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

Segment 1 of the “Work Less, Swim Better” series showed me moving smoothly through a pack of other swimmers in rough water in the 2006 World Masters Championship. Segment 2 uses underwater video to reveal what was happening underwater as I did. The key points include:

Pierce the Water

Human swimming, exemplified by the swimmer in the next lane, is all about pulling and kicking. His hand goes in, down and back in one motion. As the video shows, I travel twice as far on each stroke, taking 4 to 5 strokes, to his 9 to 10 over about 10 yards. His stroke moves water back, My stroke moves my body forward. One reason is that I use my extending hand to “separate water molecules” (as does the tapered snout of a barracuda) then line up my body to slide torso and legs through the human-sized sleeve I create. That habit – taught in Lessons 2 and 4 of the Self-Coached Workshop – significantly reduces drag so I travel farther on each stroke.

Hold your place

Human swimmers press the hand straight down by instinct – and because they need constant propulsion. When drag is high, you lose momentum quickly, so you have to stroke ceaselessly. Streamlining helps me conserve momentum, which gives me the luxury of more time to firmly trap water behind my hand. My solid “grip” is another reason my stroke propels me twice as far. It also means lets me use the “free energy” of a weight shift, rather than weaker and easily-fatigued arm muscles, as my human-swimming lane mate does. The patient catch and synchronized weight shift are taught in Lessons 5 and 6.

Cocoon of Calm

We all start out as Human Swimmers.  It takes targeted and patient focus to replace deep-seated habits with Separating Molecules and Holding your Place. This not only helps you hold form in  rough water; it also builds powerful focus that converts into a “cocoon of calm” when you encounter a churning crowd in a triathlon swim leg or open water race. Practice like that demonstrated by TI coaches from 2:14 to 2:38 helps swimmers not only accept, but enjoy, close quarters. Even while crowding each other, and intentionally creating contact, none change their form. (Click here for an expanded version of this video .) This builds resistance to the loss of form and focus experienced by many triathletes in the first minutes of a race.

Anyone can learn PMF.

There’s nothing accidental about the form those TI coaches display. Besides the seven coaches in a pack, the three swimming under the bridge, and the four swimmers following the rope all look virtually the same. PMF is the first example in swimming history of a precisely-replicable technique . . .  and one that’s highly effective: All three TI coaches swimming under the bridge — Greg Sautner, Dave Barra and me – have won USMS national open water championships. PMF is a form anyone can learn by following the  step-by-step stroke-building procedures in the 10-Lesson Series.

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.

For both Buddhism and TI, discoveries about neuroplasticity—i.e. observations that the brain is constantly rewiring itself—reveal that our practice methods create changes in brain infrastructure. When the Dalai Lama said that the purpose of life is happiness, and that purpose is achieved through training the mind, he spoke literally, not figuratively. TI has been seeking to replace the traditional belief–that you improve at swimming by training the body–with a new principle that you improve by training the brain. And that this—because it’s a form of moving meditation–is also a proven way to experience Flow, a state of almost unmatched happiness.

In an unprecedented convergence of Western science with Eastern philosophy, Dr. Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin professor of psychiatry, brought 32 subjects to his Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience in Madison and wired them for study. Half were Buddhist monks, each of whom had 10,000 to 50,000 lifetime hours of meditation. Half were control subjects with no previous training, who were taught the fundamentals of meditation for two weeks prior to the experiment.

All were placed in an MRI scanner and asked to think compassionately about people close to them, then about mankind in  general. The scientists reading the scans knew that optimistic and constructive thinking activates the left frontal cortex, while stress or depression activate the right frontal cortex.  When the monks meditated on compassion, they showed an average of 100 percent greater activity in the left frontal cortex; two showed increases of 700 to 800 percent. The novice meditators increased activity in that area by just 10 percent.

This study was the first to document that thinking patterns can be learned in the same way as physical skills–by stimulating cell growth in the region of the brain where that kind of neural activity occurs. The scans revealed that thousands of hours of meditation had grown significantly more robust brain circuits and, with it, the ability to generate far more “brain power” in that region. In other words, brain power is no different than muscle power—a result of targeted work that adds ‘functional tissue’ in a particular area of the physical body.

“People are not stuck at certain preset points,” Dr. Davidson says. “We can take advantage of our brain’s plasticity to enhance chosen qualities.” In another study at Massachusetts General Hospital, and MIT, brain scans showed that regular practice of mindfulness increased cortical thickness in an area of the right hemisphere that we use to sustain attention and increase sensory awareness—two essential capacities for improving a stroking pattern!

From Aspiration to Achievement

These were my most exciting and empowering insights in all the time since I began swimming in 1966 or coaching in 1972. They revealed that: (1) The mindsets and behaviors that lead to Mastery are learnable; (2) Literally every perception or action that occurs from the moment you  cross the threshold to the pool deck, or approach the shore of a lake is controlled by the brain; and (3) Any rational objective can be brought to fruition through the application of strategic mindfulness.

• If you expect to improve continuously at swimming, you will.
• If you interpret something in your environment—crowded lanes, rough water, not enough time, too-warm or too-cold water—as an opportunity to “strengthen a circuit”. . . though every other person in the pool finds it annoying or inconvenient . . . you will turn it into an opportunity.
• If you focus on finding and fixing inefficiency in your stroke, it will improve before you leave the water.
• If you decide to complete a 20-mile marathon—no matter that you can barely complete 25 yards now—you will!

How different from the wishful thinking I done for the first 25 years of my swimming life.

The TI Self-Coached Workshop has been designed upon this principle.

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.

As you can see in the article, the advice he received might not have been that encouraging to those who, like him, are left “gasping” by a single length. Most just reinforced the idea that there’s not much to be done but work harder to survive that ordeal.

We learn of several people who – somehow – manage to swim miles of butterfly, but never quite learn how . . . except that one “spends two hours training on dry land for every hour he spends in the pool.”  And no wonder, when you consider the following: “’There’s a huge surge of propulsion as the arms pull you forward, then a deceleration during the recovery,’ says Steven Munatones, a former coach of U.S. Olympic distance swimmers.”

Or this: “Great butterfly swimmers have always boasted powerful torsos. As a world-record-setting teenage girl, ‘I had such a strong core that I had to wear boy’s pants,’ says Mary T. Meagher, who won three gold medals swimming butterfly at the 1984 Olympics.”

When Helliker asked me if I thought an adult could learn to swim butterfly  for distance, here’s what I offered – a small part of which made it into the article.

Kevin

Five years ago, after much experimentation and one eye-opening insight, I began developing an adapted version I called Butterfly for Boomers.

Background: I had striven since I began swimming at age 14 to find some way to swim butterfly that didn’t exhaust me after 25 or 50 yards. Despite many faithful repetitions of 25- and 50-yard repeats to get in better “butterfly condition” plus countless cumulative hours of all the usual fly drills – single arm, triple kick . . . and despite having coached some amazingly fast flyers, including one who was world-ranked in the mid-80s . . . that goal eluded me for 40 yrs.

Five years ago, age 54, I was watching a DVD of Michael Phelps, advancing frame-by-frame, and noticed something I’d never discerned before. I saw that after landing, he simply held a streamline – for a nanosecond – while allowing himself to sink. And that after sinking, he rose again — without trying to climb back to the surface.

What I took from this was that Phelps was swimming fly in a fundamentally different way – a difference that was sufficiently subtle that he probably wasn’t consciously aware of it. In essence he had turned butterfly into a way to play off the natural forces of Gravity and Buoyancy against each other.

I went straightaway to our Endless Pool, set the current relatively low, and began swimming experimentally. I had these thoughts as I did

-                  Land Forward. Don’t dive in – as many swimmers do. Since gravity would return me to the water anyway, there’s no reason to dive.

-                  Hold a Streamline while sinking. To ensure I’d continue traveling forward while I sank.

-                  Wait until I felt that the force of Buoyancy (acting on the air in my lungs) was stronger than that of gravity.

-                  Begin next stroke just at the moment I felt my head about to break the surface – purely via the assist from buoyancy. You can see both of these occur between 32 and 52 seconds on the youtube video.

Within 10 minutes I found myself able to just keep swimming in the current (no walls, therefore no regular rest breaks) with no fatigue nor any reason to stop other than a desire to do something else.

I later added other elements – such as don’t “pull” – just use your hands, as gently and briefly as possible, to “help” your head emerge. I also added the Butterfrog adaptation – which was far better suited to my non-supple middle-aged lower back. The breaststroke kick even turned an immobile back (my hips refused to undulate even at 15) into an asset, rather than impediment.

At 15 – as well as 25, 35 and 45 – I was unable to swim even 100 yards in anything other than desperately-hanging-on mode on the final 25. At 55 I regularly swam 200 yards of Butterfrog in practice and entered the 200 Fly in Masters meets 3 times. I won the gold in my age group and improved my PR each time. And the 3rd time I swam progressively faster splits on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th 50s, something most people would think only a Mary T or Phelps would be capable of. You can imagine what a heady experience this was.

I view this within a larger frame — that is how to rethink and re-engineer a variety of sports-related skills to adapt to physical changes that occur as we age. I find an amazing amount of possibility for this in swimming, because one can finesse drag to a far greater extent than one can finesse gravity, and because of the yielding nature of water. For instance we call our  latest iteration of crawl technique “Perpetual Motion Freestyle” because it’s so well adapted to swimming longer distances with little or no fatigue and significantly easier on the body than conventional crawl.

See Butterfly for Boomers here:

Energy cost really depends on how you swim – either stroke. Energy cost will be lowest in both strokes when you do the following:

1) Focus more on streamlining than propelling. In both strokes, the typical swimmer gives most of his attention to pulling and kicking. Instead, think mainly about doing what it takes to put your body in a streamlined position at the conclusion of each stroke. “Streamlined” means elongated and sleek, with head hanging between shoulders.

2) Spend more time in that streamlined position, most of it below the surface. Spend less time in any non-streamlined position. We’re talking about nanosecond adjustments here, but small changes in timing make a big difference.

3) While you focus on holding a streamlined position, let gravity take you down . . . until you feel buoyancy has become the stronger force. Let buoyancy return you to the surface. This is far more economical than diving-and-climbing.

4) Start the next stroke just as you feel buoyancy – working mainly without much help from you – is about to take you back through the surface. Do just enoughwith your hands to help your head clear the surface for a breath.

5) About that breath: Keep your head as stable and neutral as possible – and your chin in the water – as you breathe.

Related resources:
Find considerable detail and step-by-step suggestions for building skill, speed and endurance (i.e. the distance you can swim WITHOUT fatigue) in the book Extraordinary Swimming.

For visual learning aids, there are the DVDs BetterFlyfor Every Body and Breaststroke for Every Body.

I hope someone can help. I feel I have the TI technique down EXCEPT the two beat kick (2BK). For some reason my leg goes to a 90 degree angle at the knee when I kick. I know this is creating drag and want to correct it. I’ve tried everthing. I have even thought about tieing my feet together in a shallow pool. Any suggestions?

I replied:

I’ve spent years on my own 2BK “project.” But even before giving the 2BK much attention, I had spent over a decade focused pretty narrowly on the many ways in which one can reduce drag.

I began a shift toward efforts to improve propulsion around 2000, thinking mainly about my armstroke for a few years. In 2004 I began to focus on my kick.

Since then my efforts have been organized as follows:
1) Make my legs more passive to save energy and reduce turbulence
2) Get them to “draft behind my torso.”
3) Synchronize leg beats with hand-spear.
4) Use less muscle to accomplish #3 – shifting the work from quads to core.
5) Focus again on streamlining the kick – using toe-flick rather than leg-drive.

Eliminating a scissors — or other leg-splaying habits — falls into #2. The most helpful thing I did to streamline my kicks was improving lateral stability – i.e. controlling rotation. Besides imprinting controlled rotation in Skate and SpearSwitch, I also focused on keeping my elbows as high and wide as possible as I completed extension.

I’ve described my 2BK process and project in detail in Chapter 7 “How to Kick in Open Water” of the Outside the Box ebook.

Streamlined Legs - and Body - in SpearSwitch

Legs Draft Behind Torso in Whole Stroke

This morning was my second EP practice since installing a pool at home. Not having used the EP in over a year, I’m reacquainting myself.  This morning I decided to focus on improving how I hold water with the extended hand while breathing.

A common error associated with freestyle breathing is that the lead hand collapses (in aggravated cases) or strokes prematurely because the rotation to air, plus a tendency to lift the head, loads the lead arm. When either happens, the next stroke (left hand if you breathe right) is less effective: The hand moves back more than you move forward.

In recent years I’ve improved that aspect of technique a great deal, with most of that improvement coming from EP practice. In recent weeks, I’ve been aware of a slight “slipping” sensation in my right hand when breathing left so I thought it was time to refocus on it.

I started with a very low current speed, stroking as slowly and gently as possible. On each stroke I paused my hand for a moment at full extension. I could see my hand in the bottom mirror so I checked that it was (i) still for a moment, (ii) on a Wide Track and (iii) hanging relaxed with fingers separated and palm back.

I took 10 right breaths (20 strokes), 10 bilateral breaths (30 strokes) then 10 left breaths. I used this breathing sequence to pinpoint my right hand. Because of bad habits acquired and ingrained during millions of “pre-TI” strokes from 1965-1988, when I was mainly a left-side breather, my right hand has been more stubborn about learning patience. It’s much better than it used to be, but still not as good as my left hand during a right side breath – because that was still a relatively  blank slate when I began TI practice 21 years ago.

When breathing right, it’s easy to imprint a patient right hand. Breathing bilaterally I get 5 strokes in every 6 in which I can hold that patience fairly easily. When I breathe left, I really have to focus to avoid right-hand slippage.

After each sequence of 30 breaths, I turned up the current slightly, and returned my focus to keeping that “moment of stillness”  before stroking.  I continued that for about 20 minutes.

In my final 10 minutes, with the current flowing a bit faster (yet still probably in a leisurely 27 min for 1.5k range) I alternated 20 bilateral breaths with 20 left-side breaths, taking a break of 5 cleansing breaths after each sequence of 20 breaths/100 strokes.

My focal point here was to feel (1) a slightly-exaggerated overlap between my hands while breathing; and (2) a sense of lightness and absence of pressure in my extended hand as I breathed.

I’m not sure my right hand was improved after 30 minutes of practice. I am sure I was more sensitized to it and that way lies improvement.

These three screen shots,  from Lesson 6 of the Easy Freestyle DVD show a patient right hand–relaxed and on-track with palm back–just before my face emerges to breathe. 2nd image shows same moment, from the surface. 3rd image shows a split-second later. I’m just about to return my face to the water, left hand about to enter, and right arm still extended.

Related blog on breathing skills: Free Air: How to Breathe Easier

TI Breathing Skills DVD

Related thread on TI Forum.

• Distance of repeats and/or the set;
• Strokes Per Length [SPL];
• Time for the repeats; and/or
• Stroke Tempo (in strokes per second) from the Tempo Trainer.

In addition to the objective numbers above, I also include a subjective rating, for effort level or “mojo.” I’ll describe how I use subjective ratings in another post. Here I’ll focus on how and why I use hard data.

Last week I traveled to Pittsburgh Thurs thru Sat to conduct a clinic for the Allegheny Mountain LMSC. While traveling I try to swim as regularly as possible though sometimes I can only squeeze in 30 minutes or less, as was true two of the three days I’ll recount here. As you’ll see, even 20 minutes can constitute a great practice when you aim for measurable improvement.

Thursday May 6 1000 yards at Bucknell University

While driving from New Paltz to State College PA, I stopped in Lewisburg for a swim and lunch with Jeannie Zappe a newly certified TI Coach. We had only 20 minutes to swim. I suggested 20 x 50 on a minute, trying to gradually increase pace, while maintaining a constant SPL.
On the first 50, swimming with consummate ease, I took 25 strokes (12 down, 13 back) and 46 seconds. My goal would be to continue taking 25 strokes per 50 for as long as possible while gradually swimming faster. This is a common set for me; I always try to let the seconds “melt away” (swim faster without trying) initially. When I succeed, it’s because my nervous system gets progressively more “tuned” to the task.
Over the first 10 x 50, I improved gradually from :46 to :42 with no perceptible increase in effort.  My primary focus was to feel a longer, more slippery bodyline. (Lesson 3 of Easy Freestyle). When the effortless improvements no longer came, I increased effort in highly specific ways:

• More sense of hold with my hand and forearm.
• More snap in my 2BK “toe flick” – yet keeping it streamlined within the “shadow” of my upper legs.

Over 6 x 50, I improved to 39 seconds. During my final 4 x 50 I allowed myself 1 more stroke on each length for 27 total and improved to 38 seconds, trying to feel a bit more ease at that higher count and faster speed. I felt great at the end.

What happened? To maintain the same SPL for an extended series of repeats, I have to travel a constant distance on each stroke. To improve pace, I have to propel myself over that distance faster. That means the frequency of my strokes also increases – though I never consciously tried to stroke faster. So Stroke Length was constant. Stroke Rate increased . . . because Velocity increased. This is different – and easier – than trying to stroke faster . . . which is the most common way to try to swim faster.

Friday May 7 4200 yards at JCC in Pittsburgh

TI Coach Suzanne Atkinson brought me to the JCC where she’s a member. We swam for about 90 minutes. For warmup, I swam 400 easy, alternating 25s of FR, BK and BR. I held 13 SPL for FR, 16 for BK and 8 for BR. I can take fewer strokes on back and breast if I focus in an exacting way, but preferred to stay relaxed.

Main Set: 6 rounds of 4 x 50 + 2 x 100 + 1 x 200 with Tempo Trainer. Increase tempo by .02 sec on each round, progressing from 1.10 sec/stroke on 1^st round to 1.00 sec/stroke on 6^th round. I rested 10 beeps between 50s, 15 beeps between 100s, 20 beeps before the 200 and gave myself a minute between rounds to reset the TT.

My SPL on the 4 x 50 @ 1.10 was 14+15. My goal was to progress through all distances and rounds to the final 200 @ 1.00 with as little change in SPL as I could manage. I was able to keep my SPL at 16 or lower for Rounds 1 through 4. In round 5 (1.02 sec/stroke) I had perhaps 3 lengths (of 24 total) at 17 SPL. In round 6 (1.00 sec/stroke) I took 17 SPL on about 6 lengths.

Suzanne and I finished with 12 (for me, 16 for her) 25s of Butterfly. I’ll describe this set in a separate post.

What happened? The goal of this set is to swim constant pace within each round — as repeat distance goes from 50 to 200 – and to improve pace with each successive round. If Tempo and SPL stay constant, so must pace. If Tempo increases and SPL stays the same (or increases very modestly) then pace improves. If SPL increases too much as Tempo increases, then pace will stay the same, or possibly even get slower.

I only checked the pace clock after the 200s. My 200 time improved an average of 2 seconds in each round. That means a tempo increase of .02 sec for one stroke created an improvement of 2 seconds (100 times as much) for 200 yards. This is a decent “trade” of tempo for speed so I ingrained good efficiency habits during this set.

Saturday May 8 2200 yards at Duquesne University

Duquesne Coach Dave Sheets opened the pool so Suzanne and I could swim prior to our clinic. He also joined us for the swim (and was impressively fast; in fact his backstroke repeats were as fast as or faster than my crawl.)

We had only 30 minutes so I planned a set similar to Friday’s, but with a varying pace  emphasis with each round, in place of Saturday’s constant pace emphasis.

Main Set: (1 x 200 + 8 x 25) – (1 x 200 + 4 x 50) – (1 x 200 + 2 x 100) – (1 x 200 + 4 x 50) – (1 x 200 + 8 x 25) The 200s were to be swum at “Cruise” pace and the 25s, 50s and 100s at “Brisk” pace. I aimed to hold ALL repeats @ 14 SPL.

I didn’t time the 200s, focusing instead on a Stroke Thought of Superslow Recovery without sacrificing balance or stability. I swam the 25s in an average of 17 sec, the 50s in 37 sec and the 100s in 1:14-1:15.

What happened? SPL remained constant, but – as on Thursday’s 50-yd repeats – pace varied. I swam significantly faster on the 25s, 50s and 100s, than on the 200s. In this case, I did put a good deal more effort into them. But SAME SPL combined with FASTER Pace also means higher Stroke Rate. This time I accomplished faster pace by shortening repeat distance and adding a bit of effort.

Summary: In all 3 practices I created nervous system adaptation by varying the task, while keeping at least one variable constant.

• On Thurs, repeat distance and SPL stayed constant, SR (and consequently pace) increased.
• On Fri, I tried to keep SPL constant, and succeeded in minimizing change as repeat distance and tempo increased.
• On Sat, I kept SPL constant while repeat distance varied. Pace and SR changed as repeat distance got shorter.

When I describe my practices, I’m often asked how I can remember so many details to record them in my log later. Part of the reason is years of “data collection and recording” have trained my brain for this kind of memory capacity (which is highly specialized; outside the pool I’m know for being absent-minded and forgetful). But recall is also made easier by the fact that I have a context or framework for the numbers I track. I use my first repeat or two to set a baseline or benchmark then decide, based on experience, what sort of improvement goal I’ll pursue. Since thousands of hours of practice have improved my ability to execute what I intend, I usually need only to take note of where I’ve diverged from the plan.