Triathlon swimming made easy (4 page)

Part 2

The Smart Swimming Solution

In the next six chapters, we'll explain the smartest way to become a more effective swimmer. The information we'll present is simple, readily available, and logical.. .but widely ignored by swimmers and triathletes, who cho
ose the much harder, more frustrating route of generic training. But not you. In the next few pages, you'll learn the most clever and reliable way to improve your swimming, and you'll gain all the tools you need to train smarter and more efficiently than virtually every swimmer on earth.

Chapter 4

Stroke Length: How You Can Swim Like Ian Thorpe

While special oxygen-analyzing equipment may be needed to measure economy in the research lab, in the pool economy is easy to recognize. The pool where I train is filled with thoroughly "average" swimmers. Their splashy, choppy, noisy strokes are the norm. The pool at Auburn University, where we did a TI team workshop for the school's two-time NCAA Championship team, is filled with extraordinary swimmers. Wherever we looked — even before we began teaching — almost all of the fifty men and women swimmers were practicing long, relaxed, unhurried strokes, with little noise or splash and
a marked absence of visible effort.

Good swimmers have one thing in common: They make it look easy. Genuinely great swimmers — there are only a few dozen in the entire world — are so fishlike that they look downright elegant. The latest example is 2000 Olympic champion Ian Thorpe, who shattered world records in Sydney, while taking what The New York Times described as "strokes of languid purpose."

Since 1992, Alexander Popov had been my favorite exemplar of swimming economy. While Popov, for 10 years the World's Fastest Human, is enormously gifted, he and his coach also made a purposeful decade-long effort to emphasize the practice of fluidity and control at all speeds. The
impression I get from champions such as Thorpe and Popov is that they always seem to be o/the water, not just
in
it. The word that best captures the quality of their swimming
is flow.

And what is the secret to flow? For years I was convinced it was pure talent: great swimmers somehow knew
in their bones
how to remain fluid and smooth when going fast. The rest of us could just watch in envy. But ten years of intensive teaching have shown me that "Fishlike" swimming is possible for anyone who pursues it logically and patiently. At every Total Immersion workshop, we start on Saturday morning with splashy, choppy, "average" swimmers, like those that fill my pool, and yours. By Sunday afternoon, the flow pattern right across the pool is much like what we saw at Auburn.

Using simple information, you too can understand exactly how to achieve flow and then, to a surprising degree, achieve it for yourself. Once you've "broken the code" of fluid, relaxed swimming, you can consciously practice, as Alex Popov does, the movements and qualities that produce it, and that all but guarantee you'll swim your best. I won't promise you'll swim as fast as an Olympian, but you
will
swim as well
as you're
capable of swimming.

The key to being the best swimmer you can be is a longer stroke or, as swim pros call it, Stroke Length. This "secret" is actually widely known, but almost perversely ignored, by coaches and swimmers, who continue to pursue success mainly through sheer sweat, even though more and harder laps actually tend to make your stroke shorter, not longer. Hard work, without sufficient care and thought, will actually
slow
most swimmers' progress.

An even more powerful impediment than habit is instinct. Most every swimmer who wants to go faster automatically thinks first of churning the arms faster. And a faster stroke (i.e., higher stroke rate, or SR) results in a
shorter
stroke — again, just the ticket for swimming slower, instead.

Stroke Length: The Mark of Champions

How do we know stroke length is so important? Since 1976, more than a dozen researchers have analyzed the results of meets at all levels, from high-school championships to the Olympics, to figure out what made the
faster swimmers faster. Each study produced the same result: Winners took fewer strokes. Test it yourself at any local pool or at your next workout: Count strokes per length for slower swimmers and compare with faster swimmers. The faster swimmers will almost certainly take fewer strokes.

This simple insight has incredible potential to transform your own swimming, if you'll just use it. But as I said, most swimmers or triathletes continue to train as if the pace clock and yardage total were all that mattered. If even one study had identified aerobic power as the key to better swimming, such overwhelming focus on distance, time, and effort would make more sense. But none did. Likewise, plenty of athletes pump iron or muscle their way through endless laps with huge paddles and/or drag suits, as if sheer power was the way to swim faster. Yet when scientists study the i
mpact of power on performance, they usually find the best swimmers in the world are
less
powerful than any number of mediocre swimmers. So weight-room visits and power-oriented swim sets aren't the answer either.

None of this is to suggest that fitness is unimportant. But at the Olympics,
everyone
has worked hard;
everyone
is incredibly fit. Yet certain swimmers still have an edge over all the others. And that edge, up to 90 percent of the time, is a longer stroke.

What, Exactly,
Is
Stroke Length?

You can work more effectively on your Stroke Length (for simplicity, I'll refer to it as SL, and to stroke
count
per length of the pool as spl), if you understand it, but SL is one of the most poorly understood terms in swimming. Even though swimmers are beginning to grasp that a long stroke is advantageous, most are still unsure of exactly what SL means or how to make a stroke longer. They mostly think of SL as "how far you reach forward and push back."

Coaches usually recognize that there's more to SL than just "the length of your stroke," but few understand how to significantly improve it. When I eavesdrop at workouts, I hear directives such as, 'You've got to make your stroke longer!" which the swimmer naturally interprets as "Reach forward and push back more." This will produce a small increase in SL, but 99.9% of the time that increase will be lost the moment the
swimmer tries to go faster. Nor will it bring the swimmer anywhere near his or her best possible SL. So the swimmer remains unconvinced and goes back to relying on SR (stroke rate) for speed.

For years, I struggled to increase my own SL without much success. So long as I worked on it by trying to push more water back, I managed to shave about one stroke from my average each year or two. Then my teaching experiences began showing me the importance of being balanced and slippery, and all at once I was able to lop off a jaw-dropping three SPL in a few weeks — and to help other swimmers score SL improve
ments of up to 50% literally overnight. Often, these were people who understood the value of SL and had been trying for years to improve it.

The reason stroke length doesn't have a lot to do with arm length, or with how you push water back, is SL is
bow far your body travels each time you take a stroke,
and your success in minimizing drag influences it far more than how you stroke. You'll learn how to minimize drag in the next three chapters.

Run Like a Greyhound; Swim Like a Fish

The key to becoming a better swimmer can be found in a simple equation:

V = SL X SR

Velocity equals Stroke Length multiplied by Stroke Rate.

How fast you swim (V) is a product of how far you travel on each stroke (SL), multiplied by how fast you take those strokes (SR). In that way, at least, swimming is no different from running or in-line skating or crosscountry skiing, where SL and SR refer to Stride Length
and Stride Rate.

Throughout the animal kingdom, the really fast creatures — race horses, greyhounds, cheetahs, Marion Jones, Michael Johnson — use about the same stride rate at all speeds. They run faster by taking
longer
strides, not by taking them faster. (Please note though that elite runners and triathletes have higher stride rates than recreational runners and make subtle changes in speed by tweaking their stride rate while maintaining a biomechanically efficient stride length.) Using real numbers, a runner doubling his speed from a 10-minute-per-mile pace to 5-minute miles, might well do
it by stretching each stride from 18 to 33 inches (an 83% increase), while increasing stride rate by only 8%, from 83 to 90 per minute. But in the water, for all the reasons I explained earlier, we humans do just the opposite, resorting to churning our arms madly when we want more speed.

It seems self-evident that a longer stroke or stride would be more efficient than a shorter one, but in the water a longer stroke is
much
more efficient. Here's why. First, there's the energy cost of a higher SR. As you increase SR, the energy cost goes up by a
cube
of that increase. Double your stroke rate and you burn energy eight (2x2x2) times faster. Second, there's the effect of a higher SR on coordination. As SR (and your heart rate) increases, your ability to stay coordinated and fluent diminishes dramatically. As your form becomes increasingly ragged and inefficient, energy cost goes up even more. And, finally, you disturb the water around you far more when you're churning than when stroking smoothly. A fas
t turnover is like swimming in white water. Not only is drag higher in turbulent water, but also your hands can't "grip" churned-up water nearly so well as they grip still water. One of the surest ways to find still water to pull is to swim with a greater SL and lower SR.

How Can I Improve My SL?

As soon as you begin counting strokes, you'll recognize that virtually every choice you make in training influences your SL in some way—the distance of your repeats, how much you rest between them, the length of your sets, how fast you swim, your heart rate. But the single most important reason for a mediocre SL
is failure to pay attention to it.
If you are not
consciously monitoring how your SL holds up at various speeds and distances (by counting strokes), your instincts will drag you back into too much reliance on SR. In fact, if you were to put this book away now and do nothing more ambitious than count your strokes regularly and set some personal standards or an acceptable upper limit, you would immediately start improving. When you do monitor your count, you'll be alerted as soon as your SL falls too steeply and can immediately take steps to fix it. And what might those steps be?