Recently in Swimming Category

In the last few months, I've been really into Total Immersion and their teaching method. Swimming is one of those activities which require mastery of so many little details that trying to learn swimming all at once is very very difficult. So they do a great job of breaking down technique with drills, and enforcing focus on only one thing at a time so that you can master that without getting confused by other things you're trying to learn. Thus, I've spent the last many months, and plan on for the better part of this year, in breaking down exactly what is wrong with my stroke and working on each individual part one at a time.

This has led me to believe that its teaching concepts in the area of form training can be applied to any other physical activity, especially in the case of cycling and running for me. In thinking about this, I thought I could encapsulate it in the 4 S's of form training:

1. SYSTEM: You must have a system for identifying problems, removing bad habits and imprinting new and correct habits. With TI, they've done all that for you. Running has some great methods now (ie. ChiRunning, Pose Method) that strive to break down running so that you can focus on parts of your form. I have not found that to be true yet of cycling and would love to be pointed to some that discuss cycling form.

Without a system, you will inevitably try to do too much at once and see little or no improvement as old habits remain ingrained, and you can't imprint new correct ones. It also means that you are hampering your brain/body's ability to imprint new habits; someone once told me that you have to do something about 45 days or so to imprint a new habit. This means that you have to perform the new habit in the new way that many times exactly!

2. SENSITIVITY: You need to develop and have a sensitivity to what you're doing wrong and also what you're doing right. When habits become ingrained, they become commonplace and we don't even notice when we're doing something. This is both good and bad. Correct habits ingrained means we're unconsciously performing optimally and not exerting excess energy and brain power to maintain activity. But if we've ingrained a bad habit, we may actually not know we're doing something wrong because we've been doing it that way for so long. So we need to develop the body awareness to know how are bodies are moving both when we're moving slow and especially when we're moving fast. Slow is much easier, but when we're cycling our arms and legs fast this may become too much to easily discern how and where are body parts are moving. Once we can know when we're doing something wrong, then we can take steps to fix that.

3. SUSTAINABILITY: Once we ingrain new habits, we must be able to sustain them over the course of training and during the long hours of a race. Thus, we must be constantly wary of falling into old bad habits especially when we get tired and/or we lose our mental focus. Training only good habits and extending them over time will ingrain good form that is sustainable over a long time, ensuring an efficient race (and probably also injury free).

4. SYMMETRY: One thing that gets sometimes overlooked is the importance of symmetry of habits on each side of your body. We humans are built with two halves, both mirror images of each other. But unfortunately, we often perform the same activity differently on each side of our body due to old habits, favoring our strong side, muscle inbalances, etc. So while our form may be great on one side, we may find that the other side is challenged. Therefore, training to make sure that we even out both sides to equal form is important or else bad form on one side can actually affect performance on the other side.

Going back to the first S which is SYSTEM, it may be hard to find a system for your activity. TI does a great job for swimming and there are some running ones, but for cycling it may be hard. But finding a great SYSTEM will enable SUSTAINABILITY and SYMMETRY more, and help you train your brain to be more SENSITIVE.

Surfing through the Total Immersion forums, I responded to someone wondering how to use the tempo trainer. I thought it would be worthwhile to re-post that here:

I have found that the tempo trainer is one of the best ways to introduce measurability and repeatability into swimming. It's much more detailed than just remembering how fast you can swim laps; you also gain knowledge into efficiency when you couple tempo and counting strokes per laps. Remember that you can always swim faster by just cycling your arms faster, but you want to know across workouts that you are consistently putting out a certain effort, combined with efficiency, and still keeping to a speed, or going faster/slower. It is not as good to know that you swam the same interval at given speed over two workout days, but one day you worked your butt off because your form was off but the other day you were more rested/better form and you actually had less effort.

I use the tempo trainer both for improving stroke technique and efficiency and then for endurance training.

For improving stroke technique/efficiency, I first setup baseline counts for 25y lengths from 2.6 seconds tempo all the way down to 0.8 seconds tempo. Around 1.2-1.3 seconds is considered cruising, and .8-.9 you're pretty much sprinting. In/around 2.4-2.6 seconds is almost unbearably slow. Over a period of workout days I would swim 4x25 (or 2x25) at each time and then record that down. Sometimes I would start at 2.6 and work my way down .1 seconds at a time, sometimes I would start in the middle, ie. 1.6 seconds and go to 1.2, sometimes I would start at 1.4 and go all the way down to 0.8. Sometimes I would go directly to 0.8. I usually stop when I feel I am getting too tired and losing concentration and focus.

BTW, writing it down sure beats trying to remember. Bringing paper and pen doesn't work because they fail when wet. I use a cheap plastic acrylic picture frame and a grease pencil which is better, although it can fail when there is condensation on the acrylic, but it's still much better than pen and paper.

Once you establish baselines, then you can see if you can figure out ways of beating those stroke counts. Mostly this is about firming up your technique more than anything else. Also, you will notice that at certain points you'll jump 1-2 strokes per length. These are critical points at which something is happening; maybe your technique is deteriorating, maybe you're getting tired.

BTW, if you get tired, it may be a good time to just get out of the pool because you don't want to imprint bad habits!

At some point you'll find that it's almost impossible to beat your stroke count at given tempo time. This is now your max and now you can use this to practice against from time to time to know if you're technique is suffering for some reason. However, I also think it is an interesting exercise to take some time to see if you can actually beat and maintain a lower stroke count for a given tempo time, so play with this.

For endurance, it's been about figuring how to maintain a tempo in the face of declining resources, and maintaining form at those tempos over a longer period of time and distance. So I use tempo trainer on more continuous sets, starting with 50, 100, and then longer, usually by adding 50m every week, or sometimes varying it up with more short 50m lengths, or sets of 200s, or one big 500 or 1000m set. But definitely start low distance in lengths and give yourself some rest, even upwards to 30 seconds rest. The object is to slowly increase lengths, and reps, and lower rest between reps (ie. 20 sec, down to 10 or 5 seconds rest) gradually such that you do not ruin your ability to maintain optimal swimming form by getting too tired. If you find that at a certain interval distance that you are having trouble keeping up or your form is getting messy, I would back off and practice that workout a few more times before increasing the difficulty.

Over time, you will get better and be able to go longer, with your tempo trainer keeping time along the way as a relentless timemaster.

The other thing to do is to practice different tempos with this protocol. Then you will have different speeds to engage, such as sprinting to get in front of a pack and then cutting back to cruise mode and being able to switch cleanly from all that.

A word about training on the slow end. I have found that, while almost unbearable, it has also been extremely valuable as a way to reinforce holding perfect form and practicing balance in the water. I find this translates to helping my form with faster tempos.

Hope this helps...Coach Shinji is going to run me through a "strategic use of tempo trainer" talk soon. I hope to learn more from him on how he is using the tempo trainer to help improve swimming.

In recent months, I've come to realize how much I love the tempo trainer for swimming. It also sparked the realization that I have finally found a method for to ensure measurability and repeatability for swimming.

What's so important about measurability and repeatability?

Repeatability is the ability to come back day after day and train with a certain level of effort, intensity, etc. and ensure that you're creating the same conditions as you had the last time you trained. Measurability allows you to measure those conditions to ensure repeatability.

For example, weight training has both easy measurability and repeatability. That 30 lbs. dumbbell is still going to weigh 30 lbs. the next time you pick it up. Thus, you'll know if you are getting stronger or weaker, depending on how many reps you can curl that dumbbell.

The problem with us triathletes is that it's not so easy to have measurability and repeatability with our three sports. Of the three running is probably the most measurable and repeatable. With cycling and swimming it's not so easy.

If you don't have an accurate way to measure effort and the ability to create conditions to ensure repeatability, you won't know for sure if you're improving over time. For example, you may have increasing effort, but you may be actually performing worse if you're overtraining.

So it's important to be able to measure your training conditions and to recreate them so that you know with some level of certainty that you're improving, or how your body is performing so that you know when to back off or increase effort.

I thought I'd list my favorite training tools to maximize measurability and repeatability:

RUNNING:

Treadmill - The treadmill allows you to recreate running conditions with great accuracy, in both speed, duration, and grade. Its relentless nature doesn't allow you to fall behind; if you do, you either fly off the back of the treadmill or have to keep up. Thus, I can generally know if I'm either improving over time or not, or if I'm just a bit tired and can't repeat a workout on a particular day.

Track or measured distance running - Running a measured distance and recording the time allows you to know if you're improving over that distance and path.

CYCLING:

Power meter - Riding outside with my Powertap allows me to see what my instantaneous power is, as well as for the entire ride. I can compare that over a given path, or even just against other rides, and see how my power output compares to previous rides. With power measurement, I don't necessarily need to ride the same path; I can compare power outputs and see if I was able to increase overall power output or not.

Computrainer - The Computrainer is the best way to repeat workout conditions. After the calibration step, it will give you the same workout conditions as you had last time.

SWIMMING:

Tempo Trainer + Counting Strokes - You would think that swimming intervals was good enough for repeatability. However, swimming is a complex activity that is dependent not only on raw endurance and strength, but also on your technique. If your goal is not simply to just work harder (which I would argue it shouldn't be because you can only go so much faster by more effort and you can do much better by refining and reinforcing technique), then you need to not only measure your interval time but also how well you swam the interval. If you think about it, you can go faster by increasing your stroke rate. But if your technique gets messy, you might swim an interval at the same time as if you had swam it before with better technique but lower stroke rate. Thus, the tempo trainer ensures you are not changing your stroke rate, and counting strokes gives you a measure of how good your technique is.

With these training tools and methods, I can ensure measurability and repeatability of training conditions, giving me a nice picture of how I'm improving (or not!).

This morning I got up early before my usual swim time and read some blogs while eating a bit before leaving for the pool. I came across this post on the Total Immersion forums, shinji asked how i cut strokes to 7, which caught my eye for two reasons: one, my coach was referenced, and two, this guy was going to talk about how he attained 7 strokes!

I quickly skimmed through it and set it to memory, and then went out to the pool today to try to apply some what he had done and see if I could get my minimal stroke count for 25 yards down to 7 (previous best was 9).

On the first try, I hit 8! It took two more 8s before I actually glided in for 7! Unbelievable! I then managed to do a few more glide-ins to 7 and 2 actual solid 7s. I stopped when I started drifting to 8 and knew that I was getting tired.

Some notes on how I achieved the 7 strokes:

1. Everything that don h said worked great!

2. There definitely was a lot of gliding. I found that I must be able to hold my body position without a single wiggle and be perfectly balanced between strokes in order to glide as far as possible on each stroke.

By the way, gliding is harder than it looks. You have to be perfectly balanced *and* also in body position for the next stroke with your arms. You also have to be relaxed and not tense, and not anticipate the next stroke but just wait patiently for the right moment and let it happen. Total Immersion drills really helped here.

3. Forget breathing. I haven't perfected breathing without some slowdown, so I elected to hyperventilate and recover fully before each length, so that I could swim the entire 25y without taking a breath.

4. The push off the wall was with a traditional streamline, with both hands pointed into a spear in front of my head with one hand on top of the other. This allowed me to travel further before slowing down.

5. As Don mentioned, I too played with the first stroke, which was my right hand. I attempted to make that stroke also propel more further before my official first stroke (remember that my coach told me that the first stroke is counted *after* this initial stroke pulling the arm back from the first streamline). This was difficult, and very much brought me back to skating drills; I had to stroke back strongly and then get into skating position without losing balance. Once I get the knack of that, I could go 11 yards or so before taking my first stroke.

6. One interesting note. I tried to glide with my arm up in cocked position, ready for the next stroke as Don suggests, but I found that where my previous head position was, this would actually drive my head forward and deeper into the water, sometimes actually even sinking me down! This was not good, as it did not allow me to use gravity to drop my cocked arm down into the water and forward into the next stroke. In fact, being partially submerged made it harder to even perform that movement with that cocked arm. So I had to actually lift my head up slightly, which counterbalanced my dropping hips with the cocked arm's weight and I was riding much better and higher on the water that way.

7. I practiced minimizing my leg movement between strokes. I relaxed and tried to keep the insides of my feet lightly touching. This minimized drag.

8. One thing I tried actually not to do was to glide too much with my recovery arm in stationary cocked position. I was feeling like this may relate to some of the comments my friends and I have regarding efficiency training as "cheating" because you glide so much and this doesn't happen in real swimming. While I have come to feel that super slow swimming for efficiency training is not cheating, I felt that it was better to just pretend that I was super duper slow motion swimming where my recovery arm never really stops moving. In this way, I could just imprint the movement, however slow, and in theory speed it up and hopefully keep form.

Super slow swim training really works, in my opinion. I can really examine everything my body does in slow motion, and I know when something is wrong when all of a sudden I need an extra stroke to the touch the wall. Or, sometimes I need to glide just a little longer on that last stroke to hit the wall. Then I replay my length in my head and try to remember where I didn't do so well and try to not to that again on the next length.

Yesterday, the day after my longer swim with LAMVAC's annual 10K swim, I was feeling a bit tired. Still I went to the pool to limber up and try to lower my SPL again on a 25y pool. Based on my previous attempt and hitting 10 SPL, I decided to try to figure out what my tempo was at that SPL so that I could use my tempo trainer to help me figure out how to maintain that SPL and increase tempo.

By the way, I have figured out that the tempo trainer, in concert with counting strokes for a given length, is an excellent way to determine if you are working out at a level that is consistent with past workouts. On my bike I know I can do this with my Computrainer and training by watts; on running, I have the relentless treadmill to repeat training conditions, and also measured distances and times on either the track or known running paths. For a long time, I didn't have a good way of doing that with swimming. I only had swim times per length or lap, but I don't think that is good because I may be swimming with more or less efficiency across workout days but yet still hit the same time for a length or lap. Now, with the tempo trainer and counting strokes, I have a more precise measure as to how I'm swimming, how much effort I am putting into that interval, and even know when I should get out of the pool because I'm tiring.

My reason, thus, for determining my tempo at my 10 SPL is to figure out how to maintain SPL while increasing tempo, which should mean that I am maintaining efficiency while increasing my speed.

I had a pleasant surprise though; I hit 9 SPL! Here are my results:

Tempo 2.6 seconds:
11, 9 strokes
10, 9
9, 9

Tempo 2.5 seconds:
10, 9 strokes
10, 9
9, 9

Tempo 2.4 seconds:
10, 9 strokes
9, 9
9, 9

Tempo 2.3 seconds:
10, 10 strokes
10, 10
10, 10

I began at 2.6 seconds on my tempo trainer, which is almost unbearably slow. I knew my 10 SPL was also at a very slow tempo, so I just started here. Then I increased it by .1 seconds, doing 6x25 at each tempo. I flipped flop for a while between 9 and 10 SPL and eventually could not maintain 9 SPL at 2.3 seconds. This is my critical point at which I need to see if I can pull it down to 9 SPL at some point.

Some notes:

1. I need to relax more and not anticipate the beep of my tempo trainer. This caused me to lose balance as my body began to turn in anticipation of the beep coming but I was conditioned to swim at a faster tempo and I would turn too soon, resulting in an unbalanced position while gliding and creating drag.

2. My body was unstable and I need to learn to maintain my glide position and balance in the water for longer. I got better at this as my session went on. Also, being tired from the previous day's swim session didn't help.

3. For some reason, I had a decently coordinated switch with my left hand driving forward/right hand stroking back, but my right hand driving/left hand stroking was terrible. Bad hip drive with bad arm drop, and even bad beginning body position because of item 1 above. I need to make sure my switch/stroke is perfectly coordinated. Swimming super slow is tough!

4. I need to hang my head more; at times I seemed to lift up and I know my hips are also dropping as a result, creating more drag. This seemed to happen intermittently.

5. Relaxing is key and maintaining perfect balance, slightly on either side as my arm recovers overhead, so that I just glide with minimal water disturbance and drag.

6. Sometimes my feet would start to drift apart, mostly in anticipation of the beep and wanting to do a kick. But the beep wouldn't come and then my kick was cocked for longer than it need be, creating more drag. Need to keep them together for more streamlining.

7. Breathing still slows me down. I need to practice doing this more at slower speeds.

8. Despite the problems, there were times I felt that my stroke and glide between beeps was perfect. I would stroke with a perfect switch and arm drop, and then I would be in perfect gliding position as my arm recovered overhead and timed the next beep perfectly. This is the situation I need to imprint and work on repeating over and over again.

On New Years Day, my Master's group, LAMVAC, hosts a 10K swim each year. I think this was the first time I actually went and swam this annual swim, although I was pretty sure I would not make it to 10K as I haven't swam more than 1600y since Ironman CDA!

I did want to test two things, which was to see what my SPL was for a 50m length, and also practice a bit of longer distance tempo training at various tempos.

Here are my results for trying to minimize SPL for 50m:

38, 36, 37, 33, 35, 35 strokes

That was a vast improvement for my usual 50 strokes to hit the other wall of a 50m length!

After that, I did some tempo training by doing 100m laps at 1.6 seconds tempo, and then lowering my tempo by .1 seconds for each 100m thereafter until I hit .8 seconds. Definitely finding that I am limited now, because I really haven't been training for distance in the last few months but only on refining technique. As it gets warmer, I will begin to add a longer distance swim each week just to practice long distance at various tempos. But I don't want to turn all my workouts into distance training as I don't have any race to train for this coming year, but rather want to focus on cementing and imprinting the right body movements for technique.

This week, for kicks, I decided to take one workout to see if I could lower my SPL for 25y to as low as I can get it.

My best SPL before this was 12 strokes for 25y. I was determined to do better, but also figure out what I needed to do to actually get a low SPL.

On my first 2 tries, I hit 11 SPL. Then I hit 10 SPL and held that for 4 lengths, and then ping ponged between 11 and 10 SPL as I got tired.

Some thoughts on getting to a lower SPL:

1. For this exercise, I had to lower my tempo a great deal. This increased my glide time for each stroke.

2. At higher tempos, I try to ride my speed curve, meaning that I try not to let my speed drop too far as my current stroke ends, before my next stroke picks up the acceleration again. But for this exercise, I let myself get further down the deceleration part of the curve after my current stroke ends, and I let myself maximize my glide before my next stroke begins. This minimizes my stroke count and maximizes the distance I glide for each stroke.

3. I found that I for each stroke, I had to really stroke back with great force, as well as shooting the lead hand forward at the same time. This is to maximize the distance I cover with each stroke. However, I tried to do so with proper form, not throwing water with my rear hand backward, really engaging the core in my stroke for more energy, and using my kick to give my rotating hip extra energy.

4. My bodyline needed to be perfect. It needed to be straight and extremely streamlined, so that on each glide I would minimize deceleration due to body drag.

5. My body also needed to be stable, and not be rocking back and forth during a stroke and glide. Any kind of extra movement creates drag.

6. I need to be as relaxed as possible and just let my body glide in between strokes. A tense body creates all sorts of disruptions leading to more drag in the water. Besides, it also wastes energy.

In some ways, I felt like I was cheating; I would just stroke once and then ride the glide for as long as possible. In thinking more about this, I think this is a beginning to a set of exercises to increase efficiency in the water. I had to go through this first to figure out what it would take to get to 10 SPL. What did I need to do to my body? My stroke? How much force do I need to generate with each stroke?

Obviously to maintain my SPL at a higher tempo, I would have to be moving faster and farther with each stroke or else my increased tempo would add a stroke before I would cover the same amount of distance per stroke, at a lower tempo. This means I have to do all those items I noted above, but just at a higher rate and with more forward acceleration and momentum.

My next task is to slowly increase my tempo and seeing if I can still maintain my 10 SPL, and then find my breakpoint tempo-wise where I cannot maintain 10 SPL no matter what I do. This is a critical point at which I'll have to practice a lot.

Monday I swam, thinking a lot about what Coach Shinji and I worked on Saturday.

I warmed up and then instead of only practicing Strokes Per Length (SPL) I did SPL with the tempo trainer.

As one workout, I will practice SPL without caring about tempo. I just keep trying to maintain the lowest SPL for as many 25y lengths as possible, until I start to tire. This time I decided to do something slightly different. I wanted to see if I could maintain the same SPL but at a higher tempo. In doing so, I could practice efficiency but at higher speeds. I can start practicing what it takes to be efficient at higher tempos, and what I need to do in my stroke and body position to make it so.

I started at 2.0 seconds on my tempo trainer and did the first 25y length at 13 strokes then got to 12 strokes on the next three 25y lengths. I then went to 1.9 seconds and maintained 12 SPL for four 25y lengths. I then dropped to 1.8 seconds and so on, swimming four 25y at 12 SPL at every tempo setting. I finally found my limit at 1.5 seconds where I was feeling like I was gliding a little bit longer at my 12th stroke to the wall. At 1.4 seconds I lost 12 and did 13. I tried for the next three lengths to hit 12 and think on the last one I could have finally glided to the wall on 12, but took the extra stroke anyways.

It was very interesting to note exactly what I had to do to maintain 12 SPL especially at faster tempos. At 1.5 seconds, I really had to shoot the forward arm fast while stroking back with the other arm with more speed/force. But I also had to do this by being more relaxed and not tense, and also making sure my body streamline was more precise. Just more stroking force and forward arm speed was not enough. At 1.4 seconds tempo, it took me 3 lengths to get the right technique to barely make the 12, even as I took the 13th stroke to firm up hitting the wall.

I was also getting tired too so that didn't help. In addition, as my tempo rose, it seemed my breathing technique got messier and I was not gliding as much when I took a breath.

I sent this to my coach for feedback and he told me that this is a good thing, which is to be able to control my speed at the same stroke count. He estimated my time to hit the wall on a 25y length at 2.0 seconds tempo to be about 30 seconds (12 SPL x 2.0 seconds tempo + 2.0 seconds tempo x 3 additional strokes my coach adds for the push off the wall and glide = 30 seconds). Using the same formula, at 1.5 seconds tempo it took me about 22.5 seconds. So between 30 seconds to 22.5 seconds I could control my speed and still maintain my SPL.

He also told me that my body position must be more precise as I increase my tempo, and that being tense will make me slower. He mentioned that as I practice the various tempos, I can eventually determine what part of my body I should loosen and tighten up to maintain SPL.

He then told me to practice the same process with 13 strokes, but now at a faster tempo range like 1.6 to 1.3 seconds. Then I repeat until I get to 15-16 SPL at a super fast 0.8 seconds. If I can master this tempo control and maintain efficiency, then I can employ a variety of speeds during races.

Cool stuff. I think over the next few weeks I will work a bit on seeing if I can maintain 12 SPL at higher tempos for some of my workout sessions. I will also try to figure out what it is my body needs to do to be more efficient at higher tempos. It will be critical in figuring out how to get faster in the water and not just be exponentially increasing my effort needlessly to get a tiny increase of speed.

Total Immersion has this drill called the Superman Glide. You basically push off the bottom of the pool (not the side; that's cheating!) and launch yourself forward into the "Superman" flying position.

The object is to practice good streamlining, relaxation and no tension. If you do it right, you will zip farther in the pool before you stop than if you have poor streamlining or have an extremely tightness in your body.

My Coach Shinji can glide 18y on a single push off. It's pretty freakin' amazing:

One exercise I did was to see how many Superman Glides it would take to get to the end of a 25y pool. At first, it took me about 4.5. Over the last few months, I experimented with a lot of tweaking of my body positioning and finally made it in 3 glides. Some things I found that worked:

1. Relaxing is much better than stiff or tight. I just exercise enough tension to hold my arms straight out in front of my head, and to extend my legs. But no more than that.

2. However, relaxing totally didn't work either. It meant that my body was a bit too loose and resulted in a less streamlined profile than holding enough tension to extend my body more sleekly.

3. I discovered that narrowing my body profile by extending my arms forward of my head is better than just putting them out there in a "V". my shoulders are actually extended forward with my arms so it reduces the width of my shoulders.

4. I straightened my back, which feels a bit like arching the back to remove the natural curve of the spine. This is also achieved by rotating the hips forward a bit. A flat back seems to make me go further.

5. My legs do not just hang back relaxed. There is too much drag if they are just hanging out straight. Instead, I make a conscious effort to keep them straight back and touch my feet gently together, which puts my legs in my slipstream.

6. On the push off from the bottom of the pool, I plant my feet firmly before pushing off. I also try to push forward, which is tough because the bottom of the pool is slippery. It is better to plant the feet on the non-tile portion of a lane. Tiles are much more slippery than the other non-tile surfaces of the pool bottom.

I push off as straight as possible. Any angle or upset in my direction will either push me into a lane line or cause me to rock, which increases drag.

I try to push off as hard as possible. This is very hard because my feet slip on the bottom, even if they are not on the tiles. A harder push means more forward momentum, but is hard to achieve because your feet don't have a nice surface to grip onto.

7. As I glide and slow, there is a tendency for my legs to drop. I try to flex whatever muscles in my back I can to keep my legs as high as possible, and to extend the time before my legs drop. Letting your legs drop is OK as far as the exercise goes, but it does not let you achieve your maximum length glide.

I only let my legs drop when I come to a complete stop.

8. By the way, you should be rested and not out of breath from warming up, or doing laps before. Gliding a long time also means holding your breath a long time until your forward motion stops so you don't want to stop the glide early just because you're running out of air!

9. I am very sensitive to the water flowing around every inch of my body. As I develop my position, I try to sense where is water causing drag on my body and where it is not. If there is drag, I try to change something on the next glide to see if I can remove the drag. This is also helpful during regular swimming, which is to see if anything on your body is slowing you down.

One of these days, I hope to achieve an 18y ultimate Superman Glide!

Another great session with Coach Shinji this last Saturday. It was a rainy, cold day but us swimmers don't care; we're wet anyways. It's not so nice for coaches who have to stand in the rain though.

Everytime I work with him, I always get a few more tidbits of insight from him. Some notes:

1. Practice varying the entry point from very wide to very narrow. Find the place which is most comfortable and also generates the most speed. Open water swimming tends to have a wider entry point than in the pool. Narrow entry points allow for longer hand motion under the water as the hand shoots forward, generating more momentum.

2. Wetsuits don't allow as much roll so you have to learn how to generate motion on a wider track.

3. Push down on the instep when snapping the kick.

4. If I increase tempo too fast, then I could spin, which is when my arms are just cycling but I stop after each stroke and there is no glide. I must learn how to increase the tempo but do not spin.

5. If my SPL jumps at a certain tempo then this is the point at which something is wrong or something has changed.

6. At each tempo, I should count stroke and look at how it changes as tempo changes.

During this session, Shinji and I started at 1.2 seconds tempo, and did 25y lengths counting strokes, with each length decreasing the tempo by .1 seconds. I did this all the way up to 2.0 seconds tempo, and my SPL ranged from 15 in the beginning to 12 at the end. Then I increased the tempo by .1 seconds for each 25y length, all the way down to 1.2 seconds. I discovered that at around 1.3 seconds, my SPL jumped to 15 and realized that at this point, I needed to concentrate on what had changed, and how to maintain SPL.

7. Slower tempo requires more relaxation and good balance. There is more gliding, so you need to glide with balance and not rock.

8. Eventually I need to get to .8-.9 seconds tempo, which is sprinting and used when you're trying to break out of a pack of swimmers during a race.

9. I need to turn the elbow slightly inward which will prepare my hand for the catch. This is also done my turning the thumb in and down. If my elbow is turned the other way, then I will waste a bit of time getting my arm in position for the catch, which can deter me from achieving a higher tempo.

10. When skating, I need to end my hand on top of my thigh, or else my body will more easily over rotate.

11. When I swim, I am throwing water backward with my right hand and not my left. Need to examine this further. I should not be throwing water back.

It's been almost a month since my last lesson with Shinji. My blog was busted until now but finally I can post my notes from my last swim session with him.

This session was focused on improving breathing, and also learning TI's sighting method which was slightly different than what I was doing.

Previously I noticed that my speed would suffer when I took a breath. Every time I would breathe, I would take the breath and turn my head and look back downward in the water and notice that I had come to almost a complete halt. I needed to figure out how to breathe and still be gliding and not at a dead stop due to bad streamlining.

We went through some drills to improve breathing and not slowing down. The drills were very basic, which was to break down the movement and drill each part partially until the whole movement was perfected.

Generally, the head turns with the body and remains in neutral position with respect to the body position until the very last moment as the head is almost breaking the water, at which point the head turns slightly to take what they call a "sneaky breath". The water is still sticking to the mouth at this point, and you have to exhale slightly to clear the water away from the mouth so that a breath can be taken. If you move the head too much, you create drag which slows you down.

Also, I've found that after reading the TI forums, that slowing down occurs when I do not completely shoot the lead arm forward and complete a strong stroke, and that when I breathe, sometimes I forget to complete the stroke sequence correctly.

These drills were:

1. Take 4 strokes with head down, then turn the body and head until you look at the raised arm (after the stroke and arm recovery, but holding it up in the air) but no taking the breath yet.

2. Take 4 strokes with head down, then turn the body and head until you are almost breaking the water, then turn the head slightly and exhale (to clear the sticking water), and take a breath. Then turn the head down and glide, leaving the recovering arm in the air after its stroke.

3. Do 2, but then recovering arm completes the next stroke after breath.

Since I breath on the right side primarily, I start with the left arm leading and do the 4 strokes, at which time the right arm is the last stroke and can breathe on the right.

For sighting, Shinji says to sight when I shoot the right arm forward. It needs to shoot a bit shallower, as I lift the head up to look above the water. Then drop the head down and complete the stroke.

Drills to practice:

1. Take 4 strokes, then when I shoot the right arm forward, look up to sight and glide.

2. Do 1, then take a stroke after looking up.

3. Do 2, but take a breath after a stroke to get the rhythm of sighting regularly and breathing.

4. If 1-3 too hard, try stroking a few and then shoot the right arm forward and left head to sight, and scull the arms to practice gliding a bit while looking.

I practiced this extensively in the oceans of Hawaii a few weeks back. It works pretty well but the timing is a bit funny for me in the beginning, but I think I got the hang of it.

Other notes:

1. To improve breathing, practice active balance drills. Practice glide and while kicking, rotate the body and practice the ease of doing so.

2. I was still kicking with a lot of splash, so practice silent kicking. Quick, smooth, minimal splash.

3. Same with stroking. No bubbles, enter the arm smoothly into the water, no splash. Focus on quiet entry and shoot forward.

4. On left arm forward skating, I tend to tilt my head to the left. I must keep it straight.

5. Overhead arm recovery is not choppy, but smooth.

6. Another arm recovery drill, while underwater, is to lift the arm circularly up from the bottom.

7. We talked about improvements to practicing rhythm and SPL control. I have not done this yet, but one practice to try is to continually swim lengths at a SPL, and then figure out how to increase or decrease from there. So if the base SPL is at the "0", then do this:

0 - at the base SPL, it should be an easy pace
-1
-2 - focus on power, more speed
-1
0
+1
+2 - less power per stroke, focus on rhythm

Repeat this. Don't worry about the tempo.

Today, I have another lesson with Shinji on extending TI swimming for speed and time. TI has been running seminars for Advanced Total Immersion which is to drill with TI techniques for speed and distance. I'm hoping Shinji can help me to extend my TI skills to swim longer and faster. I also signed up for an Advanced TI seminar in January. Looking forward to taking that!

On Thursday, I practiced swimming efficiency and tried to maintain as low a stroke count as possible for as many 25 yard lengths as possible. Amazingly, I was hitting 13 strokes for the majority of the lengths, one 12 stroke length, and one 14 when I was getting tired.

Some notes:

1. Must be as relaxed as possible. But I can't be so relaxed that when I initiate a roll to one side, I start rotating too far and become unstable. So I must rotate and then maintain stable position after I finish the rotation.

2. The stroking arm must move forward as fast as possible after hitting the end of the stroke. It must get to the cocked position fast, with slightly hunched shoulder, which drags my hips up in the water, and stops it from dropping too much and slowing me down.

3. The cocked arm must shoot forward fast into the water, which helps me go faster forward. This is in combination with the stroking arm pulling back with the hip roll.

4. The two beat kick really helps. I do a quick, hard snap on the foot that is on the same side as the stroking arm. This helps my hip roll snap over to the other side with great force, which lends force to the pulling arm.

5. Breathing is still an issue. Taking breaths slows me down and adds at least one stroke to the 25 yard length. In order to make 13 strokes, I usually only breathe once down the length. I need to practice breathing more, and when my coach gets back from Japan we will go through this.

Practice, practice, practice...in combination with tempo training, Total Immersion is working great!

My TI coach will be out of the country this next month, so I signed up for my next class for today so that I could practice some more things while he is gone.

Following my amazing feat of hitting 13 strokes for 25yards, I was actually able to hit 12.5 today! Well, the .5 was due to a Michael Phelps-ian half stroke near the wall before touching it; I was not sure if I could glide to the wall or not on my 12th stroke. Oh well - I'm still amazed that 12 strokes is within my reach now. Given that I started at 21, getting to 12ish shows me that I am not a failure at swimming, and that I just needed the right type of instruction to get there.

Some notes from today:

1. Last week's lesson, my coach told me not to throw water back on the tail end of each stroke. It takes a lot of energy and is not really needed. It was not until today's lesson that I felt that this was really true. Corrections in my form and using the two beat kick to generate power virtually eliminated the need for throwing water back and I could glide so much further on each stroke without such a tiring move.

2. Today it took me about 3.25 superman glides to get to the other side of the pool. Now 3 is my goal! See next entry on why.

3. I need to flatten my back more, which will make my body more smooth in the water. To do this, I rotate my hips slightly forward, which removes the arch in my back and flattens it out. Doing this on the superman glide made me glide forward a lot longer than with the natural arch that is in my back. I must research this more and also employ it in my regular swimming. This means a slight tightening in the stomach muscles to keep the hips rotated just enough forward while swimming.

4. On the zipper switch and over switch, I should think about the one shoulder shrug when bringing my arm up for the stroke. This movement is also tied to extending my shoulder blade forward. And while doing this, it drags my whole side, and thus my butt higher in the water! Cool no more butt dragging!

5. OK now that I am working on an overhead arm recovery with the zipper switch and overswitch drills, I should practice the overswitch by gradually dragging my wrist, my hand, and then my fingers through the water on the path to a recovery with my hand completely out of the water. All this with 90 degrees at the elbow.

6. With overswitch, I now have to pretend there is a target in which my hand will spear back into the water. My coach tells me that if I enter the water closer to my head, this is generally better for trying to decrease my stroke count. But for more speed, the target shoud be further out. He encourages me to play with different entry points to see their effects. But generally the target is about at the same level out as the other arm's elbow.

He also notes that advanced swimmers going fast will have an entry point further out and the catch happens almost immediately as the hand enters the water, and the catch is strongly engaged by the bending of the forearm and hand at the elbow very far forward of the head. Thus, the pull back is very strong and is very long as it travels through more water.

7. As the hand spears through the target, it should stop going down but instead bend more forward and shoot to the front, with the hip drive and two beat kick helping to make the move strong. This helps with propulsive force going forward.

8. For drilling, I should pause in the overswitch, and then do a small exaggerated hop into the target. This is to get my feel for entering and hitting the target correctly. I should also practice this with the tempo trainer with what is called half tempo training, where the first beep is the pause at the top, and then the second beep is when I spear into the water and extend forward.

9. Using the tempo trainer, my coach suggests:

Half tempo training:

Start at 1.15 seconds, and then try to lower by .2 to .70 seconds

First beep, elbow up. Second beep, spear.

Full stroke overswitch training:

Start at 1.6 seconds, lower by .2
Arm must get into position before beep!

Underswitch training:

2.4 seconds

Zipper switch training:

1.8 seconds

Tempo trainer workout:

Recommend 1.2 seconds and try to swim 30/60 min at the same tempo.

Notes: He notes that you *will* get tired. So you need to figure out what is causing a particular slowdown of tempo. It could be stroke length, it could be the kick snap is too big or too small. The idea is to move the arms at the same tempo and train that.

He also recommends separating tempo trainer days and reduce stroke count days, so for example, swim either 500 tempo trainer or maintain stroke count.

10. For stroke count training, he recommended trying this workout:

Swim a few 25y sets and find baseline stroke count. Then swim a few lengths of 25y and try to change the stroke count: 0, -1, -2, -1, 0, etc.

11. In watching my video during one drill, I had a severe up and down motion during a stroke. My coach tells me this is because my stroke is not straight back but slightly down also. This is bad! So I should concentrate on pull straight back as much as possible.

12. My first breathing lesson: the idea is that I take a quick breath and then I watch the hand come down into the water, spearing through the target. This will take some practice for sure.

Lots to practice this next month, and looking forward to my next lesson which is more about breathing while swimming.

On Friday, I learned how to do the two beat kick. Previously, I had no idea what two beat was, nor four or six or two beat crossover kick was. I still don't. I've read the literature and they try to describe in words a physical action and I still can't get it. Someday I might, but not today.

In any case, my TI coach went over the two beat kick with me. It was a tough coordination exercise as I'm supposed to kick the foot that is on the same side as my stroking arm. I discovered that I was right foot dominant, and tended to kick that foot on either side. My coach then ran me through some exercises to focus on kicking the correct leg on a particular side.

Today, I went to the pool after that session and was determined to get the coordination of the two beat kick down. I ran through some of the isolation exercises for a while and thought I got it. So then I went to swim some normal laps, trying to maintain the correct form of the two beat kick. I would actually cock the leg a bit more than normal just to emphasize which foot was kicking, and attempt to keep my other leg relaxed and extended straight back.

On my first swimming length of 25y, I counted my strokes and made it down in 14 strokes! WHOA. This is a significant result. In my first swim lesson, my coach took a look at me, my swim style, my body shape and height, and figured that 14 would be a great goal for me. In weeks previous, I've been working hard at decreasing my stroke count, and seemed to hit a wall at 16. Most of the time, I was at 17 strokes to touch the far wall, and I felt like I was cheating a bit since I would just stroke less to let myself glide more. But today, while stroking normally and using the two beat kick, I made it down in 14 on the first try.

Well, I didn't believe it. I thought I counted wrong. If you swim a lot, you know what I mean. Your brain wanders, you get confused as to which stroke was which number. It's easy to lose count.

So I pushed off the wall and swam another length. This time it was 13 strokes! Now I'm starting to believe it. I swam another 2 or 3 lengths at 14, and then I got tired and/or messy in the technique and dropped to 15 which I swam for several more lengths.

As far as I can tell, the two beat kick does a few things for me. As I kick, the leg helps my hip rotate to the other side. Apparently, as the hip gets an extra oomph to rotate, that helps to drive the lead arm forward, and lend more energy to the stroking arm which is pulling back via connection to the hip. In other literature, I've read that kicking correctly also stabilizes the body more during a stroke. I didn't feel this particularly as it seemed like the hip rotation was throwing me off kilter, but perhaps not as I was propelled forward more with each stroke than before using the two beat kick.

I'm looking forward to drilling the two beat kick more and seeing if I can more consistently maintain 14-15 strokes per 25y, or perhaps even less (12 anyone?).

Yesterday I had my second lesson with Coach Shinji. Once again it was full of insight and watching the video of me swimming afterwards was again painful (haha!). But Coach Shinji is great at breaking down the details of swimming and explaining it well, and also has taught enough people to know that there isn't one way of swimming that fits everyone. He is able to articulate things to try to improve someone's stroke as an individual, versus trying to shoehorn the "one way of swimming" into everyone.

Some things I learned from yesterday:

1. I need to be completely relaxed in the water. That means holding my body straight without tension but being relaxed. I tend to stiffen my neck too much in particular.

2. He advocates a flatter back. In watching my videos, I seems to arch a bit. I need to figure out how to rotate my hips forward just a tad to reduce the arch in my back.

3. I discovered my head position was too tipped forward, meaning my chin was too close to my chest. He told me that they tell their students to look directly down at the bottom of the pool because too many look forward. However, then he told me that actually you should be looking very slightly forward once you get more advanced.

For me, when my head was too tipped forward, it proved to be a factor that slowed me down considerably. I think the water was being stopped by the way my head was positioned, and once I tilted my head upward slightly, it presented a better profile for cutting through the water.

4. The under-switch is very interesting as its apparently used for underwater swimming in competition in Japan. There is an interesting video of a group of swimmers who swim the length of a 25 yard pool the whole way underwater using the under-switch stroke.

I also need to widen the pause position slightly, which is when my hand comes up under my body and I pause with it approximately extended to the same level as my other arm's elbow. It is pointed too much towards my centerline.

5. He suggested I change my 6 beat kick (well, my feeble attempt at 6 beat kicking) to kicking my top leg a little bit less in frequency, and my bottom leg with more frequency. It's definitely a bit weird to not be kicking with the same frequency and took me a while to get the hang of it, but somehow the different kicking frequencies allowed me to travel faster while kicking only. I need to research this more.

6. He taught me the two beat kick, which I think I like better because it allows me to maintain an undisturbed streamline better than kicking a lot. It also means less kicking, which conserves energy a lot more than kicking more. The funny thing for me is that the two beat kick means that I need to kick the bottom leg as the lead arm, which is on the bottom, strokes back, or kick the same leg as the stroking arm. I definitely need to practice this more. I seem to kick both legs when I try to kick the left leg. Need to uncoordinate the legs so that only one leg is kicking, and also at the right time. For some reason, I want to kick the top leg when I stroke the bottom arm.

For practice, I am to accentuate the kick on the stroke while attempting to keep the other leg extended, straight, and motionless.

7. I got into the zipper-switch practice today. This is beginning of practice the over-arm recovery. In TI, the elbow is high, but the wrist should be directly down from the elbow. Also, the elbow should always be at 90 degrees. As the elbow comes up, you need to lead with the elbow and not with the hand. This keeps the elbow high and gives you a reserve of potential energy which you use to help drive the arm forward once it enters the water. Also, I learned to actually extend with the shoulder blade versus lifting the elbow; this has the interesting effect of dragging the side of my body forward, which (bonus!) then brings the back half of my body up and helping keep my hips high in the water. Definitely a good thing to help cure me of my hip dragging swim style!

For the drill, I hold my elbow at a position that is about the same as where I pause for the under-switch, and then drive my hand down into the water with the potential energy stored by the high elbow, as well as using the hip turn for giving it even more energy.

8. TI Swimming teaches stroking your arms along tracks, which are the width of your shoulders. One thing that I learned was that the tracks should be positioned when you are flat on the water. However, when you're swimming, your body is angled BUT the tracks remain at the same width as you're flat. Because your body is angled, the result is that where your shoulders are during the angled body position are actually too narrow. This means that as I extend my arm out during a stroke, it needs to drift to the outside slightly to compensate for the fact that I am angled.

If my hands get too narrow during the stroke, this is bad because it slows me down as it tips my body in strange ways, creating more drag.

I'm looking forward to drilling all this over the next few weeks, and then onwards to my next lesson!

I'm a big fan of Total Immersion, an outfit based on the east coast that teaches swimming. You might think that there are many people who teach swimming, from coaches to the YMCA to your high school swim team. But after experiencing some of them, I've found that Total Immersion has done a better job than most breaking down the elements required for swimming and helping to improve each one.

I love this Perpetual Motion Presentation that Terry Laughlin gave at a New England Multisport Expo. What I love:

1. Terry asks the audience whether they are swimming better today than in years past. Most say yes, but he also talks about reaching what one of his students says is "terminal mediocrity", which is no matter how much they swim, they never seem to get better. I feel that over the years I've swam now, this very much applies to my swimming. I am doing some things better, but I have not made significant strides, and sometimes I feel like I'm regressing in my swimming during the season.

2. Terry talks about the fact that with each swim session, his goal is to swim better at the end than when he began the swim session. I think this is crucial and something that I've set as a goal, but not seriously pursued or even attained in the sense that as the season has gone onward this year, I've actually started swimming slower and slower. Obviously I'm not swimming better or else I should be faster right?

3. He talks about things that are counterintuitive in increasing swimming ability, which I agree with more and more. I don't feel like swimming more and more laps, at decreasing interval goals, is doing anything but make more frustrated and tired. Although there is this notion that I need to figure out what it is I need to do in the water to be better, and also trying to apply the minimal clues that a unfortunately distracted Masters coach is trying to tell me, neither is enough information to get me to doing the better thing. Nor am I given the opportunity to practice what I need as an individual during a normal Master's workout because these are set workouts for the group as a whole.

I have found Total Immersion techniques are setup to drill specific parts of the stroke, and to discover which parts need more work and which ones need less. Also, in working with Coach Shinji at TI Swim West, it's been great having one and one sessions where someone can focus on what I am doing, and help me adjust at a micro level what to do better.

4. He talks about the importance of imprinting correct habits, which is something I can only do by drilling by myself over and over. I don't often get the chance to do this during a Master's workout. Thus, I am swimming more and more by myself now so that I can just make sure I am swimming exactly the way I should be swimming each time, and if I can't hold that form, I just get out of the pool because I've either become mental burnt out and/or I'm too tired.

5. I love his explanation style. It's obviously been built up from years of thinking about, studying, and explaining this stuff. Most coaches don't talk about swimming in this way and just ask you to try things from a physical standpoint, but lack the mental explanation part of the training which I like, which is to noodle on things in my brain as much as I try to do something physically.

I have really enjoyed watching this presentation; it really helps fill in the gaps in my thinking about swimming and how to get faster.

I think it's a shame that many coaches talk down on Total Immersion and its teaching theories and techniques. It's sort of like when martial artists say their kung fu is better than someone elses - if you've studied a lot of martial arts, you'll know that every style has its own specialties, and that many of these work better for certain body types and personalities. There are so many factors in winning a combat against another individual that it isn't that one style is better than another, but rather it's you picking the best fighting techniques (which may or may not be style dependent) based on what works for you. So Bruce Lee's philosophies on taking what works for you applies not only to martial arts, but to other types of training like swimming. I'm learning that there is much variability in what makes an individual fast in the water, and what works for one person may not work for another because people are different in body type and shape. I think Total Immersion is great for figuring out what is going to work for you from a technique standpoint.

Today I went to my first lesson with Coach Shinji Takeuchi, who runs Total Swimming West (TI Swim West). I was getting kind of frustrated with my swimming in that I was improving, but I did not have consistent improvement nor did I have a good sense of what I should be improving. Shinji was perfect; a private coach and he videotaped his students for later review!

Also, I watched his cool videos on Youtube. Man, look at this guy swim:

He's so frickin' smooth it's unbelievable. I knew that I had to take lessons from him - I've always wanted to achieve that smooth, glide stroke and didn't really know how to get there.

Back in 2003, I took a TI seminar and thought it was pretty good. But I also felt that being a group seminar that individual attention was not possible so it helped, but I think that I wasn't able to improve further. Now I could get firsthand individualized instruction: perfect!

Coach Shinji started videotaping immediately and he taped me the whole time. Watching my swimming video is always painful; I think I'm not all that graceful in the water! But I did show improvement by the time the 45 minute coaching session was over.

The most interesting points I learned was:

1. When I turn to one side during a stroke, my lead hand needs to spear forward at about 6" under the surface, and then end up about 12" down and also about 4" outward. The outward distance counterbalances my body turning to that side, and the 12" down helps keep my hips up by providing a counterbalance forward.

2. Speed comes from the hip not only in pulling the stroke hand back, but also in driving the spearing hand forward.

3. Relaxation of the whole body enables longer glides.

4. I was arching my back too much and need to rotate my pelvis slightly forward to more flatten my back. This also increased my speed.

5. Kicking too much uses up oxygen. He ran me through some repetitions of drills without taking a breath and I found I could go farther by kicking less intensely. Of course relaxing helped as well.

My target goal is to make it across a 25 yard pool in 14 strokes. Right now I'm about 21. In terms of drills, I should be able to make it across the pool with the Superman glide in 3 or less; I'm at 5 right now and should be able to do better.

Lots of practicing between now and my next lesson. Looking forward to more coaching from him!

I just read this off of the Total Immersion blog and had to comment immediately:

How long can you sustain Fast Swimming?

I found it to be extremely interesting in its discussion on adaptation and about neurological training. He states regarding adaptation:

These days, the coaches of elite swimmers are far more likely to give a moderate training load, let the swimmer adapt to it, then give a slightly more demanding load, adapt to that, etc. Rather than one major peak per season, they're looking to produce a prolonged series of carefully-calibrated smaller advances in capacity and performance.

I've always thought that shocking the system as in the past was only going to wear somebody down and I've adjusted my own training to reflect an approach that is very similar to what he describes. I up my training load, then spend about 3 weeks to cement that adaptation into my system before raising it again.

The other important point is here:

The seldom-acknowledged weakness in this approach is that, while it may work reasonably well for the metabolic systems (aerobic capacity, muscle strength, etc.), neurological capacity was poorly served. A swimmer who is barely surviving workouts, because of prolonged intensity or volume, is far more likely to "practice struggle" in their movements, hurting the neuromuscular imprint needed to swim fast.

Lately, I've really come to realize the importance of neurological training. This is not only practicing and imprinting proper form in swimming, but also in the way my legs move in running, and also getting my nerves to fire faster so that my legs are more comfortable in cycling fast, even when tired.

Driving your system to exhaustion so that you can't even focus on form is just dumb. I've discovered this as well where I would get to a point of tiredness and can't even maintain form while running. The result is that I start stomping more, heel striking, my legs start moving slower and slower: this is all bad not only for racing fast, but increasing the likelihood of injury.

This is why I am mentally extra focused on maintaining form in all 3 sports. It's super important to practice this, especially when you get into tired states because the body just gets lazy as you focus on "keep moving" versus proper form. The worst thing that can happen, as the TI blog entry suggests, is that when you get tired, you start imprinting improper form or you never gain the ability to imprint proper form because you're always tired and you can't.

Love this blog entry and love how it validates some of my own personal discoveries.

In my interactions with my coach M2, I have learned that there are 6 types of training. These are:

1. Neuro-muscular - training of the nervous system to do something either differently, better, or to some form which maximizes efficiency and minimizes effort. Example: super short high speed treadmill intervals for 15-30 seconds per interval, form focus workouts for swimming.

2. Speed - training that results in being faster. Examples: swimming speed sets, sprinting track workouts for running.

3. Strength - training that results in you being stronger, and to put out more energy at the same effort. Examples: hill climbing in running, hill climbing or more watts on the computrainer in cycling.

4. Endurance - training for the ability to race or produce energy output for some length of time. Example: gradually lengthening the duration of a long run over a period of weeks.

4b. Stamina - I make this a sub-section to endurance, which is the ability to maintain a level of speed/strength for a long period of time. Example: gradually increasing the time of your intervals and reducing your rest periods while maintaining the same wattages during Computrainer bike interval workouts.

5. Recovery - stimulation of blood flow by raising heart rate and circulation but not raising effort to flush the body of exercise by-products and promote healing. Example: cycling on a computrainer at negligible watts, but high RPMs for about 20-30min.

It is somewhat obvious that whenever you go out to train, you're most likely training more than one of these areas simultaneously. However, I wanted to point out:

1. You can train to focus on only one of these areas.

2. It's good to have a mix of all 6 areas as you're building for a race. The mix depends on where you are in your training schedule.

3. You have to be aware that potentially you could be detracting other areas if you're not focusing on these areas.

Let's talk about the first point.

Focusing on one thing is possible and many times desirable. Of the 6 training types, I've focused on mostly neuro-muscular, strength, and recovery. It's all based on what you individually need.

For example, over the winter, I did a lot of treadmill training where I'd warmup with track drills, ie. kick backs, skipping, and then started doing 30 min intervals at super high speed, building from 6 MPH to as much as 11 MPH (where the interval drops to 15-20 seconds due to the fact that the treadmill takes too long to accelerate to that speed). By the way, I have not found a gym treadmill that goes faster than 11 MPH, although I have heard that you can actually get treadmills that go that fast. What this achieved for me, is not necessarily the ability to maintain an 11 MPH/5:27 min/mile pace over a race. It does help train my neuromuscular system to fire my muscles quicker so that I get used to running at a higher turnover rate, at paces I can maintain. This results in me being faster simply because my body is accustomed to moving my legs faster.

For strength training, over the last 2 years I started climbing and doing laps on Old La Honda and Kings Mountain. These laps have built up my leg strength considerably and increased their resilience on hill climbs, where I was defeated utterly at Ironman Austria a few years back.

I am also a big user of recovery workouts. I figure out if, for a given workout, I need to back off. If I do need to back off severely, often I'll do a recovery workout. An example of this is a pedaling efficiency workout involving a lot of high RPM one-legged pedaling drills at minimal wattage. It doesn't stress my muscles from a power standpoint, but it raises my heart rate and circulation so that blood is flowing through my muscles and the flushing effect helps my recovery so that the next day I'll be able to perform a normal workout.

Second point: The mix.

Training all in one type means that you're not gaining the full benefits or reaching your potential for a race. If all you're doing is sprinting workouts on the bike, you may not be able to last an entire century. If all you're doing is running at endurance pace every workout, you may find that you aren't increasing your speed, or you don't have enough strength to pass someone when you want to.

You need to mix it up and include all types and improve on them all. You can figure out, as I have, where my deficiencies are, and do some focus on improving some areas. But overall, you need to train all 6 types as you build through your season to the big race.

I tend to focus on neuromuscular workouts during the offseason, as they don't stress my aerobic system and are great for recovery workouts. Then I move from neuromuscular focus as my training season starts to building speed and strength with a lesser endurance emphasis. This is because endurance is easiest to build, but speed and strength take lot more time. As I hit mid-season, I am adding more endurance and stamina into the mix as I try to extend the speed and strength I've built up to longer times.

Third point, watch out for what you're not focusing on and don't let it slide.

As you're focusing on certain aspects of training, you have to watch out that you don't reduce other aspects. An easy example is that as you build endurance, you may find that your form (neuromuscular aspect) gets really messy as you get tired. This is very bad! The trick is to maintain form even when you're butt tired, and as you focus on building endurance. Otherwise, you could injure yourself through poor form, as your muscles are tiring and you engage other weaker muscles to compensate.

Another example is when you're supposed to be doing a recovery workout, but yet you feel energized and so you try to push harder and do something with more energy. But then all of a sudden, half way through the workout, you find that you burn through that initial burst of energy which fails you later because you weren't fully recovered and you don't have enough stamina to continue. Recovery when you have to and don't force yourself to do something your body just isn't OK for.

Yet another example is not gradually increasing your workout intervals to improve stamina. You mentally don't feel like doing fast intervals beyond a certain point, and thus your stamina never improves. You hit race day and you find that as you try to maintain speed, you can't and you're slowing down as you move through the miles.

While training typically involves the simultaneous training of all 6 types of training, I think that there is a lot of benefit to identifying where your personal needs are, and coupled with where you are in your training season, you can focus on specific areas which need improvement and advance them greatly. Categorizing the different types of training really helps in thinking about training and how to race faster.

For those who are curious, the progression I swam to build my one arm swimming strength is below:

4x100 - 25 R, 25 L repeat; 4x50 - 25 R, 25 L; RI :10
2x100 - 50 R, 50 L; 3x100 - 25 R, 25 L repeat; 4x50 - 25 R 25 L; RI :10
3x100 - 50 R, 50 L; 3x100 - 25 R, 25 L repeat; 4x50 - 25 R 25 L; RI :10
4x100 - 50 R, 50 L; 4x100 - 25 R, 25 L repeat; 4x50 - 25 R 25 L; RI :10
2x150 - 75 R, 75 L; 3x100 - 50 R, 50 L; 4x100 - 25 R, 25L repeat; 4x50 - 25 R, 25 L; RI :10
2x150 - 75 R, 75 L build 25s; 3x100 - 50 R, 50 L neg split 50s; 4x100 - 25 R, 25 L; 4x50 - 25 R, 25L; RI :10
2x150 - 75 R, 75 L build 25s; 2x150 - 75 R, 75 L mod; 3x100 - 50 R 50 L mod; 4x50 - 25 R, 25 L; RI :10
3x( 150 build 25s, 150 mod); 3x100 neg split; RI :10
2x200 - 100 R, 100 L; 2x150 - 75 R, 75 L; 2x100 - 50 R, 50 L; RI :10
3x200 - 100 R, 100 L; 3x150 - 75 R, 75 L; 3x100 - 50 R, 50 L; RI :10
2x300 - 150 R, 150 L; 2x100 - 50 R, 50 L; 4x50 - 25 R, 25 L; RI :10
1x400 - 200 R, 200 L; 2x100 - 50 R, 50 L; 2x100 - 25 R, 25 L repeat; 4x50 - 25 R, 25 L; RI :10
10x100 - 50 R, 50 L; RI :10
1x400 - 200 R, 200 L; 1x300 - 150 R, 150 L; 1x200 - 100 R, 100 L, 1x100 - 50 R, 50 L; RI :10

Notes:

1. The net distance on the entire set is about 1000-1200 yards/meters. Total time to finish this workout is probably about 30-45 minutes depending on what I did after the main set.

2. I swim this workout on a 25 yard pool.

3. I started in the offseason and swam this workout 2X/week. It allowed me to focus on one arm swimming strength alone.

4. I would warm up with 400 EZ swimming, then jump into this workout.

5. I did this workout with fins, to give my body an extra push and not let me wallow in the middle of a lane when I got tired.

6. Following this workout, I would either do sprints of 50s, or pull with paddles and do 25 EZ/25 sprint alternating for about 200y. At the later stages, I would sometimes just cool down after the main set because my muscles were too tired. I did not attempt to force my tired muscles to do anything else afterwards, as I considered this a strength only workout and didn't tie in any other elements like endurance. I would focus on that during other workouts in the week.

7. The stress on my muscles was quite high, especially after I crossed the 200y mark of 100 right arm, 100 left arm. At the same time, I started into the base phase of my training too. That's when I started doing this workout once a week, and swimming normal Masters workouts another 2X during the week.

8. When you're one arm swimming, you can really focus your attention on the stroke and pull of each arm. I really put my attention on each and every stroke, and try to make each one the perfect stroke and be able to repeat it through the entire set. What's the perfect stroke for me:

a. Body form - Keeping as straight as a needle. I try not to let my flutter kick ruin my body straightness. I lay on one side and don't let my body sway or rock. I relax and think that I am a log just floating on the water and just paddling the log.

b. Head position - I keep it aligned with my body. I don't lift it up during any part of the stroke (another thing I found out I was doing!) but keep it in one place. I put my cheek against my bicep to maintain form and also close up the gap between my face and arm to prevent a possible place where drag from water can occur. I had to experiment with how deep my head was in order to keep my hips from dropping lower. With my body composition, I believe that my head is actually lower than many instructors might want it. But I also try to keep my forehead slightly up to cut through the water better, versus having the water barrel over my dipped head and create drag.

c. As my stroke enters the water, I try for the most quiet, non-bubble creating entry into the water. I am most successful with my right arm, not so good with my left arm. It has been talked about in other literature that creating bubbles wastes energy, and also is evidence of a messy, energy-using entry into the water. I try for perfect entry every time.

d. The moment it enters the water, I extend fully and almost immediately catch. The catch is when I bend my hand downward to "grab" water. Following next is my forearm bend to catch even more water, but as my forearm sweeps down, I also feel the actually stroke begin to work. I make sure that I bend ONLY at the elbow and keep my upper arm high. I don't let the entire arm drop down deep into the water. This is evidence of getting tired and also will create more drag as the deep water presses against the arm.

e. I keep my elbow high as I pull back the arm, down the length of my body. I try to keep the elbow skating along the surface of the water, or perhaps less than an inch under the surface as I move my arm/hand back against the water.

f. I try to keep the stroke strong through the entire length of the stroke. In the past, I discovered that my stroke would always start strong, but then fizzle out towards the end. So I focus on using my big lat muscles to pull back and not my shoulders, which are small and would get strained. As my hand/arm passes my shoulder and towards my hip, I start thinking about using my tricep to sweep the water back behind me with the final extension of the hand. This is where I had the most problems, where I was losing energy at the end of the stroke and was just letting my hand just drift backward and not using energy to get that extra push at the end.

g. I focus on keeping the hand/arm pressing straight back against the water, and putting 100% of the backward force into exactly forward motion. In the past, my arm was drifting up and down, and even moving backward in a circle when it started getting tired. Your tired arm will start to move around in order to find the place of least resistance to move backward; this is bad! It needs to push against the area of resistance that creates 100% forward motion. I focused on making every stroke put 100% of my energy into going forward EVERY TIME.

h. The only thing missing from this type of workout is the addition of your hip roll into the force of the stroke. I only lay on my side swimming and don't attempt to add my hip roll to give extra oomph. I focus on arm only and do not rock my body at all. I work on adding my hip roll during normal swimming.

9. It's OK to repeat workouts until you master it from a muscle standpoint.

10. I found this workout to be extremely demanding on my swim muscles. I need adequate recovery afterwards, which is at least a day in between until my next swim workout.

Every now and then, my swim coach would make us do what he called the "scooter drill".

You take a pull buoy and hold it one hand in front of you, as you swim with one arm for a set number of strokes. Then you switch hands and swim with the other arm for a number of strokes. It's sort of like getting on a scooter and pushing constantly with one leg to make it go.

It's also an annoying drill because no one is used to swimming with one arm generally.

I hated it. As I swam down the 50m length, I would be OK for a few strokes and then I start getting tired, and get slower and slower, until I'm totally wiped out just reaching the other wall.

I grew determined. I wanted to be able to do this drill, which others seemed to do OK and seem to be so fast going down the length of the pool.

During my off season, I started doing intervals of swimming with each arm for 25m. I would successively increase both the number of intervals and the distance I swam with each arm. I eventually reached swimming a 400m with one armed swimming for 200m each. I would then do other shorter intervals for a total of a 1000m set. I would do this 2-3X a week during the off season, and as I entered into the base phase, I would do this once a week while swimming normal workouts the other 2 times.

As expected, my "scooter drill" improved greatly. I got much faster and fatigued a lot less, as I was working out with one arm a lot longer than the scooter drill intervals. But another more amazing thing happened; my regular swimming got a ton stronger and faster.

One big thing I suffered from was that my stroke would kind of fizzle out at the end of the stroke, near my hip as it exitted the water. In doing one arm swimming, I was now able to keep my stroke strong through its entire length, and for longer durations. I could still be strong swimming for workouts up to 4000m. In addition, I was able to lower my stroke rate and thus not be so out of breath and/or wiped out AND my swim speed increased.

One arm swimming really bummed me out. I rallied, took matters into my own hands, and improved my one arm swimming ability in a focused manner. But then I realized the benefits of this strength increase in both endurance and speed.

Yes....amazing!

If there is one training principle I have come to both love and hate, it's the negative split. It's also one of the most important.

In short, it means that you increase effort and, thus (hopefully) speed, on the second half of your workout or race. Workouts can also be gradual in increasing effort, resulting in descending time so it is some times called descending workouts or intervals (ie. in swimming, you can do a set at descend 1-2-3, which means you descend time over the next three intervals). No matter what you start at one pace, but you end up at increased pace/effort.

Our bodies race like we train. When we go all out during a race, we often put out the most effort and have the highest speed during the first part of the race, when we're fresh. Then when the second half of the race comes, we find ourselves getting more and more tired and often slow down as we hit the finish line.

This is bad! Slowing down as you approach the finish line, often starting from miles out, means:

1. You're getting tired and depleted. Maintaining speed becomes a grinding experience or impossible. Your heart rate starts leaping higher and higher and you have no choice but to slow down or else you'll flame out...or pass out.

2. Your better trained opponents are now passing you. That sucks right? You try to pick it up and you can't!

3. As you get depleted, your muscles get stiffer and stiffer as lactic acid builds up. It just becomes a painful experience as you force your muscles to keep going, and you may be reduced to walking, or weak spinning for cycling, or for swimming your stroke rate just keeps dropping as your arms feel like lead.

4. Mentally, it just makes the race feel like the worst experience ever. You're glad to hit the finish line and you wonder why in the world did you ever subject your body to that kind of torture.

However, training via negative splits or descending intervals means you condition your body to be able to perform while tired and give more energy during the latter half of the race. You learn to pace yourself and not go all out in the beginning, and your body learns to give that extra kick in second half while your energy levels begin to wane.

In every workout I do, I try to always finish with more effort than I begin. I slowly ramp effort and speed throughout a workout and then by the end of the workout, I am sprinting towards the parking lot where my car is. Or I'm on the way home on my bike and after doing laps on Kings Mountain, I'll raise my energy level pedaling and get close to sprinting home on the bike.

It's a tough workout, but over time your body gets used to it. Come race day, you'll be thankful for training this way. During races you're always putting out 100%+ effort and you need to be conditioned to give extra effort even while your energy level is dropping.

What a rush to be accelerating and passing other competitors and feel like a million bucks as you accelerate towards the finish line!

In the last USMS Swimmer magazine, there was an article depicting a swimmer showing perfect streamline, one arm extended, form in the water. She was practicing the extension to pierce the water in as needle-like form as possible, and practicing to maintain this form. One thing they talked about was the fact that her head in the correct position resulted in her cheek being against her shoulder while her arm was extended forward into full extension for the stroke.

I have form that really falls apart when I try to swim faster, and also when I get tired. I really wanted to improve my ability to maintain perfect streamline form while swimming at high stroke rates. To that end, I began swimming like the woman in the article and making sure my arm was fully extended and that my cheek would touch my shoulder briefly before I began my stroke. The other thing I began doing was breathing only once every 4 strokes. This allowed me to hold my head in a stationary position and not be disturbed so much by taking a breath. I could rotate my body back and forth along the line dictated by my head and neck and make sure everything was in line and not swaying back and forth, causing drag.

So I began swimming that way. Certainly taking less breaths was challenging, but I seemed to have gotten used to that by now. If I need to take an extra breath, I'll take another breath after my last one and then go back to once every 4 strokes. But it does help me to relax and try to be very efficient in the water.

The other thing I noticed was that by touching my cheek to my shoulder, it made sure that my arm was fully extended on each stroke. Pulling so much while having my arm extended caused knots to form in my serratus and lats, and my pecs began to get sore as well. I am sure this is my body's way of adjusting to the more extended stroke. It also made me realize how short my strokes really were, and how more efficient they could be.

I dealt with the knots with lots of ART and some reduced swimming until my muscles adapted.

The result: I am more easily maintaining fairly fast (for me) swim times for 50 and 100 meters. I am finding that I can keep a faster speed for a longer period of time, than the way I was swimming before this cheek to shoulder/less breathing method. Keeping my body in a better streamline was also helping me maintain speed and not lose speed between strokes.

A few years back, I got hooked on the notion of shaving my legs for triathlon. I remember hearing about it and the supposed benefits of shaving my legs. Some of these were:

1. Biking - if you get in a crash and you need to put a bandage on, pulling it off is less painful due to having no hair.
2. Biking - aerodynamics is improved by not having all those pesky hairs on your legs to create minor turbulence in the air as the air flows past your legs.
3. Swimming - less resistance through the water with all those hairs on your body creating drag.
4. General - It looks better than having hairy legs, and more consistent with the look of a healthy, motivated triathlete/cyclist.

One morning in 2003, I decided to shave my legs in the shower. It was a messy affair. Fumbling about with shaving cream and a women's razor, I proceeded to take clumps of hairs off my legs and watch them slowly go down the drain (I hoped that my shower drain wouldn't get clogged!!). I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking that it looked very weird to not have hair on my legs any more and that it felt almost...more naked.

The day after, I jumped in the water for a swim and I recall having this funny sensation of "feeling" the water more. I felt faster in the water, and unfortunately had no conclusive proof that I was faster than with hair on my legs. But I did feel better when I swam.

As for cycling, I somehow felt more like a real cyclist, and it's funny that I noticed guys who didn't shave their legs more out there on their bikes and thought they looked very...well...non-cyclist.

Then in the July-August 2007 issue of USMS Swimmer magazine, there was an article called "The Naked Truth About Shaving Down" where they give some scientific basis for why shaving is good for swimming. They claim that it helps swimming by reducing the amount of stimuli that your nervous system is receiving from the environment and that your motor output is improved when you remove that stimuli through shaving. So I guess this means that you control your muscles better through your perception of what is required to be slippery through the water and your ability to feel the water when you stroke. While I was definitely more sensitized to the water environment post-shaving, I cannot verify if my motor output is improved simply through shaving. And because I shave every week, my body has since gotten used to environment with my no-hair-on-my-legs level of sensitivity and I don't perceive any additional sensitivity due to shaving now.

In the sidebar, there is reference to a study that showed that blood lactate accumulation was reduced significantly. If I were to read this small snippet correctly, does this mean that I am being more relaxed and efficient through the water simply because of the positive feelings that one gets while swimming with shaved legs (and/or body)?

Who knows. I try lots of things and don't have conclusive evidence that everything I do improves my performance, such as taking certain supplements or the research that shows that having protein in your sports drink is better than not. Some of it is just insurance. That which does not hurt me might just help me.

A while back I took a Total Immersion Course. I thought it was really good but it only gave me half the solution to swimming fast, which was to maintain a good body position while in the water to ensure minimal slowdown due to drag.

The other half had to do with stroking.

You'd think that by swinging your arms through the water, that all you'd have to do was cycle them faster and then you'd go faster....right?

Well, I found out that there are so many little details with the stroke that make a whole LOT of difference in your speed.

One of them was introduced to me by Marc Evans during a swim session in a endless pool. Basically, you never having one hand pushing against the water. You never stop stroking and just glide like Superman. As one hand almost finishes its stroke and has reduced pressure against the water, the other hand was already be beginning its stroke and continuing the pressure against the water. This is so that this hand has already begun its stroke before the other hand exits the water.

It took me a long time to master this even a little bit. Now, I can keep it up for short periods, but I am doing tempo sets at distance to practice maintaining this constant propulsion stroke for longer periods of time. When I get tired, I can't keep the other hand from starting its stroke fast enough before the other hand loses its propulsion. I start getting back into small periods of time where I am doing a Superman glide and then my other hand begins its stroke. This is undesirable because as I glide, I slow down, whereas if I have at least one hand pressing against the water, I can keep my average speed higher.

I also found that when I do this, I can actually swim a 100m interval faster with less arm cycles and be less stressed aerobically. My arms definitely get tired more, but I am not gasping for breath like when I am just speeding up my arm cycles in an attempt to gain an extra few seconds in speed but with exponential energy expenditure.

I really could see the effect of constant propulsion swimming when the other week I was swimming with a pull buoy and paddles. As I set out on the interval, I noticed as I looked down on the black line on the bottom of the pool that my speed was pulsing as I stroked. I would speed up during a stroke, but as my other hand began to enter the water, my speed would slow until the other arm began its stroke. I realized that I was gliding too much and waiting too long between strokes, and not really creating constant propulsion. So I altered my stroke to begin a lot sooner and all of a sudden, my pulsing speed became less and I was moving with more consistent speed. Very interesting!

So now I practice constant propulsion speed while swimming with pull buoy and paddles to fine tune my timing on the stroke, and take that neuromuscular training to swimming without tools. When swimming with the pull buoy and paddles, I can really see the effect of constant propulsion swimming versus gliding too much due to the amount of water I can catch with the paddles. It's a great way to get visual feedback on whether or not your arms are moving with the right timing to create constant propulsion.

I added this training to my tempo training with constant propulsion stroke, starting with reps of 100m and increasing that both in reps and in distance over time.

These last few weeks swimming I've been thinking about bubbles.

Not bubble bath mind you, but the bubbles I create while swimming.

If you read about bubble formation in swimming books, some of them say that it's the byproduct of wasted energy. Energy that could have gone into propulsion gets wasted in creating turbulence in water whose evidence is bubble formation. There is also much written about quiet or calm swimming, which is the ease and flow of swimming that makes you feel and look like you're gliding through water with little energy.

Lately, I've really tried to employ calm swimming and maintaining the form which minimizes turbulence in the water. It's hard to maintain that form, as I lose concentration as I get tired. As I stroke and look at my stroke under the water, I noticed a big difference between both arms in bubble formation.

This was strange, I thought at first. My right arm would stroke with almost no bubbles at all, but my left with stroke back with a huge frothing of bubbles. As I analyzed further, I realized that I was not symmetrical with respect to my stroke. My right hand enters the water more at my head, and then glides straight forward out. My left hand, however, does a more traditional reach-out and over the water until it is almost extended, and then enters the water far forward of my head. Somehow, this reach-out and over causes huge bubble formation and if the texts are true, then I am wasting energy on bubble formation which could be used for forward propulsion but is making me expend more energy in a non-useful fashion.

So I've been really paying attention to my bubbles and trying to remove them. After figuring out what was different between my left and right arm strokes, I strove to make my left arm like my right arm. On slower stroking, I can make both arms even with minimal bubbles. As my stroke rate increases, it becomes harder and harder. Yet another thing to practice in the next coming months...

Marc Evans once asked me during a private swim session if I could actually do a drill and count how many strokes I do. It was a strange question, but very relevant as the task was very simple, which was to do 3 one arm-left arm strokes, then 3 one arm-right arm strokes, and then stroke both arms together for about 6 strokes (3+3).

I thought it to be a funny question, but then I jumped into the pool and did what he asked, although I did lose concentration a few times and stroked more or less than the instructions.

I asked him why he asked me, and apparently there are beginners who have not either not practiced enough, or even have the ability to focus on a particular drill. He was pleased that I could do it most of the time, but apparently enough people go through his swim session who cannot.

I think about this conversation a lot when I jump in the pool. It's hard to do long distance in a 50 meter pool, and even harder in a 25 meter pool, simply because counting is tough, and doubly tough in a 25m pool.

This last Wednesday, we do our monthly 30 minute swim as a measure of fitness and also for stamina building. Sometimes I absolutely hate it, because I need to count. In order to do that, I have to really have razor sharp focus and I still screw it up. For 30 minutes, you can swim over 15 laps (or 30 lengths) and if you're not used to it, it's really tough to count the laps without phasing out somewhere in the middle and then you wonder, "wait was that lap 9 or lap 10?" Once you get there, you're dead. You'll never get back on count.

Swimming 30 minutes is definitely great mental training. It trains your brain to maintain power and stroke rate for a long period of time, but it also trains your focus for counting.

To make things easier, I switch workouts for 50 meter pools versus 25 meters. If I jump into the YMCA or Spectrum Club pool, I pick a workout with more 25/50/100 meter intervals. The most I'll do is 200 m intervals. Beyond 200, I start wigging out because on a 25 m pool, you have DOUBLE the counting. And that really sucks. To do 250/300/400 m intervals multiple times is way too hard. I also try to do more speed sets, which tend to be shorter anyways but still stresses the muscles in a big way.

Today I pulled out an old issue of USMS Swimmer magazine, issue September-October 2006, which featured the XI Fina World Masters Championships held this year at Stanford University back in early August.

Here are some of the folks who competed and how fast they swam:

Laura Val, 55, 50 Free 29.59, 100 Free 1:02.63
Richard Abrahams, 61, 50 Free 25.23
Christel Schulz, 66, 50 Free 32.73, 100 Free 1:14.76
Graham Johnston, 75, 100 Free 1:10.92, 200 Free 2:36.30

Oldest swimmers to compete:

Eugene Lehman, 93
Ellen Tait, 96

Things to consider. My fastest 50 is probably around 52 seconds and I can't keep that up past 50 meters. My fastest 100 is probably around 1:48 or so and that's also going all out. And you look at that partial list of folks who competed and note that they are DECADES older than you and are still swimming faster than you, sometimes twice as fast...!

Growing old and weak? Not on your life. They keep training and training and reaping the benefits of strength maintenance and health. They have mitigated the slow physical decline of aging and blast the traditional notion that when you grow old, your body will waste away. And to compete when they are 90+ years of age: WOW.

These folks are my heroes, the ones I aspire to be like. For when I grow to be as old as they are, I plan on being as energetic as they are, enough to keep racing Ironman for many decades to come. They are truly an inspiration!

These last few months I've been building up my use of paddles while swimming. It was hard in the beginning, as they put a lot of stress on my shoulders. Slowly, over several weeks, I built my endurance to use them to about 400m now. Over the same period, I've noticed the pull in my stroke has gotten considerably stronger, and consequently I have been able to hold high speeds for a longer period of time now.

At the end of every workout, whenever possible, I try to pull with paddles and really get a nice strength workout at the end of a normal Masters workout, and do about 300-400m of swimming. As I enter into my off season, I intend to get more into the strength building part of swimming in preparation for applying strength and endurance next year when the training season begins.

I have used stretch cords and also have done weight training for my catch and stroke. But I have not found that to be as effective as pulling with paddles in the water.

As I find this to be effective for me, I come also to think on all the books I've read and the coaches I've talked to about their methods of swim training.

It seems that so many opinions abound regarding swim training and the use of tools like pull buoys and fins, and what should one focus on and not.

Total Immersion coaches focus on body balance in the water and maintaining a good body position to keep the hips up as well as front quadrant swimming, where you should keep at least one arm in front of your head at all times while swimming. They say that pull buoys don't really work but fins are ok.

Steve Tarpinian, writer of swimming books and producer of swim DVDs, says that each person has an indvidual swim form and they need to find that. He also has a strong opinion on which tools work and which do not.

Marc Evans, a triathlete coach in the Bay Area, is into constant propulsion swimming and actually shortening the stroke from pushing all the way down your leg. In this way, propulsion is constant and maximal.

So how do we, as athletes know what's best for us? The only thing I can say is that I had to try about everything, and also get to know myself as a swimmer very well in terms of what my needs are, and how I swim and where my issues are. I basically had to try everything to figure out what would work best for my body, techniques, and methods.

Bruce Lee, in developing Jeet Kune Do, emphasized studying many styles and taking what works for you and discarding the rest. I believe that learning swimming is the same way, and that to broaden your knowledge base while getting to know one's own issues and strengths is the way to go.

Someone asked me what I thought about swimming and why they seemed to swim many times a week for months on end and never seem to improve. So here is what I've learned, and what has been told to me. Also some useful resources:

1. I think that swimming early, or doing any sport for that matter early, is a plus. People who have swam competitively while in high school/college definitely have a leg up. They already have built up key muscles which you or I do not have not...yet.

2. Definitely genetics has something to do with it. I am a butt dragger. I need to really work at bringing my butt up higher, whereas others with different body shapes and compositions seem to ride higher naturally, and thus can focus on other things. This just gives me one more thing to worry about and when I get tired, my butt starts dropping and I get slower. There are other things like size of your hand, length of arm, body proportions (ie. do your proportions look like Michael Phelps'?) that just make you more capable of swimming faster with more ease, rather than working at it.

3. There seems to be a upper bound to swim speed for most people. I think this has more to do with body shape and composition, but also there is a training component as well.

4. My ART doctor told me he works on this competitive swimmer. He's got this muscle in his armpit area that is as thick as my bicep. That comes from swimming 10,000m PER DAY, 5 days per week. It would be amazing if I crossed 10,000m in a week, which usually happens but depends on whether I make a 4000+ swim on Saturdays. To get there, this guy must have been swimming for years, if not a decade or two. I would not recommend doing this next week without proper preparation. So two things here:

a. You need to get to a certain level of volume which implies a certain level fitness and strength. That gives you strength and endurance to power through a race which is much shorter than your training regimen.

b. Where in the world do we working people find the time to swim 10K meters a day? We can barely get through two workouts of two disciplines each day. So just time limitations of life make it difficult to achieve such status. By the way, my coach once worked out with Chris McCormack, the pro Ironman guy. He said this guy's typical day is go to the pool and swim 7000m, then ride about 4 hours at pretty high speed, then run for about an hour, and then jump back in the pool for another 4000m. these pros have the time and motivation to get their bodies primed for such punishment, which equates to incredible excellence during a race.

5. Swimming is a highly technical sport, more so than biking or running. Maintaining strict form is really important for efficiency and speed. People tell me it takes years to do this through an entire workout. When you get tired, your form starts sucking and then you slow down. So here I thought that a video analysis of my swimming at Marc Evans' flume was really valuable in figuring out what I was doing wrong. One of my major focuses is to keep working on the form so that it is neuromuscularly burned into my brain and muscles and I don't have to concentrate on maintaining form. This may be something you'd want to work on in more detail.

6. Last year, I managed to swim 2000m straight at a less than 2:00 pace. It was an amazing thing for me. I even did IM NZ swim leg at 1:55 pace, although it was with a wetsuit. But then I had this nerve pinch thing and it atrophied my right tricep, so now im building my strength back up. I think that after a winter break, we tend to slow down anyways and then we speed up again with base building and moving into build phase of training.

7. To me, if I can sprint at a speed, at some point i can achieve something close to it for long distance. At least that's my goal. Of course I can't keep a threshold pace the whole way, but I should be able to get close to it.

8. I got see saw days too. It happens a lot with triathlon. Yesterday, I ran long and hard, about 12 miles in 1:49 which is very close to my race pace by about :30/mile. It wiped me out for today's workout and I really tanked on the 5x100 drafting round robin and I really died on the 800. So I think a previous day's workout can definitely affect your swim workout. And sometimes I jump in the pool and can't get a proper rhythm down so I'm slower. I suppose if you really wanted to get better at something, you'd want to focus solely on it and forget other sports. I find I like to run a marathon at the end of the season, after getting all the other triathlons out of the way. It allows me to focus solely on running faster, and it has really helped my marathon speed. I don't get drained by long/hard bike sessions as well as long swim sessions. My body can recover from damage better as well.

9. By the way, we're getting older. Perhaps we're past our prime on some kinds of sports. We get more prone to injury so we need to be careful. When i train for triathlon, I find I can only run 3x /week. When i marathon train alone, I run 4-5x /week. But I did manage to up my bike training to 5-6x /week by varying the duration and intensity of the workouts, and allowing for recovery. So we can still build some adaption to higher volumes even at our age! But since our growth hormone levels aren't anywhere near when we were in high school, can we build these massive swim muscles needed for fast, long distance swimming at lightspeed?

10. I think that swimming at Master's workouts is tough from the perspective of preparation for races. If I could, I would have an individual program setup to peak at my races, using periodization. For example, it was really hard to come off the winter break and jump into speed sets. That was definitely not the right thing. I should have had at least a month of endurance base building before really starting speed workouts. There is none of that with most Master's swim workouts. It seems very random. So I started doing some of my own planning around Master's workouts. I started adding 4000+ swims to build endurance. I also added one day of speed training on Mondays when I am down in LA - shorter total length, but lots of sprints. Then on Wednesdays, I usually go to Master's and swim whatever he gives us. On Saturdays I do the super long swim. definitely I think one way for you to improve is to get on a well developed progression versus swimming semi-random workouts. You might do better with stanford - they post the type of workouts for each day of the week ahead of time, and do a rough periodization. so if you could vary the days you go to hit the certain types of workouts, for a given periodization/peak you are trying to reach.

11. Btw, swimming is the least impt sport. Why worry about improving this for only a few minutes more off your total time?

12. You can also try weight lifting. I have found stretch cord workouts to be very beneficial. Lots of tricep work helps.

13. i have a great book called Swimming Fastest by Ernest W. Maglischo. $45 retail, $29 at amazon. Iit's a huge hardcover monstrosity but also has the latest in swimming research from a science point of view. Very cool stuff. explains a lot on how to get faster.

By the way, I have also read many books on swimming. No two coaches agree on anything. It's very confusing as coaches will say what they think is important, and also which tools help the most or least. My take on all that is that everybody needs to find what works for them, given their age, body composition, and fitness level.

UGH! The Waikiki Rough Water Swim this last Sunday in Honolulu got cancelled due to extremely rough conditions. Strong trade winds blew in and sent swells rising 10-15 feet. Wind whipped up the water and the surfers were lovin' it, but not enough to risk the non-experienced swimmers of our race.

2 years ago, conditions were not as bad as on Sunday, and they pulled over half the people from the water. Strong 8-10 knot current flowing the wrong way caused many people to tire out and actually get pushed backwards towards Diamond Head.

I suppose that wouldn't have been good, to actually been swimming slowly backward the whole way.

Time to get primed for next year - always a good thing to head to Oahu!

One more thing I neglected to mention about my head positioning. I try to look about a few degrees forward of the vertical, and press the head and chin down. In that way, I know the water is not flowing over the back of my head which creates drag. When the water hits my forehead, my head is cleanly cutting through the water which is optimal.

I also use my ears as feedback that my head is completely submerged in the water. If I hear water gurgling, then I am too much on the surface, or maybe even my ears are out of the water and then my butt is dragging. So I make sure that I hear no gurgling at all and then I know my head is deep enough.

Sprinted 1:40 for 100m today - got a sprinting test on Friday of 5x100m at 5 seconds rest...yikes!

These last two weeks I've been trying really hard to reinforce two things in my swimming.

1. The Catch

My coach tells me about 2 weeks ago that I drop my arm and I don't catch before I stroke. So I start really relaxing my upper arm and make sure I bend at the elbow before my upper arm moves, feel pressure against my hand, and then stroke strongly through the movement. What a difference it made! Now my strokes generate more power and create propulsion for a longer period of time, versus catching later in the stroke and only creating propulsion about half the stroke of the arm.

2. Body position

I am what you would call a "butt dragger". My body proportions don't let me easily rest horizontally on the water. I tend to droop towards my legs and this creates tons of drag. So I did two things.

The first thing was to really use my head as the body positioner. Most of the coaches tell you to "press the buoy" or "press the armpit". This didn't work for me. I still dragged my butt. But I tried something else. I instead press my chin and extend my head. This action enabled me to move my butt higher and be more needle like and horizontal on the water, thus minimizing my drag.

The second thing was to really relax my entire body, instead of tensing, and just roll it back and forth while keeping it needle like. This conserved energy and allowed me to focus on body roll to create power in my stroke. Thus, I did not waste energy feeling nervous about sinking or going faster. I was smoother and devoted all energy to catching the water, stroking while body the rolled to increase power.

Before I did this, I was hard put to sprint 100m at 1:55. This morning I sprinted 1:44!