Well, I finally got around to submitting my application to apply for TI coach training. It’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a while and after talking to Coach Shinji about it, he was very supportive and thought I would make a good coach. So I went on the Total Immersion website, found the Become a TI coach page, and submitted my application.
Here is my application below – wish me luck in getting accepted and I hope to enter the coach training session in Coronado in September!
Briefly tell your “TI Story” and how you became interested in teaching TI.
I started triathlon back in 2002 with Team in Training. I was at a low point in my life and felt that nothing was moving forward, and I was learning nothing new in my career. So I tried something physical even though previous attempts at running had left me with sore knees and nothing but frustration. Still, I chose to get back not only into running but also swimming and biking.
When I started, I still had preconceived notions about training from my past adventures with running and weightlifting, and also from friends and family. I started with TnT training and that got me to the Pacific Grove Triathlon, but it also left me sore and in pain.
After Pacific Grove, I was determined to get myself into racing shape. I made a bunch of friends in the triathlon community in the Bay Area and they seemed to race numerous times a year with little or no injury. Certainly the frequency at which they raced was amazing to me; if triathlon and its individual elements were reportedly so destructive to the human body, then how were they able to race so often and be so fast?
In 2003, I took my first TI seminar in search of ways to increase my swim speed. I was regularly swimming Masters, but somehow, hearing the commands shouted by the coach really weren’t effective enough – there wasn’t enough individual attention at what I needed in particular. I also dug into several books on swimming, searching for those elusive secrets to allow me to swim faster.
The seminar was good, but it wasn’t enough. It didn’t reinforce what I was supposed to do after the seminar. I got a bit better but didn’t get much better after that. I fell back into the patterns of my Masters class and my performance overall was a bit better, but wasn’t consistently advancing beyond a certain point. I certainly didn’t know how to improve from there except to cycle my arms faster.
I got through 6 Ironmans and a few Alcatraz crossings but my speed had plateaued, or even see sawed faster and slower. And through it all, my shoulders were getting sore from trying to cycle my arms faster for a longer period of time.
After my last Ironman in 2009, I had a new baby and decided not to race triathlon for a while. Due to the time requirements of bike training, I elected to solely focus on improving my running and swimming, both of which I felt I could achieve better results in shorter workout times than biking which can require hours on the road. However, without the stress for preparing for a race, I could just focus solely on mastering the details of swimming by drilling for as much and as long as I need to.
Around the same time, someone sent me a link to Shinji’s Youtube video and that brought me back to TI:

I was further elated to find out that he coached individually and was located in the SF Bay area where I was! When I started Ironman training, I worked with a popular Bay area coach named Michael McCormack. I learned the value of having more individualized coaching versus working in a group. Mike didn’t focus on swim training but now I found a TI coach in my backyard and was excited to engage Shinji and learn how to swim as graceful as he does,
I began with Shinji in late summer of 2009 and devoted my entire swim training to constant drilling, without the stress of race preparation. I was determined to train and retrain my nervous system to move like how Shinji moves, and also as directed by TI concepts. I discovered that my drilling tolerance was about 800-1200 yards, after which my brain, muscles, and nervous system got tired and refused to give in to swimming more. I threw my complete trust and devotion to training TI and rebuild my stroke from the ground up.
I saw Shinji monthly and in between I would swim 3-4x per week, picking certain drills and focal points and doing them over and over until I got to some level of mastery. Then I would work on another drill, or different focal points, or increase the difficulty by a little bit, like increasing the stroke rate on my tempo trainer. Slowly but surely over 2 years, and adding in TI Tune Up instruction from Dave Cameron, I was amazed to be swimming with such great ease but yet I was faster than before. Just the other day I jumped back into my Masters swim group and found that, even with rather sedate tempos, I was passing swimmers who were formerly much faster than me.
My personal experiences and successes with TI further reinforced these concepts in my brain:
1. Traditional thinking is often filled with outdated and/or wrong information on training.
2. Individualized coaching is exponentially better than group coaching. Everybody is different; one coaching method or style may work great for some but not for others.
3. We must continue to advance training as time goes on and integrate new discoveries and methods. We cannot remain static in the past.
4. Information that has been trapped within research journals and in the brains of elite coaches must be disseminated to the public in order to help advance their own ability to become better athletes.
5. The right technology can advance training exponentially.
Learning and growing with TI was immensely satisfying, but wasn’t complete. A few years back, I underwent life coaching and discovered that not only did I enjoy learning and growing in life, but I also enjoyed teaching and mentoring as well.
As I advanced in TI, I saw others who were still training in the past, using methods that had been established for decades and were the accepted norms. However, I always saw them reach a certain point where they either got injured or they plateaued in their progress.
This motivated me to learn as much as I could about swimming, trying these techniques on myself and understanding them not just from a theoretical standpoint but from a practical, applied standpoint. Then, when I got to a level of mastery and understanding, my interest grew to want to teach these methods to the community and help spread the word about why the past was mired in training methods that didn’t need to be only ways, but that they were only facets of a host of methods that can be employed in swim training.
I hope that through TI coach training, I can help be more official in my capacity to teach people to become better swimmers in a more structured manner versus being frustrated at their progress.

What aspects of the TI approach do you particularly identify with?
1. Attention to the subtle details and drilling to imprint
2. Training the nervous system instead of just strength and aerobic
3. Breaking with “tradition” and “dogma” to find the best teaching/training methods
4. Recognizing individuality in performance, goals, and skill development

Who do you feel best qualified to teach? What type of swimmer(s)?
Most likely beginners and intermediates, perhaps some advanced who are open to learning.
I am an Ironman triathlete (completed 6 Ironmans) and identify best with the triathlete crowd. I feel very familiar and comfortable with the issues surrounding the swim leg of triathlon and teaching on this subject.
I have concentrated mostly on freestyle up to this point, so teaching freestyle is where I’ll begin.
What are your 3 highest-value reasons for swimming?
1. Learning something new and bringing it to some level of mastery
2. Challenging myself on what my true limits are, and not what other people say they are
3. Solving the neurological puzzle of my body, or mastering the control of my limbs even in water
What are your 3 most important swimming improvement goals.
1. To swim with grace, like Shinji
2. To get faster (of course!)
3. Flawless technique, symmetrical technique
My Demonstration Videos

Back in May, I met with Coach Shinji for a swim lesson. Going through some of the things I wanted to work on, I remarked that for some reason when I am spearing with my right hand, I seem to glide a lot faster/longer than when I spear with my left hand.
It had been annoying me to no end for months now. I would swim and watch the black tiles go by underneath me. As I speared with my right arm, stroking back with my left with a flick of my left foot in two beat kick, I would glide forward at a certain speed. Then my left arm would come forward and speared forward, again with right arm stroking back and flick of my right foot, I would glide forward again, but always travelling less distance and with less speed than when I speared right.
How annoying!
There would be times when I swam that there would be 1 or 2 perfect left spear strokes for each length and my glide on that side would be as fast and as far as the other side. But most of the time, I would glide more upon the right spear than for my left.
It’s amazing to see the asymmetry in my swimming when I began to train Total Immersion. The two ways you could see this was: 1) Coaches Shinji and Dave Cameron could see this with their practiced eye, and 2) constant video taping of myself by me and watching painful videos of myself swimming in slow motion.
So experienced coaches first note the problem, but then after you leave the coaching session you need to keep practicing and have the ability to get feedback on your performance so that you’re still practicing the new movement and not reverting back to the old problem. I videotaped myself swimming virtually every session for the last few weeks after the coaching sessions. I would critique myself, swear silently at myself for thinking I was improving a focal point but video evidence would tell me I barely made a nudge or I was still exhibiting the problem. Then, for the next swim workout, I would mentally adjust my focal points a little more and attempt them at that next workout.
This left side asymmetry was definitely a tough one.
The timing of my left arm spear, my body rotation, hip drive, and flick of my right foot in two beat kick were sufficiently off enough to make a noticeable difference between my left and right sides in propulsion. The problems were mostly in the timing of the left arm drop from high recovery into the water and how the hip is connected to that movement. Then the kick itself was not exactly at the right time to send the spear off with maximal effect.
How I worked the heck out of it and brought it to some level of being fixed:
1. I would swim very slowly and focused on using my hip to move the arm into the water, versus whatever I was doing before, which was more about leading the spear with my arm and shoulders.
2. At Shinji’s suggestion, I then worked on focusing on my hips to time each stroke versus any other body part. Thus, I would focus on rotating my hips from side to side and let my arms do their normal thing. This increased my awareness of my hips’ contribution to the stroke versus just the arms.
3. Dave Cameron made a great suggestion, which was to use a tempo trainer to help fix the coordination and time my two beat kick to each beep. In order to make a beep, I had to use my hips or else my body would just be moving too slow. Then, in order to time my kick to a beep, my side and arm spear had to be in the water before the beep so that my kick would be able to hit on that beep. This really helped even out the difference between my left and right sides.
It took many weeks of focus and drilling with the tempo trainer to start evening my two body sides out. Now I travel much further during my left spear than before, but it is still not up to quite as far and fast as I travel during my right spear.
It’s amazing to see how my body has created such asymmetries over my lifetime. I start favoring my right side since I’m right hand dominant and it is so much more coordinated than my left. Now through incessant drilling and focus, coupled with a feedback system – my coaches and videotaping – allows me to address these differences and become a better athlete as a result.

A few weeks ago, I had another coaching session with the elusive Coach Shinji, who is flying all around the world promoting Total Immersion but I managed to catch him back in the Bay area!
This time I asked about Early Vertical Forearm, or EVF. I had thought I was trying to do EVF and wanted him to video me to see how it looked. But it turns out I wasn’t even close!
When you look at this sequence of photos of Grant Hackett and Ian Thrope, you can see that their forearms are perfectly and fully vertical, well before the arm starts stroking back. Wow. I atempted to visualize that and put it in practice, but underwater video of me trying showed my technique nowhere near theirs.
Shinji taught me two very important things, which were:
1. My spear was way too low, even though it was not wrong. I was spearing at an angle down which is appropriate for typical Total Immersion style swimming. However, trying to get EVF when the elbow is so low is very hard, if not impossible because you have to lift the elbow up to get your forearm vertical and that is super hard, given the weight of water pressing down on the elbow. However, spearing low is great for balance in the water and keeping your hips up.
So I needed to spear straight ahead which is hard considering I had been spearing forward and down for months now, perfecting my balance and keeping my hips high. To spear horizontal, the feeling of the trajectory of my spear is almost that I’m spearing out of the water! Thankfully, my water balance was good such that my hips didn’t drop when my spear was much higher.
Now that my spear was horizontal, my elbow was in a very high position and thus I could just bend my forearm down to EVF.
Theoretically. More on this later.
2. There are two surges of power in the actual stroke. The first surge happens when you bend the forearm down and the surge of power is in the forward part of the stroke. Then there is a lull as the arm moves back past the shoulder. The second surge happens when you engage the lats and press through to the end of the stroke.
This was hard to grasp; I had to work on other things first. At this point, I was hoping that once my form was looking good, that the 2 surges of power would happen naturally.
Then I went to a Total Immersion Tune Up with Dave Cameron who taught me another critical part of EVF. For details, check out his post High Elbow Catch Introduction. Basically, he showed me the sequence of moves to shift from recovery to spear and EVF. The video in that post shows the practice sequence – see it below.

You stand upright and one arm is speared while the other is preparing to recover. Then as your hip comes around (you take a small step to simulate), you keep the speared arm forward and bend the forearm to EVF position as you spear with the other arm.
I melded this with Shinji’s tips, especially on spearing high and horizontal, while in the pool. I had two video cameras on me at the edge of the pool, videoing underwater and above water. I tried swimming fast but I felt that I was getting messy and that my elbow was dropping. However, I felt that I was getting a lot more power – I could get across 25y in only 13 strokes when it was taking me 14+ with regular TI style low spearing. But it was very tiring.
Shinji did tell me that he almost never does EVF style swimming unless he is sprinting or in a short race. Otherwise it is too tiring to maintain over long distance.
I tried slowing down a lot. This helped me focus on mimicking Dave’s upright practice movement while lying in the water. I felt that I was making strides in practicing EVF as I was still reaching 25y in 13 strokes.
Analyzing the video showed a bit otherwise – I certainly did not look like Grant Hackett or Ian Thrope in that post! I thought I was spearing horizontal, but I was still angled downward. I did not bend my forearm down early enough as my nervous system is too programmed to start stroking. I need to keep my upper arm horizontal as my forearm drops down and resist the temptation to stroke before my forearm is vertical. I also need to turn my forearm/elbow so that my elbow is pointing up – this is a move I can do on dryland but I have not noticed happening in the water as too much is happening. But turning my arm like that means I can bend my forearm downward. Still, something interesting was happening as I could get more stroking force ahead of my shoulder whereas before there was not as much and I could get across 25y in at least 1-2 less strokes.
More work to be done here for sure, but at least now I know the secret of EVF!

I once started focusing on getting my Strokes Per Length (SPL) down as far as possible. I once did 7 strokes many times for 25y. But it was a very, very slow 25y. As I tried to up my speed and stroke rate, I lost the 7 strokes almost immediately. I asked Coach Shinji about this, and he told me that while low SPL is a great goal, it’s probably not something to obsess about at least not in that way.
He then told me that constructing a tempo vs. SPL matrix on a spreadsheet would be a better idea. You establish baseline SPLs at a given stroke rate using the tempo trainer, and then that would set goals for you to try to beat at each tempo. Speed would then come naturally, or else how would you do a length with one less stroke at a given tempo?
Earlier last year, mine looked like (tempo in seconds, SPL for 25y):

If you’ve ever swam at >2.0s tempo, you’ll know that this is quite painful to keep balance but a great practice to show that you have awesome balance in the water.
Each swimmer will have some sort of SPL that is dependent on their swimming skill and body type/shape. Achieving the 4-5 strokes that Michael Phelps reportedly does for 25y probably isn’t possible for guys who aren’t as tall, or as skilled, as he is!
When I practice at these tempos and compare the SPL results to my matrix, I sometimes see efficiency drops. This can happen between days, and between changes in focal points and technique practice, especially if I’m tired or extra tight, or my concentration for some reason isn’t as good on some days as others. When my efficiency drops, I usually go back to drilling basics with single focal points and then move back to whole stroke to see if my efficiency comes back. If not, I may just get out of the pool or else I risk imprinting bad habits.
More matrix notes:
1. Establish your base SPLs and their tempos and record them.
2. You can record more granular tempos if you like but I think the .1 and .05 steps provide enough granularity for this exercise, even as .01 steps can have positive effects on neuromuscular adaptation to higher tempos.
It’s just that who has time during a workout to go through all ranges of tempos at .01 steps? But of course you can focus only on a narrow range during any workout and just record that, even at .01 sec tempo increments.
3. Notice where your SPL jumps by 1 or 2 when go down .05/.1 seconds. This is evidence that your form is breaking down. This is also a great tempo point to drill at and around further because you need to get your form better.
4. Record each time you can remember to, your tempos and times. Also record your mental/physical condition. Try to find patterns over time on your physical and mental condition as it affects your swimming.
5. The ultimate goal is to know how fast you’re swimming instinctively due to your swim tempo and to develop gears in which you can shift to, in order to cruise, to rest a bit, to accelerate past others, or to up the effort during the latter part of a race when others are tiring and getting slower.
Terry Laughlin talks about winning races by being able to maintaining speed over long race distances. Remember, Terry isn’t necessarily the fastest on sprints but he can maintain high cruising speed over the length of a race when others start to falter on form due to fatigue!

Total Immersion uses focal points and incessant drilling of focal points to imprint the correct movement habits for better swimming.
In the last few months, I focused on these focal points:
1. Upon recovery, my elbow lead needs to come more forward. In my videos I see that sometimes my recovery is messy and my hand comes forward first.
2. Dave ran us through a lap focusing on a slight hip drive with the spear. This really added some power to my spear.
3. We worked on the spear-kick-stroke back timing. Dave had a great drill where he made us wait until the last possible moment to kick, with the recovering arm entering the water up to the elbow by the time the kick happens. When the spear was almost extended, then the other lead arm catches and strokes back.
4. Shinji has shown me how to generate a flat back. Now I need to drill with this focal point to figure out how to maintain a flat back while swimming.
My workouts would look like this:
200 W/U
4×50 with RI to full recovery ~20-40 seconds with each 4×50 on a single focal point:
1. Bringing the elbow all the way forward into true elbow led recovery.
2. Modified catch up, per focal point 3 above.
3. Adding the hip drive to spear
4. Relax the forward shoulder as recovering arm comes forward to about shoulder point, before spear.
5. Practice swimming with flat back
It would only be about 800-1000 yards and that’s it. I would do this quality swim 3-5 times a week in order to work solely on imprinting the right habits without wiping myself out so that I would get too tired to swim properly.
Then I started thinking about how I could swim with better technique overall, so I started playing with doing drills with more than one focal point.
So I began my drill sequences as above, but then I would challenge myself with focusing not only on the current focal point, but also on every preceding focal point too. For example, after doing focal point 1 for 4×50 alone, for the next 4×50, I would focus on both focal points 1 and 2. Then the next set of 4×50, I would focus on three focal points: 1, 2, AND 3.
This was succeedingly harder as I added one and then 2 more focal points. At about 3 was my limit of how many focal points I could focus on during any one lap of the pool. But through practice, I was able to segment my brain to be able to focus on more than one and juggle them together and make sure I was performing each well, but all during a given swim.
Of course, this was also an expression of my mastery of those focal points, so adding focal points as I became more proficient at performing them became easier because they were imprinting. For totally new focal points, I would most likely have to go back to focusing on that one particular point in order to begin imprinting it.
I queried the Total Immersion forums on this issue, and Terry answered my post. I also liked his version of the successive addition of focal points, which was to grab a few focal points for a given swim set, and then focus on one point for a given set of laps, and then switch to the next point and so on.
Still I think there is value in both Terry’s method and mine, although I think that mine is tougher on the brain at least initially. Most people I meet don’t have the mental ability (yet) to maintain a single focal point for any length of time! But as I’ve found, ingraining new habits even requires practice of ingraining/imprinting, as well as the actual imprinting itself.
To add to my fun, I’m now working on even more focal points:
4. Slip through the hole made in the water by my spear.
5. On the stroke back, exit my arm at an angle forward, and no swiping the water backward.
6. Complete a catch with completely vertical forearm and forward of the head.
7. Let the body rotation pull arm back and make less of a conscious effort to stroke back the arm strongly.
I’m looking forward to my next coaching session with Coach Shinji, and also the next Total Immersion Tune-Up!

This all started after my last session with Coach Shinji. I had been working with him since July of 2009 and been spending all my time with a combination of drilling, swimming, and tempo trainer work. But something still bugged me.
I would watch videos like this one of Ryan Cochrane at the Commonwealth Games:

Man, can you see the bow wave generated by these Olympic quality swimmers? Of course, they are also moving so much faster than me.
I would also watch Coach Shinji’s videos like this one, of his 9 stroke for 25 yards:

I found out later that his tempo was 1.6 seconds to swim 9 strokes. Of course, after I found out, I put my tempo trainer at 1.6 seconds and swam 25 yards at 12 strokes. He was, for the same tempo, 3 strokes more efficient than me!
Comparing to Coach Shinji was easier than a comparison with Olympics class swimmers because of physical similarities between Shinji and me. We are of comparable height and build, versus most Olympics class swimmers who are much taller than me. But yet, despite Shinji’s height and body type being a lot closer to mine than me to a Ryan Cochrane, he was able to achieve a 3 stroke efficiency over mine! I think that other more subtle body differences may make him more naturally more efficient, but I think I should be able to still get much closer to his stroke count than 3 apart!
In this video, I saw other differences between what TI has been teaching me:

Most notably for me was the spearing arm being so horizontal rather than spearing more downward which is what we are taught in the beginning. But yet, Terry Laughlin in all his videos would teach and demostrate a much deeper spear. Why was there a difference?

Overall, questions were forming in my mind all based on the fact that I was learning TI and thinking that I was performing a lot of the TI concepts very well, but yet I was not getting noticeably faster; nor was I achieving more efficiency than my current situation.
Last Thursday, I had a session with Coach Shinji. I armed myself with a printout of questions and got there early to discuss it with him before I jumped into the pool. Here was the list of questions:
1. Acceleration too low – spear + stroke back needs more force or faster?
2. Why no bow wave? How to get bow wave?
3. Angle of spear at extension
a. Dave Cameron video shows him nearly horizontal
b. Shinji is slightly angled down
c. Should I be deeper to get hips up?
4. When to relax hand for catch? I feel water resistance against back of hand if dropped too early.
5. Flat back?
6. Shinji’s hips break the water surface. Where are mine?
7. Recovering elbow for Shinji is very forward before dropping into water. But I feel no pull on lats at full forward position. Should I turn shoulder downward as it comes forward?
8. Is my head coming up? Should it be deeper?
9. How angled should my body be? Is it angled enough?
Shinji took me through every one of my queries. He micro-adjusted my stroke bit by bit until I started swimming more like him, Dave Cameron, and ultimately was able to produce a bow wave, albeit a small one.
Some of the micro-adjustments:
1. The head must be higher than where I was holding it. My head was totally submerged by 2-3 inches and this was my attempt at keeping my hips high in the water. The back of my head should just be touching or slightly breaching the water. Cutting through the water in this position creates the bow wave generated by elite swimmers.
By the way a higher head made it easier to breathe also. With my head so deep before, I had to lift my head up and/or turn more to breathe.
2. I had to change the angle of the spear to be more parallel with the surface of the water and thus more horizontal. When the angle of the spear dips down, there is resistance against the water for every bit of surface area exposed to the frontal direction. A horizontal spear presents minimal surface area to the frontal direction and minimal drag.
3. As the recovering arm comes forward and reaches the shoulder, the spearing/lead arm’s shoulder should begin to relax and start to dip downward as the recovering arm begins its spear into the water. The dip downward is also the beginning of the catch.
4. Spear-kick-stroke back timing was very off. I needed to keep the glide and be patient as the recovering arm enters the water and the spear is going forward – then I kick. The spearing arm then begins the catch and strokes back.
5. The spear and stroke back do not happen together at the same rate. The spear happens first, and the stroke back happens almost as the spear is ending and potentially you are catching water so much that you cannot move the stroking arm back as fast as the spearing arm is going forward.
6. I was arching my back too much and need to have a flat back. A flat back provides a more streamlined body shape and has less drag. This is achieved by rotating the pelvis forward. The feeling I have when this happens is more that there is a arching of my lower back although that is not the action to be performing as you don’t want to arch your whole body and your legs start bending down. You need to hold a horizontal body while flattening your back. Shinji tells me that all elite swimmers hold this position naturally for the entire swim. Visually it can also look like your gut has sucked in, but that is just what it looks like when they are flattening their backs it is not actually someone sucking in their stomach.
7. I need to bring the elbow more forward before it goes down. We have practiced other entry points for the spearing hand after recovery, like at the ear, at the eyes, and at the forehead. Dragging the elbow lead as far forward as possible, and as fast as possible after the stroke back, keeps my weight shift forward and prevents my hips from dropping.
So now I have the basics to transform my stroke to one that is more like more advanced swimmers like Shinji and Dave.
After all this, Shinji then tells me that swimming is a constantly changing activity. He runs me through testing many positions:
a. Spearing deep, medium, horizontal depths.
b. Recovering arm enters water at ear, eyes, and forehead.
c. Recovering arms enter water at wide, medium, and narrow (near head).
This is because in the pool it is an optimal swimming condition. There are lane lines separating swimmers. There are no waves or currents to knock you around. So you can develop an optimal swimming position for this nice stable situation.
When you are out in open water, all bets are off. Add to that, during a race where there are many competitors all swimming and knocking around you, some kicking you or climbing over you, you need to adjust those 3 positions constantly due to environmental conditions as well as your body’s energy and fatigue level.
So we learn with a bit more drag to find balance in the water first, fix our dropping hips, and be able to relax as we glide every stroke. We master the basics and burn those into our bodies first. Then comes the revelations that I had this Thursday.
After going through all this, Shinji then tells me there are about 4-5 people who have progressed in TI to this stage, and that there are 20-30 in Japan who are working now on adjusting their stroke for speed. I state this not to brag about how I’ve progressed in TI training, but rather that I find it interesting that TI has evolved its training to take people through basic work and then now people who stick with it and have reached a plateau working with the typical TI drills can now progress further into swimming faster.
This is assuming they want to; reaching a level of proficiency with basic TI techniques results in a very amazing zen-like calm swimming and a fluency with the water that is very enjoyable.
But now they are developing teaching methods and protocols to take those who want to even further.
Adding to this revelation, I also attended the Total Immersion Tune-Up at SF State on Saturday, headed by Dave Cameron. With Dave’s comments, I can now add some other focal points to work on over the next few months:
1. Upon recovery, my elbow lead needs to come more forward. In my videos I see that sometimes my recovery is messy and my hand comes forward first.
2. Dave ran us through a lap focusing on a slight hip drive with the spear. This really added some power to my spear.
3. We worked on the spear-kick-stroke back timing. Dave had a great drill where he made us wait until the last possible moment to kick, with the recovering arm entering the water up to the elbow by the time the kick happens. When the spear was almost extended, then the other lead arm catches and strokes back.
4. Shinji has shown me how to generate a flat back. Now I need to drill with this focal point to figure out how to maintain a flat back while swimming.
It’s nice to know that Total Immersion is progressing and evolving. More than ever, I am motivated to keep practicing, drilling, and progressing in my swimming skills and look forward to exploring the advanced training of Total Immersion.

This morning I raced the Alcatraz: Swim with the Centurions Race which was an Alcatraz crossing that ends at Aquatic Park in San Francisco.
I made it to the beach in 44:30. it was a mediocre time for me, about the same as the other times I’ve done it. If there is one thing I’ve learned about swimming Alcatraz, it’s never the same each time I swim it (this is number 13).
First, it was choppy out there. Not really big waves, but they seemed to be a lot of little ones which kept rocking my body back and forth. I almost preferred bigger waves than these lots of smaller ones.
Second, they gave us bad current information. They told us that there was a flood (the water flows into SF bay) which would switch to ebb (water flows back out of the SF Bay) during our swim. Funnily enough, another swimmer told me they looked up the currents in a tide table book and it said that the switch would happen at noon, which was much later than when we would finish. According to that info, we would be swimming in a flood the whole time.
However, the race directors told us that there was a switch. Knowing this, I and many other swimmers headed for the correct landmark which would end up sweeping us towards the opening at Aquatic Park when the flood would end and the ebb would start.
But the ebb never came which was exactly what the tide book predicted! So I kept wondering why I was ending up so far left of the opening. The kayakers out there kept telling me to aim more to the other side. I finally understood that the race directors gave us bad info.
This cost me a lot of time, hence my mediocre swim time. Once I got into the calmer waters of Aquatic Park, I headed fairly quickly to the finish line.
Notes on use of Total Immersion techniques out there:
1. Boy, I needed to swim more with my wetsuit in rough water. When I got out there I wasn’t used to the extra buoyancy, and I had to get used to floating higher. This, with the choppy water, kept me from syncing my 2BK at all until I got close to the opening of aquatic park.
2. Because the choppy water was messing around with me, I breathed every other stroke to the right, which probably slowed me down but I had increased my effort (ie. stroke rate) to try to compensate for lack of a good 2BK to add to each body rotation.
3. Once I got into the calmer waters of Aquatic Park, I thankfully wasn’t wiped out aerobically so I settled into breathing every 4 strokes and by that time I had got the hang of syncing my 2BK to my stroke and I think I moved fairly smoothly and quickly to the finish line.
4. With the choppy waters, I thought it was really hard to know if I was getting the right angle of entry for each arm/hand. I felt like I was barely using my body at all in the stroke. This was much much better once i got into Aquatic Park.
5. My coach Shinji’s tip about relaxing the catch hand at end of the spear really helped. I seemed to have burned that into my nervous system because even when I felt like I was fighting the choppy water I never felt like my forearms and arms were getting tired from the extra effort of stroking with more force. After I got out of the water, my arms still weren’t tired at all!
6. Turning my head with my body for breathing really helped some neck tightness problems and I felt no tightness there as well. I also think it helped prevent some chafing around my neck due to the collar of the wetsuit.
I think that more time swimming with a wetsuit would be good, but not just in calm waters. I think I need to practice more in choppy water and see if I can maintain good TI technique in those conditions. It is obvious to me that in calmer open waters and with wetsuit, I got the hang of it and it wasn’t such a problem. It seemed that practicing without a wetsuit in the few times I was in somewhat rough water in Hawaii and on the Jersey shore didn’t help this fact at all since I was swimming with what I thought was decent TI technique, but this fell apart when I had my wetsuit on.

Two weeks ago I received my GoPro Video camera in the mail and was very excited to see if it could help me videotape my swimming at the pool. I bought both the standard lens and wide angle lens as forums on the TI website had noted that both lenses may be useful depending on what I wanted to video. I also bought the suction cup assembly assuming that it would suction onto the side of a pool. The camera plus suction cup looks like this:

It’s nicely sealed in a watertight case which is waterproof to 100 feet.
Taking the camera to the pool, I found some constraints.
1. Depending on which pool you go to, they may have some rules regarding taking pictures or video because of privacy concerns. I go between two YMCAs and unfortunately they have strict rules on videoing. Thankfully, the lifeguards were pretty cool to let me take some video as long as I was alone in the lane.
2. The tile on the side of the pool may prohibit the suction cup sticking properly onto it. If the tiles are small, it could let air into the suction cup and thus, it won’t stick.
3. Lighting is critical. Since the camera’s sensor is pretty small, the more light the better. So on a sunny day, the video can capture me getting a lot farther down the pool before my body becomes undiscernable. See the comparison on the following two videos. This video was taken at an outdoor pool on a bright sunny day:

You can see my strokes for many times before I disappear into the distance.
This video, for comparison, was taken at an indoor pool with relatively poor lighting.

You can see how the water is much murkier looking in the second video. Unfortunately, I don’t get many strokes down the lane before I disappear so I can’t study my stroke for too many cycles which sucks.
By the way, I editted both videos and cut out the parts of the video where I disappear off into the distance and you can’t see me any more.
4. The video camera should be pointed down the middle of the lane and/or you should swim directly towards it versus off to a side. In the first video, I was able to find a place to stick the camera such that I could swim directly at it. It provides the best view of both sides of my body when stroking. In the second video, the pool side had small tiles, with the exception of where the lane number was and that tile was big enough to put the suction cup on. However, the big tile was offset to the middle of the lane and swimming towards it not directly meant I was losing some view of one side’s strokes.
5. By the way, being alone in the lane is pretty important. Otherwise, somebody else swimming there might inadvertantly knock your GoPro off the wall if they’re not careful. Certainly, you’ll capture a random person on video too.
Watching these videos, I was really able to study the problems in my stroke.
Here is what I learned:
1. Over the last few weeks, I drilled my left arm entry intensely to follow a wider track, since it felt like it was entering way too close to my head relative to my right arm. However, I did feel that my right arm was moving on a wider track. Looking at the video, I saw that my left arm had indeed began entering on a wider track:

This was good and I was happy that my drilling produced the desired result. However, in studying my right side, which I had assumed was doing OK, I noticed that the entry occurred OVER my head.

This was extremely weird and unexpected! At least my right arm ended up in the right place after entry, but it should not be entering into the water OVER my head but it should be further out like my left arm entry.
2. On both sides, upon the end of the spear of my arm forward, it then drops:


In studying swimming videos of Coach Shinji and also Dave Cameron, their speared arms never drop! I believe this robs me of some forward momentum as the deeper my arm is, the more water resistance there is (according to some literature I’ve read about the effect of the stroking arm’s depth).
3. When I swim, I use the two beat kick. On my left side with left arm stroking backward, I kick only with my left leg. Looking on the video, on my right side with right arm stroking backward, I sometimes do a scissor kick and kick with both legs! This can be seen somewhat in this screen grab, although if you watch the first video again, you will see it in motion:

Here my right arm is stroking back and my right leg has kicked, but my left leg is cocked back and just about to kick. This is bad! My proper kicking leg is imparting rotational force to my body turn, which adds force to my stroke backward. However, if I kick my other leg while my body is turning, it resists the force of my body turn and making it weaker, thus making my stroke back also weaker. I believe this is why my left arm spear/right arm stroke back results in lesser forward momentum than my other side; I can see it when I swim where it results in me traveling further on one side but not the other!
I think this is a result of either or both of poor balance on that side and/or just my nervous system being programmed to kick twice for some reason on that side.
Absorbing all this, I jumped into the pool this last week and attempted to correct all of these. The first thing I noticed that was that my left arm spear/right arm stroke back resulted in more forward momentum, now that I focused on only kicking my right leg. Awesome!
Less successfully, I wasn’t able to move my right arm outward as much. I think this will require drilling more at slower stroke rates to fully correct. I seemed to be able to do this at lower stroke rates (I was using my tempo trainer here), but when I got to faster tempos it broke down pretty quickly and I could sense I was back to my old habit of entering OVER my head (so weird…!).
Video analysis is so enlightening and I am now bringing my GoPro always to the pool, in hopes that I can find some accomodating lifeguards who will let me video. I also want to test in another indoor pool which is lighted much better to see how the GoPro performs. I have not tried the wide angle version either, but fear that the distortion of the lens may make swimming analysis difficult. In the forums, someone noted that it was good for taking a longer view of swimming from the side, since the camera is stationary. I will have to try that to see if that is worthwhile. Otherwise, I will just use my wide angle GoPro for cool biking and running shots!

These last few weeks I’ve been really focused on retraining my nervous system. Why? Because I was working with Coach Shinji and feeling good about my swimming…until I started doing some detail comparisons of my swimming videos with those of Shinji and on the Easy Freestyle DVD.
UGH!
I had a major problem with what I call “hand lead recovery”. It should be elbow led, not hand led! At times it makes me look like I’m pawing at the water. I also saw that my left arm was clearly doing something different than my right arm. It’s entry was much closer to my head and I really needed to be swimming on wider tracks. I think this also affected my ability to use gravity to assist the hand/arm drop into the water as it spears forward. With a focus on noticing what was different, I swam a few laps and really discovered that my swimming was not symmetrical at all.
At this point, I had to do something about this before I ingrained bad habits. It was time to retrain my nervous system before I had to build for the Alcatraz 100 swim in October.
So I went back to basics. I pulled up Chapter 5 of the Easy Freestyle DVD and concentrated on drilling the elbow circle, ear hops, drawing straight lines front to back to front, and then used the Zen switch drill to practice all this. (To know what these mean, check out the excellent TI DVD, Easy Freestyle DVD).
I spent about a month drilling. My typical workout for this period netted out to about 1000-1200y on a 25y pool and looked like this:
200-400 warm up with typical TI drills:
2×25 Superman glide
2×25 R and L side one arm skate
2×25 R and L side one arm under switch
2×25 under switch swim continuous

2×25 R and L side one arm zen switch to pause, raise elbow to water surface
2×25 R and L side one arm zen switch to pause, raise hand to water surface
2×25 full stroke, one stroke only, start with R or L side, repeat
2×25 full stroke, two strokes only, start with R or L side, repeat
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, elbow at surface of water
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, middle of forearm at surface of water
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, wrist at surface of water
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, fingertips at surface of water
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, full stroke
for the last series of 200y sets, I would focus on elbow circling, drawing straight lines front/back, focus on the position of my left arm as it moved forward and then let gravity drop the arm down into the water and forward to spear.
Some observations:
1. It was interesting to note how different the feeling was between having the hand/arm touching the water versus above the water. The water served to anchor my brain’s perception of where my hand was. When it was out of the water, I immediately felt awkward; I had to train my brain to know where my left arm was in space, as it is moving during swimming! Over a period of a month, I slowly got better at this until I felt like I could, for the most part, repeatedly put my arm in the same place every time as it came forward.
2. With my head down, I would peek at where my arms would spear to. Consistently, my left arm would actually spear almost straight forward whereas my right arm would spear slightly outside, which is where I want it for wide track swimming. I discovered that I had to mentally spear what was perceived as “extra wide” and when I did that, my left arm would actually end up where I wanted it to be. I also realized that my front deltoid and pectoral muscle (specifically the pec minor as this is where my ART guy would constantly work out tightness there) had a twinge of tightness when I speared “extra wide”. I think that a lack of flexibility in my left arm in that area has caused my spear to end up more straight than wide.
3. Coach Shinji would always tell me that my left arm was being thrown more forward and I needed to enter the water closer to my ear. So I had to mentally bring back my entry point closer to my ear.
4. My spearing momentum was very weak and added little to my forward propulsion. This was especially apparent on my left arm, and even worse during when I took a breath when I would literally come to a stop in the water! So now as I enter, I would let gravity take my arm and drop it into the water so that it added momentum to the spear forward. I also had to practice this while taking a breath so that my momentum while turning to breathe would not disappear.
Slow swimming was key here. I got rid of the need to swim fast and just focused on form only. I would stroke slowly back versus with force and found that as my form improved, I was actually moving forward quite fast and smoothly even though I used little force. I definitely now could see what TI coaches were saying in that it is amazing to see how little force one needs to use to swim fluidly and with some speed.
My goal was to first retrain my nervous system using drills and slow swimming. Once my brain got better at telling where my left arm was in space, and I was hitting the “mail slot” on my left side better, as well as having significant improvement on elbow led recovery and not arm led, I started doing reps of 50y or 100y with the tempo trainer. Now I would proceed to retraining my nervous system to repeat the habits at higher speeds.
My strategy was to use the tempo trainer to slowly bring my new habits into ever faster repetitions, or faster arm cycle tempos. I used the tempo trainer in two ways:
1. I used it to determine where my nervous system was at, for a given workout day.
2. Then I would use it to inch my way to a faster tempo and then reinforce the habit at those faster tempos, usually at some tempo limit I had for that day where I could maintain the good form, and also up to the point at which I get tired and when my form starts to fall apart.
After my typical 200-400y warmup, I would then do 100s of Zen switch with arm rising higher each time until I hit full stroke swimming. Then I started using the tempo trainer. I determined that my slow swimming was about at a 1.6 sec tempo. At the first workout, I started just swimming at 1.6 sec tempo to get used to using the tempo trainer again, and syncing my swimming cycle to a beep.
The next workout I started determining at what tempo limit my newfound habits would fall apart. I would swim 100s at 1.6 sec tempo, then drop by .5 sec tempo until I found the fastest tempo where my form would start to fall apart while attempting to keep that tempo.
The first time I tried this, I got to 1.4 sec tempo where for each arm cycle it felt messy and awkward to maintain form. Then I just backed up .5 sec to 1.45 sec where it felt OK. I then proceeded to do what Terry Laughlin did, which was to do laps at .01 sec tempo faster each time until I hit 1.4 sec. Amazingly, if I approached my tempo limit by inching up to it, my nervous system was able to adapt and I could swim with decent form at what seemed to be the tempo at which my nervous system had a limit that day. After inching up to it, I would do a few more laps to reinforce the sensations and habits until I got tired and my form would start to falter again. At this point I would get out of the pool.
Week over week, I was able to get to faster tempos. The next time I started at 1.5 sec and repeated the same descend by .5 sec until I found my new limit (at 1.3 sec) and then backed up and inched towards it again and did some more repeats. The workout after that I started at 1.4 sec and made it to 1.2 seconds. At 1.2 seconds I seemed to need more time to reinforce my nervous system with good form, so I did that workout again.
Also, depending on my mood, how much time I had, and how my body felt, I would sometimes do laps of 50y instead of 100s due to those constraints. But no matter, I was still improving and progressing.
My next step is to do 2 things:
1. Continue form and nervous system training at faster tempos down to .8 sec.
2. Lengthening my laps from 50-100y to 200 and beyond, in preparation for the Alcatraz 100. This would also inevitably mean my total workout length would increase, and I hope to get to 3000-4000y in a workout as I get closer to race day.
Key learnings here are:
1. It takes time and patience to retrain the nervous system but it can be done. I had to give up on being paranoid about not having enough fitness for the Alcatraz 100 in order to find time to do this.
2. Detail analysis, focus and attention to subtle differences during video analysis really helped me figure out what I was doing poorly.
3. Singular focus on a training element helps reinforce that particular habit. But I also would keep in the back of my mind all the other things I should be doing as I focused. This also required practice but is really useful so that my form wouldn’t get messy in other places while I was focusing on one thing.
4. Using the tempo trainer to inch my way to faster tempos is an amazing technique for retraining my nervous system.