Teacher and Student: A TI Lesson from Two Points of View

- by Laurie Roberts and Kevin Millerick

Laurie’s Account:

I returned to competitive swimming two years ago at age 26, following a 13-year break. I discovered TI and was soon knocking chunks off my swim times. Then disaster struck. Last year I got tendinitis in my left shoulder and didn't manage a proper training session for the next six months, and four months of that I didn't enter the pool at all. It was so frustrating I considered giving up. At the start of the year I thought I'd give it one last go. I began swimming again, taking it easy, but could still feel some soreness in my shoulder. I concluded there must be something about my technique causing the problem and contacted Kevin Millerick of TI UK for some instruction. When we met, Kevin asked me to swim a 200 meter free and assessed my stroke.

1. Mistimed Kick
   Kevin noticed that I had a 4-beat kick and though I kicked with my left foot when my right hand entered, I also kicked with my left foot when my left hand entered, which caused me to arch my back. I had read numerous posts on the Discussion Forum about a 2-beat-diagonal-kick but couldn't get it to work. The first lesson Kevin reminded me of was the need to have a single focal point per length and to practice in drills before introducing it in full stroke. Kevin had me do ZipperSwitch drill (single switches) focusing on kicking with the opposite foot, and exaggerating it for effect. After a few lengths I was beginning to feel more in synch and then, on one length, suddenly discovered diagonal power. I was swimming super-slow and managed to string together around five ZipperSwitches with diagonal power. I felt a surge as I moved down the pool. I still have an awful lot of muscle memory to overcome and it will take time to drill this into my stroke but I felt a definite improvement. If I learnt nothing else in the day, I’d have been happy to make this breakthrough!

2. Tense Hands
   Despite my excitement at discovering diagonal power I was still concerned about strain on my vulnerable shoulder. Kevin had noticed my hands were rigidly cupped as they entered the water. While still practicing ZipperSwitches, he told me to keep my fingers open! I was a little skeptical. Surely the water would just pass between my fingers? Kevin explained that the difference in surface area was negligible and that it would be compensated for by a greater degree of relaxation. So I did as he said on my next length of ZipperSwitch and for the first time in my life, flowed down the pool with virtually no stress on my arms or shoulder. In addition, I found that I wasn't having to think about rotating. It just seemed to happen naturally -- and I seemed to be rotating more symmetrically. I am now almost certain that my previous technique of tensed, cupped hands, placed tension on my shoulder contributing to my shoulder problem. Again, if I had only learnt this from my lesson it would have been money well spent. Again, I had to focus purely on this one point. If I tried to focus on my kick as well I tensed my hands and vice versa. I learnt the benefit of focusing on one focal point per length. Kevin assured me that, gradually, it would all come together.

3. Over-reaching
   Kevin also noted that I was over-reaching when entering the water. This caused me to compensate by arching my back (another contributor to the shoulder problem?). The remedy was to concentrate on Ear Hops as a focal point for 10 to 20 lengths each time I swim, to ingrain it into muscle memory.

4. Exaggerated front quadrant swimming
   In our afternoon lesson, Kevin videotaped me underwater. This revealed that I was over-exaggerating my front quadrant swimming which made it more difficult for me to rotate smoothly. I was almost swimming with a catch-up drill. This wasn’t easily observable on the surface but now I'm conscious of it, I can assess it when I swim. To correct it I can work on my switch timing in UnderSwitches, where I have a visual cue, and reinforce that by switching when my “Zipper hand” reaches my ear in ZipperSwitches. I’ll do this for 10 or 20 lengths each session until I get it right. I am lucky in that my local pool is well lit and I can I can see my shadow on the bottom of the pool. This allows me to continuously observe when my arm is entering the water – and watching that will also remind me to keep my head in neutral position.

5. Lack of elbow bend
   The video also showed that I wasn't bending my elbow under water early enough to anchor. Kevin suggested fist gloves to correct this. And obviously, to focus on this as a focal point for 10 or 20 lengths each session until I started to ingrain it into my muscle memory!

It's too early to say whether my shoulder problems have gone for good. But I'm hopeful and I learnt a lot regardless! I'm keen to start practicing what I have learnt. Thanks Kevin!

Kevin’s Account:

I’ve been a swimmer, in some way, my whole life. When I swam competitively from age 8 through 21, kicking was what we did when we weren’t pulling or swimming whole stroke. Out came the kickboards, up went the heads, open went the mouths for a set of 10 X 50 chit-chats. I can’t remember any of my coaches ever explaining how the (freestyle) kick related to the rest of the stroke. I just did the kick sets so my legs would be there when I needed them to make me go faster. When I started to swim regularly again after a 22-year hiatus, I trained as I had before I retired in my early 20s. That was six years ago, but even though I’ve learned to swim and teach the TI way, I hadn’t learned my lessons well enough. But because of my TI teaching experience I now understand precisely how the kick should interact with the rest of the stroke, and can diagnose when it’s not.

Last year, while working with a teenage triathlete, I was thrilled at how well she drilled, but nearly as dismayed at her ungainly whole stroke. Each lesson the drilling would be video quality, but the swimming would be… well, awful. Then one day, I prayed for divine intervention while watching her. After a few lengths the light bulb went on – she was kicking with the wrong foot, short-circuiting her rotation! Eureka! We spent the next 10 minutes doing slow swimming with proper kick timing as the focal point. With patience on both our parts, we soon had her connecting a compact flick of her foot to the entry of her opposite hand, which produced a nice surge of effortless momentum with each stroke.

Soon after, I began working with Laurie. Once again I saw the familiar symptom of really beautiful drilling but ragged whole stroke. While he had attended a workshop a year earlier, he’d been away from swimming for several months due to his shoulder injury. Kick timing wasn’t among his reasons for wanting a “tune-up” because, like most swimmers, he had no idea how his kick was supposed to fit in with his other swimming movements. I also noted that although his swimming was pretty fluent, his hands were very tense throughout the stroke cycle. A beneficial by-product of relaxing - which Laurie found invigorating – was that it reduced strain on his shoulder. Finally I noticed dead spots in the stroke cycle, especially as his hands entered the water. Laurie was being too patient, doing almost a catch-up movement, which robbed his stroke of the power of dynamic weight shifts.

As with his kick, we used ZipperSwitch practice to help Laurie develop a relaxed recovery.

Having his hand resisted by the water on recovery would heighten his awareness of whether it was tense or relaxed. I asked him to drag his hand with the water at the knuckles. Next time I asked him to keep his hand completely submerged on recovery. By focusing on allowing the water to gently flex his hand backward during recovery, he quickly learned the sensation of relaxing it. The switch exercise also helped reduce the exaggerated overlap between his hands in front of his head. Because the water’s resistance to his dragging-forward hand diminished as his hand approached his shoulder, that gave him a cue for the proper moment to switch. By the end of two hours, Laurie had made real progress.

I swim every day and the regulars at my pool are often curious about what I do and why my swimming is so different than theirs. I’ve shared some tips with several of them but they seldom “get” it. The reason quick fixes don’t work is that stroke correction is a process. It’s simply not possible to implement a quick fix, on the fly, without taking the time to slow down, isolate the movement and mindfully practice each “mini-skill” until it’s ingrained. Laurie’s lesson is an example that significant improvement can be made in one day, but it’s essential to take an organized approach to diagnosis and choosing the right fix…one step at a time.

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