Triathlon swimming made easy (7 page)

5. Use shoulder roll to extend your hand. Though you may feel as if your arm is weightless, don't feel as if it's disembodied. Use your arm as an extension of your torso. Work on this by extending each arm until you feel that shoulder touch your jaw; men with a bit of chin stubble should finish each practice with a small red spot inside each shoulder. An added dividend: More body roll will add an inch or two to your reach — and to the length of your vessel.

6. Learn the "Switch," and practice "FQS." Swimming taller means you should always have one hand in front of your head —
particularly at slower speeds — which also means that for a brief moment in each stroke cycle
both
hands should be in front of your head. This is known as FrontQuadrant Swimming (FQS), though many people confuse it with catchup swimming (a non-TI drill in which the recovering hand touches the extended hand before each stroke).

As the photos show, our object is to learn to time strokes precisely so that one hand remains extended for slightly longer in each stroke, until the other hand is just about to enter the water. The quickest and easiest way to learn this is with our series of "Switch" drills, found on the
Freestyle Made Easy
DVD and in Chapter 10.

7. Master one skill at a time. Swimming taller in freestyle involves more coordination than in other strokes. Avoid mental overload by learning the six stroke modifications just one at a time, in the order listed. Mastery of one will lead naturally to
the next. Spend 10 to 20 minutes of each practice on one skill, and focus on only one or two skills in each session. Allow yourself at least two to three weeks to incorporate each skill. Most important, don't rush to practice them in whole-stroke swimming. Star t with drills, then a mix of drill and swim. When you do begin wholestroke practice, focus on only one point a time.
Whenever
you swim, never push off a wall without knowing what skill you are really trying to do well.

A Note on Front-Quadrant Swimming

Among the many non-traditional recommendations in the first Total Immersion book, the most-debated was for Front-Quadrant Swimming mainly with regard to sprint swimming. Some critics have pointed out that, at top speed, sprinters usually don't race with both hands in front of their head (though most of the fastest middle-distance and distance swimmers do). And it's true that swimmers who practice FQS too rigidly can find themselves restricted from reaching the stroke rates necessary to swim fast in 50- and 100-meter races. So let's clarify how you can find out if it's really advantageous
for your swimming and, if so, how to apply it properly.

Because this book is written for triathletes, it's important to point out that freestyle sprinters race at a stroke rate (SR) of up to 100 arm-strokes per minute, while the best SR for most triathletes is just 50 to 60 strokes (25 to 30 stroke cycles) per minute. At that SR, it should be quite easy to maintain FQS (or semi-catch-up) timing with no sense of restricting your ability to swim freely and rhythmically. But even so, we
always encourage swimmers to experiment with a range of stroke timing at a variety of speeds and stroke counts to find the timing that feels best to you. Here's how to do that.

Finding Your Best Stroke Timing

At TI workshops, we describe FQS as the most "negotiable" of the skills we teach. Practicing the Switch drills that teach FQS timing will allow you to discover for yourself whether you can make FQS feel comfortable and natural. A small percentage (less than 10%) of all the students I've worked with have found that FQS timing inhibited their natural sense of rhythm. We advised them to use the Switch drills to add just a bit more
awareness
of length to their strokes without disrupting their natural rhythms in whole-stroke swimming.

For the great majority — and particularly the slower-stroking triathletes — who can adopt FQS with a rhythm that feels comfortable, I explain that this is nonetheless still a
practice
strategy for imprinting timing that is not natural or instinctive. Do a good job of that by purposefully and consciously working on FQS at lower speeds in training, and when you start chasing the pack on race day, the nervous system will just know how to maintain the greatest efficiency at what feels like an appropriate and sustainable SR. You'll be able to swim freely at the stroke rates and rhythms that move yo
u fastest.

What about those of you who might like to swim a short freestyle event in a Masters meet? Is it true that FQS doesn't work if you need to swim really fast? I can only say that I personally watched Alexander Popov for a cumulative total of several hours, both in meet warmup/warmdowns and in practice, while he was in New York for the 1998 Goodwill Games. Other coaches I know have also observed Popov's practices during his visits to the USA, for anywhere from a couple of hours to three weeks. And we all observed the same thing: He swam most of his practice laps relatively slowly with impeccable fo
rm, and every stroke on those slower laps was done with FQS timing.

The payoff comes on race day when, as a result of this rigorous nervous-system training in practice, Popov maintains greater stroke length at his highest stroke rate than do swimmers who fail to practice FQS. That's also why he held his form better in the closing stages of races, and won so many races over the final 10 to 15 meters.

I wanted the sprinters I coached at West Point to be able to do that too, so here's how we got the best out of FQS while ensuring they had the necessary SR for short races. At super-slow practice paces, we consciously practiced the greatest degree of overlap or FQS timing. As the pace increased, we gave up overlap bit by bit, trying to hold on to as much as possible without feeling restricted. I instructed them, as they approached race pace and race tempo, to just do what feels most natural.

The results, over the course of each six-month season during my three years coaching at West Point, were undeniable: a significant improvement in the SL my swimmers were able to maintain at their highest speeds. And by season's end they invariably swam
significantly
faster, and with significantly improved SL. As a long-distance open-water swimmer myself, I have used exactly the same approach in my own training

I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn't just work for the youngest and fastest among us, either. Over several years, I have been able to steadily reduce the number of strokes it takes me to swim 100 yards at super-slow speeds (from 52 to 39), to gradually improve my speed at every stroke count (13 spl, 14 spl, etc.), and have dropped my SPL in mile races in the pool from 19/20 to 15/16. This progressive increase in Stroke Length and economy has made me feel much more smooth and controlled at my top speeds. Best of all, it has helped minimize speed loss over my 1
2 years of Masters racing, from age 38 to 50.

You're almost fishlike. You've improved balance to save energy, letting the water do work that you once struggled to do. And you've reduced drag with a longer vessel so more of your energy goes into speed instead of making waves. All that's left is the final stage of the metamorphosis: learning how to slip through the smallest possible hole in the water.

Chapter 7

Slippery Swimming: The Smarter Way to Speed

I began swimming with aspiration upon entering my first race at age 15 in 1966. As soon as speed replaced fun as the goal of my pool time, I became aware of the gospel: "Swimming is hard." Virtually everything I've heard or read on swimming since has described the price of speed as "more" and "harder." No surprise then that the whole world understands the swimming speed problem in the same way.

Fortunately the whole world has it wrong. The one non-negotiable, unavoidable, unyielding limit to speed is
resistance,
not your capacity for long or hard work. There is no workout, w
et or dry, that can overcome the amount of drag produced by your body as it travels through the water.

Consider this: Even Ian Thorpe or Alexander Popov, who swim as efficiently as a human can (gliding 25 yards in as few as six or seven freestyle strokes), use — at best — 10 percent of their energy for propulsion. More than 90 percent is consumed by wavemaking and other inefficiencies. What about athletes who take 22 or more strokes per 25-yard length? They may be spending as much as 97 percent of their energy making waves.

If you're one of the countless triathletes who find swimming exhausting or frustrating, it's a virtual certainty that drag, not your fitness, is to blame. It's drag that limits human-swimming speed to 5 mph or less, while some fish hit 50 mph with seeming ease. Fish are so much faster because
evolution has shaped them to minimize drag. Arm-thrashing, leg-churning humans are almost as ideally designed to
maximize
drag. And no matter how conscientiously you streamline, just the fact that you swim "like a human" still creates a huge amount of water resistance. But a strategy like one that already works well for you in cycling can make a big difference.

I've enjoyed cycling for about 40 years, and have always had a general understanding that I could ride more easily when I was tucked over the handlebars than when I was "tall in the saddle." But I didn't fully appreciate how powerfully drag could influence cycling speed until I read that relatively little of a cyclist's energy output actually makes the wheels turn; most of it is spent pushing air out of the way. Thus, as every triathlete knows, a great deal of cycling speed can be created simply by lessening air resistance, instead of laboring to build leg power or aerobic conditioning.

I recall precisely when I realized drag must be an even bigger factor in swimming. In 1978 in Midlothian, Virginia, I began coaching at a pool with an underwater window. The first time I climbed down to watch my team during a set, I was spellbound by a graphic picture that had eluded me all the years I'd watched swimming from above. Watching my swimmers push off the wall, I could see that the tightly streamlined ones traveled a
looooong
way before they began stroking. They really looked like fish in an aquarium — so long as they were in streamline. The moment they began pulli
ng and kicking, they worked much harder and moved much slower.

Those who maintained a sleek shape could cover up to eight fast and easy yards before they took their first stroke. Any swimmer not tightly molded into a torpedo shape lost speed so dramatically that they looked exactly as if they'd run into a wall. And they had. To a poorly streamlined body, the water is a wall. I understood, in that instant, that the primary thing limiting how fast my swimmers could go was not the workouts I spent hours devising, but the effect of drag on their bodies. Clearly the most valuable skill to teach was streamlining — not just on the pushoff, but
the whole length of the pool.

This was a logical conclusion, based on the fact that water is over 800 times denser than the "thin" air that costs cyclists such a stunning amount of energy. In a medium as thick as water, the payoff for reducing drag at
even the slowest speeds can be enormous. And water gets "thicker" as you go faster: Drag increases exponentially as speed goes up, so the payoff for
avoiding
drag also increases exponentially the better you avoid it.

Why Water Is a Wall

Boats, cars, and planes avoid drag best when they are long, sleek, and tapered. Humans can enjoy a moment or two of that as we push off, but as soon as we begin stroking again, most of us revert to blocky and angular shapes. (Seeing these shapes for the first time on slow-motion underwater video is an incredibly revealing moment for students at TI workshops.) Fast swimmers maintain the most streamlined position as they stroke; slow swimmers do not.
This is the most important distinction between them.

But drag isn't just some general retarding force. There are three distinct forms of drag, which you can avoid better by understanding them. Two can be minimized by changes in technique, one by changing your suit.

1. Form drag is resistance caused by your human-body shape. As you swim, you push water in front of you, creating an area of higher pressure. Behind you, your body leaves a turbulent swirl, creating an area of lower pressure. Higher pressure in front and lower pressure behind creates a vacuum that, in effect, sucks you back. (That's why drafting off other swimmers — or cyclists — f
eels so much easier. The low-pressure area trailing the swimmer in front of you sucks you forward.) Form drag increases as the square of your velocity. Thus, twice as fast means four times as much form drag.

Your body's size and shape determine form drag, and the best way to minimize that drag is
to pierce
the water or slip through the smallest possible "hole." You do that by staying in a balanced, horizontal position and by making sure any side-to-side movement is rotation — not snaking or fishtailing. TI Coach Emmett Hines puts it succinctly: "If you're perfectly streamlined — as in the pushoff —
any
motion will increase form drag." That means it's critical, once you begin swimming after the pushoff, to make your propelling actions as smooth and economical as possible. Concentr
ate, even as you pull and kick, on fitting through the smallest possible hole in the water, and you'll be on the right track.