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For those of you swimming in Masters workouts and want to continue to incorporate TI learnings and principles, here are some tips:

General Tips:

1. Practice maintaining mental focus on each lap, to do whatever it is you are practicing for those lengths or laps.

2. Train your brain to keep active for the entire workout. Resist drifting off.

3. Practice counting strokes for each length, and remembering them by the end of the workout.

4. If stroke counting and other data you want to remember is hard, buy a waterproof notebook and waterproof pen from amazon and write things down. I would not recommend regular pen and paper. Paper will disintegrate upon contact with water, and regular pens won't write on soaked paper.

5. Focus on continual improvement. Know when you are slipping or getting tired. Change your routine if it is getting monotonous.

6. Know when to get out of the pool. Our energy and skill ebb and flow day by day. Sometimes it's better to just get out of the pool and - most importantly - do not keep imprinting bad swim habits for the sake of lasting through a workout.

7. Swimming has a energy system training component, but until your swimming skill has reached a decent level, it is more important to train the nervous system FIRST so that your body can make the correct swimming movements before you worry about extending perfect swim habits over time. Swimming poorly at higher stroke rates in an attempt to increase speed will result in exponential energy usage but with very little speed increase, or perhaps even decrease. It will also raise the probability of injury.

8. Training for short distance sprints versus for longer distance (ie. triathlon swim leg) versus for marathon swims (ie. swim around Manhattan) all have common elements and different elements. Don't mistake the training that many coaches might do for pool swimming for optimal swim training for long distance.

9. Get to know your stroke counts at given tempos and lengths (ie. 25y, 50m). Take some time to setup a tempo/SPL matrix.

10. Having a Tempo Trainer (TT) means you can have consistency between workouts and know if your skill has increased or decreased day by day. Without the TT, it can be very hard to know if you're really swimming better or not. Or if you're having an off day.

11. Get used to swimming with the TT. It can be annoying/distracting/unfamiliar to be swimming to a task master like the TT whose beep forces you to swim to its tune, not to your own. I swim with the TT all the time now and can't imagine swimming without it for workouts.

12. Get to know the Masters coach. Does he/she care if you break from doing his workouts exactly or does he come over to yell at you if you don't swim his instructions? Does he let you not swim with tools if you want? Can you swim a set in freestyle even if he calls out back/breast/fly?

Are you able to ignore his instructions or yelling if he comes over and sees you not following your instructions exactly?

Does he comment on your little TT gadget and then make disparaging remarks about it? Or does he even comment on you "swimming TI" and how TI sucks?

It may be time to switch Masters workouts - your goal is to swim better, not to be berated for attempting to improve your swimming. IMHO a great coach should be open to new ideas and not be dismissive. In any case, unless you are specifically on a swim team driven by this coach, you should have more freedom on how you swim his workouts.

If you don't have a TT, use these tips:

1. Before you start the workout, have a set of things you want to workout during the Masters workout. Generally, these boil down to focal points which will help you practice great swim form and habits.

2. For each interval, pick a focal point or set of focal points. Maintain the focal point for the entire length or lengths.

3. As you pause at the wall, select the next focal point, or keep you current focal point. You may want to practice the same focal point for many laps/lengths/intervals.

4. As your ability to swim with focal points increases, you can start trying to employ more than one focal point within a given swim set.

a. The first method would be to rotate between focal points, changing after each length. Ex. for a 150m lap, you would do focal point 1 for the 1st 50, focal point 2 for the 2nd 50, then back to focal point 1 for the 3rd 50.

b. A more advanced method would be to try to swim any given length while focusing on 2 more focal points at once.

5. Count strokes for each length. For TI, we like to count when the lead arm spears forward as one stroke.

a. Generally the first length seems to always be one stroke less. It is most likely the result of strong initial pushoff plus the length you are swimming with the most energy.

b. If you have a TT, we usually push off on a beep, let one beep go by while gliding, then pull one arm back on the 2nd beep, and our first official counted stroke is on the 3rd beep. This works for tempos of 1.2s or higher (or slower tempo). For faster tempo, we sometimes let another beep go by.

In general, you want to start stroking at about the same point in a pool length, which is usually around where the flags are. If you start stroking at different points in the lane, you'll find your stroke count could vary by 1-2 on this fact alone.

If you have a TT, use these tips:

Use the tips for without the TT and combine with the below:

Warm Up Set:

1. Use the warm up set to determine your easy and cruise tempo for the day. It may be your usual easy and cruise tempos, or it may have changed due to other factors like fatigue.

2. Determine how many lengths or laps you can swim for your warmup. Start with your easy tempo. Aim to increase your tempo each length or lap until you hit your cruise tempo. So do some quick math and know the increment you want to increase tempo with, and adjust the TT after every length or lap.

Do not be afraid to not increase the TT if you are not feeling comfortable just yet. Swim another lap and see if adaptation occurs on this or the next length/lap.

If for some reason you're just not able to increase it, you may have reached your current neural threshold. This is a data point for use later during the set.

3. You can use the warm up set to employ some focal points to fine tune your technique for the main set. This can also be a good time to see which focal points you need more work with, or less.

Main Set:

1. Get to know your tempos for the various effort levels a Masters coach might designate for a set. These might be easy, cruise, tempo, fast, strong, sprint, etc. These will also vary by length. Ex. you might be able to sprint at .7s tempo for 50m but you have a hard time sustaining that for 100m so you set at .8s.

Note this changes day to day based on fitness/fatigue level, and also as your skill grows.

2. Upon hearing the set, think quickly on the tempo(s) you will use, adjust the TT before you swim.

3. Depending on the set, you may or may not need to adjust the TT.

Sometimes you may go out too fast a tempo for a given set or fitness/fatigue level. You may need to pause at the wall to readjust tempo.

4. The easiest sets to swim with the TT are the ones that have a pause at the wall, which is time for you to be able to adjust the TT. So 3x50 descend 1-2-3 on 1:50 interval would have pauses between 50s to speed up tempo to aid in the descend.

The more difficult, if not impossible sets, are the ones that vary speed without you pausing at the wall. For example, a set which is 150s descending 50s would be tough to stop in between the lengths to adjust the TT. In situations like this, I would recommend one of two options:

a. Don't adjust the TT. Just swim the entire 150 at one tempo. Note that this may cause yelling at you by the coach.

b. Set the TT at the starting tempo which is slower. Then attempt to "beat the beep" on the subsequent lengths. You could set it at the ending tempo but I find that it is more comfortable to start with the slower beep and then beat it on the subsequent lengths.

5. TI discourages the use of tools like fins and paddles. Depending on the situation, they have their uses. However, they do tend to interfere with developing the finer points of swimming that we teach. You should consider not swimming with them even during sets which require them.

6. If you are primarily a freestyle swimmer, consider free for sets that are back/breast/fly. You should essentially practice free as much as possible to get better at it. This may also result in a yelling session from your coach.

7. Over the time of a Masters workout, I like to end up at a faster tempo than when I started. This is because:

a. As my nervous system adapts, I can generally sustain higher tempos.

b. Pushing higher tempos challenges my neural threshold. My goal is to maintain form at higher tempos which in theory means I should be swimming faster.

c. Over the course of a race, you always want to end up either at the same effort level or higher by the end. Most of your competitors won't have trained that way and will fizzle while you will be experiencing rising energy and, hopefully, speed.

So start with Easy->Cruise during Warm Up. Then start the first sets at cruise tempo and eventually end up faster than that, probably ending up at tempo which may end up being the new cruise tempo by the end of the workout, maybe even sprint tempo if the coach designates some sprints at the end.

8. Don't increase tempo or back off to previous tempo if your nervous system isn't adapting to the new tempo. Evidence is speed drop off, form breaks down, extra effort or discomfort experienced, etc. However, be patient. Try again in a set or two. Sometimes a little more time needs to happen before adaptation.

Having said that, if you just increased tempo and finding it tough to adapt AND you feel good still, try swimming a length or 2 or 3 at the new faster tempo. You may adapt after a few more lengths.

8. Be mindful of stroke counts and times to swim a length or lap. Practice using your brain to keep track of both as much as possible to know when your form is slipping. For example, a stroke count increase of 2 or more between lengths probably means your form faltered on that length, if the tempo remained constant. Another example: if you stroked at a faster tempo but your time to swim the length remained the same as with a slower tempo, was that a good set or bad?

Cool Down:

1. Simple method is to set it very slow and swim but with the same mindfulness. The aim is to swim technique-wise the same whether slow tempo or fast. But swimming slowly will cool you down.

2. Turn off the TT and swim slowly.

3. Practice minimizing stroke count with and without the TT.

4. Use focal points but with slower tempo for cool down.

In the Total Immersion forums, a user asked about where should hand leave the water for recovery. I thought it would be useful to repost my response here:

Regarding when/where the hand release should happen, I think you should think of it this way:

1. In general, the longer the hand is in the water (and assuming it is moving, hopefully straight back!), then it is still contributing to forward motion. This is good. Therefore, your goal is to have as long a stroke length in the water as possible, as traced by your hand.

2. Having said 1., it is very dependent on tempo and your ability to move your hand underwater faster, which involves strength and endurance.

So in order to move your hand through water which is a much heavier medium than air, it will require more strength - to do that over time requires endurance of your arm muscles.

Faster tempos thus give you less time to travel that distance from catch to where you'd want to exit the hand out of the water (and you still have to move the hand back forward in recovery).

NOTE: It is possible that if you move your hand TOO fast, then it may slip and you are not gaining the most benefit of the stroke back but in actuality wasting energy moving your hand back as fast as possible, but not maximizing your potential forward energy given that your hand is slipping and not gripping water as well as when it is moving slower.

3. Given your fitness and skill level at a moment in time, you may be able to swim at a faster tempo BUT in order to keep up with the tempo you have no choice but to exit the hand sooner, which may mean that you exiting at your waist or even above. Attempting to lengthen your stroke length underwater of your hand may be difficult to impossible to maintain because your strength and endurance may not be high enough. Thus you have no choice but to exit sooner.

4. You can also play with speeding up the arm forward after it exits the water to help you lengthen the stroke portion underwater. But you may reach an upper limit of how fast you can move your arm forward given your current fitness and skill level.

5. During a race, you may find that you want to sprint but simply cannot get a faster tempo without exiting sooner. This will also vary based on your fatigue level which will change during race conditions.

BTW, play with faster tempos and where you exit the hand; you may find that even though you are shortening your underwater stroke length, your overall speed is still going up, when compared to attempting to keep the same stroke length. This is evidence that some other part of your stroke is falling apart a bit as you try to speed up AND also try to maintain stroke length.

For example, a little while ago, I was playing with this and faster tempos and found that when I exited sooner, I had a bit more time to execute a better spear + 2 beat kick and got more speed. When I was rushed due to a longer stroke length, it became messier and I was actually more slower overall! So this is yet another thing to work on....!

Train to lengthen the underwater stroke portion via the same methods prescribed by TI - proceed measurably and slowly, increasing your tempo bit by bit over time. Use the tempo trainer religiously!

Mike McCloskey, a Total Immersion swimmer, wrote to me regarding some tips on training for a Early Vertical Forearm or EVF.

Here were my replies:

What drill(s) can you recommend to entrain a high elbow catch, or, which one(s) helped you the most?

In answer to your question, first see my old post:

Total Immersion: Learning the Early Vertical Forearm - Training, Training, Training

You really have spear as horizontal as possible and you may not even know if you're spearing lower than you should without looking at video of yourself. Spearing horizontal makes the elbow high and allows an easier EVF.

Next, watch Dave Cameron's video. This is an excellent dryland exercise. I used to do it all the time just standing around until it was burned into my brain. It doesn't completely make it easy in the water, but it does help a great deal.

Some drills/focal points to try:

1. Leave your patient lead arm out there as long as you can before you stroke. This doesn't directly train the EVF but it does train critical timing and helps you resist the temptation to just stroke back with the non-spearing arm.

2. Attempt Dave's dryland drill in the water. Keep your current spearing arm out there as long as you can, and as you spear the other arm, bend the elbow of the previously speared arm before stroking back.

3. Extend the upper arm of the previously speared arm, as you spear the other arm. This helps train you also to not just pull back the arm while you initiate the EVF. You want the EVF to complete before you start stroking back.

4. A variant of 3, open up the axilla/armpit of the previously speared arm, as you spear the other arm. Feel a big circle form from your armpit, arcing to the elbow joint and down the forearm as the forearm drops down, but the upper arm does not because you're extending the armpit.

5. Swim forward by using the momentum of the spearing arm only, plus the hip drive and the 2BK. Resist the temptation to pull back the stroking arm for as long as possible and try to get as much forward momentum with the spear/hip/2BK. As you spear, just drop the other arm's forearm down but do not stroke back until the last possible moment.

6. A variant of 4, use the hip drive of the spear to open up the axilla/armpit of the opposite arm. In essence, use your hip to powerfully open up the axilla and dropping the forearm down into EVF. This really helps cement the body's role in creating the catch and the subsequent stroke.

He then asks:

1) You point out that Shinji hardly uses EVF except for races, because he feels it is too tiring for general use. Do you feel the same way and do you only use EVF for 'special occasions'? My motivation for entraining a good EVF is in large part to train the lats to take over some of the work my rotator cuff and deltoids have been doing, therefore, HOPEFULLY, to reduce shoulder stress. But if in fact EVF is more rather than less exhausting, in particular for shoulders, maybe I'd better look elsewhere for shoulder relief.

I think you can train your body to do just about anything. I also should ask him exactly why he thinks it's tiring for him as I'm not really sure. When you watch videos of Shinji, you'll probably notice that his catch is not as aggressively "forward vertical" as Sun Yang's. Still, his form is impeccable and his speed shows - he told me he swam a 1:04 100m in a Masters meet! Wow!

After doing EVF training for almost a year now, I finally think I have the hang of it and will be extending it to at least Alcatraz crossing distance (~1.2 miles).

As for reducing stress on your rotator cuff and delts - I'm not sure EVF will in itself make that better. More likely other TI aspects will have a greater effect on your shoulder joint and muscles.

As mentioned in one of my focal points about not resisting the stroke back - you should try some laps where you try to swim *with barely any stroking energy* at all. This forces you to rely solely on spear/arm drop/hip drive/2BK to send you forward, as your other arm just kinda hangs out there. You'll be amazed at how fast you can go without relying on the stroking arm. It's a great way to fine tune the non-intuitive parts of swimming propulsion.

Doing this also helps EVF because now your arm is just hanging out there and you have time/space to let your forearm drop down.

And of course your shoulder muscles and joint is saved since you're swimming faster without using shoulder muscles to force your way through water.

2) In reply to the deep vs. shallow spear, early last year (or so) there was a thread on the TI forum discussing a video of Ian Thorpe, and I pointed out that his hand entry was fairly deep and steep, surprisingly TI-like, but immediately thereafter his hand came back near the surface so his forearm was nearly horizontal. Next, the forearm moved down again into a vertical position for the catch. I wondered if this 'dolphin-like' down-up-down motion was intentional, and Terry replied that it merely reflected Thorpe's great ability to relax his lead arm. I never got that part, for the reason you mention elsewhere, i.e., a deep angle of entry makes it hard to bring the elbow back up, because the forward motion puts pressure on the forearm opposing that motion. In the face of that pressure, how could simply relaxing the arm allow it to 'float' back up?

That video is here:

Thorpe's spear is the shallow I was talking about. I was only talking about the part of the arm when it is underwater and not about the steepness of the entry. you need to end up with a more horizontal extended arm than angled downward, which is where TI beginners may start when they first learn balance in the water.

The angle of entry is defined by the path of a cocked arm as it touches down into the water. You should not be extending the arm before it hits the water. But once it enters the water, you control the depth of where it goes. You want to drop into the water and immediately shoot it horizontally forward. So you are changing the direction spearing arm.

Thorpe is amazing actually - his hand is actually shooting higher than horizontal but he retains enough control to never break the water surface which is bad. This can get a tiny bit more elbow height!

3) In reply to your point #5 (resist the temptation to pull back) ... it's been subconscious and so deeply engrained ... but at least these drills have brought it to consciousness. Even when I use what I imagine (no video or other observers yet) is something closer to EVF, and definite catch, than before, I can feel the lats engage and push water back. But that's a forward step for now, I think, because it's my bigger less fatigable lats doing the work my shoulders were doing.

There are lats engaging but also connecting your stroking arm to your body's rotation will also lend authority to the stroke back without wiping out muscles. It's a hard concept to grasp but once you have the coordination, I think one day you'll email me back and say "Dave, so THAT'S what you meant by coordinating the stroke back with body rotation!"

Another way to look at all this is, you're changing the timing of your arms in the stroke cycle. When you first learned TI, and usually Shinji teaches this first, you spear and stroke back at the same time. This timing is easier to master. Once you get this, then it's onwards to EVF. NOW you'll have to change your timing. The spear now happens first and is on its way forward, as the other arms drops into EVF and THEN strokes back. The timing is now shifted. So one manifestation is the fact that you need to resist stroking back so soon in order to change that timing....

Way back in 2005, I wrote about how Active Release Technique (ART) could be used for performance enhancement in my post, Where there is Pain, There is Gain... . Using ART, I released decades of adhesions that were restricting my hips from moving properly. After loosening of them up, I was able to improve my speed dramatically in as little as two weeks!

This last week I asked my ART doc to check out my shoulder blades or scapulae due to a new focal point I learned through Total Immersion. This focal point was to move the scapula forward during arm recovery, so as to increase the elbow's forward position during a proper elbow led recovery. As I practiced this, I became aware that I was performing an unfamiliar movement, and I immediately thought of using ART to make sure that my muscle structure around my shoulder blades remained loose. If they were tight and short, then those muscles would restrict the movement of the shoulder blade forward and either not let it get as far forward as possible, or start using too much energy in the muscles used in moving the shoulder blade forward.

My ART doc did some work on the muscles of the shoulder blades. The muscles that could restrict the movement of the shoulder blade forward are the rhomboids, erector spinae, lower trapezoids, and serratus anterior. Strangely, my left side was worse than my right; certainly there were restrictions there, but the left side was much more restricted. Once he released those muscles, my shoulder blade did feel looser.

However, in thinking further, I think this is correct - my left side does have a better elbow led recovery than my right, and it's possible that this action did naturally cause more restriction in those muscles. Now I'm trying to even it out and so I anticipate more restrictions to pop up as I perform this unfamiliar movement. Still, with constant ART treatment, I should be able to fully integrate the correct movement for elbow led recovery while managing my muscles' adaptation process. Without ART, I run the risk of letting the restrictions and adhesions grow, which could cause injury and movement issues later on.

ART is an amazing discipline and I enjoy exploring its performance enhancing capabilities in my training.

This weekend, I took the last two days of Total Immersion coach certification - I'm almost there, needing only to do one last homework assignment and I'll be an official TI coach!

At the end of the coach certification classes, I asked Dave Cameron (aka Distance Dave) if he would do a short private coaching session with me. As always, the comments were fascinating. I will talk about them as focal points during the swimming laps he had me swim:

1. Swim with fists, then point the index finger, then point the index finger and pinky (the "longhorn"), and then open up the hands and swim with fully open hands
As I went through this progression of swimming with each hand position for 10 strokes (on a 50m pool), I was told to focus on the hip drive into spear to drive the body forward, and not rely on the hand stroking back because my ability to catch was hampered by the closed hands. As a second observation, I could see the effect of catching on the forearm and not only the hand.

2. Open up the axilla on the recovering arm and use the hip drive to open it up and catch more water. The axilla is a fancy name for the underarm/armpit. We talk about opening up the axilla on the spearing arm, in order to get extra body length on the stretch forward, as well as a longer stroke back since it begins further forward. However, this was the first time someone talked about opening up the axilla on the recovering arm! If I do it right, this makes the EVF even more effective by catching a big volume of water underneath the curve of my arm because I am extending my axilla of the recovering arm as I spear with my forward arm. Definitely an exercise in coordination here! Then, Dave told me to use my hip drive to create the opening in the axilla which was another interesting but effective notion.

3. Keep the hands facing back at all times during stroke and recovery, as it lifts out of the water and comes forward. I was turning my hand at the end of the stroke, which can cause a chicken wing elbow as it lifts out of the water. This inhibits proper elbow led recovery.

4. Move the shoulder blade as far forward to enhance elbow led recovery. I was not moving the shoulder blade forward enough, which sometimes encouraged a hand led recovery which is very bad. Moving the shoulder blade helped keep my elbow leading the recovery and also put my hand in the right place to drop into the water.

5. Practice hip drive on all of the above. We would run through each of the focal points, and then Dave would ask me to insert a stronger hip drive while maintaining the previous focal point. Yes, lots of practice maintaining not only one focal point but two, sometimes three!

It's always invaluable to continue my private coaching with Shinji and Dave!

Yesterday, I swam the Alcatraz Invitational 2011, one of the many Alcatraz swims that are held each year. This one is held by the South End Rowing Club and is a favorite.

Alcatraz swims can generally be held in two conditions, either starting with a flood or ebb. Then there is a slack where it changes direction and the current is zero or very low for some time, and then it fully switches to the other direction. Depending on which current it starts with determines what landmarks you sight on, and therefore, what direction you swim to work with the current and not against it in reaching Aquatic Park.

For this swim, I stuffed my Garmin 305 GPS watch under my swim cap to track the results. I am always curious on my actual track - did I go off course? How far did the current take me? Was I fast enough to get across or was I too conservative? Here is the track:

Disregard the track around Alcatraz Island; I turned on the tracking before I hopped off the boat as I wanted to make sure the timer was on before I stuffed it under my swim cap. The swim started at that little jog in the track, to the right and slightly lower than Alcatraz Island in the image.

In this case, it started with a flood, and a very mild one at that. Faster swimmers always can go directly for the opening at Aquatic Park; I thought it best that I should point slightly off from the opening in case I could not get across before the flood would start coming in and sweep me past the opening (this happened to me once; it was a tiring trick to achieve the opening when the current is going against you). So I sighted on Fort Mason and you can see the my initial track was slightly left of the opening.

As I swam across and got closer and closer to Aquatic Park, I began to steer towards the opening. But given that my track was pretty straight to Fort Mason, the current was nearly nil and I probably could have gone directly for the opening and gotten to the finish line faster.

I steered to the opening of Aquatic Park, and then made a beeline for the beach where the finish line was. By my personal watch, I made it from leap off the ship to beach timing mat in 33:43, a new personal record! (NOTE: the results say 35:09 which is probably total clock time).

I was very ecstatic - If I did not count incorrectly, this was my 15th crossing and I have been frustrated to not be able to lower my time from the usual 42-45 minutes that it takes me. Finally, I was able to come in below 42 minutes.

In future swims, I think I will be confident and go directly for the opening. I think that rebuilding my stroke via Total Immersion has helped a lot, and I shouldn't be fearful that I will mistime the currents, although given the varying conditions of the San Francisco Bay, I am sure it will happen more than once still in the future!

Today, I got up early and swam the Waikiki Rough Water Swim. It's my third time swimming it and hoped for a faster time today but it was not to be - I did it in 1:22:46 which is about 2+ minutes slower than my previous time of 1:20. Rebuilding my stroke via Total Immersion has slowed me down but I know it's for the better as I relearn how to swim with better form and build my speed from there.

This time out, I tried mapping my swim with my Garmin 305 GPS Watch. I've heard from numerous people on how they have done it by stuffing under their swim caps. Some put on a swim cap and then they put the watch into a ziploc bag, put it on their head, and then put another swim cap on top. Others put a swim cap on, then duct tape the watch to this swim cap without ziploc bag (it is supposedly water resistant), and then put another cap on top.

Two days ago, I had to make sure that one method would work so that on race day I would not be fiddling with the GPS watch right before race start. I didn't have duct tape but I did put the watch into a ziploc bag to help reduce its water exposure. I put on a swim cap but I could not put on another swim cap over my watch and my head no matter what I did! I was definitely feeling like I would rip my second swim cap for sure. So I just stuffed the bagged watch under the back of my swim cap, right above my neck. That worked fine - it was a bit bulky but it didn't bother me.

I then tried to hit the start button but no dice. I could not tell if it was started or not! When I thought I had hit the button and took it out to check, it was not started. So I just decided that I would hit start and then stuff the bagged watch under my swim cap and hope that the swim cap's tightness wouldn't re-hit the start button, which stops the timing. After stuffing the bagged watch under the cap, I put on my goggles and adjusted the double strap so that it would loop around the watch face and not put pressure on the start/stop or lap buttons.

Hitting the start button before the actual race start meant I would not get actual race timing this way, but I could GPS location data for the swim course. I had another Timex watch anyways so I would time the race with that.

This morning, I did all this and jumped into the water when the start horn went off. Here are the mapped results, downloaded into the Garmin Training Center and then uploaded to Google Earth application for Mac OS.

According to the GPS track, at least I did not go wandering around the course much; I was pretty much following the buoys closely. I just was slower than the last time I did it and to pour salt on the wound there was a current going in our favor too! Oh well, I got some cool GPS data to show for it and will dig later into the data to see if the speed data is worth looking at. I also look forward to jumping back into the pool to keep fine tuning my technique and hopefully improve my open water speed. Next up: Alcatraz crossing in two weeks.

In this thread of the Total Immersion forums, I replied to Terry Laughlin's post of:

Sun Yang is the new TI poster boy. (No we are not claiming him as a TI swimmer, only as a demonstration that longer strokes ARE the way to superior swimming.

with this comment and query:

Terry,

I have been working towards a race and using the TT to prepare. My goal has been to gradually raise the tempo and practice relaxing and maintaining proper form. So far, I've made it to 1.08s where I find my 50s are still getting faster. However, once I move past 1.08s I find that my 50s are slowing down quite a bit, and even slower than 1.08s. So faster SR doesn't necessarily mean faster times!

But your statement intrigues me above, that longer strokes are the way to superior swimming. It would seem that when my TT goes faster, a few things happen:

1. My ability to recover between left and right arm strokes reduces exponentially. It's amazing how sensitive that is to minute drops in tempo.

However, training with the TT means I can change that week over week which is pretty amazing.

2. In order to achieve speed, I find the limiting factors are:

a. My hip connection to the spear is diminished, as I'm trying to keep up with the TT but I can't seem to generate the same authority in the spear with the hip.

b. My hip rotation is diminished in order to keep up with the TT. I find that a tiny bit more hip rotation means I can get a little more oomph in a spear. But hip rotation is lowered as the TT interval is diminished.

c. In reference to 1. above, each stroke has less force pulling since I'm tiring faster. With less pulling force, I diminish my speed when compared to pulling with more force.

d. My pull also shortens in an attempt to keep up with the TT, while I get tired and can't pull back fast enough to maintain a SL from earlier when I am less tired.

e. The recovering arm must also move very quickly forward. Getting tired can make this slow down.

Is the goal to then train such that at higher tempos:

1. maintain SL, which means a faster pull to make the tempo interval.

2. As I maintain SL, I must also train to maintain the force of the pull. Simply swishing my arm fast through the water doesn't have enough effect.

3. I also have to work on maintaining the authority of the hip's contribution to the spear/pull.

Thoughts? Any other insight you could share about training at higher tempos and actually getting faster versus just getting tired faster?

Also, my goal to reach higher tempos is driven by the fact that my next race is in OW and in choppy waters, I am challenged to swim at lower tempos as the waves batter my body...

Thanks in advance!

To which Terry replied:

David As a tech guy, you'll appreciate the following: 1) Your Tempo is a Data Point 2) Your SPL at any given Tempo is a Data Point. 2) Every sensation you experience when you approach or cross your current threshold of 1.08 is also a Data Point.

The more data points you have the better your information and the more targeted your efforts can be.

Key tenets of Mastery, Deliberate Practice and Flow are
i) Be error-focused. Constantly practice in ways calculated to expose weak points.
ii) When you find an error or weak point, develop strategies to strengthen them.

All those sensations you experience at or below 1.08 are things to focus on improving as you patiently work your Tempo Threshold to 1.07, 1.06, . . .

As you improve them, you'll reduce then eliminate the extra strokes, and your times will continue improving as you continue increasing Tempo.

Just a month ago I was hitting a point of diminishing returns above 1.00. Since then I've improved my tempo threshold down to .95. I feel as if .90 by Labor Day is not out of the question.

PS: The process you are describing will produce intuition that will be invaluable to your clients when you earn your Coach Certification.

and also, member dobarton replied:

I could not agree more with all your observations. The trick seems to be to use the TT to do exactly the same thing at 1.07 as you do at 1.08 secs. Synchronizing hip drive and spear, setting the catch perfectly, timing the re-entry of the spearing arm, shaping the recovering arm perfectly, kicking at the perfect time to assist the spearing arm to move forward... The faster your stroke, the more perfectly timed all these components must be while still doing so with grace, balance and streamline!! Your observations are spot on!!

The trick with increasing tempos and increasing speed is to figure out how to maintain your stroke length while your tempo is getting faster. At my current breakpoint of 1.08s tempo, I find that it is impossible right now for me to stroke faster and increase speed; in fact, my efficiency drops so much that I actually slow down!

As I approach the Waikiki Rough Water Swim on Labor Day, I am using the tempo trainer to keep practicing maintaining similar, long stroke length while my tempo increases. My goal is to get as close to 1.0s (or faster) as possible since I find in open water, I need a higher tempo to combat waves and choppy conditions that force me to stroke faster in order to maintain control in the ocean.

FOOTNOTE: In reference to that guy, Sun Yang, mentioned in Terry's initial post, check out this 400m race. Sun is the guy in lane 4. Check out his stroke rate relative to his opponents especially on the last lengths of the race. Notice how much slower his stroke rate is but yet he is pulling away from the pack!

Throughout the TI forums, we find references to how the elites swim and whether or not Total Immersion needs to change its teachings so that we all drive towards swimming like Michael Phelps and like company.

One of those contentious topics is the spearing angle. I replied on one of the forum posts with this:

Like all things taught in TI, spearing angle, depth and width, is dependent on so many factors:

1. Skill level of the swimmer
2. Natural body buoyancy of the swimmer
3. Fatigue level
4. Water conditions
5. Drilling vs. Training vs. Racing

It isn't entirely accurate to say that one way is the best way. After all, we humans are of different body sizes and shapes, our fitness levels differ, our brains are wired differently as are our nervous systems by the time we attempt our swimming.

Throwing out some observations on spearing:

1. Drag in part is caused by the amount of frontal area you present to the direction of travel. That means that when you spear deep, you are presenting more of the area of top of your arm to the direction of travel and thereby produces more drag than if you are spearing horizontally.

2. Spearing deeper can improve your body's balance in the water. For drilling, it can be a much easier experience if you spear deeper as you are generally moving slower and lower speeds will cause your butt to drag a lot more readily than at higher speeds.

For example, I used to struggle with kicking across a pool in skate position. It wasn't until I speared deeper than I normally do while swimming, that I realized that my body was higher in the water and kicking actually propelled me more.

So spearing deeper (in conjunction with other things like weight shift forward and reducing the time that your arms are lower than your head) will help improve body balance.

3. At higher speeds, you can spear more horizontally since your momentum helps you stay higher in the water.

4. Spearing higher also means you can execute an early vertical forearm easier since your elbow is already high.

5. I would definitely say the drag produced by a lower spear is pretty inconsequential compared to the drag produced by your lower half of your body dragging through the water. So if you spear more horizontally before you have mastered good body balance in the water, you may find you're struggling a lot to gain speed but this speed could be regained by spearing deeper because you're counterbalancing your butt dragging.

6. Your fatigue level will drive how deep you will want to spear. Swimming with EVF can be very tiring over long distances. You may want to rest and spearing deeper will allow you to minimize drag, maintain good body balance, and decent speed while you rest.

7. Pool water conditions are very sedate and consistent. Once you jump into the open water, all bets are off. You will find that waves (and other swimmers running into you) will constantly be challenging your balance. You may find that in order to maintain balance and some control in certain water conditions, you'll have to spear deeper (and potentially wider too).

8. Your skill level in learning TI swimming can dictate how deep you'd want to spear. Generally, beginners in TI (or in overall swimming) will want to experiment with the depth (and width) of the spear to figure out what works best for them. This is like learning to walk before you run; you start with basics and then move up in skill from there, as you master elements before them.

Spearing deeper for beginners will help improve their experience of swimming because their body balance is improved; with better body balance, there is less struggle in the water. Once basic body balance is mastered, then they can learn more advanced TI concepts which generally mean advancement to body coordination in kick/hip/spear and then on to EVF.

But if you are of a body type/shape which has less natural body balance and you try to advance too far by spearing too horizontal, most will find that there is a lot of struggle and they may not know why or how to improve, except to back off and start from the beginning. How impatient we humans are to improve!

9. Spear depth/width will also vary if you are drilling, or training, or racing. When you drill, you practice focal points and some of those will mean deeper spears. When you train, you will want to swim laps with different spear angles to get used to swimming with that style over time. When you race, you'll want to go for speed and hopefully you'll have prepared properly for a spear that will minimize drag and maximize your ability to generate speed.

Flexibility in spearing is just one of those elements of swimming that should be mastered as a goal.

10. Ultimately, practicing all depths (and widths) of spearing will prepare you for the varying conditions of open water racing, and you can remain relaxed in the ocean even while 3-6' waves are battering you. If you start getting distressed or panicking in the ocean because of rough conditions, you will waste energy doing something unfamiliar which is bad. Practice in the pool with different spear angles will help prepare you for the unexpected in open water.

11. People who swim don't all have the same goals. Some want to just enjoy being in the water and swim without feeling like they're going to sink and drown. Others want to experience the joy of swimming from Alcatraz to SF and say they did it. Still many others want to have the race of their life at the next Master's competition or Ironman. Dependent on your goals, you will find that your spear may also reflect what your ultimate swim goals are.

A deeper spear involves swimming in a more relaxed fashion while still retaining a lot of propulsion. If you want to enjoy swimming in a pool or lake for fitness or fun, then you may be just fine mastering TI with a deeper spear. And being like Michael Phelps isn't your goal so why bother trying to practice mimicking his form?

But if you want to have the race of your life, maximizing speed on the swim leg of your next Ironman, then maybe you'd want to try to master the minutiae that generate that last microsecond of speed, including those elements of spearing which accomplish that.

All in all, spearing is a much more complex topic than anyone can realize. I have found it worthwhile to explore the limits of that topic and think that TI provides the best place for that discovery and learning to be accomplished.

ADDITION FROM THE TI FORUMS:

I forgot about injury reduction/prevention. Whenever we raise our arms out of the range of straight down to some angle up but forward of the head, it puts stress on the shoulder joint. It's in a disadvantaged position relative to the muscles and tendons and if you try to flex there, the likelihood of injury is much higher.

So if you spear horizontally, the arms are in the "over the head" position and thus in an unfortunately disadvantaged position relative to our normal ranges of motion. Spearing deeper means your arms/shoulders are in more advantaged positions and our muscles and joints can flex with greater utility.

Overextending your arm out of the shoulder socket can also put stress on the shoulder while stroking. So spear, but if your shoulders are beginning to hurt, you may want to practice not extending so far. It reduces the total length of a stroke's pull but better that than wrecking your shoulder joint. However, not extending so far means you can focus on other aspects of your stroke to increase speed, like coordination of your body/hip rotation/2BK to add authority to each spear, versus extending your arm so far and injuring it.

Well, I finally got around to submitting my application to apply for TI coach training. It's been something I've been thinking about for a while and after talking to Coach Shinji about it, he was very supportive and thought I would make a good coach. So I went on the Total Immersion website, found the Become a TI coach page, and submitted my application.

Here is my application below - wish me luck in getting accepted and I hope to enter the coach training session in Coronado in September!

Briefly tell your "TI Story" and how you became interested in teaching TI.

I started triathlon back in 2002 with Team in Training. I was at a low point in my life and felt that nothing was moving forward, and I was learning nothing new in my career. So I tried something physical even though previous attempts at running had left me with sore knees and nothing but frustration. Still, I chose to get back not only into running but also swimming and biking.

When I started, I still had preconceived notions about training from my past adventures with running and weightlifting, and also from friends and family. I started with TnT training and that got me to the Pacific Grove Triathlon, but it also left me sore and in pain.

After Pacific Grove, I was determined to get myself into racing shape. I made a bunch of friends in the triathlon community in the Bay Area and they seemed to race numerous times a year with little or no injury. Certainly the frequency at which they raced was amazing to me; if triathlon and its individual elements were reportedly so destructive to the human body, then how were they able to race so often and be so fast?

In 2003, I took my first TI seminar in search of ways to increase my swim speed. I was regularly swimming Masters, but somehow, hearing the commands shouted by the coach really weren't effective enough - there wasn't enough individual attention at what I needed in particular. I also dug into several books on swimming, searching for those elusive secrets to allow me to swim faster.

The seminar was good, but it wasn't enough. It didn't reinforce what I was supposed to do after the seminar. I got a bit better but didn't get much better after that. I fell back into the patterns of my Masters class and my performance overall was a bit better, but wasn't consistently advancing beyond a certain point. I certainly didn't know how to improve from there except to cycle my arms faster.

I got through 6 Ironmans and a few Alcatraz crossings but my speed had plateaued, or even see sawed faster and slower. And through it all, my shoulders were getting sore from trying to cycle my arms faster for a longer period of time.

After my last Ironman in 2009, I had a new baby and decided not to race triathlon for a while. Due to the time requirements of bike training, I elected to solely focus on improving my running and swimming, both of which I felt I could achieve better results in shorter workout times than biking which can require hours on the road. However, without the stress for preparing for a race, I could just focus solely on mastering the details of swimming by drilling for as much and as long as I need to.

Around the same time, someone sent me a link to Shinji's Youtube video and that brought me back to TI:

I was further elated to find out that he coached individually and was located in the SF Bay area where I was! When I started Ironman training, I worked with a popular Bay area coach named Michael McCormack. I learned the value of having more individualized coaching versus working in a group. Mike didn't focus on swim training but now I found a TI coach in my backyard and was excited to engage Shinji and learn how to swim as graceful as he does,

I began with Shinji in late summer of 2009 and devoted my entire swim training to constant drilling, without the stress of race preparation. I was determined to train and retrain my nervous system to move like how Shinji moves, and also as directed by TI concepts. I discovered that my drilling tolerance was about 800-1200 yards, after which my brain, muscles, and nervous system got tired and refused to give in to swimming more. I threw my complete trust and devotion to training TI and rebuild my stroke from the ground up.

I saw Shinji monthly and in between I would swim 3-4x per week, picking certain drills and focal points and doing them over and over until I got to some level of mastery. Then I would work on another drill, or different focal points, or increase the difficulty by a little bit, like increasing the stroke rate on my tempo trainer. Slowly but surely over 2 years, and adding in TI Tune Up instruction from Dave Cameron, I was amazed to be swimming with such great ease but yet I was faster than before. Just the other day I jumped back into my Masters swim group and found that, even with rather sedate tempos, I was passing swimmers who were formerly much faster than me.

My personal experiences and successes with TI further reinforced these concepts in my brain:

1. Traditional thinking is often filled with outdated and/or wrong information on training.
2. Individualized coaching is exponentially better than group coaching. Everybody is different; one coaching method or style may work great for some but not for others.
3. We must continue to advance training as time goes on and integrate new discoveries and methods. We cannot remain static in the past.
4. Information that has been trapped within research journals and in the brains of elite coaches must be disseminated to the public in order to help advance their own ability to become better athletes.
5. The right technology can advance training exponentially.

Learning and growing with TI was immensely satisfying, but wasn't complete. A few years back, I underwent life coaching and discovered that not only did I enjoy learning and growing in life, but I also enjoyed teaching and mentoring as well.

As I advanced in TI, I saw others who were still training in the past, using methods that had been established for decades and were the accepted norms. However, I always saw them reach a certain point where they either got injured or they plateaued in their progress.

This motivated me to learn as much as I could about swimming, trying these techniques on myself and understanding them not just from a theoretical standpoint but from a practical, applied standpoint. Then, when I got to a level of mastery and understanding, my interest grew to want to teach these methods to the community and help spread the word about why the past was mired in training methods that didn't need to be only ways, but that they were only facets of a host of methods that can be employed in swim training.

I hope that through TI coach training, I can help be more official in my capacity to teach people to become better swimmers in a more structured manner versus being frustrated at their progress.

What aspects of the TI approach do you particularly identify with?

1. Attention to the subtle details and drilling to imprint
2. Training the nervous system instead of just strength and aerobic
3. Breaking with "tradition" and "dogma" to find the best teaching/training methods
4. Recognizing individuality in performance, goals, and skill development

Who do you feel best qualified to teach? What type of swimmer(s)?

Most likely beginners and intermediates, perhaps some advanced who are open to learning.

I am an Ironman triathlete (completed 6 Ironmans) and identify best with the triathlete crowd. I feel very familiar and comfortable with the issues surrounding the swim leg of triathlon and teaching on this subject.

I have concentrated mostly on freestyle up to this point, so teaching freestyle is where I'll begin.

What are your 3 highest-value reasons for swimming?

1. Learning something new and bringing it to some level of mastery
2. Challenging myself on what my true limits are, and not what other people say they are
3. Solving the neurological puzzle of my body, or mastering the control of my limbs even in water

What are your 3 most important swimming improvement goals.

1. To swim with grace, like Shinji
2. To get faster (of course!)
3. Flawless technique, symmetrical technique

My Demonstration Videos

Back in May, I met with Coach Shinji for a swim lesson. Going through some of the things I wanted to work on, I remarked that for some reason when I am spearing with my right hand, I seem to glide a lot faster/longer than when I spear with my left hand.

It had been annoying me to no end for months now. I would swim and watch the black tiles go by underneath me. As I speared with my right arm, stroking back with my left with a flick of my left foot in two beat kick, I would glide forward at a certain speed. Then my left arm would come forward and speared forward, again with right arm stroking back and flick of my right foot, I would glide forward again, but always travelling less distance and with less speed than when I speared right.

How annoying!

There would be times when I swam that there would be 1 or 2 perfect left spear strokes for each length and my glide on that side would be as fast and as far as the other side. But most of the time, I would glide more upon the right spear than for my left.

It's amazing to see the asymmetry in my swimming when I began to train Total Immersion. The two ways you could see this was: 1) Coaches Shinji and Dave Cameron could see this with their practiced eye, and 2) constant video taping of myself by me and watching painful videos of myself swimming in slow motion.

So experienced coaches first note the problem, but then after you leave the coaching session you need to keep practicing and have the ability to get feedback on your performance so that you're still practicing the new movement and not reverting back to the old problem. I videotaped myself swimming virtually every session for the last few weeks after the coaching sessions. I would critique myself, swear silently at myself for thinking I was improving a focal point but video evidence would tell me I barely made a nudge or I was still exhibiting the problem. Then, for the next swim workout, I would mentally adjust my focal points a little more and attempt them at that next workout.

This left side asymmetry was definitely a tough one.

The timing of my left arm spear, my body rotation, hip drive, and flick of my right foot in two beat kick were sufficiently off enough to make a noticeable difference between my left and right sides in propulsion. The problems were mostly in the timing of the left arm drop from high recovery into the water and how the hip is connected to that movement. Then the kick itself was not exactly at the right time to send the spear off with maximal effect.

How I worked the heck out of it and brought it to some level of being fixed:

1. I would swim very slowly and focused on using my hip to move the arm into the water, versus whatever I was doing before, which was more about leading the spear with my arm and shoulders.

2. At Shinji's suggestion, I then worked on focusing on my hips to time each stroke versus any other body part. Thus, I would focus on rotating my hips from side to side and let my arms do their normal thing. This increased my awareness of my hips' contribution to the stroke versus just the arms.

3. Dave Cameron made a great suggestion, which was to use a tempo trainer to help fix the coordination and time my two beat kick to each beep. In order to make a beep, I had to use my hips or else my body would just be moving too slow. Then, in order to time my kick to a beep, my side and arm spear had to be in the water before the beep so that my kick would be able to hit on that beep. This really helped even out the difference between my left and right sides.

It took many weeks of focus and drilling with the tempo trainer to start evening my two body sides out. Now I travel much further during my left spear than before, but it is still not up to quite as far and fast as I travel during my right spear.

It's amazing to see how my body has created such asymmetries over my lifetime. I start favoring my right side since I'm right hand dominant and it is so much more coordinated than my left. Now through incessant drilling and focus, coupled with a feedback system - my coaches and videotaping - allows me to address these differences and become a better athlete as a result.

A few weeks ago, I had another coaching session with the elusive Coach Shinji, who is flying all around the world promoting Total Immersion but I managed to catch him back in the Bay area!

This time I asked about Early Vertical Forearm, or EVF. I had thought I was trying to do EVF and wanted him to video me to see how it looked. But it turns out I wasn't even close!

When you look at this sequence of photos of Grant Hackett and Ian Thrope, you can see that their forearms are perfectly and fully vertical, well before the arm starts stroking back. Wow. I atempted to visualize that and put it in practice, but underwater video of me trying showed my technique nowhere near theirs.

Shinji taught me two very important things, which were:

1. My spear was way too low, even though it was not wrong. I was spearing at an angle down which is appropriate for typical Total Immersion style swimming. However, trying to get EVF when the elbow is so low is very hard, if not impossible because you have to lift the elbow up to get your forearm vertical and that is super hard, given the weight of water pressing down on the elbow. However, spearing low is great for balance in the water and keeping your hips up.

So I needed to spear straight ahead which is hard considering I had been spearing forward and down for months now, perfecting my balance and keeping my hips high. To spear horizontal, the feeling of the trajectory of my spear is almost that I'm spearing out of the water! Thankfully, my water balance was good such that my hips didn't drop when my spear was much higher.

Now that my spear was horizontal, my elbow was in a very high position and thus I could just bend my forearm down to EVF.

Theoretically. More on this later.

2. There are two surges of power in the actual stroke. The first surge happens when you bend the forearm down and the surge of power is in the forward part of the stroke. Then there is a lull as the arm moves back past the shoulder. The second surge happens when you engage the lats and press through to the end of the stroke.

This was hard to grasp; I had to work on other things first. At this point, I was hoping that once my form was looking good, that the 2 surges of power would happen naturally.

Then I went to a Total Immersion Tune Up with Dave Cameron who taught me another critical part of EVF. For details, check out his post High Elbow Catch Introduction. Basically, he showed me the sequence of moves to shift from recovery to spear and EVF. The video in that post shows the practice sequence - see it below.

You stand upright and one arm is speared while the other is preparing to recover. Then as your hip comes around (you take a small step to simulate), you keep the speared arm forward and bend the forearm to EVF position as you spear with the other arm.

I melded this with Shinji's tips, especially on spearing high and horizontal, while in the pool. I had two video cameras on me at the edge of the pool, videoing underwater and above water. I tried swimming fast but I felt that I was getting messy and that my elbow was dropping. However, I felt that I was getting a lot more power - I could get across 25y in only 13 strokes when it was taking me 14+ with regular TI style low spearing. But it was very tiring.

Shinji did tell me that he almost never does EVF style swimming unless he is sprinting or in a short race. Otherwise it is too tiring to maintain over long distance.

I tried slowing down a lot. This helped me focus on mimicking Dave's upright practice movement while lying in the water. I felt that I was making strides in practicing EVF as I was still reaching 25y in 13 strokes.

Analyzing the video showed a bit otherwise - I certainly did not look like Grant Hackett or Ian Thrope in that post! I thought I was spearing horizontal, but I was still angled downward. I did not bend my forearm down early enough as my nervous system is too programmed to start stroking. I need to keep my upper arm horizontal as my forearm drops down and resist the temptation to stroke before my forearm is vertical. I also need to turn my forearm/elbow so that my elbow is pointing up - this is a move I can do on dryland but I have not noticed happening in the water as too much is happening. But turning my arm like that means I can bend my forearm downward. Still, something interesting was happening as I could get more stroking force ahead of my shoulder whereas before there was not as much and I could get across 25y in at least 1-2 less strokes.

More work to be done here for sure, but at least now I know the secret of EVF!

I once started focusing on getting my Strokes Per Length (SPL) down as far as possible. I once did 7 strokes many times for 25y. But it was a very, very slow 25y. As I tried to up my speed and stroke rate, I lost the 7 strokes almost immediately. I asked Coach Shinji about this, and he told me that while low SPL is a great goal, it's probably not something to obsess about at least not in that way.

He then told me that constructing a tempo vs. SPL matrix on a spreadsheet would be a better idea. You establish baseline SPLs at a given stroke rate using the tempo trainer, and then that would set goals for you to try to beat at each tempo. Speed would then come naturally, or else how would you do a length with one less stroke at a given tempo?

Earlier last year, mine looked like (tempo in seconds, SPL for 25y):

Tempo (sec)	SPL 25y
2.6	9
2.5	9
2.4	9
2.3	10
2.2	10
2.1	10
2.0	10
1.9	11
1.8	11
1.7	11
1.6	12
1.5	12
1.4	13
1.3	14
1.2	14
1.1	15
1.0	16
0.9	16
0.8	16

If you've ever swam at >2.0s tempo, you'll know that this is quite painful to keep balance but a great practice to show that you have awesome balance in the water.

Each swimmer will have some sort of SPL that is dependent on their swimming skill and body type/shape. Achieving the 4-5 strokes that Michael Phelps reportedly does for 25y probably isn't possible for guys who aren't as tall, or as skilled, as he is!

When I practice at these tempos and compare the SPL results to my matrix, I sometimes see efficiency drops. This can happen between days, and between changes in focal points and technique practice, especially if I'm tired or extra tight, or my concentration for some reason isn't as good on some days as others. When my efficiency drops, I usually go back to drilling basics with single focal points and then move back to whole stroke to see if my efficiency comes back. If not, I may just get out of the pool or else I risk imprinting bad habits.

More matrix notes:

1. Establish your base SPLs and their tempos and record them.

2. You can record more granular tempos if you like but I think the .1 and .05 steps provide enough granularity for this exercise, even as .01 steps can have positive effects on neuromuscular adaptation to higher tempos.

It's just that who has time during a workout to go through all ranges of tempos at .01 steps? But of course you can focus only on a narrow range during any workout and just record that, even at .01 sec tempo increments.

3. Notice where your SPL jumps by 1 or 2 when go down .05/.1 seconds. This is evidence that your form is breaking down. This is also a great tempo point to drill at and around further because you need to get your form better.

4. Record each time you can remember to, your tempos and times. Also record your mental/physical condition. Try to find patterns over time on your physical and mental condition as it affects your swimming.

5. The ultimate goal is to know how fast you're swimming instinctively due to your swim tempo and to develop gears in which you can shift to, in order to cruise, to rest a bit, to accelerate past others, or to up the effort during the latter part of a race when others are tiring and getting slower.

Terry Laughlin talks about winning races by being able to maintaining speed over long race distances. Remember, Terry isn't necessarily the fastest on sprints but he can maintain high cruising speed over the length of a race when others start to falter on form due to fatigue!

Total Immersion uses focal points and incessant drilling of focal points to imprint the correct movement habits for better swimming.

In the last few months, I focused on these focal points:

1. Upon recovery, my elbow lead needs to come more forward. In my videos I see that sometimes my recovery is messy and my hand comes forward first.

2. Dave ran us through a lap focusing on a slight hip drive with the spear. This really added some power to my spear.

3. We worked on the spear-kick-stroke back timing. Dave had a great drill where he made us wait until the last possible moment to kick, with the recovering arm entering the water up to the elbow by the time the kick happens. When the spear was almost extended, then the other lead arm catches and strokes back.

4. Shinji has shown me how to generate a flat back. Now I need to drill with this focal point to figure out how to maintain a flat back while swimming.

My workouts would look like this:

200 W/U
4x50 with RI to full recovery ~20-40 seconds with each 4x50 on a single focal point:

1. Bringing the elbow all the way forward into true elbow led recovery.
2. Modified catch up, per focal point 3 above.
3. Adding the hip drive to spear
4. Relax the forward shoulder as recovering arm comes forward to about shoulder point, before spear.
5. Practice swimming with flat back

It would only be about 800-1000 yards and that's it. I would do this quality swim 3-5 times a week in order to work solely on imprinting the right habits without wiping myself out so that I would get too tired to swim properly.

Then I started thinking about how I could swim with better technique overall, so I started playing with doing drills with more than one focal point.

So I began my drill sequences as above, but then I would challenge myself with focusing not only on the current focal point, but also on every preceding focal point too. For example, after doing focal point 1 for 4x50 alone, for the next 4x50, I would focus on both focal points 1 and 2. Then the next set of 4x50, I would focus on three focal points: 1, 2, AND 3.

This was succeedingly harder as I added one and then 2 more focal points. At about 3 was my limit of how many focal points I could focus on during any one lap of the pool. But through practice, I was able to segment my brain to be able to focus on more than one and juggle them together and make sure I was performing each well, but all during a given swim.

Of course, this was also an expression of my mastery of those focal points, so adding focal points as I became more proficient at performing them became easier because they were imprinting. For totally new focal points, I would most likely have to go back to focusing on that one particular point in order to begin imprinting it.

I queried the Total Immersion forums on this issue, and Terry answered my post. I also liked his version of the successive addition of focal points, which was to grab a few focal points for a given swim set, and then focus on one point for a given set of laps, and then switch to the next point and so on.

Still I think there is value in both Terry's method and mine, although I think that mine is tougher on the brain at least initially. Most people I meet don't have the mental ability (yet) to maintain a single focal point for any length of time! But as I've found, ingraining new habits even requires practice of ingraining/imprinting, as well as the actual imprinting itself.

To add to my fun, I'm now working on even more focal points:

4. Slip through the hole made in the water by my spear.

5. On the stroke back, exit my arm at an angle forward, and no swiping the water backward.

6. Complete a catch with completely vertical forearm and forward of the head.

7. Let the body rotation pull arm back and make less of a conscious effort to stroke back the arm strongly.

I'm looking forward to my next coaching session with Coach Shinji, and also the next Total Immersion Tune-Up!

A week ago, I was excited to receive my new FINIS Swimsense watch in the mail. Originally, I was excited about the Swimovate watch, which would record my swim workouts and give me some ability to remember the intervals that I swam and how they performed.

However, in using the Swimovate, I was disappointed in a few things and delighted about others:

1. The watch doesn't need any calibration to my stroke thankfully. Some of the older models required you to swim certain strokes with it to calibrate it.

2. The watch loses count of laps on occasion. This is very annoying when it somehow doesn't register a turn at a wall.

3. The watch cannot be used for distance per stroke training and doesn't like it when you swim under 6 (one arm) strokes; it sometimes thinks you never got to the end of a lap.

4. The watch's user interface is a bit convoluted and for some reason difficult to navigate the menu system. I have often made mistakes trying to get into the menu to see a previous workout. I have also sometimes erased its memory by accident.

5. All in all, I usually just use the watch to get a sense for my laps when I workout so that I know approximately how many sets and laps I've swam.

6. The newer Swimovate allows you to save workouts on your PC. This is great. However, I'm on a Mac so I can't comment on whether the new version of the watch has improved on its interface because that's about when I heard about the Swimsense and decided to order that.

7. Annoyingly, you have to actively tell the watch that you've finished a workout and then it will save it. If you let the watch time out and go back to clock mode, it will NOT save a workout. So you have to press the Swim button and hold it for 2 seconds in order for it to come out of Swim mode and save your workout. I hate this - there have been a few times where I got out of the pool and forgot to hold the Swim button for 2 seconds in order to end the workout and it did not save it.

Upon playing with the Swimsense, I've found it to be a much better product than the Swimovate. Some comments:

1. Even though both the Swimsense and Swimovate both have 4 buttons, the Swimsense's menu navigation is much more intuitive than the Swimovate.

2. Like the Swimovate, it is annoying when you have to actively tell the Swimsense that the workout is over. Exitting out will NOT save a workout. But in the case of the Swimsense, you have to Stop and then Reset to save the workout. In both cases, I think this is really bad. The Garmin 305 GPS watch, for example, saves the workout no matter what you do; if you turn the watch off, it just saves everything that you did and assumes that was a workout. This is a much better interface behavior than defaulting to not saving.

3. The upload of data is via an Adobe AIR application, which works both on the Mac and PC, to the FINIS Swimsense website. Originally, you could only upload for free but then it would delete your workout after a few minutes. In order to save workouts, you have to pay $9.99/month. Then it would save your uploads forever (or at least until you stopped paying). After some feedback, this has changed now to giving everyone the ability to save every workout. I think FINIS is smart to have made this change.

4. The graph analysis of the workouts is excellent. If you swim a set with multiple laps, you can see the data for the entire set, PLUS you see the data for each individual lap as well, with time and distance. Other graphs you get are Stroke Count breakdown for the entire workout, Pace in time for each interval, Stroke Count Over Time for each interval, SWOLF Score, Stroke Rate and Distance/Stroke.

Each interval is color coded for the type of stroke: free, breast, fly, back and mixed. When you mouseover the graph, there is additional data that pops up on the data points.

5. Some weirdness appears when the time is shown with a decimal point, but I think it should be a colon, ie. so 1.40 is not really 1 and 4/10 of a minute, which is really 1 minute and 24 seconds, but rather 1 minute and 40 seconds. I've mentioned this to the FINIS people and they are looking into it.

6. A calendar interface is also presented there so you can go back and view a workout on a given day. Very nicely done here.

7. So far, the Swimsense has NEVER lost a lap like the Swimovate. It's ability to determine when I turn at a wall has not failed yet.

8. Also, unlike the Swimovate, the Swimsense doesn't lose a lap when I go under 6 strokes for distance per stroke training. It records it correctly. However, it is not recognizing my stroke correctly since I was swimming free but it thinks I swam breast. This may be that my stroke rate was so slow that it got confused. I've also mentioned this to the FINIS people.

UPDATED
9. They also display the stroke rate on the site which is really cool. However, we TI swimmers use a tempo trainer which shows our tempo per arm; the data display is for a single arm's stroke, which is the arm on which the Swimsense is sitting on. Thus, you have to divide that stroke rate by 2 to get a tempo trainer rate for a single arm.
/UPDATED

All in all, I am very impressed with the FINIS Swimsense. I would highly recommend this product over that of the Swimovate. It's more expensive but it seems to be of better technology and the analysis tools on the website are superb. It is a welcome addition to my collection of high tech training tools!

This all started after my last session with Coach Shinji. I had been working with him since July of 2009 and been spending all my time with a combination of drilling, swimming, and tempo trainer work. But something still bugged me.

I would watch videos like this one of Ryan Cochrane at the Commonwealth Games:

Man, can you see the bow wave generated by these Olympic quality swimmers? Of course, they are also moving so much faster than me.

I would also watch Coach Shinji's videos like this one, of his 9 stroke for 25 yards:

I found out later that his tempo was 1.6 seconds to swim 9 strokes. Of course, after I found out, I put my tempo trainer at 1.6 seconds and swam 25 yards at 12 strokes. He was, for the same tempo, 3 strokes more efficient than me!

Comparing to Coach Shinji was easier than a comparison with Olympics class swimmers because of physical similarities between Shinji and me. We are of comparable height and build, versus most Olympics class swimmers who are much taller than me. But yet, despite Shinji's height and body type being a lot closer to mine than me to a Ryan Cochrane, he was able to achieve a 3 stroke efficiency over mine! I think that other more subtle body differences may make him more naturally more efficient, but I think I should be able to still get much closer to his stroke count than 3 apart!

In this video, I saw other differences between what TI has been teaching me:

Most notably for me was the spearing arm being so horizontal rather than spearing more downward which is what we are taught in the beginning. But yet, Terry Laughlin in all his videos would teach and demostrate a much deeper spear. Why was there a difference?

Overall, questions were forming in my mind all based on the fact that I was learning TI and thinking that I was performing a lot of the TI concepts very well, but yet I was not getting noticeably faster; nor was I achieving more efficiency than my current situation.

Last Thursday, I had a session with Coach Shinji. I armed myself with a printout of questions and got there early to discuss it with him before I jumped into the pool. Here was the list of questions:

1. Acceleration too low - spear + stroke back needs more force or faster?

2. Why no bow wave? How to get bow wave?

3. Angle of spear at extension
a. Dave Cameron video shows him nearly horizontal
b. Shinji is slightly angled down
c. Should I be deeper to get hips up?

4. When to relax hand for catch? I feel water resistance against back of hand if dropped too early.

5. Flat back?

6. Shinji's hips break the water surface. Where are mine?

7. Recovering elbow for Shinji is very forward before dropping into water. But I feel no pull on lats at full forward position. Should I turn shoulder downward as it comes forward?

8. Is my head coming up? Should it be deeper?

9. How angled should my body be? Is it angled enough?

Shinji took me through every one of my queries. He micro-adjusted my stroke bit by bit until I started swimming more like him, Dave Cameron, and ultimately was able to produce a bow wave, albeit a small one.

Some of the micro-adjustments:

1. The head must be higher than where I was holding it. My head was totally submerged by 2-3 inches and this was my attempt at keeping my hips high in the water. The back of my head should just be touching or slightly breaching the water. Cutting through the water in this position creates the bow wave generated by elite swimmers.

By the way a higher head made it easier to breathe also. With my head so deep before, I had to lift my head up and/or turn more to breathe.

2. I had to change the angle of the spear to be more parallel with the surface of the water and thus more horizontal. When the angle of the spear dips down, there is resistance against the water for every bit of surface area exposed to the frontal direction. A horizontal spear presents minimal surface area to the frontal direction and minimal drag.

3. As the recovering arm comes forward and reaches the shoulder, the spearing/lead arm's shoulder should begin to relax and start to dip downward as the recovering arm begins its spear into the water. The dip downward is also the beginning of the catch.

4. Spear-kick-stroke back timing was very off. I needed to keep the glide and be patient as the recovering arm enters the water and the spear is going forward - then I kick. The spearing arm then begins the catch and strokes back.

5. The spear and stroke back do not happen together at the same rate. The spear happens first, and the stroke back happens almost as the spear is ending and potentially you are catching water so much that you cannot move the stroking arm back as fast as the spearing arm is going forward.

6. I was arching my back too much and need to have a flat back. A flat back provides a more streamlined body shape and has less drag. This is achieved by rotating the pelvis forward. The feeling I have when this happens is more that there is a arching of my lower back although that is not the action to be performing as you don't want to arch your whole body and your legs start bending down. You need to hold a horizontal body while flattening your back. Shinji tells me that all elite swimmers hold this position naturally for the entire swim. Visually it can also look like your gut has sucked in, but that is just what it looks like when they are flattening their backs it is not actually someone sucking in their stomach.

7. I need to bring the elbow more forward before it goes down. We have practiced other entry points for the spearing hand after recovery, like at the ear, at the eyes, and at the forehead. Dragging the elbow lead as far forward as possible, and as fast as possible after the stroke back, keeps my weight shift forward and prevents my hips from dropping.

So now I have the basics to transform my stroke to one that is more like more advanced swimmers like Shinji and Dave.

After all this, Shinji then tells me that swimming is a constantly changing activity. He runs me through testing many positions:

a. Spearing deep, medium, horizontal depths.
b. Recovering arm enters water at ear, eyes, and forehead.
c. Recovering arms enter water at wide, medium, and narrow (near head).

This is because in the pool it is an optimal swimming condition. There are lane lines separating swimmers. There are no waves or currents to knock you around. So you can develop an optimal swimming position for this nice stable situation.

When you are out in open water, all bets are off. Add to that, during a race where there are many competitors all swimming and knocking around you, some kicking you or climbing over you, you need to adjust those 3 positions constantly due to environmental conditions as well as your body's energy and fatigue level.

So we learn with a bit more drag to find balance in the water first, fix our dropping hips, and be able to relax as we glide every stroke. We master the basics and burn those into our bodies first. Then comes the revelations that I had this Thursday.

After going through all this, Shinji then tells me there are about 4-5 people who have progressed in TI to this stage, and that there are 20-30 in Japan who are working now on adjusting their stroke for speed. I state this not to brag about how I've progressed in TI training, but rather that I find it interesting that TI has evolved its training to take people through basic work and then now people who stick with it and have reached a plateau working with the typical TI drills can now progress further into swimming faster.

This is assuming they want to; reaching a level of proficiency with basic TI techniques results in a very amazing zen-like calm swimming and a fluency with the water that is very enjoyable.

But now they are developing teaching methods and protocols to take those who want to even further.

Adding to this revelation, I also attended the Total Immersion Tune-Up at SF State on Saturday, headed by Dave Cameron. With Dave's comments, I can now add some other focal points to work on over the next few months:

1. Upon recovery, my elbow lead needs to come more forward. In my videos I see that sometimes my recovery is messy and my hand comes forward first.

2. Dave ran us through a lap focusing on a slight hip drive with the spear. This really added some power to my spear.

3. We worked on the spear-kick-stroke back timing. Dave had a great drill where he made us wait until the last possible moment to kick, with the recovering arm entering the water up to the elbow by the time the kick happens. When the spear was almost extended, then the other lead arm catches and strokes back.

4. Shinji has shown me how to generate a flat back. Now I need to drill with this focal point to figure out how to maintain a flat back while swimming.

It's nice to know that Total Immersion is progressing and evolving. More than ever, I am motivated to keep practicing, drilling, and progressing in my swimming skills and look forward to exploring the advanced training of Total Immersion.

This morning I raced the Alcatraz: Swim with the Centurions Race which was an Alcatraz crossing that ends at Aquatic Park in San Francisco.

I made it to the beach in 44:30. it was a mediocre time for me, about the same as the other times I've done it. If there is one thing I've learned about swimming Alcatraz, it's never the same each time I swim it (this is number 13).

First, it was choppy out there. Not really big waves, but they seemed to be a lot of little ones which kept rocking my body back and forth. I almost preferred bigger waves than these lots of smaller ones.

Second, they gave us bad current information. They told us that there was a flood (the water flows into SF bay) which would switch to ebb (water flows back out of the SF Bay) during our swim. Funnily enough, another swimmer told me they looked up the currents in a tide table book and it said that the switch would happen at noon, which was much later than when we would finish. According to that info, we would be swimming in a flood the whole time.

However, the race directors told us that there was a switch. Knowing this, I and many other swimmers headed for the correct landmark which would end up sweeping us towards the opening at Aquatic Park when the flood would end and the ebb would start.

But the ebb never came which was exactly what the tide book predicted! So I kept wondering why I was ending up so far left of the opening. The kayakers out there kept telling me to aim more to the other side. I finally understood that the race directors gave us bad info.

This cost me a lot of time, hence my mediocre swim time. Once I got into the calmer waters of Aquatic Park, I headed fairly quickly to the finish line.

Notes on use of Total Immersion techniques out there:

1. Boy, I needed to swim more with my wetsuit in rough water. When I got out there I wasn't used to the extra buoyancy, and I had to get used to floating higher. This, with the choppy water, kept me from syncing my 2BK at all until I got close to the opening of aquatic park.

2. Because the choppy water was messing around with me, I breathed every other stroke to the right, which probably slowed me down but I had increased my effort (ie. stroke rate) to try to compensate for lack of a good 2BK to add to each body rotation.

3. Once I got into the calmer waters of Aquatic Park, I thankfully wasn't wiped out aerobically so I settled into breathing every 4 strokes and by that time I had got the hang of syncing my 2BK to my stroke and I think I moved fairly smoothly and quickly to the finish line.

4. With the choppy waters, I thought it was really hard to know if I was getting the right angle of entry for each arm/hand. I felt like I was barely using my body at all in the stroke. This was much much better once i got into Aquatic Park.

5. My coach Shinji's tip about relaxing the catch hand at end of the spear really helped. I seemed to have burned that into my nervous system because even when I felt like I was fighting the choppy water I never felt like my forearms and arms were getting tired from the extra effort of stroking with more force. After I got out of the water, my arms still weren't tired at all!

6. Turning my head with my body for breathing really helped some neck tightness problems and I felt no tightness there as well. I also think it helped prevent some chafing around my neck due to the collar of the wetsuit.

I think that more time swimming with a wetsuit would be good, but not just in calm waters. I think I need to practice more in choppy water and see if I can maintain good TI technique in those conditions. It is obvious to me that in calmer open waters and with wetsuit, I got the hang of it and it wasn't such a problem. It seemed that practicing without a wetsuit in the few times I was in somewhat rough water in Hawaii and on the Jersey shore didn't help this fact at all since I was swimming with what I thought was decent TI technique, but this fell apart when I had my wetsuit on.

Two weeks ago I received my GoPro Video camera in the mail and was very excited to see if it could help me videotape my swimming at the pool. I bought both the standard lens and wide angle lens as forums on the TI website had noted that both lenses may be useful depending on what I wanted to video. I also bought the suction cup assembly assuming that it would suction onto the side of a pool. The camera plus suction cup looks like this:

It's nicely sealed in a watertight case which is waterproof to 100 feet.

Taking the camera to the pool, I found some constraints.

1. Depending on which pool you go to, they may have some rules regarding taking pictures or video because of privacy concerns. I go between two YMCAs and unfortunately they have strict rules on videoing. Thankfully, the lifeguards were pretty cool to let me take some video as long as I was alone in the lane.

2. The tile on the side of the pool may prohibit the suction cup sticking properly onto it. If the tiles are small, it could let air into the suction cup and thus, it won't stick.

3. Lighting is critical. Since the camera's sensor is pretty small, the more light the better. So on a sunny day, the video can capture me getting a lot farther down the pool before my body becomes undiscernable. See the comparison on the following two videos. This video was taken at an outdoor pool on a bright sunny day:

You can see my strokes for many times before I disappear into the distance.

This video, for comparison, was taken at an indoor pool with relatively poor lighting.

You can see how the water is much murkier looking in the second video. Unfortunately, I don't get many strokes down the lane before I disappear so I can't study my stroke for too many cycles which sucks.

By the way, I editted both videos and cut out the parts of the video where I disappear off into the distance and you can't see me any more.

4. The video camera should be pointed down the middle of the lane and/or you should swim directly towards it versus off to a side. In the first video, I was able to find a place to stick the camera such that I could swim directly at it. It provides the best view of both sides of my body when stroking. In the second video, the pool side had small tiles, with the exception of where the lane number was and that tile was big enough to put the suction cup on. However, the big tile was offset to the middle of the lane and swimming towards it not directly meant I was losing some view of one side's strokes.

5. By the way, being alone in the lane is pretty important. Otherwise, somebody else swimming there might inadvertantly knock your GoPro off the wall if they're not careful. Certainly, you'll capture a random person on video too.

Watching these videos, I was really able to study the problems in my stroke.

Here is what I learned:

1. Over the last few weeks, I drilled my left arm entry intensely to follow a wider track, since it felt like it was entering way too close to my head relative to my right arm. However, I did feel that my right arm was moving on a wider track. Looking at the video, I saw that my left arm had indeed began entering on a wider track:

This was good and I was happy that my drilling produced the desired result. However, in studying my right side, which I had assumed was doing OK, I noticed that the entry occurred OVER my head.

This was extremely weird and unexpected! At least my right arm ended up in the right place after entry, but it should not be entering into the water OVER my head but it should be further out like my left arm entry.

2. On both sides, upon the end of the spear of my arm forward, it then drops:

In studying swimming videos of Coach Shinji and also Dave Cameron, their speared arms never drop! I believe this robs me of some forward momentum as the deeper my arm is, the more water resistance there is (according to some literature I've read about the effect of the stroking arm's depth).

3. When I swim, I use the two beat kick. On my left side with left arm stroking backward, I kick only with my left leg. Looking on the video, on my right side with right arm stroking backward, I sometimes do a scissor kick and kick with both legs! This can be seen somewhat in this screen grab, although if you watch the first video again, you will see it in motion:

Here my right arm is stroking back and my right leg has kicked, but my left leg is cocked back and just about to kick. This is bad! My proper kicking leg is imparting rotational force to my body turn, which adds force to my stroke backward. However, if I kick my other leg while my body is turning, it resists the force of my body turn and making it weaker, thus making my stroke back also weaker. I believe this is why my left arm spear/right arm stroke back results in lesser forward momentum than my other side; I can see it when I swim where it results in me traveling further on one side but not the other!

I think this is a result of either or both of poor balance on that side and/or just my nervous system being programmed to kick twice for some reason on that side.

Absorbing all this, I jumped into the pool this last week and attempted to correct all of these. The first thing I noticed that was that my left arm spear/right arm stroke back resulted in more forward momentum, now that I focused on only kicking my right leg. Awesome!

Less successfully, I wasn't able to move my right arm outward as much. I think this will require drilling more at slower stroke rates to fully correct. I seemed to be able to do this at lower stroke rates (I was using my tempo trainer here), but when I got to faster tempos it broke down pretty quickly and I could sense I was back to my old habit of entering OVER my head (so weird...!).

Video analysis is so enlightening and I am now bringing my GoPro always to the pool, in hopes that I can find some accomodating lifeguards who will let me video. I also want to test in another indoor pool which is lighted much better to see how the GoPro performs. I have not tried the wide angle version either, but fear that the distortion of the lens may make swimming analysis difficult. In the forums, someone noted that it was good for taking a longer view of swimming from the side, since the camera is stationary. I will have to try that to see if that is worthwhile. Otherwise, I will just use my wide angle GoPro for cool biking and running shots!

These last few weeks I've been really focused on retraining my nervous system. Why? Because I was working with Coach Shinji and feeling good about my swimming...until I started doing some detail comparisons of my swimming videos with those of Shinji and on the Easy Freestyle DVD.

UGH!

I had a major problem with what I call "hand lead recovery". It should be elbow led, not hand led! At times it makes me look like I'm pawing at the water. I also saw that my left arm was clearly doing something different than my right arm. It's entry was much closer to my head and I really needed to be swimming on wider tracks. I think this also affected my ability to use gravity to assist the hand/arm drop into the water as it spears forward. With a focus on noticing what was different, I swam a few laps and really discovered that my swimming was not symmetrical at all.

At this point, I had to do something about this before I ingrained bad habits. It was time to retrain my nervous system before I had to build for the Alcatraz 100 swim in October.

So I went back to basics. I pulled up Chapter 5 of the Easy Freestyle DVD and concentrated on drilling the elbow circle, ear hops, drawing straight lines front to back to front, and then used the Zen switch drill to practice all this. (To know what these mean, check out the excellent TI DVD, Easy Freestyle DVD).

I spent about a month drilling. My typical workout for this period netted out to about 1000-1200y on a 25y pool and looked like this:

200-400 warm up with typical TI drills:
2x25 Superman glide
2x25 R and L side one arm skate
2x25 R and L side one arm under switch
2x25 under switch swim continuous

2x25 R and L side one arm zen switch to pause, raise elbow to water surface
2x25 R and L side one arm zen switch to pause, raise hand to water surface
2x25 full stroke, one stroke only, start with R or L side, repeat
2x25 full stroke, two strokes only, start with R or L side, repeat

200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, elbow at surface of water

200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, middle of forearm at surface of water

200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, wrist at surface of water

200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, fingertips at surface of water

200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, full stroke

for the last series of 200y sets, I would focus on elbow circling, drawing straight lines front/back, focus on the position of my left arm as it moved forward and then let gravity drop the arm down into the water and forward to spear.

Some observations:

1. It was interesting to note how different the feeling was between having the hand/arm touching the water versus above the water. The water served to anchor my brain's perception of where my hand was. When it was out of the water, I immediately felt awkward; I had to train my brain to know where my left arm was in space, as it is moving during swimming! Over a period of a month, I slowly got better at this until I felt like I could, for the most part, repeatedly put my arm in the same place every time as it came forward.

2. With my head down, I would peek at where my arms would spear to. Consistently, my left arm would actually spear almost straight forward whereas my right arm would spear slightly outside, which is where I want it for wide track swimming. I discovered that I had to mentally spear what was perceived as "extra wide" and when I did that, my left arm would actually end up where I wanted it to be. I also realized that my front deltoid and pectoral muscle (specifically the pec minor as this is where my ART guy would constantly work out tightness there) had a twinge of tightness when I speared "extra wide". I think that a lack of flexibility in my left arm in that area has caused my spear to end up more straight than wide.

3. Coach Shinji would always tell me that my left arm was being thrown more forward and I needed to enter the water closer to my ear. So I had to mentally bring back my entry point closer to my ear.

4. My spearing momentum was very weak and added little to my forward propulsion. This was especially apparent on my left arm, and even worse during when I took a breath when I would literally come to a stop in the water! So now as I enter, I would let gravity take my arm and drop it into the water so that it added momentum to the spear forward. I also had to practice this while taking a breath so that my momentum while turning to breathe would not disappear.

Slow swimming was key here. I got rid of the need to swim fast and just focused on form only. I would stroke slowly back versus with force and found that as my form improved, I was actually moving forward quite fast and smoothly even though I used little force. I definitely now could see what TI coaches were saying in that it is amazing to see how little force one needs to use to swim fluidly and with some speed.

My goal was to first retrain my nervous system using drills and slow swimming. Once my brain got better at telling where my left arm was in space, and I was hitting the "mail slot" on my left side better, as well as having significant improvement on elbow led recovery and not arm led, I started doing reps of 50y or 100y with the tempo trainer. Now I would proceed to retraining my nervous system to repeat the habits at higher speeds.

My strategy was to use the tempo trainer to slowly bring my new habits into ever faster repetitions, or faster arm cycle tempos. I used the tempo trainer in two ways:

1. I used it to determine where my nervous system was at, for a given workout day.

2. Then I would use it to inch my way to a faster tempo and then reinforce the habit at those faster tempos, usually at some tempo limit I had for that day where I could maintain the good form, and also up to the point at which I get tired and when my form starts to fall apart.

After my typical 200-400y warmup, I would then do 100s of Zen switch with arm rising higher each time until I hit full stroke swimming. Then I started using the tempo trainer. I determined that my slow swimming was about at a 1.6 sec tempo. At the first workout, I started just swimming at 1.6 sec tempo to get used to using the tempo trainer again, and syncing my swimming cycle to a beep.

The next workout I started determining at what tempo limit my newfound habits would fall apart. I would swim 100s at 1.6 sec tempo, then drop by .5 sec tempo until I found the fastest tempo where my form would start to fall apart while attempting to keep that tempo.

The first time I tried this, I got to 1.4 sec tempo where for each arm cycle it felt messy and awkward to maintain form. Then I just backed up .5 sec to 1.45 sec where it felt OK. I then proceeded to do what Terry Laughlin did, which was to do laps at .01 sec tempo faster each time until I hit 1.4 sec. Amazingly, if I approached my tempo limit by inching up to it, my nervous system was able to adapt and I could swim with decent form at what seemed to be the tempo at which my nervous system had a limit that day. After inching up to it, I would do a few more laps to reinforce the sensations and habits until I got tired and my form would start to falter again. At this point I would get out of the pool.

Week over week, I was able to get to faster tempos. The next time I started at 1.5 sec and repeated the same descend by .5 sec until I found my new limit (at 1.3 sec) and then backed up and inched towards it again and did some more repeats. The workout after that I started at 1.4 sec and made it to 1.2 seconds. At 1.2 seconds I seemed to need more time to reinforce my nervous system with good form, so I did that workout again.

Also, depending on my mood, how much time I had, and how my body felt, I would sometimes do laps of 50y instead of 100s due to those constraints. But no matter, I was still improving and progressing.

My next step is to do 2 things:

1. Continue form and nervous system training at faster tempos down to .8 sec.

2. Lengthening my laps from 50-100y to 200 and beyond, in preparation for the Alcatraz 100. This would also inevitably mean my total workout length would increase, and I hope to get to 3000-4000y in a workout as I get closer to race day.

Key learnings here are:

1. It takes time and patience to retrain the nervous system but it can be done. I had to give up on being paranoid about not having enough fitness for the Alcatraz 100 in order to find time to do this.

2. Detail analysis, focus and attention to subtle differences during video analysis really helped me figure out what I was doing poorly.

3. Singular focus on a training element helps reinforce that particular habit. But I also would keep in the back of my mind all the other things I should be doing as I focused. This also required practice but is really useful so that my form wouldn't get messy in other places while I was focusing on one thing.

4. Using the tempo trainer to inch my way to faster tempos is an amazing technique for retraining my nervous system.

TI coach Dave Cameron posted this amazing series of photos analyzing the freestyle stroke of Grant Hackett and Ian Thrope.

Two things I wanted to point out which were very interesting to me:

First, in pictures 5 and 6, it's unbelievable to see how high their elbows are on the catch. I tried this and it seemed kind of awkward, and I think ultimately I probably dropped my elbow much more than these swimmers did. I also didn't feel the full advantage afforded by such a high elbow catch. I hope to work on this more as the beginning TI drills we tend to spear to a certain low position, versus spearing more horizontal and then catching from there, which tends to be something we work on after we get past the beginning drills.

Second, in 14, the text says that in a picture of Hackett that he presses his chest down while breathing. Breathing up to this point for me has always seemed to stop me dead during that moment. So I began trying to press the armpit/chest right at the moment of breathing and some interesting things happened:

1. At the moment of pressing, my head sank very fast and there was only a small moment when I could take my breath before water encircled my sideways facing mouth. This was in contrast to being simply turned and I had more time to take a breath.

2. When I consciously pressed at the breathing moment, my hips rode higher and my momentum was preserved much better, meaning that I still had forward movement versus coming to a stop during the breath.

I hope to see more of these analyses of top swimmers. It's so instructive to see how they move through the water.

Friday I had a breakthrough of tremendous proportions in my swimming. Since my last post, I've been focusing on my stroke, specifically my arm recovery, as it has been something that hasn't felt right.

So my typical workout, once I embarked on this focus to fix the problems in my stroke, looks like:

200-300y W/U w/ drills:

200y if I get the shallow end of my pool where I can stand:
2x25 Superman glide
2x25 Alternating R/L arm skate
2x25 Alternating R/L arm underswitch skate
2x25 Underswitch swim continuous

300y if I get the deep end where I can't stand:
100y swim easy
200y underswitch swim

4x50 Zen switch, arm submerged to elbow, continuous swim

4x50 Zen switch, arm submerged to middle forearm, continuous swim

4x50 Zen switch, arm submerged to wrist, continuous swim

4x50 Zen switch, dragging fingertips along surface

4x50 Swim w/ focus on various arm recovery drill points

The points I had focused on were:

1. Elbow led recovery, via circling the elbow, per Easy Freestyle DVD Chapter 5.

2. Elbow led recovery, by having a straight elbow path, from back to front entry, also per Easy Freestyle DVD Chapter 5. On my left, my elbow is tracing some sort of arc and ends up too close to the centerline. It even causes my body to arc sometimes. In feeling, I attempted to actually trace path that is straight, but angled towards the outside. This probably meant in actuality that my left arm was moving straight forward even though my brain thought it was going forward straight before.

The secondary points I kept a mental check on were:

1. Releasing at the end of the pull back. Tension builds on the stroke back, but then I release it all and relax for the elbow led recovery.

2. Stroking towards the outside, almost at 45 degree angle away from body as Coach Shinji puts it, although I think it just ends up being less than that. I think the important thing is to not end up alongside or close to the body.

3. Wide tracks to swim on, versus being too narrow.

4. Setting up the entry around where the opposite arm's elbow is, and then letting gravity take the arm into the water and then spearing forward.

5. Upon entering with my left arm, keep it spearing slightly to the outside. Previously I believe I've been spearing my left arm too straight forward.

6. Quiet arm entry, and thus quiet swimming and as bubble-less as possible.

Other very important points that I kept an awareness of:

1. For this exercise, I chose to not stroke back strongly, but see if I could impart more forward momentum via the spearing arm rather than depending on the stroking arm back. Coach Shinji and I did some drills to illustrate how much momentum you can generate simply by spearing forward.

2. Stroking back straight and not up or down. My right arm stroking tends to make my body hop up and down slightly, indicating that my stroke back is not exactly straight back and is directing propulsive force in other directions besides fully moving my body forward.

3. At the end of spear forward, let my wrist relax and my hand just hangs down so that it is ready for the catch. This also releases tension in the arm; tension in the arm is bad.

4. Slight attention on bending at the elbow to catch at the front, but not too much at this juncture, as it requires a bit more flexibility than I have at this point.

5. Hanging the head in a relaxed manner.

6. Keeping the body straight, and also when I roll back and forth during swimming to roll on my axis and not swipe back and forth.

As one can imagine, keeping track of all this can be overwhelming; swimming is such a complex activity! Luckily, our bodies have imprinted all this such that all that text is really easy and burned into our natural movements. The problem of course is when we imprint bad habits and have to change them.

Running through my workout, I became a bit more unstable as I have been when my arm starts to get higher out of the water for each drill. But yesterday, I had about a lap of instability and then something changed. My swimming became amazingly relaxed and I was moving forward with ease, and by not stroking back strongly at all.

The sensations I felt were:

1. My head was very relaxed hanging down. But I remember feeling no water swirling at the top which meant that my head was pretty submerged, probably more than it has been.

2. My left arm entry felt really good. I just let it drop into the water and spear forward.

3. As I kept my stroking arm moving with firm but not extra force, I felt the first inklings of what anchoring in the water meant. My stroking arm became an anchor for my spearing arm to push forward against, as well as with a lot of help from my two beat kick putting some authority into my hip turning. With this action, I started to really understand what Coach Shinji meant by saying that you could really move forward fast without using a whole lot of energy.

4. My body was totally straight, and for the first time I felt that I was turning nicely on my axis and keeping like a needle through the water.

5. With all this working, I felt at ease from stroke to stroke, very relaxed, but yet I felt like I was moving smoothly and continuously through the water, with each stroke being very rhythmic and with no stops or starts.

I felt so good that I didn't want it to end and swam another 4x50 in hopes of it burning into my nervous system just a bit more. It was a banner moment for me in my swimming and I hope to imprint this further in future sessions.

In my last session with Shinji, I worked on my arm recovery. Then, a reader of my blog emailed me for some questions on arm recovery, which prompted me to post on the TI forums, and then prompted this post.

In working on my arm recovery, I have been given many visuals through verbalizations to help with the right motion by Shinji and also some from an Advanced TI Seminar by Dave Cameron. These were:

a. [Shinji] The one trapezoid/shoulder shrug to bring the arm up.
b. [Shinji] Extend the shoulder blade forward
c. [Shinji] Try to exit the hand/arm through the same hole in the water that it's laying in, at the end of the stroke. Not only does this stop placing forces that are not helping me go forward in the water (ie. making me sink or bounce in the water), I find that dragging your hand out that way means you are naturally doing the elbow led recovery.
d. [Dave Cameron] Imagine during recovery that you are scraping your bicep across the surface of the water as you bring the arm around.
e. [Dave Cameron] Use inner rotation of the shoulder, don't bring it up and over. The arm tends to trace a path that is more a swing around rather than straight along the path over the body. He has said that inner rotation also saves your shoulder from damage.

Great coaches have a multitude of vocabulary and can come up with many ways to help a student perform some complex action. Then, posting on the TI forums, Terry Laughlin and Dave Cameron both weighed in on these comments. Here are their posts reprinted:

Terry says:

"Dave I would probably have difficulty following those focal points. For instance, I'm not sure how to interpret the phrase "extend the shoulder blade forward." That's why I prefer focal points that describe a simple action or a sensation described in 'universal' language.

One key to a recovery in which the elbow lifts and leads the hand and forearm forward is how you exit the water. I've used the following images to help me with that:

1. Release, rather than push back, at the end of the stroke
2. Release away from the hip - i.e. toward the outside. (This helps combat the tendency to bring the elbow toward the spine on recovery.)
3. Circle the elbow - like the crank of a bicycle. (This helps reinforce #1.)

As for video, Lesson 5 on the Easy Free DVD is devoted to release, recovery and entry. It shows LOTS of video of the rehearsal exercises that improve your kinesthetic awareness of leading with the elbow. Also of the release, recovery and entry, including contrast of all the most common errors and how to correct them."

Then Coach Dave Cameron posted:

"One thing that must be realized about my coaching is that I always use tricks to get what I want. I wanted it to FEEL like the elbow scraped, but it shouldn't be as wide as that in reality. Just to get people to break their habits on that one, We started with the release, went to the shrug/shift, the swing, the slice without sacrifice, and the slip.

The recovery can have a lot of variety based on flexibility and balance.
Denser swimmers may need to be wider, especially with breathing in mind. Flexible swimmers will look like Shinji, but be cautious that there isn't a hitch before entry when swimming (not a drill skill, as KevinM puts it) when you roll through some of the tougher parts of a higher recovery.

If you extend to lock at the end of the pull/anchor phase, it's very difficult to fix this and have the right recovery. Make sure that when you transition from anchoring, the focus rotates to shoulder and elbow manipulation. If you try to take the hand around, it's almost impossible to focus on it without putting tension on the marionette arm."

Absorbing all this as text, and then putting it in my head as a visualization, and also wrapping in my live coaching sessions with Coach Shinji was quite a feat.

Looking to Terry's comment about the Easy Freestyle DVD Chapter 5, I put that on and found some nice video to complement all the text above.

I think in the end, Terry's drills on the DVD proved to be the easiest to work with. I went out for a few sessions now attempting to work the exercises and they seemed to work great.

I found out that my left arm was quite different than my right arm, and that it was doing a slightly different, but critically different movement. It definitely showed in how far and fast I would glide between my right and left sides.

Doing the Zen Switch by dragging my arm/forearm/wrist/fingertips through the water while swimming, I found that my strokes were better than when the arm was out of the water. For some reason, when some part of my arm/hand was moving through the water, I had some sort of anchor where I could tell where my arm/hand was and put it in the right place. The moment I lifted it out of the water, my left arm began to lose its form, whereas my right arm was OK.

Other tips that really helped:

1. As Terry mentioned in 2., and also Shinji has said to push water away from you at a 45 degree angle at the end of the pull, this sets up the arm for recovery.

2. I also was stroking not straight back which causes my body to hop up and down as evidence that I was putting force in other directions besides moving me forward. I need to stroke straight back.

3. I need to perfect the arm drop before spearing forward. I seem to have this OK on my right side where I can really feel gravity just dropping my arm into the water and then it spears forward. On my left, it feels awkward and I seem to be using my right arm pulling back as compensation for a weak spear forward. This is really bad when I take a breath and the spear forward is very weak, resulting in me almost stopping when I breathe.

Shinji has told me that the spear forward generates a lot of forward motion and he is right. We have done isolated drills where I am not stroking but merely attempting to move forward via spear alone. It's pretty amazing how far you can go. So I do not want to lose this momentum generating motion and need to get it right on my left side.

4. Another bad habit to break: sometimes as I bring my left arm through recovery, I tend to arc my body. Very weird and need to stop this.

As always, thanks for the great advice from all my TI coaches and sources of information and lots to work on!

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!