Segment 2 showed me sharing the pool with a single ‘human swimmer.’ The underwater view revealed the critical differences that allowed me to travel twice as far on each stroke. The most significant is that Perpetual Motion Freestyle (PMF) prioritizes active streamlining, while human-swimming prioritizes pulling and kicking.

We showed that contrast to illustrate that swimming ‘like a human’ is normal . . . a relaxed and streamlined stroke is a learned skill. From 1966 to 1991, I swam ‘like a human’ too. I only began learning PMF at age 40 — and have continued improving my form for 20 years. Such enduring improvement is possible because human-swimming instincts are encoded in our DNA. However, as the TI coaches and swimmers in Segment 2 illustrate once you learn PMF you replace wired-in struggle with flow.  Segment 3 reveals the starting point for learning it. (Note: One of those swimmers, Dave Barra, completed an English Channel crossing yesterday, Sept 1.)

Humans naturally swim like other terrestrial mammals, head high and limbs churning. PMF consciously mimics the swimming of aquatic mammals (whales, dolphins, walrus, manatee, sea otters) to whom evolution has given a naturally streamlined shape. Another natural advantage of aquatic mammals is aquatic balance – a low-drag horizontal position. The designed-in balance we humans have is vertical – great for walking and running, but a source of drag when swimming.

Thus the first step in learning PMF is to rewire your brain.  This creates new circuits of motor neurons,  which allow us to move differently. Even more critically, it creates new cognitive circuits, so we can think differently.

Superman Glide, illustrated here, begins the creation of motor circuits that guide my head (hanging) arms (wide tracks) and legs (passive and streamlined) into new positions. Cognitively, it replaces the almost-universal sinking sensation with a ray of hope that ‘weightlessness’ is possible. Once I felt the possibility of weightlessness, I gained the freedom to make a conscious choice to use my arms to (i) extend my bodyline and (ii) ‘pierce’ the water instead of churning — an inevitable legacy of the sinking sensation.

Superman Glide and Laser-Lead Flutter, shown in this segment, are examples of a new form of TI drill – called Tuneups – introduced in the Self-Coached Workshop. Tuneups are intended for practice  in short intervals–usually 6 to 10 yards, rather than  full lengths.  They’re designed to narrownly target your attention on an essential aspect of the stroke, making it easier to maintain as you progress to more complex movement and longer reps. They also help you relax when you feel yourself becoming tense or — as human swimmers usually do — working too hard.

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.

From Chapter 5 “Different Strokes: Open Water vs. Pool Technique”

While others at Masters workout focused on pool speed, I used every repeat, no matter how short, as a rehearsal for open water races.  On short repeats, most would swim with aggressive, high-turnover strokes – some taking 21 or more strokes for 25 yards, while I limited myself to 15 SPL, regardless of how brief the swim or how hard the coach urged us to swim.

I probably could have swum those sprints faster by taking more strokes. But since my favored races were long open water swims, rather than pool sprints, I preferred to imprint the optimal way to swim during them. On “sprints,” rather than take more strokes, I focused on getting more out of those I took. I felt this would help program my muscles for the faster parts of open water races-–the start and finish. I was unconcerned that my sprints were slow by pool standards, so long as they developed open water speed.

Beyond the question of stroke count, I’d also begun to refine my sense of technique adjustments that minimized fatigue without sacrificing pace, a years-long process that included an unhurried catch, a higher-elbow-but-lighter-pressure stroke, and a patiently-tuned 2-Beat kick.

My goal was to avoid reliance on fatigue-prone arm and shoulder muscles by drawing ‘free power’ from weight shifts and untiring core muscle. This required the patience to work in a longer time horizon: While my pool-mates were thinking about racing to the next wall, I thought constantly about how I hoped to feel during open-water races months-–or years–in the future.

To swim your best in open water you must make a strategic choice to swim in a way that could slow your pool times, at least on shorter repeats — and, during a period of adjustment, possibly on longer ones as well. However, any swim that lasts over a minute should benefit fairly quickly from the reduced energy cost of Perpetual Motion Freestyle.  But first, you must be willing to defer the immediate gratification of short-term speed for long-term gain.

*  *  *  *

Will myelin improve my  swimming?

At 1:23 of the accompanying video, I play a brief clip from the Outside the Box DVD, showing me swimming in the 2006 World Masters Open Water Championship in San Francisco Bay (clip shot by TI-Japan Head Coach Shinji Takeuchi.) It shows me swimming through a pack of swimmers from waves which started 5 to 10 minutes before mine. The difference between my technique and theirs is striking. I explain their struggles as resulting from “not enough myelin.” This excerpt from the Outside the Box ebook explains the significance of myelin.

From Chapter 10: “Increase Sustainability by Secreting Myelin!”

Muscle memory is a metaphor for a physiological change in your neuromuscular system. Swimming efficiently requires a specific set of muscles to be turned on (and off) in an exacting and non-instinctive pattern. With each stroke, an electrochemical signal travels from your brain to instruct motor units to contract or relax. Each time the signal crosses that circuit, a bit more myelin, a fatty substance that acts like insulation on electrical wires, is secreted, strengthening the signal received by your muscles. A relatively faint signal is good enough to keep the movement consistent while swimming slowly for short distances in a low-distraction environment. It takes a strong signal, i.e., a lot of myelin, to remain efficient as your fatique increases when you swim a mile or more at higher speeds with waves smacking you or avoiding collisions with other swimmers. . . . in the rough water of San Francisco Bay, the main difference between me and those I’m passing is myelin secretion. Thicker insulation, laid down during thousands of focused, purposeful rehearsal repeats allows me to swim with virtually the same stroke as in the pool or a serene lake. Lacking it, most others swim with a “barely coping” stroke.

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.

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.

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.