SWIM WITH YOUR BODY, NOT YOUR ARMS AND LEGS

Discover effortless power you never knew you had.

By Terry Laughlin

Want a quick and easy lesson in how to make your swimming smoother and stronger? Visit an aquarium. Watching fish and aquatic mammals underwater will give you one dominant impression: the best "engine" for propulsion in a fluid medium is the core body. Lacking arms and legs, fish cannot propel themselves by pulling and kicking as humans do; they move far more gracefully and effortlessly with rhythmic undulation than would ever be possible by churning up the water as humans do.

Watch the world’s best human swimmers and you'll see a similar principle at work: their strokes are a symphony with the torso setting the rhythm and the arms and legs moving in synchrony to it. Watching unskilled swimmers, you see precisely the opposite: arms flailing, legs churning, and their core body usually immobile in the middle of the action.

In recent years, there's been increasing "buzz" among coaches about hip rotation as the power source in swimming. But simply instructing swimmers to "roll your hips" misses the main point; there's not enough true muscle in the hips to provide any real power. A far more helpful goal, I've found, is to aim to swim with your whole body, as fish do, rather than with your arms and legs.

The interesting question is why it should be necessary to learn hip rotation in the first place. Your body naturally wants to move from side to side to accommodate the alternating arm action of freestyle and backstroke, which you can prove to yourself by standing in place and moving your arms as if swimming. Yet most unskilled swimmers expend huge amounts of energy fighting the water and themselves in order not to roll.

They do so either because of misinformation or poor balance. The former can be blamed on swimming coaches and teachers who have erroneously advised that you’ll swim better in a flat, stable position in the water like some big, flat-bottomed steamboat. That analogy fails because your propulsion comes from an alternating arm stroke (in free and back), not a paddlewheel. And, as you have already experienced, a flat body position impedes an effortless alternating arm action.

The balance aspect is a bit more involved. Because the body wants to roll, in order to remain flat freestylers must expend energy--usually by splaying their arms or legs--to arrest their natural roll. In most cases this is not conscious or intentional; they remain flat because they haven't mastered side-lying balance. As soon as they become comfortable in the side-lying position--which is not natural or instinctive for most people, but must be learned—they stop fighting themselves and roll more freely.

Though coaches speak of hip rotation primarily as a way to swim more powerfully, in truth, the greater advantage is hydrodynamic. Your body is more "slippery" on its side (the "yacht-like position") than it is when flat (like a barge). Because water is elastic (the harder you push on it, the harder it resists), anything you do to reduce drag is always more beneficial than anything you do to increase power.

Once you have become more slippery by learning the balance that frees your body's natural roll, you gain access to an incredibly powerful "engine" for swimming propulsion: the Kinetic Chain. If we think of our arms and shoulders as doing the “work” of swimming, when we want to swim faster, we will work them harder. This leads to fatigue and inefficiency. If we instead think of our entire body as generating the power and doing the work, when we want to swim faster we will engage the entire body, and use the arms and shoulders to simply transmit force that has been generated elsewhere.

Body rotation in swimming generates propulsion just as it does in baseball, golf, or tennis (or in throwing a javelin or a punch): A biomechanical chain reaction occurs, in which the legs propel the hips, which power the torso, which drives the last link in the kinetic chain--the shoulders and arms. The most powerful movements don't start and stop in any one joint; when we employ precise body mechanics, power ripples through our bodies like it does through a cracked whip until it finally arrives at the point where it's released.

But there is one key difference in how swimmers use the kinetic chain compared to land-based athletes. On land, the chain reaction starts with twisting the body away from the direction of the swing while the legs are anchored to the ground, an action known as elastic loading, similar to a rubber band being stretched before firing. The hip cock acts like the handle of a whip, throwing the energy upward through torso, shoulders, and arms with increasing speed and power. Since swimmers cannot anchor their feet to the ground, the hips cannot act as a whip handle, making it essential that you focus on moving the entire torso.

When we are swimming with maximum effectiveness, it is torso rotation that thrusts the recovering hand forward into the water at the same time that it drives the propelling hand back. We increase stroking power not by lifting weights, but by shifting from passive body roll to dynamic body rotation, pressing into service the stronger muscles of the torso that “feed” power to the arms.

The kinetic chain most often breaks down in swimmers--even those who are balanced and roll passively when swimming slowly--when they attempt to swim faster. Because the instinct to seek power and set stroke rhythms in the arms is so strong, 99% of all swimmers churn the arms faster and harder when they want to swim faster. But a key principle of all rhythmic movements is that they should always start in the core, not in the extremities. Your arms have so much less mass than your torso that it's easy for them to get ahead of your core body rhythms. Once they do, it’s like disconnecting a boat’s propeller from its engine.

The best way to learn to swim with your body, instead of with your arms and legs, is to combine stroke drills and super-slow swimming. During ten years of teaching improvement-minded swimmers at Total Immersion workshops, I’ve found that most swimmers learn to roll much more readily through stroke drills than by simply trying to increase body roll while swimming. When swimming whole-stroke, your ingrained habits and muscle memory resist change. Stroke drills bypass that roadblock because your nervous system doesn’t interpret them as “swimming” and they allow you to exaggerate the new motor pattern that you're trying to learn. Any drills that teach balance and emphasize body rolling have the potential to replace your arm-dominant stroke with core-based propulsion. (For complete instructions on these drills, see the Total Immersion Fishlike Freestyle Video or the Total Immersion Swiminar Workbook.)

Once you have learned the balance that makes rolling fully and freely more comfortable, then you can begin practicing it in your stroke with Super-Slow Swimming, the virtues of which are threefold. First, you’ll be more aware of body roll when you swim at a slow pace. Second, the slower stroke rate allows you to slightly exaggerate the roll, which is helpful in trying to change a long-term and strongly ingrained motor pattern. Finally, when starting from a very slow stroke rate, it is far easier to practice raising your stroke rhythm by shifting from easy and passive body roll to faster, more dynamic body rotation.

Here are several good ways to make “core-body propulsion” a habit:

Pick-ups. Swim a series of 25-yard repeats. Start each at very slow rhythm, about 50% of maximum effort, and gradually increase the effort to 70% or 80% as you approach the finish.

Speedplay. Swim a series of 50-yard repeats. On each, swim the first length at 50% speed and effort and the second at 75%.

Build-ups. Swim a series of 75-yard repeats. The first length at 50% effort, second length at 75%, third length at 90%. (It’s best, while learning, to stop short of an all-out effort because that will probably cause you to fall back into arm spinning.)

Descending sets. Swim a series of 100-yard repeats. Swim the first at 50% effort and each succeeding 100 about one second faster. Continue increasing speed only so long as you can do so mainly by rolling your body faster. As soon as you feel your stroke falling back toward arm churning, drop back to 50% effort again and repeat the cycle. On each succeeding cycle, try to maintain control at slightly faster speeds than in the previous round.

On each of these suggested series, the common elements should be:

When swimming at your slowest speed, you should also exaggerate body roll to some degree. As you speed up, focus on “trading” body roll for rhythm. Starting each cycle with more rotation gives you more to trade, increasing the chance that you’ll hold onto more as you reach higher stroke rates.

As you move from 50% effort and stroke rate toward higher speeds, consciously practice trading roll for rhythm in a progressively stingy transaction. Your object is to learn to retain more roll at ever faster rhythms.

Never speed up by moving your arms faster; always do so by moving your midsection faster.

Focus far more on body awareness (body-rolling rhythms, weight shifts like in cross-country skiing) than on the pace clock.

The ability to generate speed from the core-body is what distinguishes great swimmers from average swimmers. Alexander Popov sets world sprint records while seeming to move his arms in a leisurely fashion because he sprints at a stroke rate of 45 cycles per minute with lots of body roll. His slower rivals are usually churning at stroke rates as much as 20% higher, and with much less body roll. Because the ability to roll more makes him both more slippery and more powerful, he swims at any speed with less effort than swimmers who don't.

You’ll enjoy the same advantage when you master “fishlike” swimming. You’ll experience far less fatigue at any speed, because instead of relying solely on your arm and shoulder muscles, you’ll be distributing the workload over more and stronger muscles, those of the torso and hips. You’ll be using the weight of your entire body to propel yourself forward.

Happy laps!