Total Immersion Freestyle Mastery Introduction Terry Laughlin Founder, Total Immersion Swimming

Total Immersion Freestyle Mastery Introduction Terry Laughlin Founder, Total Immersion Swimming

Copyright Total Immersion Freestyle Mastery Copyright 2016 by Terry Laughlin. All Rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, printing, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Total Immersion, Inc. For information, contact Total Immersion Swimming, Inc., PO Box 370, New Paltz, NY 12561. Or email info@totalimmersion.net. For information about Total Immersion instruction, call 800-609-7946, or visit www.totalimmersion.net Text and concept: Terry Laughlin Cover Swimmer: Terry Laughlin Cover photo by: Bob Fagan First edition published 2016. i

Introduction Is this course for you? This introductory section of the TI Freestyle Mastery Workbook has been made available as a free ebook. If you re reading the free version to evaluate whether the course will help you reach your goals, we hope this will help you make an informed decision. First I ll describe whose needs and goals I had in mind while planning and producing it. Experienced TI Swimmers: This course has been nearly 30 years in the making. If you ve learned freestyle the TI way, you probably have a more balanced, stable, streamlined, and fluent stroke that has greatly increased your efficiency and enjoyment. If you ve been waiting for TI to teach advanced skills with equal depth, you ll find that, and much more, here. Improvement-Minded Swimmers: Are you an experienced freestyle swimmer with intermediate to advanced skills yet feel something s holding you back from realizing your full potential? In this TI Freestyle Mastery course, you ll find the most comprehensive guide ever produced to bringing your stroke technique to the very highest level of skill, efficiency and satisfaction. Mastery-Oriented Swimmers: If you pursue improvement in all things, have embraced the spirit of Kaizen, and think Mastery is its own reward, you ve come to the right place. This is the first swimming course ever offered which consciously uses Mastery principles and habits to help swimmers reach for their best. My Story: Swimming Better Than Ever! There s nothing natural about the form I demonstrate on the accompanying videos. Every aspect resulted from painstaking practice, explicitly planned to improve efficiency. For my first 25 years as a swimmer, starting at age 14, I had a radically less efficient stroke. At age 20, I thought my swimming was as good as it was ever going to be. 2

I swim better than ever... I couldn t have envisioned how much better it could be. Much less that it would still be evolving nearly 50 years later! My intensive phase of stroke improvement began only as I neared age 40 and accelerated in my 50s and 60s! And enjoy it more at age 64! Each of the thousands of hours I ve devoted to improving technique has been deeply satisfying. What s more, I ve arrived at a sort of swimming nirvana. These days, every swim feels fantastic. Yet, as good as my stroke feels, I know I haven t yet reached my potential. In the words of TI enthusiast, Hadar Aviram, I never take a stroke in vain. That constant Kaizen mindset keeps me deeply engaged every minute of practice. Because my stroke is regularly recorded on video, I not only feel my improvement; I have a visual record. Video confirms that my stroke has become noticeably more controlled, integrated, and efficient. But this experience is about much more than swimming. It s really about Mastery and what we ve learned about how to transform swimming into a vehicle for improving at anything. Will you swim faster? The answer is YES even if that s not the main reason you are taking this course. Learning these skills will improve your speed. More important, you ll swim faster... easier. By easier I mean not only that less effort will convert into more speed but also that you ll make faster progress toward your true potential as a swimmer. Do You Love Practice? My Sensei (Master Teacher) on Mastery has been George Leonard. Leonard was a student of zen who began study of aikido at age 47, and earned the rank of Sensei. Of all who attained Sensei rank, he began study latest in life. 3

From this experience, he wrote Mastery, the Keys to Success and Long Term Fulfillment, which has become essential reading for any serious student of TI. In a single sentence, Leonard s message is: Success and satisfaction in any endeavor are byproducts of learning to love practice. According to Leonard, that transformation occurs as a result of choosing a challenge that requires your full devotion. All TI instruction is consciously designed to provide that sort of challenge, and to increase your passion for, and enjoyment of, practice. Four Mastery Habits While we promise you ll realize the goals that brought you here, George Leonard the TI Mastery course is about more than swimming. In addition to swimming better than ever, you may also develop habits that have an enduring positive impact on body, mind, and spirit. Here are four essential habits, and one critical insight. Habit One: Focus on improvement. Your core goal for every practice should be to Improve Your Swimming. E.G. Hold Your Place is a challenging skill presented in Lesson 1. Can you sense yourself doing this slightly better after 10 minutes of concentrated practice? Did your ability to maintain focus also improve? Improving both is critical to success. Habit Two: Strike a balance. Each time you practice Hold Your Place, set your success bar slightly higher. In fact, every task you undertake should feel like a stretch but not too much. Too easy = boredom. Too difficult = frustration. TI lessons are designed to guide you through a series of small wins, each preparing you for the next. Habit Three: Embrace imperfection. Most of the time, you ll miss the mark you were aiming for. That s good! Mistakes concentrate your attention and are essential for course correction. Continual improvement is a process of repeated mistakes and recalibrations, each bringing you slightly closer to success. Habit Four: Love the plateau. TI Essential Skills (the course which precedes this) involve large body parts and muscle groups, and require simpler coordination. Consequently, breakthroughs generally come in steady succession. The more complex skills presented here create a steeper learning curve. At times, you may wonder if you ve hit a plateau. You haven t! 4

When you follow the guidelines in this workbook, and practice deeply, change is ongoing but at the cellular level, below your threshold of awareness. That cell-level change periodically consolidates to produce an exciting forward leap. (After 50+ years of swimming, I still experience such leaps about once a year.) Between leaps, the pleasure of being totally immersed in practice becomes its own reward. The Invaluable Insight: You never achieve Mastery! A true Master never becomes complacent, never stops pursuing improvement. Swimming, where every important skill is counterintuitive, provides more opportunity for this than any other skill or sport. Among all athletes, and students of movement arts, swimmers have the greatest expectation of being able to realize lifetime learning and improvement. This why the enthos of Kaizen is so central to TI practice. * * * Which techniques are Mastery Skills and why? There are three freestyle techniques which we believe qualify for the designation Mastery level. In part, this is so because they represent such a rarefied level level of skill and self-perception that historically they ve been displayed only by a tiny group of elite freestylers, like Katie Ledecky. In recent years, a steadily growing number of dedicated TI students has shown that average swimmers can also learn them... in some cases demonstrating form better than many elites. They didn t start with a vision of attaining mastery. Like me, they began with simply trying to learn balance, as everyone must in order to become efficient. Success at that encouraged them to move on to learn the other TI foundations of a stable core, a streamlined vessel and synchronized movement. This process began a habit of acquiring one skill, then another, then another. It also provided the necessary foundation a combination of body control and mental habits to pursue the most challenging skills of all. Thus the progression from basic to expert skills involved no great leaps, but rather a natural progression from one small success to the next. Because the physical foundation of a balanced, stable core body is so necessary to success at learning Mastery Level skills, we rarely mention these advanced techniques while teaching TI Essential Skills. 5

The Mastery Level techniques taught in this course include: Lesson 1: Expert Catch-and-Press (the propulsive phase of the armstroke) This technique creates maximum propulsion with minimum effort. An Expert Catch and Press is patient and firm and displays a rare degree of feel for applying effective and precise pressure to the water. That is: Just the right amount of pressure. At exactly the right time. In the right direction. Lesson 1: Apply Effective Pressure... Lesson 2: Expert 2-Beat Kick If any of these describe you: Prefer distance to sprints; Want to swim a faster mile or marathon; Swim in triathlon or open water, for fitness or enjoyment. To Travel Farther, Faster, Easier On Each Stroke. You ll benefit from learning an Expert 2-Beat Kick because it: 1. Maximizes propulsion while minimizing drag and effort. 2. Draws power from your core body, sparing fatigue-prone leg muscles; 3. Uses the principle of leverage to multiply the effect of each light flick of your foot. Lesson 2: Work Less; Get More... By Mastering the 2-Beat Kick. 6

Lesson 3: Expert Breathing This is the most challenging skill not only in freestyle, but in all of swimming. The ability to breathe with consummate ease and in absolutely seamless coordination with the rest of your stroke is exceedingly rare. This lesson will improve your breathing in two ways: Bring you to a markedly higher level of relaxation as you breathe to save energy with every breath. Bring you to a markedly higher level of integration as you breathe to propel more effectively with every breath. Lesson 3: Breathe with Better Form than the Elites... By Mastering Expert Breathing. What both qualities have in common is that you achieve them by fully synchronizing your breath with the action and rhythms of the core body. This brings us to... Lesson 4: Expert Stroke Length and Tempo Stroke Length is the swimming measure that most closely correlates with better performance. Not the longest stroke the one that s best for your height and skill set. 7

Lessons 1 and 2 give you the efficiency to swim more easily at all stroke counts in your Green Zone. Lesson 3 helps you swim farther while maintaining high-efficiency stroke counts. Lesson 4 teaches you to use a Tempo Trainer to: 1. Accelerate, reinforce, and integrate what you learn in Lessons 1 to 3. 2. Completely personalize your range of efficient stroke counts. 3. Achieve Pace Mastery by experimenting with different combinations of SPL (stroke count) and Tempo. Four Stages of Learning This rule of learning originated from the field of psychology in the 1970s, and has gained wide acceptance since. It says we generally start out with a blind spot: We don t know what we don t know. We must recognize our deficit to progress further. The next two stages are to consciously acquire, and consciously use the skill. We develop the ability to use the skill somewhat automatically. What happens next is critical. 8

The four stages are: 1. Unconscious Incompetence We fail to recognize the existence of a higher level skill or that it has value. You may have escaped this stage early in your swimming experience. I didn t do so until almost age 40. Until then, I believed my swimming potential was limited by a lack of the right genes. That notion was dramatically dispelled when Bill Boomer taught me a balance drill, and I recognized a huge blind spot in my knowledge of technique... though I d coached with great success for nearly 20 years! 2. Conscious Incompetence Like most TI swimmers, the first skill deficit I became aware of was balance. For 25 years, I d thought I had heavy legs that tired easily, no matter how much I worked at conditioning them. When I aligned my head and spine and shifted weight forward, my legs immediately lifted to the surface. That remains my single most transformative moment in 50 years of swimming. 3. Conscious Competence For the next six months I thought of almost nothing but keeping my head and hips, and weight forward, fearful that after 25 years of unbalanced swimming I would lose this magical feeling if I wasn t explicitly focused on it. This was the first time I d ever swum with such singular and tireless focus. 4. Unconscious Competence When I finally trusted that balance had become semi-ingrained, I immediately adopted a new skill goal Swim Taller, which I d learned would reduce drag. This change was just as challenging: For 25 years I d focused exclusively on pushing water back. Now I had to train myself to ignore that. The fact that I felt markedly better when I made this change was powerful encouragement. Swimming Taller kept me occupied for several more months during which I regularly made time to check on head-spine alignment. As soon as it felt more natural to swim taller, I chose another skill goal Hold My Place: Consciously anchor the lead hand and spear the entering hand past it. This was more complex and challenging than the first two skills. Fortunately I was prepared. On the physical side, if I hadn t already learned balance, it would have been impossible to Hold My Place. And nine months of hyper-focused practice had prepared me for this far more demanding level of Conscious Competence. That was 1989. Ever since, I ve rarely swum a stroke without some Conscious Competence goal. This illustrates a critical distinction in how TI views the learning stages. 9

Fistgloves Hyper-Sensitize Hands... And Teach Best Arm Position. The Kaizen Continual Loop It is not a stair-step progression from Unconscious Incompetence, ending in Unconscious Competence, as shown in this illustration. 10

Instead, strive to maintain a continual loop. Upon achieving Unconscious Competence in one skill, immediately find a slightly more challenging skill at which you experience Conscious Incompetence. Work on it consciously until it feels more natural and consistent. Then start the process again, as illustrated on p. 10. As in that example, your learning experience in this Mastery course should be circular a series of loops rather than linear. A Super-Learner s Guide to the TI Mastery Course The Lessons and skills are presented in the order in which I would teach them if I were coaching you in person. You could easily spend several weeks or months on each and still find new things to understand, learn, and improve. However, I recommend you don t try to max out Lesson 1 before progressing to Lesson 2, and so on. You ll make the most progress and stay most engaged if you sample Lesson 1 for an hour or two, then do the same with Lessons 2 and 3. When you circle back to Lesson 1, you should experience more control than before thanks to awareness gained while cycling through the other lessons. And you can easily adapt Lesson 4 exercises to any of the other three lessons. Also, steadily increase your proportion of whole-stroke practice to learning exercises. Use a learning exercise for several minutes to pinpoint a mini-skill and heighten awareness of its fine points. Then test your ability to maintain that feeling in whole stroke. Continue whole-stroke repeats so long as you feel yourself improving, integrating, or imprinting that mini-skill. Using a Tempo Trainer, as in Lesson 4 exercises, will intensify focus and bring rhythm to new movements. Here s an illustration: The key exercise in Lesson 1 is Single-Side Swimming. We recommend you practice it at first with short, no-breathing reps (or breathing through a Swimmer s Snorkel) as this makes it easier to master a critical detail to start and finish each stroke in a balanced, stable, fully-extended position. You ll use your hips to aid rotation in Single-Side Swimming; how you kick is secondary. After sampling the 2-Beat Kick exercises in Lesson 2, circle back to Single-Side Swimming. But this time integrate hips and legs in creating the core-body rotation that propels you. This will improve your 2-Beat Kick and better integrate it with the armstroke. 11

Then progress to whole-stroke reps to harmonize and memorize everything some reps without breathing, and some with. Using a Tempo Trainer to sequence focus from hands to hips to feet will also help. You ll revisit Single-Side Swimming in Lesson 3 this time as a breathing exercise. Skills developed in Lesson 1 will enhance your ability to breathe comfortably and seamlessly in Single-Side Swimming. After practicing Single-Side Swimming with breathing, put your new skills to the test with whole-stroke reps, breathing with new awareness. Last Word: Become Your Own Best Coach Still Calmly Inhaling as Water Closes Over My Face. You ll find two styles of guidance in the first three lessons. In Lessons 1 and 2, I provide a lot of detailed and direct how to guidance. In Lesson 3, I share the observations and impressions I find most striking as I watch the video. As if we sat together as I analyzed a video. Video should be an incredibly powerful aid to your success far more than any words I might add. My goal in Lesson 3 is to move you beyond just learning higher level skills to developing the ability to be your own best coach. 12

Study of video especially comparing demonstration of skills you re trying to acquire with your own form is the most powerful form of self-coaching. After reading my observations on any portion of video, view it several times to record and compare your own observations. Then make some notes to guide your practice. After doing that with Lesson 3, then return to Lessons 1 and 2 and view them with newlyobservant eyes and make your own practice notes, rather than rely solely on mine. May your laps be as happy as mine, Terry Laughlin April 28, 2016 13