Easy Freestyle - A Total Immersion Instructional Manual

Nội dung text: Easy Freestyle - A Total Immersion Instructional Manual

1. EasEasyy FrFreeeesstyletyle by Terry Laughlliin A Total Immersion Instructional Manual Copyright © 2006 Total Immersion. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, printing, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Total Immersion, Inc. For information, contact Total Immersion, Inc., 246 Main Street, Suite 15A, New Paltz, NY 12561. Revised: December 16, 2003 Total Immersion, Inc.
2. SWIMMING YOU LOVE Total Immersion literally means “to go beneath the surface.” Its other literal meaning is “to do with complete engagement.” In swimming, as in any endeavor, total immersion is a prescription for loving what you do. Easy Free is nominally intended to improve your Freestyle technique, but the true intention of every TI book or video is to help you discover a passion for swimming. When you practice total immersion, you’ll swim with a sense of purpose, commitment and optimism that virtually guarantee your success in achieving any goal. You’ll enjoy every minute, experience “epiphanies” regularly, and eagerly anticipate each practice. Experiences like those will result almost inevitably in continuous improvement. That’s Kaizen Swimming. What keeps many from experiencing passion for swimming is a combination of frustration or boredom. Frustration, if swimming is difficult to master or understand. Boredom, if: (1) You feel there’s little to stimulate – or even distract – you while your face is in the water; or (2) You’ve reached the state of “Terminal Mediocrity: No matter how much I swim, I never improve.” Easy Free will help you love swimming by: 1) Providing clear and explicit priorities for improvement: saving energy and reducing drag. 2) Illustrating and explaining a learning sequence in which every step (a) contributes in specific ways to saving energy and reducing drag, and (b) prepares you for the next step while teaching a skill that will be essential in the whole stroke. 3) Leaves no stone unturned in providing you with the tools for understanding and action that will allow you to coach yourself – and even friends and family – effectively. As we promise, Easy Free will be the next best thing to having a lesson with a trained TI coach. Easy Free is designed for: New Swimmers because the first step requires nothing more complicated than floating and the progres- sions from one “mini-skill” to the next are clearly outlined and highly achievable. Master each step at your own pace and build from the simplest movements to a full stroke of rare fluidity, ease and grace. Experienced Swimmers because no matter how long you’ve been swimming, it’s likely your prior coaching or practice has not given sufficient attention to energy savings, drag reduction and integrated movement. If you’ve become stuck on a plateau in improvement or enjoyment, Easy Free will uncover a broad range of unexplored possibility for greater understanding, efficiency, endurance and speed. It will also help you enjoy swimming more. Fitness Swimmers because the efficient, fluent, whole-body movements taught at each step of this learning sequence are best for your body and will also allow you to swim longer and farther without fatigue. As well, the improvements and enjoyment it will bring will increase your motivation to enjoy healthful swimming more often. Competitive Swimmers because the primary impediment to swimming as far and as fast as you would like is drag and energy waste. Easy Free is the first freestyle-improvement program to give its primary attention to minimizing drag and saving energy. 2
3. Coaches and Teachers because the progressions illustrated in this DVD will give you a broad range of new skills and fine points to teach your athletes and students. As well, the graphic enhancements we’ve included, and right/wrong comparison video will help you identify and correct the most common errors and inefficiencies. Gain Speed and Endurance by Saving Energy Three Percent. That’s how much energy and “horsepower” the average human swimmer converts into for- ward motion. In other words, 97% of our energy gets diverted into something other than propulsion. (For comparison, elite swimmers are just 10% efficient – that’s right, even Michael Phelps wastes 90% – whereas dolphins are 80% energy efficient.) This eye-opening intelligence comes from a group of engineers and physicists who made these calculations while designing a swim foil for the Navy Seals. (Read the entire arti- cle here. If you ordered the Easy Freestyle DVD in hopes of swimming farther or faster, your most valuable takeaway will be increased awareness that the opportunity to gain speed and endurance by saving energy is far greater than what you might gain by getting fitter or stronger. And if your goal is to enjoy swimming more, I guarantee that improving from, say, 3 percent to 4 percent efficiency will not only give you a 33% energy increase; it will also likely make you feel 33% better in the water. How you feel and how you swim are closely related. Whatever increases your comfort is likely to help improve your speed and endurance. The stroke-improvement program on this DVD is the first to give primary emphasis to becoming an energy- conscious swimmer. While the drills illustrated here will also improve your pull, kick and breathing, the goal of saving energy will be foremost at every step. Within your first hour of practice, you should be well on your way to reinvention as an energy-conscious swimmer. Why We Waste Energy If you’ve felt frustrated by swimming, you have lots of company. Humans are “hard-wired” to swim ineffi- ciently and virtually all of us work too hard to swim too slowly. I call this the Universal Human-Swimming Problem. Here are four reasons why Human Swimming is so inefficient: 1. You think you’re sinking. Well, you are and should be! Based on normal body composition, the human body’s natural position is 95% underwater – i.e. only 5% will be at the surface. The only part of your body that floats well is your lungs; everything below your sternum has a specific gravity that makes sinking natural. As gravity drags your hips down, buoyancy pushes your chest up. You’re not really sinking (except for a few highly muscular and heavy- boned individuals); you’re just swimming “uphill.” Nonetheless, because you think you’re sinking (and your body’s internal gyroscope senses imbalance) survival instinct kicks in and you do whatever it takes to stay afloat. The “survival” strokes that result are both ineffective and exhausting. Through years of dogged effort, some swimmers learn to cover greater distances, while still wasting 95% or more of the energy they expend. But with each inefficient stroke, “struggling skills” are being ever more deeply imprinted in muscle memory. 3
4. 2. Water is a wall. Water is almost a thousand times denser than air. Now think about how “thick” air feels when you hold your arm out a car window. That will give you a sense of how powerful drag can be at even slow speeds in the water. To understand better, try walking – or better yet running – in the pool. The best example of drag-minimizing design is a fuselage. Cars built to break land speed records, bullet trains, jet fighters, torpedos, and even rowing shells all share the same shape, tapered in front and back with a streamlined body. So do fish. The human body is nothing like these and therein lies the prime reason we tire too easily and swim too slowly. In a fuselage, the pointed tip gradually separates air or water molecules so they move smoothly as the thicker part comes through. When the leading edge is blunt, or the body unstreamlined, the molecules move crazily. The result is waves, turbulence and momentum-sapping eddies. You can dramatically reduce wave- making and turbulence by rethinking and reshaping your swimming body. When you do, you’ll swim farther and faster, with no more effort. And possibly even less effort. 3. Water is hard to hold. Though water may stubbornly resist you when you try to move through it, unless you stroke with care, it often just swirls away when you try to push it backward while stroking. As well, your hand is tiny compared to the body mass it’s trying to propel. Even when you do it perfectly, pushing water back is a terribly inefficient form of propulsion – which is why propeller-driven boats run circles around those propelled by a paddlewheel. When you combine the challenges of a sinking, unstable body, high drag and poor traction, swimming is like trying to pedal a bicycle uphill on an icy street. Traditional swimming techniques reinforce all those inefficient tendencies by having you kick the water into a froth, windmill your arms, and swim endless grueling intervals to immunize yourself from the fatigue that inevitably results. Techniques that emphasize pulling and kicking can never be effective in a medium that’s both highly resistant and offers little traction. And by ignoring your imbalance and instability, conditioning laps simply deepen your “struggling skills.” Becoming an Energy-Conscious Swimmer You must learn ease before focusing on speed or endurance. When there’s so much energy waste, there’s nearly limitless opportunity to improve through saving energy. But no one takes this approach naturally because each energy-saving strategy is counter-intuitive. You have to realize they’re advantageous, then make a conscious decision to practice them with patience until they replace your instincts for harder work. Becoming aware is the first step. Here are the energy-conscious principles you’ll learn on Easy Freestyle: 1. Cooperate with Gravity. It’s normal for us to think of sinking as bad, even dangerous, and we’ve often been told we should swim on top of the water. But, as I mentioned earlier, our inherent “specific gravity” leaves 95 percent of our mass submerged. So we swim through the water, not over it. Moreover, gravity is an inexorable force; does it make more sense to fight it, or use it? 4
5. For new TI swimmers, the moment they first feel a reassuring sense of support from the water is almost life-changing. It transforms what has often been a harrowing experience into a hopeful sense of comfort – even possibility. While balance is the essential foundation of efficiency, learning to relax into the water is equally important. It breaks the survival-stroking cycle, and frees your arms and legs for productive use. To use gravity, let your head and chest sink, until you feel your lower half becoming more buoyant. Sinking into balance gives you an advantage – there’s less drag just below the surface than right at it. If you’d like a scientific reason for relaxing, consider this: tension increases your sinking tendencies two ways, (1) when you’re tense, you tend to breathe fast and shallow. This reduces the air in your lungs, which is a tan- gible buoyancy aid. And (2) tense muscles inhibit oxygen flow, reducing an intangible buoyancy aid. The ability to “swim relaxed” goes a long way toward explaining why athletically-lean world class swimmers have great body position, achieved with virtually no effort. You’ll learn to Cooperate with Gravity in Lessons 1 and 2 and reinforce in Lessons 3 and 4. 2. Take the Path of Least Resistance. The study that showed humans are only 3 percent efficient and dolphins are 80% efficient also revealed another surprising statistic: dolphins use only one-eighth of the “horsepower” physics predicts it should take to swim at their usual speeds. This is because they’re naturally designed for “active streamlining.” The best human swimmers seem to do something very similar. In 1992, USA Swimming researchers Jane Cappaert and John Troup found that elite swimmers at the Olympics generated no more stroking power than average swimmers. Cappaert and Troup concluded that their superior speed resulted from “better whole-body streamlining.” Mindful that water is nearly 1000 times denser than air – and that you must swim through it – it’s only logical to focus far more on how well you streamline than how powerfully you pull. Do this in freestyle by visualizing your swimming-body differently. In the traditional view your body has an upper half that pulls and a lower half that kicks. Instead, think of your body being divided down the middle, with each side shaped to cut through the water like a torpedo. Your freestyle stroke becomes a right-side-streamline alternated with a left-side-streamline. To swim this way, visualize parallel tracks extending forward of each shoulder. Spear your arm forward along that track, separating water molecules as it goes. Then align your torso and legs to follow it through the “channel” it creates. Then do the same with the other side. In energy-conscious swimming, you shift your focus from “pushing on the water molecules behind you” to separating those in front of you. You’ll learn Active Streamlining in Lessons 1 and 2 and reinforce it in Lessons 3 and 4. 3. Swim with your body. As I mentioned above, traditional thinking views the body as having an “arms department” that pulls you for- ward and a “legs department” that pushes you forward. This view turns the torso into so much baggage that you drag through the water by pulling and kicking. That’s why people train with buoys and kickboards to strengthen the arms and legs, often leaving torso muscles out as they do. In energy-conscious freestyle, you swim with your body, instead of your arms and legs. As you send your right arm down its track and align the right side of your body to follow it, your left side will roll above the surface. This not only makes your bodyline longer and sleeker, it also positions your body mass to take advantage of gravity. As your recovering left arm moves forward of your lungs, gravity takes over and causes the left side 5
6. of your body to fall. All you need to do is use a forward-spearing arm to channel the force of gravity, produc- ing a powerful movement that uses remarkably little energy. Harnessing that free energy creates what we call Perpetual Motion Propulsion. Naturally, there’s a lot more to it, and many foundational skills to master to do it effectively but first you need to be thinking differently – about separating water molecules and drawing power from the body’s “high side” rather than pulling and kicking. You’ll learn to Swim With your Body in Lessons 3 and 4. 4. Don’t move a muscle unnecessarily. When you waste energy as extravagantly as human swimmers do, it makes sense to become nearly obsessive about finding ways to save energy. One of the most overlooked is avoiding unnecessary muscle activation. Any time a muscle is in contraction, it’s burning energy. Never turn on a muscle unnecessarily. Never move a muscle without a clear benefit. Identifying unnecessary or counterproductive muscle tension should be one of your prime strategies for improving your endurance. I’ll catalogue a few examples, working from front to back: • Relax your hands. Nearly everyone instinctively stiffens the hand while stroking, yet that tires your wrist and forearm and can even cause tension in shoulders, neck and back. And a stiff hand doesn’t hold water any better than a relaxed one. Even worse, a stiff hand tends to scoop up as it extends to catch, causing the legs to drop and increasing drag. A relaxed hand drops naturally into the optimal catch position (i.e. fingers down and palm back) and usually causes the legs to lift, decreasing drag. You’ll imprint this in Lesson 2 and reinforce it in every lesson that follows. • Release your head. It takes muscle to hold your head up. It even takes muscle to push it down. Releasing your head’s weight, allowing it to be supported by the water, takes no work or muscle. Even better, it will improve your balance and streamlining. You’ll imprint this in Lessons 1 and 2 and reinforce it often in subse- quent lessons. • Patient Hand. When you stroke prematurely, you rely on smaller, easily fatigued arm muscles. You also increase the chances of slipping water (like “spinning your wheels”), meaning your work is wasted. But a Patient Hand on catch allows you to firmly anchor your hand and allows time for a weight shift, rather than arm muscles, to provide the power for propulsion. You’ll imprint this in Lessons 3, 4 and 5. • Marionette Arm. Your arm muscles need to be engaged to hold water. Those same muscles need to be completely relaxed during recovery. Relaxing them not only prevents arm fatigue, it also helps avoid diverting energy sideways on the recovery and entry. You’ll imprint this in Lessons 4 and 5. • Tune your kick. Many new swimmers – and all who are not comfortable and balanced – have a habit I call “busy legs.” The legs churn ceaselessly, causing turbulence and momentum-sapping eddies, and interfering with natural stroke rhythm. And because leg muscles are the largest in the body, they also burn huge amounts of energy. You’ll break the “busy legs” habit in Lesson 1, learn to focus on streamlining your legs, rather than churning them in Lesson 2, and learn to “tune” your kick to core-body movement in Lessons 3 and 4. 5. Channel energy forward. Poor balance – legs dropping below your upper body – increases drag. Instability – having the body wobble or move sideways also causes drag and diverts scarce energy in the wrong direction. Since your objective is to move forward, any motion – of head, arms or legs - that causes your body to move sideways is an energy waster. The most frequent cause of such diversion is arm movement – at any time in the stroke cycle – that goes away from or across the bodyline rather then directly forward or back. You’ll imprint awareness of 6
7. tracks, to direct arm movements along your line of travel, in Lessons 1, 2, 3 and 4. And you’ll train yourself to recover your arms along the same lines in Lessons 4 and 5. Three Rules for Energy-Conscious Swimming 1) Saving energy is how you will swim farther (more endurance). Saving energy is how you will swim faster (more speed). Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) Swimmers focus first on saving energy. 2) 99.9 percent of the time, excess drag is the reason you’re getting tired too fast or moving too slow – whether Skating, Switching or Swimming. Find ways to avoid drag and you’ll Skate, Switch or Swim faster and easier. 3) When you do focus on propulsion, always focus first on the easiest way to create it. Do less, use lighter arm pressure (and more core power) and smoother, quieter movements. LESSON ONE: WEIGHTLESS IN THE WATER - COOPERATE WITH GRAVITY These four exercises are intended to eliminate the most obvious sources of wasted energy and movement – survival-stroking in reaction to the sinking sensation and a poorly streamlined bodyline. Instead of fighting gravity – trying to stay on top of the water – you work with gravity to find your natural equilibrium. When you feel the water’s support, you gain the ability to: (1) calmly examine and improve your balance and alignment and (2) make mindful choices about head, arm, and hand position, shoulder rotation, and stroke/switch timing. 1.1 Superman Glide Push off bottom or side and glide as far as you can without kicking – even if legs sink. Stand when you lose momentum or need to breathe. Focus on: • Relax or release your head. • Extended arms on shoulder-width “tracks.” You will use these tracks as a guide for arm position in Skating, all Switch drills and whole stroke. • Extend legs to minimize drag. • In a shallow pool, see how few pushoffs and no-kick Superman Glides it takes to cross it by relaxing into support and minimizing water resistance. 1.2 Superman Flutter Glide a few yards, then begin kicking just enough to maintain a lazy, unhurried glide. Stand when you need a breath. Focus on: • Glide with awareness of streamlined legs, then begin kick as an “active streamline.” • Keep legs inside the “space” occupied by your torso; avoid noise and splash. 7
8. • Kick from core, not thighs. • Minimize water resistance and turbulence. 1.3 Laser Lead Flutter From Superman Flutter, pull both arms back and continue kicking gently until you need a breath. Focus on: • Release your head until you feel the water support it. Then focus on your laser beam. It should always point where you’re going. • Experimentally raise your laser to feel how balance is affected. Then release your head and feel easy balance return. This is the same head position you will use in all subsequent drills and whole stroke. • Feel as if you’re being towed by a line at your head – as if suspended from a skyhook, and that gravity is lengthening your head-spine line. • Speed is completely unimportant. Easy movement through drag-avoidance is your priority. 1.4 CORE BALANCE: Rotate Just Enough Push off as above. As you pull back, drop a shoulder toward your chin – keeping your head stable. Rotate just enough for your shoulder to clear the surface. Maintain this position, kicking gently, until you need a breath. Focus On: • Rotate to one side on one rep, to the other on the next. Practice this way until you consistently rotate just enough for your shoulder to clear the surface. • To sense too much rotation, roll to a “stacked shoulders” position. Then return to just-enough rotation. • The just-enough-rotation position may not be easy to hold. You’ll need to use core muscle to remain stable at that degree of rotation. This is the same rotation you will use in all subsequent drills and whole stroke. • When just-enough-rotation requires little energy to maintain, add breathing, as illustrated in the video. Bubble lightly from your nose between breaths. • Practice until your breathing is unhurried and relaxed – even lazy – to both sides. Your goal isn’t just to get air, but to minimize turbulence as you rotate up and down. Lesson One Practice Tips Long term, you won’t devote many hours to practicing these four drills and virtually all that practice will be for short stretches – say 10 yards or less. In that sense, these are exercises more than drills. In the short term, these exercises can be extremely valuable for teaching you to feel effortless support from the water. Once you feel that doing nothing is an option, you can be choosy about when and how you do something. This shift in your relationship to the water will enormously benefit every other drill and the whole stroke. 8
9. 1) Separate the task of breathing from that of relaxing. Breathing is important but you’ll breathe better when you feel in control of body position. 2) Until you include breathing in the Core Balance exercise, practice for short stretches, standing to catch a breath. When you feel a strong sense of body control in this position, include regular breathing cycles. 3) During your first three to five hours practicing the TI drills, begin each practice with a few minutes of Superman Glides and Flutters. 4) Do practice some short whole-stroke repeats after imprinting the sense of easy support in Superman Flutter (SF). Starting from SF, begin stroking easily and quietly, focusing on one of three focal points. Keep stroking only as long as you feel yourself executing your focal point with control – even if it’s only 3 strokes. Then patiently increase the number of strokes for which you feel “right.” Your focal points include: • Release your head’s weight and keep your laser beam pointing forward. • Relax your body into the water’s support and feel as if your kick can be relaxed and passive while stroking. • Memorize the feeling of wide tracks while in SF and follow those tracks with your stroke. LESSON TWO: THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE There are two forms of drag. Passive Drag is caused by the difference between the shape of a fuselage and that of a human body. Active Drag is the energy lost to wavemaking or turbulence when you begin stroke. Lesson Two focuses on minimizing Passive Drag, by teaching you the longest, sleekest, most Fishlike shape for swimming freestyle. You’ll also establish the optimal position for your lead hand as it transitions from extension to beginning the next stroke. And finally, you’ll continue imprinting the amount of body roll, or rotation, that (a) minimizes drag, (b) positions you to tap the power of the weight shift for propulsion, while also (c) increasing your potential for speed – by rotating just enough, you’ll complete your efficient strokes more quickly. The drag-reducing Skating position you imprint here will be integral to every practice drill – and every freestyle stroke – you take for the rest of your life. 2.1 Transition: CORE BALANCE to STREAMLINE In this step, you’ll reduce drag by lengthening your bodyline. The first time, you may wish to rehearse this with your feet on the bottom, as shown on the video. When you’re familiar with the Track you’ll follow as you extend, repeat this movement from Core Balance position. Extend your arm on its Track and hang a relaxed hand. Kick gently as you memorize how it feels. Repeat on the other side. 2.2 Introduce Skating Position Push off into Superman Glide and just glide a moment to feel effortless support from the water. As you begin kicking, pull one arm back (to your “inside pocket”) while extending the other forward. 9
10. Focus on: • Hang your head so your laser points forward. • Extended arm slightly outside shoulder line. Check the following: (1) Relax hand. (2) Fingers down. (3) Wrist slightly below elbow. • Rotate just enough to clear one shoulder • Press rear elbow into lower abdomen. • Align bodyline – torso-to-toes – behind the lead arm. Be spearlike. Practice for one full breath on your Right Track, focusing on laser-beam, right-hand position and a support- ed, streamlined, slightly-rotated bodyline. Repeat on the left track. 2.3 SKATING Position: Master key details. Skating is the most hydrodynamic position for freestyle. Therefore, on every stroke you take in years to come, you should “finish” each stroke in Skating and hold this position during most of recovery. This will help you travel farther – faster – on every stroke. Several details of this position are subtle, but highly conse- quential. Now is the time to begin imprinting them in muscle memory. Head Recheck that your head is hanging, gravity-neutral, with your laser pointing forward. Lead Hand Hang your extended hand just outside your shoulder line. It will feel most natural to have it in front of your nose. It takes concentration to keep it in front of your shoulder. • Heighten your awareness of horizontal (X-axis) position by sliding your hand to the center then back outside. Notice where nose and shoulder go as you do. Your nose should point down and your shoulders should be “unstacked.” • Heighten your awareness of vertical (Y-axis) position, and relaxation. Lift your fingers toward the surface and feel your laser beam follow. Then relax hand so fingers drop below your wrist and feel your laser follow. • When you find your optimal position, extend the front of your wrist forward a few millimeters feeling your bodyline lengthen. Body Rotation Recheck that your shoulder barely clears the surface. Rotate to “stacked shoulders” then back to “just enough” rotation to better sense the difference. It takes core muscle to hold this position; tune into that sense of engaging your core to hold the right position. The feeling should be of “tone” not tension. Allow plenty of time to memorize the target locations you’re hitting in these details – even to visualize a bulls-eye at your fingertips. Your hand should spear to this exact position in every practice drill and every freestyle stroke from here on. 10