Any Runner Can Swim

How to stop “thinking like a runner” while you’re in the pool

By Terry Laughlin

Learning to swim can be one of the most frustrating tasks for a runner. Thousands of them have undoubtedly had an experience like this: A runner who can breeze through a 10-miler without even breaking a sweat decides one day to try a pool workout. Two lengths leave him panting exhaustedly at poolside and thinking, "How will I ever get in a decent workout if I can’t even make 100 yards without dying?" Experiences like that leave a high percentage of runners viewing swimming as something that’s exceedingly difficult to master and suspecting that all the time and effort it will take to master the sport may not even be worth it.

In reality, I have yet to meet a runner who could not learn to swim well enough to stay fit or tackle a triathlon. All they have to do is discard everything running has taught them about the link between fitness, strength, and performance as soon as they enter the pool. The rewards for those who do can be impressive. First, learning to swim well gives you a viable cross-training outlet that will increase in value as you get older. Swimming may be the best of all cross-training choices for long-time runners because it unloads joints while helping maintain aerobic fitness, and works upper-body muscles neglected by running.

Second, learning to swim well opens the possibility of two new sports. Not only might you become good enough at swimming to consider Masters swimming, as many runners have, but also you can become a triathlete. More triathletes come from a running background than from any other sport. All have said that converting their running fitness into cycling performance was relatively easy. It was the swim leg that posed problems. Solve that and, next thing you know, you’re a triathlete.

It’s the Economy, Stupid! (Swimming Economy, That Is)

That caustic campaign slogan kept the 1992 Clinton presidential effort "on-message." The message for would-be swimmers is the same. Anyone with running experience, whether it’s neighborhood jogging three times a week, an occasional 5K road race, or an international marathon, knows the core truth about running better and faster: Increase your mileage within reason and your running improves. Run faster and harder within reason and your running will improve. Naturally enough, when runners take up swimming, they apply the same logic to swimming improvement, and find that more laps and harder laps do not guarantee improvement. After a few months of regular laps, they discover that they’ve stagnated at a certain level of swim speed. The easy gains come quickly; after that, even modest improvement seems to require considerable effort. Until they finally reach the state one of my former students christened "terminal mediocrity" and no amount of volume or effort produces any further progress.

Here’s a quick glimpse into why that is: If you were to race Olympic 400-meter champion Michael Johnson once around the track, he’d probably beat you easily. But if you were to count the number of strides that each of you took, you’d find the difference to be relatively minor, even if you are purely a recreational runner.

If, on the other hand, you were to get in the pool and race 100 meters against Alexander Popov, the Olympic champion in that time-equivalent event, not only would he beat you easily but also you’d find the difference between the number of strokes he took and the number you took to be staggering. Popov and other elite swimmers can easily swim the length of a 25-yard pool in 6 or 7 strokes (counting each hand entry as one stroke). Whenever I count strokes during lap swim at the local Y, the average stroke count for dedicated lap swimmers is 25 or higher for 25 yards.

But that’s only half the story on comparative efficiency. A world-class runner is estimated to be about 90% mechanically efficient, meaning that 90 of every 100 calories expended are directly used for forward motion, while approximately 10 are lost to muscle heat, friction with the ground, overcoming wind resistance, etc. The recreational runner is probably 80% mechanically efficient. So as you train (and training is essentially an attempt to make more energy calories available for work), 80% of the energy you gain is available to propel you faster.

A world-class swimmer is only 9% mechanically efficient. Taking into account the stroke-count data cited above, we see that the average recreational swimmer is only about one quarter as efficient as an elite swimmer, which translates into a mechanical efficiency of just 2% to 3%. This means that as a swimmer churns out lap after lap, trying to improve his swimming by raising his fitness level, perhaps 97 of every 100 calories of new energy resources created will be lost to inefficiency. Clearly the path to swimming improvement is not to make more calories available, it’s to waste fewer of them. You do that by improving stroke efficiency. If you can raise your mechanical efficiency even modestly from, say, 3% to 4%, it will result in a 33% improvement in your swimming performance. No workout program yet designed can produce those kinds of results. But I’ve routinely seen swimmers in Total Immersion workshops make gains of that sort in just one weekend. (Click on to Workshops for more information about Total Immersion’s Freestyle, 4-Stroke, and Team Workshops.)

Running Is a Sport; Swimming Is an Art

What makes swimming so different from running? Simply put, running is a natural activity. Swimming is, too... if you’re a fish. For the rest of us, it’s a struggle. When we watch the world's best swimmers, whether dolphins or extraordinary human swimmers like Alex Popov, we observe a similar gift for moving through the water, at slow speeds as well as fast, with grace, economy of movement, and fluency. When we observe most other swimmers, particularly runners taking their first tentative strokes, we see exactly the opposite. Their swimming is awkward, clumsy, inefficient. When they try to swim faster, their inefficiency increases exponentially. But don’t lose sleep if this describes you, because, as my extensive teaching experience suggests, only about 1% of the population has the innate ability to swim with such fluency while the rest of us instinctively fight the water and ourselves. This is why I describe the slippery-swimming style we teach at Total Immersion workshops as fishlike because it is so different from the way humans instinctively swim.

But I’ve also learned that the less gifted among us can learn to swim like fish if we are patient. The key is to give yourself the time and space to master swimming as an art before tackling it as a sport. Before trying to swim fast or far or hard (or churn out repeats trying to steel yourself for a 1-kilometer triathlon swim ordeal), first learn to swim slowly with beauty and grace. Learn not to fight the water or yourself, then patiently develop your ability to swim fluently while moving at progressively faster speeds or for greater distances. And NEVER allow yourself to fall into the self-defeating habit of "practicing" struggle or inefficiency.

When you simply focus on swimming more and more yards, as virtually every runner-turned-swimmer does, you're more likely to be practicing your mistakes--I call this "developing your struggling skills"--than refining your technique and boosting your endurance. You’re not becoming a more efficient swimmer, you’re just attempting to compensate for all the energy you waste by swimming inefficiently.

Fish School: Intelligent Swim Training for Runners

Fish go farther and faster, on less energy, than we’ll ever manage. But we can borrow some of their most efficient techniques by training the nervous system, not the aerobic system. Here’s a Total Immersion 5-part strategy for replacing simple yardage, repeats, and intervals with fishlike swimming:

1.Swim slowly. One of the simplest rules I give new swimmers is "You have to learn to swim well slowly before you can swim well fast." Swim much slower, on purpose, then you think you’re capable of. Swimming slowly is the easiest way to begin developing habits of ease, efficiency and economy. And while you’re swimming slowly, you’ll find it much easier to practice all of the following:

2.Count your strokes regularly. Your best measure of efficiency is how many strokes you take getting from one end of the pool to the other. As fatigue mounts and efficiency falls, your stroke count can balloon by 30% or more as you diligently train your nervous system to lapse into inefficiency, which is exactly what will keep you from making progress.

3.Practice stroke elimination. Make efficiency, not yardage or speed, your objective. Set a stroke count target of 10% lower than your norm. If you usually take 22 strokes/length on endurance swims or repeats, set a new limit for yourself of just 20. See how far into a swim or set you can hold that count instead of how fast you can finish or how tight an interval you can manage.

4.Streamline yourself. Whenever you're not counting strokes, work on getting your nervous system used to efficiency-promoting skills that make you more "fishlike." None of these comes naturally, and all take work to get used to, but they produce results Here are three that will make an immediate difference:

Get that head down! Forget the old rule about looking forward and keeping the waterline at your forehead. This puts your body in an unnatural position that just tires you out and wrecks your "torpedo" shape. If more than a sliver of the back of your head shows above the surface as you swim, you're holding your head too high. Ask a friend to check you.

Swim downhill! Shift your weight forward until you feel as if you're leaning on your chest. This keeps your body more horizontal and more "slippery," and makes your hips and legs feel lighter. That reduces the need to kick and tire out your leg muscles, for which they’ll thank you later in the race.

Swim “taller!” Say to yourself each stroke, "The most important thing I do with my hand is lengthen my body. Reach... reach... reach! Don’t pull... pull... pull." That gives you a longer stroke and a longer, sleeker "vessel" that will slice far more easily through the water. Ask any naval architect. But keep your head down and swim downhill or this may be impossible. And slice your hand in close to your head, instead of reaching over the water.

1. Swim less, drill more. If, despite your best efforts, you are unable to reduce your stroke count to a consistent 20 strokes per 25 yards, you're better off doing more drills and less swimming. Your stroke inefficiencies are so stubborn that every lap you do simply makes them more permanent. The only way to break those stubborn "human swimming" habits and build new fishlike ones is to spend more time doing drills than conventional swimming. Try doing at least 60% of your yardage in stroke drills for the next month or two and see how your stroke reacts.

Happy laps!