Now that I've gone through the hassle of signing up as a member of this dicussion group, this gets more and more fun. Maybe I'll get fired from my job :)
Anyway... I'm sure that ALL Masters level swimmers have heard of Total Immersion (from now on referred to as TI) swimming, correct? What are everyone's opinions about TI swimming? I am most curious because as a coach of age group swimmers, I was looking for training videos for our kids. I happened upon TI and liked what I saw... at first.
Here's some background for my experience with TI... very well put together, most of what they teach has been in existence for some time anyway, and they certainly are good for teaching novice/beginner swimmers the basic technique for swimming.
However, when looking to swim fast, and I mean fast, not lap swim quality, but truly competitively, I thing TI has missed to boat completely. Yes, smooth and efficient swimming is nice, but did anyone see the NCAA's? There are 20 year old men swimming 9 strokes per length in breaststroke! We have a number of age group coaches in my area teaching their kids how to swim breaststroke at 6 or 7 strokes a length!!! What gives? Extended glide is one thing, but when you slow down your stroke to such an extent just to achieve long and fluid strokes you sacrifice speed tremendously.
Hey, if you can swim 9 strokes a length at 1 second per stroke that is WAY better than 6 strokes a length at 2 seconds per stroke. Simple math.
Anthony Ervin of Cal swam the 100 free in the follwing SPL... 12 (start)/15/16/16. I could be off but that's what I was able to get from the (ahem- PALTRY) ESPN coverage. Now TI has goal SPL's of 12/13! Hello, if the BEST sprinter in history takes 8 cycles, shouldn't that tell us something? Turnover is very important. Same with streamlining, yes streamlines are nice and quite important but A.E. pops up after 5 yards MAX out of each turn. You only serve yourself well if your streamline is faster than you can swim, most age group swimmers would be well-served to explode out of the turn and swim within 3-4 yards.
Alas, it's been a slow day finishing my work for the week. Just looking to start a nice discussion. It's been my experience that a lot of Masters level swimmers are also engaged in coaching age group swimming at some level, and therefore I feel we can get some good dialogue going on this issue.
Now I've just used TI as an example because that's what I've had my experience with, but more general is what keys do you all stress when trying to mold competitive swimmers?
Au revoir,
-Rain Man
Parents
Former Member
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.
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.
