Triathlon swimming made easy (10 page)

7. Last but not least... Teaching and my own training experience have convinced me that the most beneficial tool for acquiring feel is the fistglove® stroke trainer. I'll let Scott Lemley, their inventor, tell you about them.

The Fistglove
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stroke trainer

How Those Little Black Gloves Can Lead to Huge Improvements in Your Stroke By Scott Lemley

Scott Lemley has been coaching and teaching swimming for 20-plus years. He is currently head coach of the Midnight Sun Swim Team in Fairbanks, Alaska. As a longtime student and instructor in the martial art of Aikido, Scott observed that the key steps to mastering any martial art —finding your balance, focusing your mind, and relaxing your body — are the key steps to mastering any swimming stroke.

One aspect of martial-arts teaching that particularly intrigued Scott was the practice of blindfolding students to compel them to become receptive to sensor]' information derived from sources other than the eyes, to develop a whole-body sense of balance. Reasoning that "feel" with the hands was the swimming equivalent of the perspective gained through sight on land, Scott set about developing "a blindfold for the hands." The result was the fistglove® stroke trainer. Below, Scott explains some of the many benefits of training with fistgloves®.

Before becoming a swim coach I taught Aikido, a martial art that emphasizes relaxation. Aikido training taught me that the more I relaxed, the more self-aware I became and the more efficiently and quickly I could move. I adopted these same principles to my swim coaching and have made it a core goal to teach my swimmers to combine the ability to focus mentally while relaxing physically. I used fist swimming a fair amount, but
also felt that I could improve that practice by finding a way to swim effortlessly with fists closed for longer periods without having to expend either mental or physical energy. I tested this theory on myself by duct-taping my hands closed and warming up that way for 30 minutes before swimmi
ng with "normal" hands.

As an unexpected benefit, for the first time I became acutely aware of my lack of balance, the pressure of the water on my forearms, and the "sharp edges" I exposed to the water's resistance as I pushed off. I also discovered that my hands became very sensitive
to pressure after I removed the duct tape, allowing me to "hold on to the water" with far more nuanced technique. After I began taping my swimmers' hands, I observed that every swimmer gained noticeable fluidity in their strokes. Instead of having one or two "gifted" swimmers and a host of dedica
ted but "less gifted" swimmers, I soon had what I came to think of as a team full of dedicated and gifted swimmers. After experimenting with "taped" fists for 17 years, I finally designed, patented, and began to manufacture a prototype latex glove, which I named the "fistglove® stroke trainer."

Fistgloves
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: How They Work

One essential in the acquisition of improved swim technique is our ability to change the way we interact with our environment. Humans seem to be "hardwired" to interact with the water in a particular way, but I believe we can change that in very significant ways. This is a constant theme underlying how I ask my swimmers to train. Using fistgloves® has given them unprecedented choice and control over how they interact with the water

I want my swimmers to be able to choose finesse over brute strength. When they make this choice, they swim best or near-best times with far greater consistency. But finesse in the water must be
taught;
it rarely comes naturally. Finesse has much to do with how we feel "pressure" on our hands. Reading this pressure is both a source of information and a distraction. Because we're instinctively "hand-dominant" when swimming, most of us are so fixated on what's happening with our hands that we tune out other body parts. As long as our hands feel the pressure of the water's resistive force, we
figure we're "good to go" and proceed to push it toward our feet in a way that satisfies our palms and psyches — but often neglects our body position. Is our entire body balanced and streamlined to avoid drag? It's hard to tell if we are thinking only about our palms. Add to the hand-dominant theme our human proclivity to solve problems with force, and it's no wonder that we see a lot of manhandling the water.

Another pitfall of being a swimmer who gets satisfaction from feeling pressure against the hands (and the more the better), is that it's all too easy to think that being unbalanced and unstreamlined is OK perhaps even
good
After all, an unstreamlined body will encounter massive resistance, and that resistance will feel correct and productive to most swimmers. Pushing against a substance as dense as water gives us a great sense of accomplishment. All too often the only accomplishment is to burn calories. To truly swim well, we must learn how to "feel" the water with our entire body, no
t just the hands, and learn to find our balance and cease our endless struggling to plow ahead.

All humans have proprioceptors (specialized nerve endings) in our joints, muscles, and skin that give us constantly updated information on how our joints are angled, how fast we're moving our limbs, how our arms and legs are positioned relative to each other, and the pressure of the water against various body parts. This wealth of feedback can overwhelm us if we don't know how to process it — or can help us achieve balance and flow if we learn to organize it and use it correctly. Usually our brain is so busy processing the information coming from our eyes and hands that we're not cons
cious of being out of alignment or off balance in the water.

Wearing fistgloves® helps you make balance a priority. Attempting to swim for the first time without the use of your hands, you'll probably thrash around for 5 or 10 minutes, completely helpless. But your brain will seek to solve this new puzzle by using other sources of information and other means of locomotion. Almost automatically, you'll start to swim with more finesse and less brute force. With the fistgloves®, you
must
learn to be balanced and streamlined; otherwise, you'll make no forward progress in the pool.

After wearing the gloves for 30 minutes or so, swim with open hands. You'll immediately experience what we call the fistglove® effect — a rush of information from your previously constrained, but now highly sensitive, hands to your brain. The result is that you'll become very discriminating in terms of how you angle your hands against the water, instinctively choosing the angles that give maximum purchase on what is a pretty slippery medium. You'll also become ultra-sensitive to the importance of "gripping" the water instead of "slipping" through it.

The first 30 minutes spent wearing fistgloves® will make you more aware of how balanced and streamlined you are. The next 30 minutes swimming
without
the gloves will help you learn to "hold" the water better. Fistgloves® help us become more effective on both sides of the equation. Give them a try. I think you'll enjoy the experience.

Hi Terry,

I'm writing to tell you that the lessons of the workshop all came together a couple days ago and it was so exciting to feel it happening! John and I have been faithfully practicing four times a week, mainly balance drills, with some switch drills mixed in. Last week, we started to incorporate some swimming. I didn't feel the ease at first, but I focused on hiding my head and swimming downhill On Sunday it clicked and I kept going and going and going! It was beautiful, effortless, and fun!

Before the workshop I could do only three pool lengths before I had to stop. Sunday, as soon as I could feel the balance, I did 40 lengths without stopping and felt great afterward. After a few laps, John stopped swimming and sat on the wall to watch me because he could tell something had changed We've also noticed that other people actually stop their swimming to watch us practice; they seem intrigued by how quietly and smoothly we drill Everyone else is splashing all around us and we are just flowing down the pool!

I was convinced the
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approach was right after reading the book but I was a little scared coming to the workshop since I was such a weak swimmer. However, I knew I had to learn the right way. I learned so much that weekend and received so much support and encouragement from the coaches. I never thought I would enjoy swimming so much; what I felt on Sunday was an experience of a lifetime. And I realize it is just the beginning. I'm going again tonight and can't wait to get into the pool!

We will think of you all when we get out of the water during our triathlons refreshed, not tired Thank you again for your caring and knowledge; we are both so much better for it. Sincerely, Dottie (and John) O'Connor

The lesson: Stop just swimming and start LEARNING. And once you begin working on the drills, be patient in your practice. They WILL work if you give them time. And once they do, your new skills will take you far beyond where you might have gotten by just continuing to swim laps.

Part 3

The School for Fishlike Swimming

Up to this point, our focus has been conceptual: building a knowledge foundation that allows you to understand what constitutes good swimming and how you can swim better just by changing the shape of your "vessel." Now that you're "book-smart" about swimming, it's time to move our classroom to the pool and begin teaching your muscles. Over the course of four Total Immersion "swim lessons" and other guidance on how to teach yourself successfully, you will learn to swim in a completely new way that will be faster, easier, and more enjoyable. We will do this as if every person who picks up
this book knows nothing at all about swimming. We've found that
all
of our students, no matter how much swimming they may already have done, progress much faster by starting with the most elementary skill and progressing logically through the whole sequence of TI drills. So let's get right to it.

BUT FIRST: The four lessons to follow contain detailed instructions on how to do each drill in the TI freestyle learning sequence, and the text instructions are complemented by dozens of photos of the key positions. Still, as one of our students said, "If a picture is worth a thousand words, video must be worth 10,000 words." Short of being taught face-to-face by a TI Coach, the surest w
ay to master 100% of the essential skills is to use the companion DVD,
Freestyle Made Easy,
as your primary guide to the fine points and desired movement quality.
FME
was produced expressly to complement this book and is unconditionally guaranteed to be the best learning aid you've ever owned. If you did not purchase the DVD in a package with the book, please refer to the Resources section in the back for order info.

Chapter 10

Swimming As a Martial Art

Start with a "beginner's mind"

Next time you visit the pool, spend 10 minutes watching other swimmers. What you'll see - even if you watch for an hour - is that every stroke looks exactly the same. Which is just how you'd look to someone watching you. Your stroke is a habit pattern, deeply embedded in your nervous system by thousands or millions of previous strokes. The phrase "practice makes perfect" gets it only partly right. "Practice makes permanent" is far truer.

As we switch from theory to practice, you're about to become your own coach and teacher. And your success will depend on practicing only the movements you'd like in your "muscle memory" and on scrupulously avoiding whatever you don't want imprinted there. "Tweaking" your present stroke will limit your progress, because the imprint of millions of previous strokes is so resistant to change. Fortunately you now have a proven alternative.

Each year we teach about 1500 students in TI workshops. Their average stroke count at the beginning of the workshop is 21 to 22 for 25 yards. A day later that average has improved to 16 to 17 strokes, or an average efficiency gain nearly 25 percent. This degree of improvement, following several hours of instruction, is stunning for people who may have swum 5 or 10 years with little noticeable change. The two primary reasons for
such transcendent improvement are "muscle amnesia" and "martial-arts swimming." You can also create transformation by observing these two principles in your self-coaching.