness that the opportunity to gain speed and endurance by saving energy is far

greater than what you might gain by getting fitter or stronger. And if your goal is to enjoy swimming more, I

guarantee that improving from, say, 3 percent to 4 percent efficiency will not only give you a 33% energy

increase; it will also likely make you feel 33% better in the water. How you feel and how you swim are closely

related. Whatever increases your comfort is likely to help improve your speed and endurance.

The stroke-improvement program on this DVD is the first to give primary emphasis to becoming an energy-

conscious swimmer. While the drills illustrated here will also improve your pull, kick and breathing, the goal of

saving energy will be foremost at every step. Within your first hour of practice, you should be well on your

way to reinvention as an energy-conscious swimmer.

Why We Waste Energy

If you’ve felt frustrated by swimming, you have lots of company. Humans are “hard-wired” to swim ineffi-

ciently and virtually all of us work too hard to swim too slowly. I call this the Universal Human-Swimming

Problem. Here are four reasons why Human Swimming is so inefficient:

1. You think you’re sinking.

Well, you are…and should be! Based on normal body composition, the human body’s natural position is 95%

underwater – i.e. only 5% will be at the surface. The only part of your body that floats well is your lungs;

everything below your sternum has a specific gravity that makes sinking natural. As gravity drags your hips

down, buoyancy pushes your chest up. You’re not really sinking (except for a few highly muscular and heavy-

boned individuals); you’re just swimming “uphill.” Nonetheless, because you think you’re sinking (and your

body’s internal gyroscope senses imbalance) survival instinct kicks in and you do whatever it takes to stay

afloat. The “survival” strokes that result are both ineffective and exhausting.

Through years of dogged effort, some swimmers learn to cover greater distances, while still wasting 95% or

more of the energy they expend. But with each inefficient stroke, “struggling skills” are being ever more

deeply imprinted in muscle memory.

2. Water is a wall.

Water is almost a thousand times denser than air. Now think about how “thick” air feels when you hold your

arm out a car window. That will give you a sense of how powerful drag can be at even slow speeds in the

water. To understand better, try walking – or better yet running – in the pool.

The best example of drag-minimizing design is a fuselage. Cars built to break land speed records, bullet

trains, jet fighters, torpedos, and even rowing shells all share the same shape, tapered in front and back with

a streamlined body. So do fish. The human body is nothing like these and therein lies the prime reason we tire

too easily and swim too slowly.

In a fuselage, the pointed tip gradually separates air or water molecules so they move smoothly as the

thicker part comes through. When the leading edge is blunt, or the body unstreamlined, the molecules move

crazily. The result is waves, turbulence and momentum-sapping eddies. You can dramatically reduce wave-

making and turbulence by rethinking and reshaping your swimming body. When you do, you’ll swim farther and

faster, with no more effort. And possibly even less effort.

3. Water is hard to hold.

Though water may stubbornly resist you when you try to move through it, unless you stroke with care, it often

just swirls away when you try to push it backward while stroking. As well, your hand is tiny compared to the

body mass it’s trying to propel. Even when you do it perfectly, pushing water back is a terribly inefficient form

of propulsion – which is why propeller-driven boats run circles around those propelled by a paddlewheel.

When you combine the challenges of a sinking, unstable body, high drag and poor traction, swimming is like

trying to pedal a bicycle uphill on an icy street. Traditional swimming techniques reinforce all those inefficient

tendencies by having you kick the water into a froth, windmill your arms, and swim endless grueling intervals

to immunize yourself from the fatigue that inevitably results. Techniques that emphasize pulling and kicking

can never be effective in a medium that’s both highly resistant and offers little traction. And by ignoring

your imbalance and instability, conditioning laps simply deepen your “struggling skills.”

Becoming an Energy-Conscious Swimmer

You must learn ease before focusing on speed or endurance. When there’s so much energy waste, there’s

nearly limitless opportunity to improve through saving energy. But no one takes this approach naturally

because each energy-saving strategy is counter-intuitive. You have to realize they’re advantageous, then

make a conscious decision to practice them with patience until they replace your instincts for harder work.

Becoming aware is the first step. Here are the energy-conscious principles you’ll learn on Easy Freestyle:

1. Cooperate with Gravity.

It’s normal for us to think of sinking as bad, even dangerous, and we’ve often been told we should swim on

top of the water. But, as I mentioned earlier, our inherent “specific gravity” leaves 95 percent of our mass

submerged. So we swim through the water, not over it. Moreover, gravity is an inexorable force; does it make

more sense to fight it, or use it?

For new TI swimmers, the moment they first feel a reassuring sense of support from the water is almost

life-changing. It transforms what has often been a harrowing experience into a hopeful sense of comfort –

even possibility. While balance is the essential foundation of efficiency, learning to relax into the water is

equally important. It breaks the survival-stroking cycle, and frees your arms and legs for productive use.

To use gravity, let your head and chest sink, until you feel your lower half becoming more buoyant. Sinking

into balance gives you an advantage – there’s less drag just below the surface than right at it.

If you’d like a scientific reason for relaxing, consider this: tension increases your sinking tendencies two ways,

(1) when you’re tense, you tend to breathe fast and shallow. This reduces the air in your lungs, which is a tan-

gible buoyancy aid. And (2) tense muscles inhibit oxygen flow, reducing an intangible buoyancy aid. The ability

to “swim relaxed” goes a long way toward explaining why athletically-lean world class swimmers have great

body position, achieved with virtually no effort. You’ll learn to Cooperate with Gravity in Lessons 1 and 2 and

reinforce in Lessons 3 and 4.

2. Take the Path of Least Resistance.

The study that showed humans are only 3 percent efficient and dolphins are 80% efficient also revealed

another surprising statistic: dolphins use only one-eighth of the “horsepower” physics predicts it should take

to swim at their usual speeds. This is because they’re naturally designed for “active streamlining.” The best

human swimmers seem to do something very similar. In 1992, USA Swimming researchers Jane Cappaert and

John Troup found that elite swimmers at the Olympics generated no more stroking power than average

swimmers. Cappaert and Troup concluded that their superior speed resulted from “better whole-body

streamlining.”

Mindful that water is nearly 1000 times denser than air – and that you must swim through it – it’s only logical

to focus far more on how well you streamline than how powerfully you pull. Do this in freestyle by visualizing

your swimming-body differently. In the traditional view your body has an upper half that pulls and a lower

half that kicks. Instead, think of your body being divided down the middle, with each side shaped to cut

through the water like a torpedo. Your freestyle stroke becomes a right-side-streamline alternated with a

left-side-streamline.

To swim this way, visualize parallel tracks extending forward of each shoulder. Spear your arm forward along

that track, separating water molecules as it goes. Then align your torso and legs to follow it through the

“channel” it creates. Then do the same with the other side. In energy-conscious swimming, you shift your

focus from “pushing on the water molecules behind you” to separating those in front of you. You’ll learn

Active Streamlining in Lessons 1 and 2 and reinforce it in Lessons 3 and 4.

3. Swim with your body.

As I mentioned above, traditional thinking views the body as having an “arms department” that pulls you for-

ward and a “legs department” that pushes you forward. This view turns the torso into so much baggage that

you drag through the water by pulling and kicking. That’s why people train with buoys and kickboards to

strengthen the arms and legs, often leaving torso muscles out as they do.

In energy-conscious freestyle, you swim with your body, instead of your arms and legs. As you send your right

arm down its track and align the right side of your body to follow it, your left side will roll above the surface.

This not only makes your bodyline longer and sleeker, it also positions your body mass to take advantage of

gravity. As your recovering left arm moves forward of your lungs, gravity takes over and causes the left side

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