Yesterday I had my second lesson with Coach Shinji. Once again it was full of insight and watching the video of me swimming afterwards was again painful (haha!). But Coach Shinji is great at breaking down the details of swimming and explaining it well, and also has taught enough people to know that there isn’t one way of swimming that fits everyone. He is able to articulate things to try to improve someone’s stroke as an individual, versus trying to shoehorn the “one way of swimming” into everyone.
Some things I learned from yesterday:
1. I need to be completely relaxed in the water. That means holding my body straight without tension but being relaxed. I tend to stiffen my neck too much in particular.
2. He advocates a flatter back. In watching my videos, I seems to arch a bit. I need to figure out how to rotate my hips forward just a tad to reduce the arch in my back.
3. I discovered my head position was too tipped forward, meaning my chin was too close to my chest. He told me that they tell their students to look directly down at the bottom of the pool because too many look forward. However, then he told me that actually you should be looking very slightly forward once you get more advanced.
For me, when my head was too tipped forward, it proved to be a factor that slowed me down considerably. I think the water was being stopped by the way my head was positioned, and once I tilted my head upward slightly, it presented a better profile for cutting through the water.
4. The under-switch is very interesting as its apparently used for underwater swimming in competition in Japan. There is an interesting video of a group of swimmers who swim the length of a 25 yard pool the whole way underwater using the under-switch stroke.
I also need to widen the pause position slightly, which is when my hand comes up under my body and I pause with it approximately extended to the same level as my other arm’s elbow. It is pointed too much towards my centerline.
5. He suggested I change my 6 beat kick (well, my feeble attempt at 6 beat kicking) to kicking my top leg a little bit less in frequency, and my bottom leg with more frequency. It’s definitely a bit weird to not be kicking with the same frequency and took me a while to get the hang of it, but somehow the different kicking frequencies allowed me to travel faster while kicking only. I need to research this more.
6. He taught me the two beat kick, which I think I like better because it allows me to maintain an undisturbed streamline better than kicking a lot. It also means less kicking, which conserves energy a lot more than kicking more. The funny thing for me is that the two beat kick means that I need to kick the bottom leg as the lead arm, which is on the bottom, strokes back, or kick the same leg as the stroking arm. I definitely need to practice this more. I seem to kick both legs when I try to kick the left leg. Need to uncoordinate the legs so that only one leg is kicking, and also at the right time. For some reason, I want to kick the top leg when I stroke the bottom arm.
For practice, I am to accentuate the kick on the stroke while attempting to keep the other leg extended, straight, and motionless.
7. I got into the zipper-switch practice today. This is beginning of practice the over-arm recovery. In TI, the elbow is high, but the wrist should be directly down from the elbow. Also, the elbow should always be at 90 degrees. As the elbow comes up, you need to lead with the elbow and not with the hand. This keeps the elbow high and gives you a reserve of potential energy which you use to help drive the arm forward once it enters the water. Also, I learned to actually extend with the shoulder blade versus lifting the elbow; this has the interesting effect of dragging the side of my body forward, which (bonus!) then brings the back half of my body up and helping keep my hips high in the water. Definitely a good thing to help cure me of my hip dragging swim style!
For the drill, I hold my elbow at a position that is about the same as where I pause for the under-switch, and then drive my hand down into the water with the potential energy stored by the high elbow, as well as using the hip turn for giving it even more energy.
8. TI Swimming teaches stroking your arms along tracks, which are the width of your shoulders. One thing that I learned was that the tracks should be positioned when you are flat on the water. However, when you’re swimming, your body is angled BUT the tracks remain at the same width as you’re flat. Because your body is angled, the result is that where your shoulders are during the angled body position are actually too narrow. This means that as I extend my arm out during a stroke, it needs to drift to the outside slightly to compensate for the fact that I am angled.
If my hands get too narrow during the stroke, this is bad because it slows me down as it tips my body in strange ways, creating more drag.
I’m looking forward to drilling all this over the next few weeks, and then onwards to my next lesson!

I’m a big fan of Total Immersion, an outfit based on the east coast that teaches swimming. You might think that there are many people who teach swimming, from coaches to the YMCA to your high school swim team. But after experiencing some of them, I’ve found that Total Immersion has done a better job than most breaking down the elements required for swimming and helping to improve each one.
I love this Perpetual Motion Presentation that Terry Laughlin gave at a New England Multisport Expo. What I love:
1. Terry asks the audience whether they are swimming better today than in years past. Most say yes, but he also talks about reaching what one of his students says is “terminal mediocrity”, which is no matter how much they swim, they never seem to get better. I feel that over the years I’ve swam now, this very much applies to my swimming. I am doing some things better, but I have not made significant strides, and sometimes I feel like I’m regressing in my swimming during the season.
2. Terry talks about the fact that with each swim session, his goal is to swim better at the end than when he began the swim session. I think this is crucial and something that I’ve set as a goal, but not seriously pursued or even attained in the sense that as the season has gone onward this year, I’ve actually started swimming slower and slower. Obviously I’m not swimming better or else I should be faster right?
3. He talks about things that are counterintuitive in increasing swimming ability, which I agree with more and more. I don’t feel like swimming more and more laps, at decreasing interval goals, is doing anything but make more frustrated and tired. Although there is this notion that I need to figure out what it is I need to do in the water to be better, and also trying to apply the minimal clues that a unfortunately distracted Masters coach is trying to tell me, neither is enough information to get me to doing the better thing. Nor am I given the opportunity to practice what I need as an individual during a normal Master’s workout because these are set workouts for the group as a whole.
I have found Total Immersion techniques are setup to drill specific parts of the stroke, and to discover which parts need more work and which ones need less. Also, in working with Coach Shinji at TI Swim West, it’s been great having one and one sessions where someone can focus on what I am doing, and help me adjust at a micro level what to do better.
4. He talks about the importance of imprinting correct habits, which is something I can only do by drilling by myself over and over. I don’t often get the chance to do this during a Master’s workout. Thus, I am swimming more and more by myself now so that I can just make sure I am swimming exactly the way I should be swimming each time, and if I can’t hold that form, I just get out of the pool because I’ve either become mental burnt out and/or I’m too tired.
5. I love his explanation style. It’s obviously been built up from years of thinking about, studying, and explaining this stuff. Most coaches don’t talk about swimming in this way and just ask you to try things from a physical standpoint, but lack the mental explanation part of the training which I like, which is to noodle on things in my brain as much as I try to do something physically.
I have really enjoyed watching this presentation; it really helps fill in the gaps in my thinking about swimming and how to get faster.
I think it’s a shame that many coaches talk down on Total Immersion and its teaching theories and techniques. It’s sort of like when martial artists say their kung fu is better than someone elses – if you’ve studied a lot of martial arts, you’ll know that every style has its own specialties, and that many of these work better for certain body types and personalities. There are so many factors in winning a combat against another individual that it isn’t that one style is better than another, but rather it’s you picking the best fighting techniques (which may or may not be style dependent) based on what works for you. So Bruce Lee’s philosophies on taking what works for you applies not only to martial arts, but to other types of training like swimming. I’m learning that there is much variability in what makes an individual fast in the water, and what works for one person may not work for another because people are different in body type and shape. I think Total Immersion is great for figuring out what is going to work for you from a technique standpoint.

Today I went to my first lesson with Coach Shinji Takeuchi, who runs Total Swimming West (TI Swim West). I was getting kind of frustrated with my swimming in that I was improving, but I did not have consistent improvement nor did I have a good sense of what I should be improving. Shinji was perfect; a private coach and he videotaped his students for later review!
Also, I watched his cool videos on Youtube. Man, look at this guy swim:

He’s so frickin’ smooth it’s unbelievable. I knew that I had to take lessons from him – I’ve always wanted to achieve that smooth, glide stroke and didn’t really know how to get there.
Back in 2003, I took a TI seminar and thought it was pretty good. But I also felt that being a group seminar that individual attention was not possible so it helped, but I think that I wasn’t able to improve further. Now I could get firsthand individualized instruction: perfect!
Coach Shinji started videotaping immediately and he taped me the whole time. Watching my swimming video is always painful; I think I’m not all that graceful in the water! But I did show improvement by the time the 45 minute coaching session was over.
The most interesting points I learned was:
1. When I turn to one side during a stroke, my lead hand needs to spear forward at about 6″ under the surface, and then end up about 12″ down and also about 4″ outward. The outward distance counterbalances my body turning to that side, and the 12″ down helps keep my hips up by providing a counterbalance forward.
2. Speed comes from the hip not only in pulling the stroke hand back, but also in driving the spearing hand forward.
3. Relaxation of the whole body enables longer glides.
4. I was arching my back too much and need to rotate my pelvis slightly forward to more flatten my back. This also increased my speed.
5. Kicking too much uses up oxygen. He ran me through some repetitions of drills without taking a breath and I found I could go farther by kicking less intensely. Of course relaxing helped as well.
My target goal is to make it across a 25 yard pool in 14 strokes. Right now I’m about 21. In terms of drills, I should be able to make it across the pool with the Superman glide in 3 or less; I’m at 5 right now and should be able to do better.
Lots of practicing between now and my next lesson. Looking forward to more coaching from him!