Terry Laughlin's Blog, page 28
October 12, 2013
Bright Spots
TI coaches and swimmers give a great deal of attention to identifying, analyzing, and solving what we call our Improvement Opportunities. The core value of TI, after all, is kaizen – continual personal improvement.
Finding finer and finer details of swimming skill and honing them to euphoric excellence is our passion. Of course, this is why many people come to private lessons, workshops and camps. They want expert help on solving their problems to get into the kind of swimming they have been dreaming of.
However, it is possible for us to get caught up in only one dimension of improvement – namely, dealing with the things we see as problems or weaknesses in our stroke. Because of this singular focus on what isn’t working well we can lose sight of how far we’ve come, and lose appreciation for what features in our skill are working really well already.
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Click here to read more of this post…
To view hundreds of articles of coaching advice and answers to swimmer’s questions on training and technique please visit Coach Mat’s Smooth Strokes blog.
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Swim Optimization: Beyond Balance, Streamline, and Propulsion
In the current TI method, we like to talk about the 3 stages of teaching progression: Balance, Streamline, and Propulsion. Generally speaking, mastering swimming requires mastering skills in those 3 areas in that order. One should generally have some basic level of mastery before progressing to the next level or else they will have difficulty executing the next level’s drills properly.
At a detail level, those 3 levels of progression are really areas of emphasis during our training and in drills we give to our students. In reality, you are touching upon all 3 concepts in every drill, but just to varying degrees of focus as we want to emphasize some particular concept at each level.
One thing I hear when I talk to people about TI and see also in forum posts around the internet, is that people think TI just stops there and our swimmers never get fast. And swimmers often get confused by our materials or if they do not continue coaching from a TI coach that they reach a certain point in their swimming and they don’t advance any further. Often I hear TI is at fault, or is missing something, or isn’t for competitive swimmers. This is far from the truth.
As a level beyond Balance/Streamline/Propulsion, I like to talk about Optimization, which is what you do when you master Balance, Streamline, and Propulsion. But what is Optimization?
Optimization is:
1. Further mastery of Balance, Streamline, and Propulsion in coordination, time, effort, speed, etc.
Drills don’t end with what is shown in our DVDs, or with your workshop, or with your first few sessions with a coach. We teach with more advanced progressions to fine tune your swimming, and also with focal points which are individualized to your own issues. Teaching the use of tools like the tempo trainer and tracking can help bring consistency and accurate, actionable information to your training, versus training in a data vacuum from workout to endless workout. The next level is to take your newfound skills across time, and to train you to hold form with faster tempos and for longer periods of time, and to increase your capacity to generate velocity while not wrecking your streamline and balance.
2. Application of Balance, Streamline, and Propulsion in more situations like racing, or in open water.
TI coaches have a wide variety of experiences ranging from short/long course racing to triathlon to open water racing to crossing the English channel. We apply TI techniques to make swimming in those situations more effective.
3. Pursuit of a higher goal than just mastery of swimming itself. This can be something like comfort in the water or obtaining their PR in the swim leg of Ironman. Or it can be using swimming as a means of improving mental focus and growth.
Following on 2., many TI coaches can advise and coach you to your particular goals which go beyond skill-based mastery of swimming. Swimming, like any physical activity, has benefits which can translate to activities outside swimming. Many TI coaches can help you realize the connection between the two, and perhaps even strengthen that connection.
It is an unfortunate fact that many people perceive that TI ends with Balance, Streamline, and Propulsion, or has little or nothing to offer beyond the teachings of the DVDs. Optimization of swimming is something that every TI coach I’ve encountered knows well, especially in the areas of their expertise. My hope is that over time, Total Immersion is more well known as a full system of learning and mastering swimming and for improving aspects of your life beyond the pool.
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October 8, 2013
Technique And Power
For swimmers it stands repeating:
What you are not willing to accomplish by technique you will have to make up for with power.
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Consider the speed problem. How do you speed up?
There are just two options in physics:
Apply more power.
Reduce resistance.
#1 is about building more power to overcome resistance working against you in the water and inside your own body.
#2 is about finding ways to reduce resistance in the water and inside the body so that less power is required to accomplish the task.
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Click here to read more of this post…
To view hundreds of articles of coaching advice and answers to swimmer’s questions on training and technique please visit Coach Mat’s Smooth Strokes blog.
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September 24, 2013
Postural Considerations for Swimming
One of the biggest issues I see first with my swimming clients is their posture. When they cannot get their spine aligned properly, nearly everything about swimming is very difficult.
We start with balance in the water, but if you cannot get truly horizontal in the water, then balance is hard to achieve. Most of my clients are Silicon Valley professionals – hence, a desk job at a computer for years, if not decades, with their upper (thoracic) spine and neck both dropping down, and their shoulders pulling inwards towards their chests as they look down on monitors and type on keyboards. When your posture is like that, and for many years, your body and mind think that is normal posture. All your structures and muscles have (mall)adapted to this shape. Then, one day, you want to start an athletic endeavor (great!) but unfortunately your posture is now not in an optimal shape for movement.
What does poor posture, and therefore, poor spinal alignment, produce? The body is an amazing machine. It has mechanoreceptors (nerves which sense mechanical pressure or movement) which will fire the right muscles to do what the brain is telling it to do. If you want to move or lift or whatever, and your spine is aligned, then the correct muscles will fire to perform the movement. Primary movers, big muscles like your pectorals and lats, that are designed to move your body parts fire and do the main work. Stabilizers, smaller muscles whose main function are to keep your body parts in alignment during movement, fire to keep the body structures stable so that primary movers can do the heavy work.
When the spine is not aligned, your body will do its best to enable it to perform whatever instructions your brain gives it. But knowing that your spine is not properly aligned, it will begin to fire the wrong muscles, meaning stabilizers or the wrong primary movers, in order to perform the movement. Stabilizers are great at one thing; they are designed by nature to keep the body in alignment – they are not great at creating power for large movements over long periods of time. They are smaller, and they do not have the proper mechanical leverage due to their location on the body which is not like primary movers which are placed in the right locations and attached to create huge mechanical advantages for movement. Consider the list from the Postural Restoration Institute in the document entitled Swimmer Dyssynchrony Syndrome. Muscles perform duties they were not designed to do, leading to poor swimming and injury.
Not only do muscles perform the correct functions, but also things like balance in the water get hard to accomplish. Trying to press the front part of your body down into the water becomes nearly impossible when your upper spine is frozen in a curled position. Nor is holding your body truly straight possible – so the lower part of your body wants to bend downward and trying to straighten resists muscles and structures that won’t or can’t get there.
Fixing posture then becomes a critical part of swimming well.
Sometimes, posture can be addressed by practicing activity. For example, some coaches have told me that continuous, diligent practice with Superman Glide can often aid in postural correction enough to improve balance.
Humans were designed for movement. It is the lack of movement that is creating problems in our postures. So sometimes getting people moving again and doing something other than sitting is enough. Other times it is not. Or, if someone wishes to speed up the process, then other interventions are possible and desirable.
There are many resources to address posture. I recently took the Gokhale Method which was excellent. Its methods are very much suited for the non-athletic population and think they are great for both athletes and non-athletes.
Another great resource is Foundation Training. Their therapy involves a bit more exercise and movement. However, there are some excellent exercises to help you tone up muscles and your nervous system to hold your body’s shape during movement. You can look at their DVD or find a resource who is trained in their methods on their website.
If there is anything I’ve discovered about swimming, it’s that swim training doesn’t have to take place only in the pool. There is a lot you can do out of the pool. A lot of postural correction and training can and needs to take place out of the pool. It can be like Gokhale Method where the practice does not resemble traditional exercise, or it can involve practice like more traditional exercise, like the movements described more fully in Foundation Training. Working on spinal alignment and reawakening muscles that support proper spinal alignment is a 24/7 activity.
In summary, postural improvement is an important part of swimming. Corrections to your posture both in and out of the pool will be beneficial and speed up your ability to become a better, faster, more healthy swimmer.
Coach DShen coaches Total Immersion swimming in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more posts at his training blog.
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September 12, 2013
Life Lessons from Diana Nyad?
After Diana Nyad completed a 110 mile swim from Cuba to Florida, even President Barack Obama joined the congratulatory bandwagon. The president (or more likely a 20-something aide in a West Wing cubicle) sent this tweet shortly after Nyad arrived in Florida ”Congratulations to @DianaNyad,. ”Never give up on your dreams.”
Yet I had personal reservations about whether there were lessons for the rest of us in how she approached this quest. Jeanne Safer mirrored my feelings in her post.
Diana Nyad and Swimming Torture: Must the hellish ordeal be our athletic ideal?
On her fifth try, 64-year-old endurance swimmer Diana Nyad recently became the first human to complete the 110 mile swim from Havana to Key West, without a shark cage for protection. She did it in 53 hours, vomiting repeatedly, neither ravaged by jellyfish nor being eaten, and earned universal acclaim as well as congratulations from President Obama, who tweeted her “Never give up on your dreams.”But even though I am impressed by her achievement and her indomitable will, her attitude of grim determination sounds more like a nightmare to me.
She speaks of the ocean and its perils as though it were her personal enemy, her private torture chamber; she proudly exhibits her battle scars. “Swimming,” she told The New York Times “is the ultimate form of sensory deprivation,” and sensory deprivation is a particularly fiendish type of agony.
How about sensory enrichment? Why must we idealize suffering in athletic performance, focusing singlemindedly on the goal rather than the experience, as though seeking pleasure in the activity itself shows a lack of serious commitment, and diminishes rather than enhances or gives meaning to any feat?
The ordeal mentality guarantees that the only possible gratification is reaching the goal through suffering, and swimming seems particularly prone to this masochistic ideal. Not surprisingly, Nyad is a practitioner of distracted swimming. She has an internal repertoire of 85 songs, mostly Beatles hits, which she hums continuously, removing herself psychically from what her body is doing.
Not even amateur swimmers in chlorinated, sharkless indoor pools are exempt. The same attitude prevents them from experiencing the unique delights of moving through water; “grueling” and “boring” are adjectives many use to describe swimming. That’s why any pool is full of people with waterproof iPods strapped to their goggles to help them get through their requisite number of laps before they can escape onto dry land. “If only there could be a television at the bottom,” one told me. Rare is the college swimmer who swims for pleasure later in life. For these people there is little joy—let alone transcendent experience—in moving with power and grace through another element. Their only goal is to swim faster or get it over with, and how they do it or how they feel is irrelevant.Why bother? As a passionate amateur swimmer myself, one who has no desire to race and who swims exclusively for the joy of it, I hate to think what they’re missing.
There is another way. My coach Terry Laughlin, founder of Total Immersion Swimming, has won 6 national open water championships in his 50s and 60s, participated in a relay of the English Channel, and writes about his adventures in the spirit of joy and self-discovery in his blog.
“Discover your inner fish” is his playful but serious motto, and lifelong improvement is his only goal. His technique emphasizes the mindful experience of every stroke, even in daunting conditions. He believes that he gains something even when he loses, and his joy in what he calls the “water dance” is infectious. Grim determination is not the only form of determination.
Here’s what the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy has to say about the archtypical ordeal by sea, Odysseus’ 7-year trek from Troy’s battlefields to his island home in Ithaka, and the necessity of seeking meaning—and even spiritual and sensual gratification—in the voyage rather than the destination:
When you set out for Ithaka
hope that the journey will be long,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them…
you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you…
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out
She has nothing left to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
that you will understand what all these Ithakas mean.
(after the translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
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September 9, 2013
There’s no such thing as bad weather …
Reading a recent blog by TI founder Terry Laughlin about ‘failing better’ – actively seeking to create situations which may result in errors which can then be learned from – made me reflect on my own attitudes to my swim practice and to self-development in general. In particular, enabling me to manage my unhelpful perfectionist tendencies.
You can read more here.
I’m sure I’m not alone with the challenges that I face in giving myself permission to fail constructively. I would love to hear how you all approach and tackle this.
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September 8, 2013
2-Beat Kick Purpose
Here is an excerpt from my latest blog post 2-Beat Kick Purpose:
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The 2BK has a completely different purpose than the 4BK/6BK, and because of this makes no sense as a direct forward propelling effort. When a swimmer switches to a 4BK or 6BK she is not merely changing the rhythm, she is also changing the way force is applied and transferred through the body. 4BK/6BK are not the same kick simply applied at a higher tempo.
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Click here to read more of this post… and get a good swimming instructions.
To view hundreds of articles of coaching advice and answers to swimmer’s questions on training and technique please visit Coach Mat’s Smooth Strokes blog.
The post 2-Beat Kick Purpose appeared first on Total Immersion.
September 6, 2013
Fail better. It’s that simple.
I’ve written many times that among the characteristics of those who excel in many fields is they do not fear or shrink from failure. In fact, when they practice their discipline, they almost always plan it to include a form of difficulty or challenge that will ensure some kind of failure, or reveal a weak point, knowing that’s how to get better.
Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright, and Stanislas Wawrinka have put it more elegantly. Who is Stanislas Wawrinka? He’s the Swiss tennis player who has always been overshadowed by Roger Federer. But, it’s Wawrinka, not Federer, who is still alive the men’s draw at the U.S. Open, which will conclude this weekend at Flushing Meadows. Yesterday, Wawrinka beat Andy Murray, the defending U.S. Open and Wimbledon champion, to advance to the semifinal round.
Tattooed on Wawrinka’s left forearm is a quotation from Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.”
“It’s my vision of my job and my life in general,” Wawrinka said. “In tennis, if you are not Roger or Rafa or Djokovic or Andy now, you always lose. But you need to take the positive of the loss and you need to go back to work. It’s that simple.”
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September 5, 2013
Total Immersion Live Hangout (September 5th, 7 pm EST)
Total Immersion Founder and Head of Coaching development discuss what equipment to use, and not to use in swim training.
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Triathlon Research – Total Immersion Live Hangout (5 September, 7 pm EST)
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Total Immersion Founder and Head of Coaching development discuss what equipment to use, and not to use in swim training.
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