By Terry Laughlin

Swimming Faster by Swimming Slowly

In March, the Army men's swimming team climaxed its 1998-99 season at the EISL meet at Harvard. Each morning we went to the pool by traveling along the Charles River, watching eight-oared shells moving smoothly back and forth. Four days of watching the hypnotic beauty of these sleek boats and their human "inboard motors" provided an instructive metaphor for sprint training.

Long, needle-like vessels incredibly hydrodynamic, their drag pared away to nearly nothing. They glide a long way (even when moving upstream) on just one powerful oarsweep. And they positively fly—far and away the fastest of all human-powered aquatic movement—when all eight rowers harness their energy. I rowed in an "eight" just once, and the awesome sensation created when eight rowers apply synchronized power to such a sleek vessel was like nothing else I've ever experienced.

The human swimmer when sprinting—with rare exceptions—is nothing like a rowing shell. Propelled by a flurry of arm-and-leg churning and a vessel, which when moving at maximum stroke rate is a constantly changing mix of blocky shapes and sharp angles that are anything but hydrodynamic—90 percent of it in the thick and viscous water, not scooting along on top as the shell does. The math required to calculate it is beyond me, but the difference in the drag-to-speed ratio of a human body compared to a rowing shell must be astronomical.

And yet, consider the dramatic difference in the nature of crew training and that employed by most coaches of sprint swimmers. Rowers spend countless hours practicing at relatively slow paces, tirelessly working at better synchrony. And very occasionally do they row a brief piece faster—not with the object of simply going harder but primarily to test their ability to maintain harmony at higher stroke rates and heart rates.

And as they spend hour after hour rowing slowly, aerobic conditioning and power development does occur—the sort of conditioning required to spend hours on the river achieving better harmony. But make no mistake, more harmonic movement is the primary objective of their hours of training; conditioning is the incidental byproduct. And coaches and athletes alike have a thorough appreciation for the value of all the moderate speed work they do in achieving their highly-prized synchrony.

Application to Swimming
Now consider the way most sprint swimmers are trained. Low speed training—called "garbage yardage" by too many coaches—is thought of by virtually everyone as valuable for nothing more than building the aerobic base. High speed training is used by most mainly to develop the swimmer's ability to endure pain. And we build power mainly by hitting the weights rather than by trying to achieve maximum coordination between the working muscles.

For the past three seasons, while coaching the Army sprinters, I have conducted an experiment in training sprinters by:

• Using a large percentage of low-speed swimming and drilling as an unequalled opportunity to teach fluency and develop it to ever higher levels.
• Using tightly-controlled doses of faster-speed swimming to progressively test and develop the swimmers' ability to stay fluent when we pushed the stroke-rate and heart-rate threshold.
• Never "practicing struggle."

The results of this experiment have been extremely encouraging. They easily eclipsed the results I had previously achieved in coaching sprinters and the performances achieved by these same swimmers in more conventional training at Army or in their club or high school programs previously. And their rate of progress over three years was significantly ahead of the curve for the rate of progress typically achieved by college swimmers. It was certainly encouraging enough to merit further experimentation.

Brief Background
Here's a brief background: in the summer of 1996, I called my good friend Ray Bosse, Army's head coach, and expressed an interest in joining his staff on a part-time basis. I had not coached a team for eight years—since assisting Ray in his first season as head coach. I had spent that time teaching technique to mainly-unskilled-and-inexperienced adult swimmers in Total Immersion weekend workshops. Teaching thousands of such swimmers—and having only two days to help them achieve significant improvement—had afforded me a wealth of unusual insights into swimming skills and how people learn them. The two most striking were:

• Swimmers could make dramatic and immediate improvement in their swimming by focusing on increasing their Stroke Length (SL). This was no surprise as every study of elite swimming performance has identified superior SL—not aerobic or muscular power—as the foremost characteristic of fast swimmers.
• They could achieve the most immediate and striking improvement in their SL by learning to be more "slippery." Bill Boomer had told me that coaches should at least balance their attention to "creating propulsion" with attention to "eliminating drag." TI workshops provided an unequalled opportunity to experiment with that and to refine a system for teaching swimmers to become more slippery and fluent.

After eight years of teaching relatively unaccomplished swimmers, I was growing curious about the potential efficacy of applying TI's "Fishlike Swimming" methods to more accomplished swimmers. I had also been studying Alex Popov's training with great interest, had modeled much of what I taught upon his style of swimming and knew that his training habits resembled those of rowers far more than they resembled conventional sprint training.

I wanted an opportunity to blend what I had learned about technique with my understanding of Popov's training pattern. Ray was generous enough to give me that opportunity with the Army sprinters. As my TI duties would allow me to be on-deck at Army two to three afternoons a week, some of my coaching would be by fax and e-mail. And the sprint group would also swim two to three non-specialty practices each week, which I would not attend.

Following are the unconventional aspects of the training we have done:

Nervous-system over Energy-system Training
Rather than focus on certain percentages of work done in "aerobic base," "anaerobic threshold," "lactate tolerance," etc., our time in the water is almost exclusively devoted to teaching the swimmers to "swim downhill," "swim taller," "skate on the side" and to generate power and rhythm in the core-body.

Eight years of teaching these fishlike swimming skills in workshops had taught me that for 98 percent of all swimmers, these movements are non-instinctive and counter-intuitive (and what's most natural and intuitive are the inefficient and tiring habits I call human swimming).

I realized that we would have to spend lots of time patiently learning new movement patterns, using a combination of drills and "super-slow" swimming. We did this for extended periods at very low heart-rates and modest rest intervals. As we patiently learned new movements, "aerobic base" training occurred, just as it does while the rowers practice synchrony at moderate speed.

I also realized that for these non-instinctive new movements to hold up in the heat of sprint races, we needed to spend many hours patiently imprinting them and turning them into rock-solid habits.

We did this with longish sets of moderate-speed, whole-stroke repeats practicing "minus-cycle" (holding a low stroke count) and "sensory skill practice" (trying to do just one thing well—such as keeping the head in a neutral position, lengthening the body with a weightless arm, patterning front quadrant swimming or simply swimming as silently as possible.)

And as we turned efficiency, flow and ease into habits, they also gradually raised the "anaerobic threshold."

Finally, on occasion, we swam shorter, faster repeats with a primary objective of improving the swimmers' ability to maintain unusual efficiency and flow at progressively higher stroke rates and heart rates. And as we did so, their physiology also improved its ability to "buffer lactates."

But in every instance, the energy system training was incidental and subordinate to the skill training. At no time did we ever do a set solely to train some aspect of physiology.

Controlled-speed Training
I spent far more time telling the swimmers to "slow down" than I did telling them to "go faster." The "human swimming" instinct to degenerate into inefficient thrashing is so strong, that I found it necessary to limit training speeds, particularly early in the season when we first visited speed and stroke rate (SR).

Each swimmer needed to spend lots of time finding the threshold of speed, stroke rate and heart rate at which they could still maintain optimal efficiency—and to strongly imprint a kinesthetic awareness of when they had crossed that threshold from flow to struggle.

Our goal over the course of the season was to progressively raise that threshold—let's say, from a SR of 38 cycles/minute and a HR of 180 in October to a SR of 48 cycles/minute and HR of 220 in February. (I never actually timed or measured SR or HR—I just did "eyeball" estimates.)

And how did I evaluate their efficiency? First, we counted strokes on probably 95 percent of our training lengths. Second, I watched keenly every minute of practice for any hint of raggedness in their strokes. I probably watched them for 99 percent of the time and glanced at the pace clock or my stop watch one percent of the time. To me, time was incidental; practicing flow at a variety of speeds was paramount. I can't evaluate fluency by watching the clock.

Reserving Racing Stroke Counts for Races
As I said earlier, SL has been repeatedly identified as the pre-eminent characteristic of faster swimmers. And experience has shown me that great SL is, for 98 percent of all swimmers, a learned or acquired habit. SR is what is most instinctive. If you are not consciously practicing SL in training, instinct and habit will almost certainly cause you to practice SR when you try to swim fast. (And, in fact, coaches unconsciously reinforce this inefficient instinct by constantly telling swimmers to "turn over!")

So with each swimmer, we spent much time teaching them how to be slippery enough that they could maintain exaggeratedly low stroke counts in training and allowing them to establish a range of stroke counts to be employed at various speeds—all with the intent of helping them incrementally learn to swim at top speed with more SL.

Once we established their optimal racing stroke count, every practice length was swum at some lower count. For example, Joe Novak raced the 100 free (best time of 44.1 seconds) in 13 strokes/length (s/l). In practice, he swam 90 percent of his yardage between 7 and 10 s/l, very occasionally going as high as 11 or 12, but never taking 13. That count was reserved for racing.

We established different expectations and designed different tasks for each particular stroke count, but the central purpose of this practice was to keep each swimmer constantly focused on learning how to maximize their SL at any given practice speed. This enabled each of the swimmers to raise the "ceiling" of the speed they could attain as we increased SR and allowed the stroke count to rise.

For comparison purposes, Joe swam as fast as 58 seconds for 100 yards from a pushoff while taking only 28 total strokes, and as fast as 48 seconds from a pushoff while taking only 44 strokes. The effect was that when he raced, while he appeared to any poolside spectator to be holding an unusually long and unhurried stroke at top speed, internally he felt free to move as fast as he wanted.

Training Equipment
Our primary "training equipment" was the human body. Paddles, buoys and kickboards are considered the natural ingredients of a workout by nearly all coaches and swimmers. But 10 years of intensive teaching have convinced me that there's an essential kinesthetic quality to great swimming, and most training equipment interferes with development of that sense.

Only a human body, moving unencumbered through the water—as is true when we race—can vividly experience it. I have also become convinced that the most important gift of really talented swimmers is their superior kinesthetic awareness, so I am reluctant to have my swimmers devote precious learning time to activities that inhibit the essential awareness I'm trying to help them develop.

My own experience of swimming for over 25 years with buoys, paddles and kickboards is that they contribute nothing to kinesthetic intelligence. Buoys mainly give an unnatural sense of balance and body position—which is lost as soon as the buoy is removed—as well as inhibiting the free-rolling essence of long-axis swimming.

Kickboards teach us to kick with the torso and hips locked in a flat position, nothing like the way they move when we are swimming long-axis strokes. It improves your ability to push a kickboard down the pool. Unless they begin offering races in that, I don't see the point.

And paddles provide mainly an artificial—and temporary—sense of being able to hold water; as soon as you take them off, you feel as if you're trying to row with a popsicle stick. They also encourage swimmers to try to muscle their way through the water.

So, over the past three seasons, we have not done a single length with buoys, paddles or kickboards. Whenever we kicked, we did so on our sides for long-axis strokes, practicing balance and rotation as we worked the legs. And we kicked underwater for short-axis strokes, practicing "slippery" positions, while training the legs. We also did a significant percentage of our leg-training while doing drills and whole-stroke swimming—training the legs as we would use them in races.

Our sole training equipment has been Fistgloves and Speedo Stroke Monitors. I favored the Fistgloves because they completely removed the option of trying to overpower the water. Particularly for plebes who were joining our program with years of "human swimming" habits to unlearn, they allowed us to dramatically accelerate their understanding of the importance of moving with the water, rather than trying to outmuscle it.

They also helped each swimmer improve their sense of balance, because the gloves made it impossible to use the extended arm to correct or compensate for poor body position. And finally, in contrast to paddles, when they took the gloves off, they felt as if they had hands the size of serving plates to hold water far more effectively.

Since our practices were a tireless exercise in learning the optimal blend of SL and SR to swim faster, the Stroke Monitors gave each swimmer immediate, concrete feedback on how effectively they had done that on every repeat. When doing sets of repeats, they were far more interested in raising the SEI displayed on their wrist than in simply lowering the time shown on the pace clock.

If they went faster, primarily with intelligent use of SL rather than SR, the watch would let them know right away. If they felt prey to instinct and spun their arms less effectively, the watch would instantly alert them.

Go When You're Ready
Intervals are one of the sacred-cows of swim training; how can you possibly train energy systems scientifically without precisely prescribed intervals? We did about 70 percent of our training with no prescribed—or loosely-prescribed—intervals. I prescribed some intervals early in the season, suggested ranges in mid-season and virtually never mentioned them as we moved closer to the end of the season. I viewed each season—and every practice and set—as a learning process, and worked constantly to improve the swimmers' ability to coach themselves intelligently (e.g., when teaching skills or drills, we did a lot of peer-coaching in which the swimmers paired off to teach, observe and critique each other, following observation of one of their peers doing the skill or drill well).

Each set was designed as a task or exercise from which they would learn some aspect of effective sprinting or racing by doing. I made sure to explain the objective of the task and my expectations thoroughly. Then I told the swimmers to use their best judgement of when they would be ready to start each subsequent repeat so they could do it well enough to satisfy the expectations or objectives of the set.

I was certain that they would know better than I—when their bodies were ready to do that. Given the freedom to coach themselves, they quickly committed to using the time well and never wasting it. Often, I found myself recommending that they take more rest.

Conclusions
On the whole, I have been exceedingly pleased. We swam consistently well. The Army sprinters—both men and women—who had previously been the most underperforming group on the team, became competitive and then dominant in the Patriot League. They rewrote the Academy record book in sprint events over the past three seasons. And we consistently saw an unusual rate of improvement.

Army does not, by and large, attract "blue-chip" recruits. And once there, training time is unusually limited. Between rigorous academic loads and corps obligations during the school year and military training each summer, we have to be very efficient in our training.

Yet we were able, each year (replacing losses to graduation of critical swimmers with swimmers who came in knowing nothing about Fishlike Swimming) to put together men's 400 free relays that averaged splits of 45 seconds (fastest split of 43.1) from swimmers who, by and large, had been swimming the 100 free in 47 to 49 seconds just a year or two earlier. And the women's 400 free relays averaged 52-second splits (fastest split of 50.7) from swimmers who had swum the 100 free in 55 to 57 seconds before coming to Army.

Just as importantly, the swimmers have told me repeatedly how enormously they have enjoyed this style of training compared to their previous training experiences. They do it with great pleasure and commitment. They enjoy performing tasks with clearly defined expectations, having so many aspects of swimming success to work on, and devoting their time activities that they are fully convinced give them an edge in races against swimmers who don't practice similarly.

They find every practice interesting and engaging, so they never go through the motions. I'm convinced that finding a way to continually engage their attention and interest and to motivate them to execute every aspect of training at a high level has contributed just as much to our success as the content of our practices.

About the Author
Terry Laughlin is founder and director of Total Immersion Swimming. For a sampling of actual drills and practices done by the Army sprinters this past season, visit www.totalimmersion.net.