Approach to teaching competitive swimming?

Baylor/Lone Star Masters used to put on a meet each year called the Baylor Sprint Classic. Part of the draw for this meet was that they would bring in 16 exceptional sprinters from around the world (people like Popov, Biondi, Jager, Crocker, Jordan etc) and have them do elimination swims in heats of four till a winner emerged. We got to watch them as they were warming up and then as they raced. This was back in the early days of my interest in stroke length. The first year they did this, I had my whole team counting and cataloging stroke counts for all the swimmers, both as they were warming up and down and as they were racing. A few observations stuck with me: First, if you ranked the swimmers from fastest to slowest, then looked at the stroke count column, it was immediately obvious that the there was almost a 100% correlation between speed and stroke length all the way down the list. The fastest swimmer had the smallest stroke count(counted on the return leg of a 50 mtr SC race), the next fastest swimmer had a higher stroke count...the slowest swimmer had the highest stroke count. Only one swimmer was slightly (one place) out of this correspondence. Second, ALL (as in, every single one) of the swimmers did ALL their practice/warm-up at stroke counts FAR lower than the stroke counts they raced at - even when swimming short fast segments of their warm-ups. Popov did 25 meters in 6 or 7 SPL with not the slightest hint of drilling, hesitating etc. Biondi was right there with 7 & 8 SPL. I don't have the data right in front of me but I don't recall ANY of the swimmers that exceeded 12 SPL during warm-ups. Third, NONE of the swimmers was using loads of kick to accomplish low stroke counts during warm-ups. Fourth, most of the loose, relaxed, long stretchy warm-up swimming done by these phenomenal swimmers was at fast enough paces to crush most Masters swimmers in a workout situation. They did this meet format a couple years in a row and we repeated our observations with nearly identical results. Learning to swim a length in very few strokes with little or no kick absolutely requires the ability to minimize drag and the ability maximize propulsion on each stroke. Popov's ability to swim 6 SPL at submaximal speeds is part of what allows him to sprint 13 to 14 SPL at world-class speed. To get to 6 SPL he had to learn things most swimmers have never, and will never, come close to. His skill base gives him options that the guy who has yet to swim under 18 SPL can't even conceive of, much less do. See the following article by Terry Laughlin about swimming fast using TI techniques www.active.com/story.cfm Excerpt: "It’s also indisputable that with understanding, application and patience, swimmers are much faster with TI training than they had been before. And why not? What’s not to like about less drag and less wasted energy? Here are some specific examples: From 1996 to '99, I coached the sprint group at USMA West Point, specifically to address criticism in the competitive swimming community at that time, that TI worked well only for low-skilled swimmers and those who didn’t need to swim fast. In three years of Division I NCAA competition — teaching the cadets during the week exactly what I taught to triathletes on weekends — the sprinters rewrote the Army and Patriot League record book in short events and all swam far faster than they ever had before. " Terry goes on to talk about TI influence on Auburn University (both their men’s and women’s teams have won NCAA titles recently), Olympic Coach David Marsh, U of Arizona's Roland Schoeman (who won the NCAA championship and broke the U.S. Open record for the 50-yard freestyle - 19.06), Adrienne Binder, a 16-year-old at Santa Barbara Swim Club (who swam 1,650 yards in 15:48, the second-fastest time ever for a swimmer her age and won the 400 IM at the U.S. Swimming National Championships and whose coach calls her “the best distance swimmer on the least yardage in history.”), and Susie Stark, a rookie on the World Cup triathlon circuit (and who reports that she’s swimming much faster on 15,000 yards per week of slow, purposeful TI practice, than she did on 60,000 yards of hard, fast training per week in college - at the Cancun World Cup race, Susie hit the beach ahead of Sheila Taormina and Barb Lindquist). As a Senior TI coach, my personal experience is that the vast majority of people who attend TI workshops come in with mediocre to poor swimming skills and literally need to start from scratch to learn the very basics of how to balance in the water. But my other, more extensive, day-to-day experience involves people who come to our H2O program with a wider range of skills, some of them are very good swimmers when they first come to us. Without fail, even the really good swimmers seem to find a lot to like in, and derive improvement from applying, the basics of the TI approach. While you could say that mine is a biased viewpoint - that because I'm a TI coach, my words are simply self serving shill work for TI. On the other hand, I used to be a pretty vocal critic of Terry Laughlin and the whole TI hype - until I actually attended one of the workshops and saw what Terry was accomplishing. In two days I became a convert - at least with respect to how to teach neophytes to swim. It took another couple years for me to buy in to the idea that I might coach ALL my swimmers in the TI ways. And these days, afer seeing the dramatic improvements from ALL levels of swimmers that result from relentlessly applying the TI paradigm, there is simply no other way that makes anywhere NEAR as much sense. Is my promotion of TI self serving? Yup, you bet. I'm one of the very few people in the US making an entire living from coaching adult swimmers. I beleive the TI way is the BEST way to train swimmers. I have bet my livelihood (not to mention my kids' college educations, our mortgage, our retirement, etc) on it. If I didn't think the TI way was the best way (for ALL levels of swimmers) I'd be doing it a DIFFERENT way.

My understanding is that when Jeremy Linn set the American record for the 100 yard ***, he took 1 stroke the first length, after the pullout, and 4 for the other lengths. You don't like to pay taxes, but if you're rich, you have to pay some. Same way with strokes, if you want to go fast, you have to take some strokes. I think you must work on technique because swimming is so inefficient but you must also practice relatively hard because your energy systems need the work, and let's face it, part of the reason for swimming is to stay in good shape. Swim fast, Greg

~~ You don't like to pay taxes, but if you're rich, you have to pay some. Same way with strokes, if you want to go fast, you have to take some strokes. ~~ Great analogy. And if swimmers would be as conscious of avoiding unnecessary strokes as a mizer is of paying unnecessary taxes, they would, long term, end up richer in the speed department.

Emmett- Thanks very much for your response. I suppose I have been kind of going about coaching in the manner that you presented. I teach smoothness and length during practice because it is the best way to verify a swimmer's technique and fluidity. But when we have a fast set where I would expect the swimmers to be approaching 90% effort, I teach the importance of turnover as well. That kind of sounds like what you were getting at. Learning to swim efficiently is what allows a swimmer to pick up their turnover to maximally increase speed. I didn't want to sound TOO critical of TI, just that I see a lot of age group coaches teaching with their tools, but haven't made use of (or perhaps don't know - as I don't) TI's approach to fast competetive swimming. I like the drill sets and technique-minded approach, it's just that there is a next step that must be taken to truly swim fast. I used the NCAAs as an example because some of those swimmers (all world-class) have just incredible turnover speeds, on the order of 1.0-1.2 sec/cycle in freestyle. Turning over an efficient stroke at a faster rate will make a swimmer faster. I wish some of the coaches I see didn't stop at the long stroke point, but made sure they progressed to teaching this aspect as well. -RM

Use the following link to the USA Swimming web site to see all the race analysis data (dps, tempo, velocity, turn time, etc.) for all swims at the 2000 Olympic Trials and 2000 Spring Nationals. The data allows you to compare swimmers in the same event. Also interesting is the site's recurring "The Perfect Race" feature, which uses race analysis data to illustrate why the race in question (Janet Evans' 400 free WR for instance) was a "perfect" one. www.usa-swimming.org/.../template.pl

Dear Rainman, When I read your posting, two things popped up that I would like to share and to keep in mind. Point 1: Watching the best swimmers is fun and informative. It also comes with the risk that we will believe that they are the fastest because their technique is the best in all aspects of their race. We have to be careful with that line of thinking because everyfast swimmer in the world has something they can improve. Best example I can think of is Tom Dolan's backstroke kick. I too noticed Anthony Ervin popping up at 4 yards right into the wall of water coming at him. If we all starting doing that, we are like lemmings to the sea creating fad after fad instead of solid technical improvement Point two: Besides trying to swim like fish, we should also emulate the power boats of the past. Early powerboat design was based on long hull design because the longer the boat was, the faster it was. We humans are the same way. Longer strokes lead to faster swimming. To prove that point, next time at practice, I encourage you to test what I call "The Thoery of Swim-a-Tivity." It is loosely patterns in reverse fashion from Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The Theory of Swim-A-Tivity states that as the number of strokes per 25 increases, your speed goes down. So, next time in the water, try taking 20 strokes per 25, then 30 strokes, then 40 strokes, and so on until you try to take 200 strokes per length. Do not touch the end of the pool until you take 200 strokes. Guaranteed, you will not be moving very fast by that time. Yeah, it is a little toungue in cheek and the kids love trying it. Good Luck with your swimming. Paul Windrath

There is a guy at the pool we used to train in that we call the Piano Man - cuz the first day we ever counted his strokes he took 88 SPL in a 25 yd pool. Over time we determined this was a long stretchy day for him. Some days he'd go in excess of 125 SPL. Needless to say he was VERY slow - but he made continuous forward progress. Occasionally I'd have my whole team watch Piano Man do a length, then try to emulate him for one length. Generally, despite their best efforts to cram in loads of strokes, I'd rarely have a person who was capable of doing more than 40 SPL - they were simply moving to fast to take more strokes than that. But they would find this little exercise instructive nonetheless. I refered to this as the Rush Limbaugh Drill - demonstrating absurdity with absurdity. One note: Considering all the various extraneous and conflicting motions and gyrations the Piano Man was making as he "swam" he probably got a better "workout" doing 200 yards than some of my people got doing 2000. If the ONLY thing that mattered was churning out heartbeats, he would probably have us all trumped.

Paul, Emmett, While I can appreciate the stories about super high SPL definitely be slower, they are to the level of absurdity. I'm most concerned with turnover rate for fairly competent competitive swimmers having SPL's in the 12-18 range. More strokes don't necessarily make you slower if you take them faster. Yes, at some point, an extremely high SPL puts an actual physical limitation on the time you can achieve for a length of the pool. As far as the wall streamline, I don't believe encouraging swimmers to get up and swim would be fad teaching. There's really more involved, such as tailoring streamline time to each individual swimmers kick strength, and determining the best approach for each of them to take in their own races. I'm just noticing that many age group swimmers are fast off the wall, kick until they've slowed down (they've always been taught streamline is the fastest and to take advantage of it), then they get up and swim and have to "re-speed-up" to their race pace. A study was done by some students at the University of Buffalo in New York that tested breaststrokers and pullout technique. They found across the board that the swimmers more than made up the distance lost in a quicker pullout by having kept a faster velocity. In fact, the distance lost on the pullout was very minimal, because most breaststrokers when lengthening their pullouts had slowed down so much they hadn't really "lengthened" hardly anything. The whole problem I have with technique ideologies (such as TI) is that they have adopted their opinion and stick to it to the point that nothing else is considered when it is presented. They have to make some concessions in order to truly develop successful swimmers. Technique is great, but yardage is necessary as well. Drills are nice, but drills don't teach you how to race a 200 freestyle. I love tuning into the TI discussion board to see Coach Laughlin's responses to posters' questions. He may as well have them on auto-reply because he writes back the same thing all the time, drill this, drill that, slow it down, stay long and fishlike, etc. There's so much good stuff to learn from TI, but the broken record rhetoric gets old. TI isn't a new way to train swimmers, it's a cleverly packaged product consisting of stuff that 95% of educated coaches already knew and were teaching, incorporated as a small piece of the larger training regimen. And the masses of lap, triathlon, and masters swimmers are gobbling it right up at the rate of $100 a pop. To be an effective well-rounded coach you have to watch swimming, read articles, incorporate bits and pieces of what is out there and then come up with a solid program. -RM

Originally posted by emmett ... Learning to swim a length in very few strokes with little or no kick absolutely requires the ability to minimize drag and the ability maximize propulsion on each stroke. Popov's ability to swim 6 SPL at submaximal speeds is part of what allows him to sprint 13 to 14 SPL at world-class speed. ... This eludes me after I watched videos of Popov's freestyle in this Forum. I still don't get the mechanisms of "...no kick...", "...minimize drag..." and "maximize propulsion..." in : "...to swim a length in very few strokes with little or no kick absolutely requires the ability to minimize drag and the ability maximize propulsion on each stroke.".

ION: None of it is instinctive or natural. But every bit of such a skill base can be learned by ANYBODY. And even if you don't choose to use every skill you learn when you race, what's the harm in expanding your skill base? You might just find that SOME of the skills you do not possess at this moment, but that you can learn, will be the critical success factors in your future faster swimming. As a starting point consider reading Terry Laughlin's books "Total Immersion" or "Swimming Made Easy" or read the articles on my web site www.h2oustonswims.org or the TI web site www.totalimmersion.net or get the TI long axis video or go to a TI clinic. Or consider reading my book, "Fitness Swimming". It's a technique oriented book that details a series of drills to help you build a very efficient freestyle stroke from scratch. The core of the book is 60 graduated workouts that incorporate drilling and swimming in a cohesive and comprehensive manner to improve your conditioning for swimming highly effective freestyle. The whole emphasis is on teaching you how to AVOID resistance rather than just helping you get better at OVERCOMING resistance - i.e. work SMARTER, not HARDER. And while the title is Fitness Swimming it has been well received by triathletes and competitive swimmers as well. Plus, I think you'll find the workouts quite challenging.