Swimming faster by swimming slowly

Swimming Technique, Jul-Sep 1999 by Laughlin, Terry

Sprinters at Army have been experimenting with a new training program that has produced positive results. It's a program that uses a large percentage of low-speed swimming and drilling, tightly-controlled doses of faster-speed swimming and never "practicing struggle."

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 oar-- sweep. And they positively fly-far and away the fastest of all human-powered aquatic movement-when all eight rowers harness their energy.

I began to 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.

Teaching thousands of mainly unskilled adult swimmers in Total Immersion weekend workshops-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 Bosse, Army's head coach, 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.

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.