Swimming Made Easy will completely transform how you move through the water. Beautiful strokes are within the reach of every swimmer, no matter your age, strength, fitness, or experience. SME explains that fast, fluent, effortless swimming depends far more on how cleverly you avoid drag and work with the water than on how long or hard you train.
Chapter 2 - Stroke Length: The Secret to Becoming a Better SwimmerGood swimmers have one thing in common: They make it look easy. Genuinely great swimmers — and there may be only a handful of them in the entire world — are so fishlike that they look downright elegant, in the same way that Michael Jordan looked elegant playing basketball. Genuinely great swimmers look so graceful and controlled that you'd never suspect they were going all out.
What has that to do with the rest of us? Everything. I have found it is possible — with a lot of coaching experience and with my eyes wide open — to understand what great form is all about, and then to pass along the secrets to other swimmers. Certainly I've learned more about what to teach and how to teach it by watching truly gifted swimmers than I've learned from reading books about swimming.
But the revelations didn't come overnight. Even in high school and college, when I was definitely not the kind of swimmer anyone would describe as "gifted," I was fascinated by teammates who could swim faster than I could while looking as if they were loafing along at half speed. So I made it my business to understand how they did what they did. Now, after more than 30 years of swimming and coaching — and watching — I can well understand the excitement of Ted Isbell, a TI disciple who coaches the Channel Islands Aquatic Club in Ventura, CA. After observing the fastest teenage backstroker in the world, Aaron Peirsol of the Irvine (CA) Novas Swim Team, Ted wrote to me about what he'd witnessed:
"My older son competes against Aaron so I've had many opportunities to watch him swim. I've counted Aaron's strokes per lap many times and although he's always the fastest swimmer in his age group, he consistently takes 25 percent fewer strokes than other swimmers. In fact, if you cup your hands around your eyes to isolate Aaron during a race, you'd think he'd be in last place because he appears to be swimming in a leisurely fashion. If you shift your 'tunnel' view to the second swimmer (usually 10 to 15 yards behind Aaron), he appears to be swimming hard enough to break a world record. As you remove your hands from your eyes, you are stunned by the lead that Aaron has gained, swimming so effortlessly."
And that's the key. Peirsol, as is often true of the world's best swimmers, has the rare ability to swim at top speed on far fewer strokes per lap than his peers, making fast swimming look effortless. Most of the rest of us, on the other hand, can make even slow swimming look like struggle. The better the swimmer, the less struggle you’ll see as they move through the water…and the more they’ll look like Aaron Peirsol.
Among recent world-class swimmers, Alexander Popov is my favorite example. Popov has admittedly been blessed with great athletic talent, but his coach, Gennady Touretsky, has also made a very conscious effort to teach and reinforce fluidity and relaxation and make them habitual in Popov's swimming.
The impression I get from Aaron Peirsol, from world-class champions such as Alexander Popov, and from virtually all exceptionally "fishlike" swimmers, is that they always seem to be of the water, not just in it. The word that best captures the quality of their swimming is "flow."
And what is the secret to flow? For years I was convinced it was pure talent. Great swimmers, I believed, somehow knew in their bones how to remain fluid and relaxed when they were swimming fast. The rest of us could just watch in envy. But after 10 years of intensive teaching, I now realize that fluid and relaxed swimming is possible for anyone who pursues it logically and analytically. Using simple information, you can understand exactly how flow is achieved and then, to a surprising degree, go on to actually achieve it for yourself.
Once you've "broken the code" of fluid, relaxed swimming, you can consciously practice, just as Alex Popov does, the movements and qualities that produce it, and that all but guarantee you'll swim your best. Not that you'll swim as well or as fast as an Aaron Peirsol, but you will swim as well and as fast as you are capable of swimming.
And the secret is precisely what Ted Isbell noticed when watching Peirsol: a longer stroke. The technical term is stroke length (SL). This secret is actually widely known, but for some reason that I can't comprehend, virtually all coaches and swimmers ignore it. Makes as much sense as knowing a simple shortcut to solving a tough math problem, and stubbornly insisting on solving it via the long, involved method — then getting the wrong answer anyway! Coaches and swimmers alike are conditioned to pursue success mainly through sheer sweat. More and harder laps are how they assume they'll get faster, even though more and harder laps actually tend to make your stroke shorter, not longer. Hard work, done without sufficient care and thought, can actually slow a swimmer's progress.
An even more powerful impediment than habit is instinct. Most every swimmer in the world who wants to go faster automatically thinks first of churning the arms faster. And a faster stroke (i.e., higher stroke rate, or SR) results in a shorter stroke — again, just the ticket for swimming slower, instead.
Stroke Length: The Mark of Champions
How do we know stroke length is so important? It’s a fair question, and easily answered. Over the last 20 years, curious scientists with time on their hands have attempted to discover if the secret to fast swimming could be reduced to some identifiable common factor. In several independent studies, these researchers analyzed the results of important swim meets and, aided by videotape or direct, personal observation, tried to figure out what made the faster swimmers faster. Each study produced the same result: Winners took fewer strokes. In general, the fewer strokes each subject took, the faster he or she swam. And that proved true not just for the champions, but all through the ranks.
More compelling still, when researchers cast a wider net to analyze the results of several Olympics, and of every US Olympic Trial from 1976 to 1996, and even of lesser meets such as the 1998 Iowa State High School Championships, this increasingly open "secret" was consistently evident in nearly all events. In fact, you can test it yourself at any local meet. Count strokes per length for swimmers in the slower heats of nearly any event, and compare their counts with the swimmers in the faster heats. The faster swimmers will almost certainly take fewer strokes.
This simple insight has incredible potential to transform your own swimming, if you'll just use it. But, as I said, few swimmers or their coaches do use it. Most continue to train as if the pace clock and the yardage total were all that mattered. If these studies had identified aerobic power as the key to better swimming, that intense focus on distance, time, and effort would logically seem to be the most effective training tool. Yet not one of the studies concluded that.
None of this is to suggest that fitness is unimportant. But at the Olympic Trials and at the Olympics themselves, everyone has worked hard; everyone is at peak fitness. Yet certain swimmers still have an edge over all the others. And that edge, it turns out, is a longer stroke. Plenty of athletes pump iron or muscle their way through endless laps with huge paddles and/or drag suits, as if sheer strength was the surest way to swim faster. Yet when scientists study the impact of strength on swimming, they usually find that the best swimmers in the world are less powerful than any number of mediocre swimmers. So weight-room visits and power-training swim sets aren't the answer.
Meanwhile, Ted Isbell and a growing number of "evolving paradigm" coaches (as TI advocates like to call themselves) across the US have made SL the central focus of their training. With what results? All of these coaches report dramatic, even unprecedented, improvements. The proof, to paraphrase, is obviously in the pool.
What, Exactly, Is Stroke Length?
To work effectively on your SL, you'll need to understand what it is. Stroke Length, in fact, is one of the least understood terms in swimming (for simplicity, I'll refer to it as SL, and to stroke count per length of the pool as s/l). Even though swimmers are beginning to catch on that a long stroke is advantageous, most are still unsure of exactly what stroke length means or how to make a stroke longer. Do you do it by reaching farther before your hand goes in? Or by pushing the water farther toward your feet?
Most swimmers do, in fact, think of SL as "how far you reach forward and push back with your hand." Coaches, on the other hand, understand that there's more to SL than just "the length of your reach and your push," but they seldom know how to directly and significantly improve it. When I eavesdrop as a visitor during practices, I hear directives from the deck such as, "You've got to make your stroke longer!" which the swimmer naturally interprets as "Reach farther forward and push back more." This will result in a small increase in SL, but in most cases (the 98% of us who are not intuitive swimming geniuses), that increase will not last for very long. It will, in fact, be lost the moment the swimmer tries to go faster. Nor will it bring the swimmer anywhere near his or her best possible SL. So the swimmer remains unconvinced and goes back to relying on SR (stroke rate) for speed.
Just as trying to reach farther forward and push farther back has little effect on SL, a swimmer's limb length isn’t the critical factor either — though you'd never know it from the staff at the Olympic Training Center. At the OTC, I've watched coaches and researchers measure a swimmer's reach (touch as high as possible on the wall, mark the spot; let the hand hang down at the side, mark the spot; measure the distance between the two marks) in an attempt to predict optimal SL. Yes, a swimmer's reach will have some influence on the SL he or she can achieve, but not as much as you'd think.
How do I know? Because I've worked for years on my own SL, not to mention the SLs of thousands of students who have attended TI workshops. I've seen countless swimmers of below-average height (and modest reach) who have looked much "taller" in the water than swimmers who were, in fact, tall on land (with much greater reach). These shorter swimmers turned out to have a much greater SL as measured by their s/l (strokes per length of the pool).
This discrepancy baffled me for years, as I struggled to increase my SL without much success. So long as I worked on it in the ordinary way, by trying to reach more and push back more, I managed to increase it by a puny 5% each year or two. Then my teaching experiences began showing me the importance of being balanced and slippery, and all at once I was able to boost my SL by astonishing amounts — 20% in just a few weeks — and to help other swimmers score SL improvements of 10% to 50% literally overnight. Often, these were people who knew the value of SL and had been trying for years to improve theirs by doing a better job of pushing water toward their feet. It hadn't worked.
The reason stroke length doesn't have a lot to do with arm length, or with how far you reach forward and push back, is because SL is how far your body travels each time you take a stroke. So it’s mostly your body position — not your height or strength or the length of your arms — that affects the distance you will travel on each stroke. The best way to measure your SL is simply to make a habit of counting strokes — at all speeds, and on virtually every length you swim. You'll soon find there's not a single number that represents your "best" stroke count. Rather, you'll discover you have a stroke-count range — fewer on shorter repeats and/or when you're swimming slower; more when you're going farther or faster. Your primary goal during much of your swim training should be twofold: gradually lower that entire range; and reduce the difference between its upper and lower end. At other times, you'll just maintain a consistent stroke count and work at developing more speed at that count.
But be warned: Not everyone agrees on which strokes count for "stroke count," and which don't. Purist coaches and researchers insist on measuring SL only between the flags, to factor out the glide (i.e., non-stroking time) that occurs on turns and pushoffs. For reasons I'll explain later, I prefer the far simpler measure of counting all strokes (hand hits). If you take fewer strokes to swim a given distance, you've improved your SL. Period. All that really matters is whether you're spending your precious pool time concentrating on things that will help you swim faster or more easily, and counting strokes does exactly that. A "pure" SL number is important only to researchers who may need exact SLs in order to compare one swimmer to another. The swimmer you most need to compare yourself to is you. If your range was 17 to 24 s/l last year and 14 to 20 this year (or if you can swim faster at each point in that 17-to-24 range), stay the course; you're doing something right.
What, Precisely, Can a Better SL Do for Me?
The key to becoming a better swimmer can be found in a simple equation:
V = SL x SR
or Velocity equals Stroke Length multiplied by Stroke Rate. How fast you swim (V) is a product of how far you travel on each stroke (SL), multiplied by how fast you take those strokes (SR). In that way, at least, swimming is no different from running or in-line skating or cross-country skiing, where the equivalent terms would be Stride Length and Stride Rate.
Throughout most of the animal kingdom, the really fast creatures — race horses, greyhounds, cheetahs — use about the same stride rate at all galloping speeds. So do most really fast humans, such as Marion Jones and Michael Johnson. They run faster by taking longer strides, not by taking them faster. It's only when humans get into the water that we suffer a form of momentary biomechanical derangement, resorting to churning our arms madly when we want more speed.
It seems self-evident that a longer stroke or stride would be more efficient than a shorter one, but in the water a longer stroke is much more efficient. Here's why. First, there's the energy cost of a higher SR. As you increase SR, the energy cost goes up by a cube of that increase. Double your stroke rate and you burn energy eight (2 x 2 x 2) times faster. Second, there's the effect of a higher SR (and the higher heart rate that unavoidably accompanies it) on your coordination. As SR increases, your ability to stay coordinated, fluent, and efficient diminishes rapidly. As your form becomes more ragged and inefficient, the energy cost goes up even more. And, finally, you disturb the water around you far more when you're churning than when you're gliding smoothly. In essence, a fast turnover is like constantly swimming in white water. Your hand can't "grip" churned-up water nearly so well as it grips still water, and one of the surest ways to find more still water to grip is to swim with a greater SL and lower SR.
If we plug some simple numbers into our formula V = SL x SR, we can clearly see the advantages of an improved SL. Let's say two swimmers racing 200 yards both pass 100 yards in 60 seconds. But swimmer "A" took 60 strokes (an SR of 30 cycles/minute) while swimmer "B" took only 54 strokes (an SR of 27 cycles/minute). Swimmer "A" will have "spent" far more heartbeats to swim the first 100 than swimmer "B," who will have more heartbeats remaining "in the bank" to win the race. If both swimmers have an effective SR "ceiling" of, say, 32 cycles/minute, swimmer "B" can potentially raise his SR — and speed — far more to unleash a powerful finishing sprint. By learning to swim the first half of the race in fewer, longer strokes, swimmer "B" has increased the range of strategies he can employ to win a tight race.
hat Makes My SL Go Up or Down?
Although you're usually not aware of it, virtually everything that happens in practice influences your SL in some way — the distance of your repeats, how much you rest between them, the length of your sets, how fast you're swimming, your heart rate. But the single most important reason for a mediocre SL is failure to pay attention to it. If you are not consciously monitoring how your SL is holding up at various speeds and distances, your instincts will successfully tempt you to fall back too much on SR. In a later chapter, I'll describe ways in which you can creatively monitor SL for more interesting and effective training. For now, our interest is in beginning to learn what you can do today to raise your SL to its optimal level.
SL can be improved in two ways. The easiest way is to minimize drag, and you do this by simply repositioning you body in the water to make yourself more slippery. The effect is that your body goes farther, with more ease and less deceleration, on a given amount of propulsion. The other way to improve SL is to maximize propulsion, and you do this by focusing on doing a better job of moving your body forward.
When I began teaching TI workshops in 1989, swimming technique was about one thing: how you use your hands to push water toward your feet. Every coaching clinic, talk, or article on improving your swimming focused on pushing water toward your feet more effectively, and most swimming research centered on it. Swimmers themselves thought of little else. All emphasis was on maximizing propulsion rather than on minimizing drag.
But thinking about swimming was on the verge of a sea change. I had recently become acquainted with an independent thinker named Bill Boomer, who urged coaches to at least balance their emphasis on teaching propulsion skills with some attention to teaching swimmers how to minimize drag. Like most coaches, I had focused on teaching swimmers to propel themselves better and, because my interest in technique and teaching had always been so acute, I had become more adept than most at it. As I began to understand more and more the wisdom of Boomer's approach, I realized there was an enormous amount of information on how to teach propulsion, but next to nothing on how to teach slipperiness — eliminating not just drag but also the number of heartbeats a swimmer would routinely have to "spend."
So having already shifted my full-time preoccupation from giving workouts (teaching propulsion) to teaching technique, I decided to divide my energies between showing people how to propel themselves better — which I could already do very well — and teaching them how to be more slippery, a process that was still very much an art, and a highly experimental art at that. I was clear on one thing: I was going to measure my success as a teacher by how much my students improved their SL. And, right from the start, I noticed a striking phenomenon with every student. When I was successful in teaching them how to push water toward their feet, I would see a modest improvement in their SL. When I was successful in teaching them to become more slippery and to do a better job of eliminating drag, I would see a dramatic improvement in their SL. That got my attention in a hurry, and we soon began to devote more and more of our precious pool time to "slippery swimming."
Over the past 10 years, we’ve helped thousands of "average" swimmers learn to be more fishlike in the water. We’ve had a limited amount of time to work with each of them — two days (five days for kids) isn’t much time to unlearn a lifetime of bad habits and to imprint something new. So we’ve had to refine and be highly selective about what we teach and how we teach it. The result is that we’ve looked for what really matters in teaching each of the four strokes, and we’ve developed what we feel is an unbeatable system for teaching. So let's begin learning how to be more slippery in each of the strokes.