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| How
Swimming is Different - and how to make the difference
work in your favor. |
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Article Written By Terry Laughlin
The world's best swimmers move through the water with grace, economy and flow, while novices are awkward, clumsy and inefficient. But the rest of us can learn to swim well if we take the time to master swimming as an art before tackling it as a sport. How many land-based athletes have concluded that swimming requires some exotic or elusive kind of fitness after an experience like this: Joe, who can breeze through a 5-mile jog without breaking a sweat, decides to try a pool workout one day. Within a few minutes, he's panting for breath and wondering: "How will I ever get in a decent workout if I can't even make 100 yards without dying?" Experiences like that convince many adult athletes that swimming is only for those who swam competitively as kids, and suspecting that the time and effort required to master may not even be worth it. But mastering the "swim challenge" is decidedly worthwhile. Not only is it ideal as a restorative, general fitness workout for virtually any aging athlete; learning to swim well creates the option to try triathlon or Masters swimming. And I've yet to meet an otherwise well-rounded athlete who could not learn to swim well enough to stay fit or tackle a triathlon. All they have to do is discard everything other aerobic activities such as running has taught them, as soon as they enter the pool. Anyone from occasional joggers to dedicated marathoners knows this fundamental truth: Increase your mileage or intensity and your running improves. But when they apply the same logic to swimming, most novices quickly achieve what one of my former students christened "terminal mediocrity;" after a few months, no amount of effort produces any further progress. Here's why: The world records for the mile run and the 400-meter swim are virtually identical. If you were to run once around the track with Alan Webb, America's best miler, he'd beat you easily, but -- even if you're purely a recreational jogger - by running easily and efficiently, you could nearly match the number of strides he took to cover 400 meters. If, on the other hand, you tried to swim 100 meters with American record holder Klete Keller, not only would he beat you easily but - assuming you could complete 100 meters -- the difference between his stroke count and yours would be staggering. Keller and other elite freestylers can easily swim 25-yards in 7 or 8 strokes (counting each hand entry as one stroke), while novice swimmers typically average 20 to 25 strokes for the same distance. And that threefold difference in stroke efficiency is only half the story. A world-class runner is about 90% mechanically efficient, meaning that 90 of every 100 calories expended produce forward motion, while approximately 10 are lost to muscle heat, ground friction, wind resistance, etc.. Because water is 900 times thicker than air and highly unstable as a medium for applying power, a world-class swimmer is only 9% mechanically efficient -- which means the typical novice swimmer achieves energy efficiency of perhaps 3 percent. Thus, the path to swimming-improvement is not to make more energy available through training, it's to waste less energy by improving your stroke. If you can increase your mechanical efficiency even modestly -- from, say, 3% to 4% -- that will translate into a 33% improvement in your swimming capacity. No workout program can produce those kinds of results, but I've routinely seen swimmers in Total Immersion workshops achieve that sort in a single weekend. Running is a sport; swimming is an art.
Terry Laughlin is founder and head coach of
Total Immersion Swimming and the author of
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