Triathlon swimming made easy (6 page)

Balancing Your Freestyle
"Hide" Your Head

In the early days of TI we stressed the importance of leaning on your chest or "buoy." Years of teaching balance have shown us that head position is actually far more important. In fact, simply getting the head in a neutral (aligned-with-the-spine) position dramatically improves balance for many of our workshop students. So our teaching progression now starts with teaching swimmers to "hide" the head.

From the deck, the coaches know your head is in the right position when we can see no more than a sliver of the back of your head or cap above the surface. We also imagine that a laser beam is coming from the top of your cap - directly aligned with your spine. We want to see that laser beam pointing directly at the far end of the pool. From your point of view, it
should feel
as if:

• a thin film of water could flow over the back of your head at any time

• you're looking directly at the bottom between breaths, using peripheral vision to peek just a bit forward

• your "laser beam" is pointing straight ahead

• your hips and legs feel lighter and are riding noticeably higher.

Hiding your head does not mean burying it, nor pressing it down. It simply means holding your head in a neutral position, the way you hold it when you're
not
swimming. One of the simplest ways to achieve that head position is to simply
let go!
Just give up the weight of your head entirely to the water and let it find it's own most natural position.

When I'm coaching, as I look across the pool, I want to see that tiny sliver of the back of your head showing above the surface whenever you're not breathing. Or a thin film of water flowing over it. Ask a friend to eyeball you as you swim and drill, after showing them the photo on the n
ext page.

Reach Deeper

Once you have learned to hide your head, your next emphasis should be on slicing your hand into the water - entering it
close to your head -
and slice it down to make your "catch" at a position well below your head. You'll learn the right position for your hand in the Skating drill in Chapter 10, Lesson One, then imprint it in the "Switch" drills to follow and continue focusing on in whole-stroke swimming. One simple way to begin working on it, even before doing drills, is to practice slipping your hand and arm into the water silently. If you do that without making a sound,
you will almost certainly end up with a deeper catch than previously. You can also reinforce this by tipping your fingers down each time you extend your hand forward -
particularly while breathing opposite that hand and on your first stroke following pushoff.

Swim "Downhill"

We no longer emphasize this as much as previously, but for "balance challenged" swimmers - and particularly lean triathletes who have weak kicks or rigid ankles (from years of running) - consciously shifting weight forward - "leaning on your lungs" - remains very helpful. Press in until you feel as if your hips are light, as if the water is simply carrying you. The ZipperSkate drill (Lesson Three in Chapter 10) will help give you a greatly heightened sense of how this should feel.

Drill with Total Patience

The most important advice I give to the 20% of workshop attendees who are "balance challenged" is to do as little swimming as possible. Until you have at least the basics of balance, you will almost certainly "practice struggle" to an unacceptable degree while doing whole-stroke swimming. It is essential to take all the time necessary to patiently move through the basic balance drills until effortless support begins to feel natural. Don't swim and don't even do much advanced drilling. Just stay with the most basic drills — Lesson One in the drill section that begins on page 76 — almost
to the exclusion of everything else.

Use the fistglove
®
stroke trainer

After mastering Lessons 1 through 3 (see pages 74 to 95), one of the simplest and quickest ways to further develop your basic balance skills, while doing "switch" drills and whole-stroke swimming, is to wear fistglove® stroke trainers for 50 percent or more of your pool time. These latex "mittens" tightly wrap your hand into a fist and make it impossible to use your arm as a support lever or to muscle your way through the water. They force you to use your torso for balance and support and encourage you to use much more finesse while swimming. Soon, a weightless arm is your only option.

Should I Use a Pull Buoy?

Once a swimmer has learned balance, he should never use a pull buoy again; a balanced body is its own perfect buoy. The basic problem with pull buoys is they provide artificial balance; take the buoy off and it's lost. If you really commit to imprinting a neutral head position (starting with the Fish and Skating drills) and slice your hand in at a steeper, deeper angle (find and imprint the right position in Skating and ZipperSkate drills; continue reinforcing it in all Switch drills), you'll soon learn how it feels to have your hips and legs effortlessly supported and how that can free your ar
ms to simply glide forward without the buoy.

What about My Wetsuit?

Wetsuits are universally popular with triathletes for one primary reason. They instantly solve the balance problem. Yes, they help keep you warm in cold water but, more important, they make you comfortable and confident. In Chapter 20, I'll give detailed guidance on how to use that freedom to maximum advantage in a race, but for now just be aware of this: The greatest advantage offered by a wetsuit is the freedom to slow down your arms, lengthen your body on each stroke, and end the frantic churning. If you happen to do some wetsuit swimming in pool or lake, focus more on slowi
ng your arms and lengthening your body than on anything else, and recognize that you are imprinting the balanced-swimming form. Then when you swim without your wetsuit, try to keep the same feeling of leisure, control, and flow.

Just as a balanced body fights the water less, the laws of physics also say that a longer body will slip through the water more easily than a shorter one. And, happily, there are ways to make our bodies "longer" too — at least as far as the water is concerned. So now that you've mastered balance, it's time to start "Swimming Taller."

Chapter 6

How to Swim Taller: Regardless of Your Height

As with balance, "swimming taller" is neither natural nor instinctive; in coaching thousands of triathletes, I've seen only a few who swam taller without having been taught. But, as with the other Fishlike skills, knowing how to lengthen your "vessel" in the water can be learned by anyone, given the right kind of practice.

The most significant advantage to swimming taller is that the extra length makes your body more
slippery.
According to Froude's Law, as you increase the length of a vessel at the waterline, wave drag decreases and energy cost goes down. And though it may be a stretch to compare a 60-foot steel hull making 20 knots in open seas to a six-foot triathlete trying to make one meter/second in Kona Cove (and whose "vessel" is continually shape-morphing with each stroke), there is no doubt swimmers can benefit greatly from trying to be more "Froude worthy."

The payoff is clear. If you watched the finals of the 100-meter freestyle at the 2000 Olympics, you might have noticed something striking about the finalists: They look like they would make a pretty decent basketball team. In fact, the fastest men averaged about 6'5" while the fastest women were 5'10" or taller.

Common sense suggests several advantages of being taller: Longer arms to win close touch-outs. Long legs to turn a bit farther from the wall. Incremental advantages like those would help in a close race, but the more
critical reason is that the maximum speed of a human swimmer is approximately one body length per second. All things being equal, this gives a 6'6" swimmer an advantage of approximately 10 yards over a 6'0" swimmer in a one-minute race. Thus, the price of admission to a final where everyone swims about two meters per second (48 to 49 seconds for 100 meters) is a body that's about two meters tall. And where do 6-footers find success? Generally, in events where the winning time might be only 1.7 to 1.8 meters per second, such as the 400- or 1500-meter freestyle.

Most triathletes are not endowed with unusual height, nor can they expect another growth spurt, but luckily this is not really a handicap in triathlon - as it would be if you harbored a secret goal to swim the 100meter final in the next Olympics. The point is to do all you can to maximize the speed potential of the body you
do
have and to take back the advantage from taller rivals who haven't learned how to use their height to full advantage.

Here's why this works: Drag increases exponentially as we go faster; thus it takes a HUGE increase in power to swim faster if nothing else changes. But it is in your power to change the equation: Keeping your bodyline
as long as possible for as long as possible
during each stroke cycle is among the simplest things you can do to reduce drag. And anything you do to reduce drag hugely reduces the power required to swim at any speed. The less power and energy it takes you to swim, say, 28 minutes for 1500 meters, the better you'll feel on the bike and run. Here's how you do it in freestyle:

1. Hide your head and swim "downhill." First things first. Keep working on your primary balance cues until you feel a clear sense of a "weightless arm" before you actually start
trying
to swim taller. Remember, if you haven't mastered balance and learned to make the water support you, your arms will be so busy trying to keep you afloat that you won't be able to use them to lengthen your body.

2. Lengthen your body with each stroke. As you swim, instead of thinking "Stroke...Stroke...Stroke," think "Reach...Reach..
.Reach"
You'll still be stroking — the right arm strokes as the left arm reaches, and vice versa — but your focus will shift to the reaching arm, which has far more potential to increase speed and reduce drag. This will change the entire
focus of your swimming, away from pushing water toward your feet (concentrating on what's happening
under
your body) to lengthening your body (concentrating on what's happening
in front
of your body). And that shift in focus will reduce your level of perceived effort. If you imagine you're sliding your arm through the sleeve of a jacket, you'll have it about right.

3. Reach
through,
not
over,
the water. Slice your hand into the water fairly close to your head, then extend it just below the surface. Reaching over the water is more natural, but a hand in the air is a weighted object that makes balance more difficult. Moreover, it does nothing to increase the length of your vessel at the waterline (remember Froude). But extending your hand just below the surface gives you that extra length. To get this right, practice this while doing your TI freestyle "overswitch" drills, and later while swimming:

• Have your hand
barely
clear the water on recovery.

• Slide your hand back into the water almost directly in front of your nose.

• Re-enter the water as if trying to cut a hole in the water with your fingertips and slip the rest of your arm
cleanly
through that hole.

4. Reach with a "weightless" arm. If all your brain cells are shouting "Reach!" as your hand enters the water, but your hand still plunges toward the bottom as it enters, there are two possible reasons: either you
haven't solved your balance problem (in which case, see #1 or review Chapter 5), or the force of habit is still too powerful. If it's the latter, you can correct it by a little creative self-deception: Pretend each stroke is your last of the lap, and reach forward as if for the wall before you begin the stroke. This will help you form a new habit of extending your hand weightlessly, effortlessly, and unhurriedly before stroking, as if it was just floating out in front o
f you.