One might ask: “Why make such a point about getting the timing right in Spear?”  The answer, which will be important to her as a teacher, is that there will be certain circumstances in which you would be more particular and others in which you might choose to be less.

In the 100s of workshops I’ve taught I can recall countless instances where some aspect of SpearSwitch — most often Patient Catch — proved elusive for some student. Because the Weekend Workshop follows a formal structure limited by (i) the allotted pool time and (ii) the fact that we can’t hold up a class of 10 to 20 people because 1 or 2 haven’t quite got it, I decide to move on to SwingSwitches. At first I was troubled by progressing to the next drill, when the previous wasn’t quite right. But I often saw that the problem resolved in the next step.

So the question is, if a particular aspect of skill finds resolution in a later step in the progression, why revisit it?

In the case of a teacher trainee, the answer is simple. Students learn movements far faster and more clearly by visual means. Thus the most valuable skill as a teacher of skilled movement is the ability to demonstrate impeccable form.

(It’s also essential that they be able to accurately mimic the incorrect form of a student. I’ve learned that the fastest way I can correct a student’s movement error is to demonstrate a few cycles of what I observed them doing, then, without pausing, smoothly segue into a few cycles what I’d like to see them do.)

The other aspect is: Should she encourage a student to revisit the earlier drill in pursuit of ‘perfection.’ It’s less about pursuing perfection, than it is (i) Encouraging an unquenchable kaizen passion for real Mastery; not every student will choose that path, but we always encourage it. And (ii) Swimming with the highest level of skill is such a complex art, and the path to that level has such individual unpredictability, I have had ‘unexpected epiphanies’ on countless occasions – noticing some sensation I had not noticed before that made such a difference in my whole stroke, that I made it a focal point for hours of practice.

In the case of nailing the timing in SpearSwitch, I’ve found that it helped me get the subtle distinction between holding the water and pulling. When I took that distinction to Swing and Swim, both got better – even after the general form of both had been ‘acceptable’ or even quite good.

SpearSwitch with Patient Catch

This is the first year swimming star Michael Phelps blatantly ignored his coach’s training plan. Some days he would show up to practice. Other days he would sneak off and play golf. There would be no phone call, no heads up. Bowman would wait by the side of the pool at the designated workout time. If Phelps’s lane remained empty, Bowman would go on without him.

Phelps’s performance at the Pan Pacific Championships reflected his sporadic attention. He . . . failed to advance to the final of the 400 IM in which he holds a world record and on Saturday morning he dropped out of another event because he was out of gas. He acknowledged repeatedly that he arrived here in poor shape and felt disappointed with some of his times.

This sentence, midway down, illuminates what I see as the main issue: Bowman, Urbanchek and other coaches say they know they can’t force adult swimmers to train like children, yet swimming is not a sport that readily tolerates shortcuts.

Swim coaching and training has always followed an authoritarian model. Allowing swimmers a voice in their training is unheard of. In part that reflects the reality that it was always a youth sport. Partly because promising swimmers are asked to train so hard at ages 12 to 15 that burnout by 22 or earlier is almost inevitable. And partly because swimmers lacked reason or motivation to continue beyond college. Earnings from sponsorships has changed the latter but done nothing to address the former.

Then there’s the fact that anything other than high-volume, high-intensity training is considered a “shortcut.”

Thirty years ago, I developed several world-ranked swimmers, as a USAS club coach in Richmond VA. None approached Phelps’s success, but one was an Olympic medalist in 1992. The 20 years I’ve spent working with improvement-minded adults — and personal experience training for races up to marathon distance in middle-age — have shown that technique-oriented training has far greater potential for maximizing performance than I realized back then.

So long as I remained within the “competitive-swimming bubble” my sense of possibility was mainly within the volume-and-effort paradigm. But if I were to return today to that sort of coaching,  my methods would be radically changed — and I believe could prove far more compatible with the emotional and performance needs of post-collegiate swimmers.

My TI experiences have convinced me the primary reason swimmers seem incapable of performing at a high level on less training are:

1. Human swimmers are, by nature, ‘energy-wasting machines’  and traditional training does little to address that. The USA Swimming protocols for conditioning are exhaustive and meticulously documented. Those for increasing efficiency are ad-hoc and undocumented.
2. A very high percentage of training is non-specific, summed up by the phrase “getting the yards in” which has fortunately replaced the odious “garbage yardage” which was actually an article of faith among many coaches when I was coaching.

I believe a focus on better understanding the neural aspects of training, and approaches that include the mathematical predictability of tools like the Tempo Trainer would make a considerable difference by (1) more efficient use of time and energy; and (2) replacing tedium, which is increasingly difficult for an intellectually-evolved person to tolerate, with engagement and purpose.

“Friend’s timing could not be better. Some 16 million Americans now practice yoga, a 5,000-year-old mental, physical and spiritual discipline brought to us by Indian gurus. Nowadays there aren’t just hourly classes in major American cities but also in places like Deephaven, Minn., and Hattiesburg, Miss. . . .  If yoga began as a meditation technique with poses, or asanas, devised to assist in reaching a transcendentally blissful state, it has . . . become much more about doing than being . . .  a weight-loss technique and a stress-management tool . . . an exploding market for workout clothes and equipment. “

“Friend set out to build his brand by straddling yoga’s two poles: he is trying to enhance yoga’s spiritual aspects by training teachers to speak inspirationally as they teach postures. Friend spends a great deal of time on philosophy and writes that the spiritual effects of yoga are more important than the physical ones . . . in language that draws as much from Dale Carnegie and the American idiom of self-improvement as from Hindu philosophy.”

“Friend’s yoga is based on classic hatha-yoga postures — he has refined them using what he calls ‘universal principles of alignment’ — but it can be as challenging as a student wants it to be. His classes are less about toned abs than about self-expression and enjoyment. Adjustments don’t make the poses ‘right,’ for instance, they make them “more beautiful.”

The intention to make an asana more beautiful rather than ‘right’ is one I relate strongly to. From my first day of coaching, in 1972, I had an instinct to coach esthetically more than energetically. My experience as a swimmer suggested that races were decided primarily by how long and hard you worked. My slight exposure to principles of technique left me with a sense one might need an engineering degree to really understand them.

But from literally my first hour on deck observing my team in the pool, I found myself magnetically drawn to visual impressions and to feeling that clean lines and flowing movement would produce faster times. Even as articles and clinic talks continued to describe technique like rocket science I grew steadily more convinced that that any instruction that made a swimmer look taller, sleeker or smoother deserved recall and reuse. Over the years what was initially instinctive and experimental developed into a method.

Striving continuously to make your stroke more beautiful obviously has far greater potential for engagement and uplift than striving to make it technically correct.

According to TI-Japan Head Coach Shinji Takeuchi,  the promise that draws the strongest response there is Learn to swim with more grace.  Though I’ve spent 45 years as a competitive swimmer and coach, nothing moves me more than seeing a truly beautiful stroke. Shinji’s Youtube video is both the most beautiful swimming and the most popular on the web, making it clear over a million others feel as I do.

What I take from this is that a holistic and crystallizing goal for many swimmers and triathletes would be to “Move with grace at the end of the race.”

Positive Psychology, the study of optimal human functioning, became a recognized field only 10 years ago in reaction to the fact that 60 years of research had focused almost exclusively on mental illness while ignoring mental wellness. Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the fathers of the movement, hoped that study of individuals and groups that were thriving could “find and nurture genius and talent” and “make normal life more fulfilling.”

You can choose happiness  . . .

Two recent books (my Kindle contains copies of both) reveal helpful insights from the research. In The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, University of California psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky says that each of us has an inherited potential for happiness coded in our genes, but also considerable ability to choose happiness. She says that our inherited “happiness set point” determines just 50 percent of happiness while only 10 percent results from the impact of life circumstances. This leaves 40 percent of our capacity for happiness within our control. Like nearly all areas of human potential, this capacity remains undeveloped in most people because few of us realize our power to affect it by conscious choices and intentions. This takes us right back to the words of the Dalai Lama: “The key to happiness is in your own hands.”

. . .  but will you choose right?

Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, draws on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to show the limitations of human imagination and how it steers us wrong in our pursuit of happiness.

Malcolm Gladwell, reviewing Gilbert’s book in the New Yorker,  wrote: “What distinguishes humans from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. Gilbert sets out to figure why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?”

After my post about the Dalai Lama, Lawrence commented: “My motivation for learning TI freestyle is a conviction, formed after watching you and Shinji . . . that if I could reach such a level of competency I would have a new and reliable source of peace and deep happiness in my life that I could enjoy every day. In short, what drives me on with TI is the rhetorical question I ask myself whenever I view these demonstrations: Wouldn’t it be *great* to be able to do *that*?”

The Happiness Principle I take from Lawrence’s comment is that the goal he seeks is one he can never fulfill: However he swims on a given day, he’ll return the next day trying to improve on it just a little bit. And that daily striving to improve is what will ensure Flow States while he’s in the pool . . . an enduring sense of well-being that stays with him for hours after . . . and motivates him to renew his quest the next day.

While the Dalai Lama said the purpose of life is to pursue happiness, Csikszentmihalyi says our world is not designed to make us happy, but to help us grow by facing challenges.

Csikszentmihalyi describes a defining distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. Pleasure is passive, from things like a massage or warm bath, a glass of wine or a dish of ice cream.

Enjoyment requires an active contribution to the result. In the 250,000 surveys he conducted while developing Flow Theory, people reported their happiest moments came when absorbed in a mindful and exacting challenge — like improving your swimming.

This leads me to ponder the vast amount of time devoted by Americans to watching TV, the quintessential passive activity. We (along with the UK) lead the world in watching an average 28 hours weekly, a staggering 8.4 billion hours each week of lost opportunity to be doing something that could bring true and deep happiness.

Ingredients for Flow

Clear  Goals – reset goals each time one is achieved.

Focus - keen and targeted concentration

Feedback - Direct and immediate to adjust your intention or effort

Balance – between your ability level and the difficulty of your challenge

Autonomy - A sense of personal control.

Intrinsically Rewarding – you needn’t push yourself or be pushed to do it.

I was there mainly to cheer daughter Betsy in her first triathlon — at the 70.3 distance. Betsy has taught TI for quite a few  years–to infants as well as octogenarians, to  nervous, even phobic, beginners as well as English Channel aspirants.  She’s also raced in open water several times a year, since her mid-20s. Her first triathlon was

True to form I never actually saw her take a single stroke, recognizing her only as she stood and peeled off her cap after 1.2 miles in Seneca Lake. I saw her flash by on the bike as  she left the transition to start 56 miles, and never again (I rode my own bike around Geneva to pass the time.). On the 13.1-mile run I found her by working backward from the finish to the 9-mile mark, then accompanied her for the last 4 miles, a stretch during which she passed dozens of competitors — and was passed by no one. Betsy improved her position by maintaining a relaxed smooth stride and walking only briefly at water stops, while others struggled with deteriorating form or walked for long stretches.  Though it was 85 degrees with an unforgiving sun, she looked remarkably fresh.

While I felt a father’s pride there, my memorable moment came over two hours after Betsy’s finish of 7 hrs 23 minutes. Indeed more than 90 minutes after the race was declared officially over at the 8 hour mark. Several minutes apart, at about 9 hours and 30 minutes — after the finish area had been broken down and taken away, the results trailer had been packed up, the spectators had departed and when all that remained of the post-race meal were some cold, glutinous squares of pizza — two final finishers came down the home stretch. One was a man in his 50s greeted by his wife and daughter and two volunteers who held up a length of discarded boundary tape for him to break, the other a woman wearing the green jersey of “Team Z,” who cheered her final steps lustily.

At least to me they’re anonymous–I realized belatedly I should have asked their names–because they don’t show up in the results. But I thought about the mental strength it takes to be  on the course alone, with the aid stations already closed, the cheering spectators departed, the hot sun beating and miles still to go, knowing your accomplishment will receive no official notice. But this–finishing what you started for your own satisfaction–seems to me, more than the fast times of elites that receive far more attention in the tri media, the true essence of this and all endurance sports.

I watched the race leaders during parts of the run and was impressed by their light. fluid, fast strides. But  they kind of made it look easy, and enjoyed support and encouragement  all along from aid station volunteers and spectators. They also tend to be the center of gravity and attention in the sport, particularly its media.

However, the great majority of the 1000 or so athletes I watched on Sunday appeared to be running to participate in a ‘healthful fellowship’ than to prove themselves athletically. But their keenest personal focus–in those hot, draining final miles–was to finish what they started. So this is a salute to those who traversed the hardest miles to do so.

I can’t help but add that persistence itself draws on particular brain circuits and the final finisher in an endurance event grows the persistence circuit more than anyone.

Its  message can be capsulized as:

1. The purpose of life is happiness.

2. Once  basic  needs are met, happiness is determined more by the state of one’s mind than by external conditions, circumstances, or events.

3. Happiness can be achieved through the systematic training of our hearts and minds, through reshaping  attitudes and outlook.

4. The key to happiness is in your own hands.

More succinctly, the Dalai Lama advises,  before making a choice  ask: “Will this bring me happiness?”

Reading this yesterday brought to mind an experience from last November:

Kaizen Happiness

Eight months ago, I met opera director Paolo Carignani in Manhattan. We swam  at Reebok Fitness Club before Alice and I watched him conduct a performance of Aida at the Met Opera.  Paolo had transformed himself into the picture of grace with TI practice (aided by TI Coaches in  Zurich, NY, Tokyo and Barcelona. )

Paolo always practices TI before a performance, because it increases his energy (as we saw, conducting an opera demands incredible endurance–Aida lasted over 3 hours) and even makes his conducting movements more fluid!  But he was even more emphatic about the importance of a  more holistic effect: Several times he repeated “TI has such a gift for making people happy!”

Two days later, after finishing a practice in a very happy state myself, I was reading an article about a zen roshi who conducts a weekly devotion near Woodstock. He said “People seem much happier as they leave the service.”

Suddenly this confluence of happy thoughts produced the most inspiring possibility I’d ever considered — Kaizen Happiness!

As with all things Kaizen, this would result in:

1) Continuously increasing one’s knowledge of how to  create feelings of happiness; and

2) Continuously deepen the quality of happiness one feels.

If you could do both, you might one day inspire someone to say of you (as Howard Cutler wrote of the Dalai Lama): “I still had a long way to go before achieving the kind of pervasive joy that he seemed to radiate so effortlessly.”

Since that week in November I have had a clearer vision of the direction of my own swimming, and the Total Immersion program: Aim both more consistently toward the Pursuit of Happiness.

I’ll expand further on this idea  in posts to follow, but invite you to ask yourself before any practice or set: How will this bring me happiness?

1. Human brains produce new brain cells–=a process called neurogenesis.

2. Exercise increases neurogenesis.

3. Neurogenesis improves thinking.

Apart from raising, then debunking, a notion that too much exercise might hurt neurogenesis, the content of this article offers little that’s new or significant. Like many others, it missed what I think of as the most important point of all. Since exercise increases neurogenesis and neurogenesis improves thinking, the optimal situation would be to use that new improved thinking capacity to tackle new and more complex skills in your exercise.

In other words, don’t just push your body, push your brain at the same time. This lets us know that not all exercise is created equal when it comes to brain-building.

When it comes to promoting brain function, the most beneficial physical activities combine the following characteristics:

Aerobic – Ensures the brain a better supply of the oxygen and glycogen on which it runs.

Complex – Complexity (i.e. as gymnastics involves more complex skills than running) requires the brain to coordinate a ’suite’ of motor and cognitive functions, leading to Synaptic Plasticity – a richer network of connections between neurons and circuits

Kaizen – The potential for continuous long-term skill improvement means that both neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity will also continue at elevated levels than when the improvement curve levels off. This also leads to the development of “cognitive reserve’ which has been credited with increasing resistance to age-related loss of mental acuity.

Sensory Enriched – Activities that rely heavily on a well-developed sense of feel, and which provide enriched sensory feedback, promote more neurogenesis than activities you can do on auto-pilot.

Swimming provides the greatest opportunity to exploit the brain-building potential of all these characteristics.

Which means a strong case can be made that Swimming Makes you ‘Smarter.’

Struggle is essential to improving your brain’s circuitry. In order to get a  skill circuit to fire optimally, you must first fire it sub-optimally. When you do it inefficiently, you become aware of your errors and have a chance to fix them. Mistakes increase your attention.

Even the swimming you practice after improving should still be effortful — a precisely calibrated kind of effort rather than brute force. Try smarter not harder.

Better skills happen not by trying harder indiscriminately, but by trying harder in thoughtful, purposeful, targeted ways. Here’s a typical sequence of an improvement-minded swimmer working with a new Stroke Thought:

1.    Choose a sensation to create or experience.

2.    Slightly miss the mark on your first try.

3.    Analyze what happened and adjust your intention.

4.    Try again.

5.   Compare the 2nd trial with the first.

6.   Try again, pursuing the more promising path.

Are we ever satisfied with our first effort at a new skill or tweak? Indeed are we ever satisfied with our 100th try?  Not if we’re seeking Continuous Improvement.

The “Energy Sink”

Have you ever seen a fish that wasn’t horizontal while swimming? Fish and aquatic mammals are naturally designed for aquatic (i.e. horizontal) balance. Humans, as terrestrial mammals, are naturally designed for land (i.e. vertical) balance. Most of us recognize that the cost of imbalance in the water is more drag and fatigue, less speed. But the true cost is actually far greater.

Actually, few swimmers think of it as a balance problem. It feels more like a sinking problem which leaves most new swimmers feeling at least highly uncomfortable, and often at risk. Imbalance is the reason nearly every swimmer’s first attempt to cross the pool is a “near death experience.”

Usually, we’re not in real danger. But who can think clearly when it feels like your survival depends on churning furiously until you reach safety. The reason we feel threatened is a simple matter of buoyancy and gravity. Buoyancy pushes our air-carrying lungs up, while gravity pulls our dense lower body down. That has costs far beyond what most people realize.

1. A sagging lower body increases drag considerably.

2. The resulting survival strokes churn up a froth of bubbles—and can easily exhaust you within 30 seconds–but are utterly ineffective for propulsion.

3. However the costs in mental energy may be greatest of all, and have rarely been acknowledged.

Imbalance burns Mental Energy

Though the brain makes up just 2 percent of the body’s weight, it consumes 20 percent of its energy. Normally about 50 percent of the brain’s energy consumption goes to managing balance. But when the brain senses imbalance–and particularly when it thinks you’re sinking–it goes into critical mode and  nearly 100 percent of its energy is consumed with trying to fix that.

Until you fix ‘that sinking feeling,’ you have no chance of becoming comfortable or efficient.  And with that amount of energy waste, it makes no sense at all to try to ‘tough it out.’ Before tackling even the most rudimentary skills, we need to send the brain unambiguous signals that we’ve got control of body position. That frees up the mental energy to focus on skills that require some degree of calm focus.

That’s why all TI learning sequences start by teaching comfort and body control–as is the case with Lesson One of the Self-Coached Workshop.

Relax into Weightlessness

In terms of stroke mechanics, Lesson One exercises  teach you to position head, arms and legs in ways you’ll maintain in every drill (and stroke) that follows. But more importantly–by teaching you to relax into weightlessness–it frees you from the evolutionary legacy of being a land-dwelling species.

Like all terrestial mammals, we’re wired by evolution to keep the head above the surface, in a ’safe’ place. The head-lifting instinct just makes our balance problem worse. And our survival instincts also interpret gravity–at least in water–as a threat to well-being.  Bypassing that instinct and replacing it with an instinct to cooperate with gravity is a difficult, but utterly necessary, step.

Though Lesson 1 drills appear simple, they are essential in replacing an inborn reflex with a calmly considered choice.  They also free up the considerable mental energy required for skill-acquisition. For this reason, we recommend repeating Superman Glide as much as necessary to imprint a sense of support and stability.  We also recommend that you “tune up” for more advanced skills by starting reps with a few moments of Superman Glide, while working on more advanced lessons and skills.

Newer swimmers, anyone who still feels their legs are sinking, or find it difficult to relax the kick will benefit hugely from staying with Lesson One longer. All Lesson One exercises are Tuneups, designed for practice in short intervals–usually 10 yards or less.

Even after progressing to Lesson Two and beyond, use one or more of these– particularly Superman Glide–as tuneups as you begin a practice session . . . or anytime you feel yourself becoming tense or working too hard. Repeat Superman Glide or Laser Lead Flutter until you feel weightless and relaxed again, then maintain that as you resume practice.