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Newspaper article from the Times, UK
July 11, 2004
Swim like the fishes
A new course can make you look cool in the hotel pool. We sent off our doggy-paddler to see if he’d sink or swish
Picture the scene. You check into a gorgeous beachfront hotel, throw open your balcony doors and gaze out onto a glistening blue sea. Kicking off your shoes and slipping into a swimming costume, you race down to the beach, your skin tingling under the hot sun. Just as sweat starts to bead on your forehead, you stride into the surf and dive headlong into the clear water.
And then what? In the movie remake of your life (your part is played by Scarlett Johansson or Brad Pitt), you would swim gracefully out to sea, carving effortlessly through the ocean. Unfortunately, reality has a habit of being less than perfect. When we make contact with water, most of us flail about for a minute or two then stagger breathlessly back onto terra firma.
The reason is obvious: humans were designed to be land-based creatures. Only a few extraordinary individuals, such as the Olympic champion Ian Thorpe, have a natural affinity with water. But according to a new American coaching philosophy, any of us can conquer our natural tendency to sink and — regardless of our age, body shape or fitness level — learn to “swim like a fish”.
The technique, Total Immersion, was devised by a New York-based coach called Terry Laughlin, whose revolutionary methods are being adopted by both keen amateurs and champion athletes. Students are told to discard everything they have been taught about swimming and to stop counting out one boring lap after another. Instead, they perform a series of deceptively simple drills to make their movements more “fishlike”.
At the heart of Total Immersion lies a straightforward idea. The key to efficient, effortless swimming is to become balanced, buoyant and flat in the water. Think of a toy boat in a bathtub: the gentlest of shoves will send it gliding along. According to Laughlin, even the most efficient conventional swimmers use 95% of their energy just staying afloat. If you can learn to be buoyant — and to breathe without disturbing your balance — you will race along with the minimum of effort.
I first picked up one of Laughlin’s books last year. Though some of the language was reminiscent of a quasi-religious cult, it genuinely changed the way I thought about swimming. Unfortunately, it didn’t change the way I swam. After many hours of drills — most of which involved trying to balance on one side — I had merely succeeded in swallowing several gallons of chlorinated water. The only way to go forward, I decided, was to join the cult in person.
LAUGHLIN’S ambassador in the UK is fellow American Kevin Millerick, who runs regular weekend workshops at pools up and down the country. I signed up for one and, after a brief exchange of e-mails, found myself in a school classroom near Loughborough at 8.30 on a Saturday morning.
There were 20 students, among them half-a-dozen triathletes, three swimming teachers, two teenage sisters who competed at club level, a middle-aged couple, a marathon-running pensioner, a man who had only been swimming for 10 months and another who was planning to do the Channel later in the year. Such is the reputation of Total Immersion that one student had travelled from Paris, another from Sweden.
Up stepped Millerick, a giant of a man with a goatee beard, a booming voice and a generously padded midriff. Imagine John McEnroe, recently graduated from the Anne Robinson School of Tact and Sensitivity and trapped in the body of a professional wrestler. Alongside him stood four assistant coaches, who smiled a lot and clearly shared a zeal for swimming that bordered on the evangelical.
After explaining how the weekend would pan out — seven hours in the pool, interspersed with classroom lessons and video analysis — Millerick talked about the thinking behind Total Immersion. Water, he said, is 800 times more dense than air, and its resistance rises exponentially. If you double your effort while swimming, water resistance increases by eight times. Triple it and the resistance increases by 27 times. Clearly, there is no point trying to outmuscle the water. Instead, you need to develop smooth, fluid movements, and think about slipping your whole body through the smallest possible hole in the water.
It was all beginning to sound a little esoteric, like Zen and the Art of Front Crawl. So I wasn’t surprised when Millerick went on to compare Total Immersion with both yoga and t’ai chi. In order to develop fishlike movements in the water, we would need to isolate and train each part of the body, he said. “Everything we do will be mindful, slow, relaxed and purposeful. This isn’t a workout. Think of it more like a yoga session.”
NOW FOR the pool, where we were told to do a couple of lengths of crawl. Millerick lined us up and filmed us one by one, then we did an hour of simple drills, floating on our backs, gliding on our sides and establishing the correct angle and position of our leading hand (40 degrees down and 20cm below the surface). Back in the classroom, the video made grim viewing. From above, most of the group had appeared to be competent swimmers, but from below the surface we all looked horribly human. Many of us were guilty of the most elementary mistake — lifting our heads out of the water to breathe. Though instinctive, this spelt disaster because it caused our legs to sink, destroying our balance.
Millerick pulled no punches in assessing our abilities. One of the three teachers was told she was unbalanced and had bad hand shape. Another resembled a nodding dog in the back of a car. Neither woman looked amused.
My turn next. Millerick narrowed his eyes and exhaled through pursed lips. I didn’t look good. My arms thrashed, my legs flapped and my head plunged up and down as I gasped for air. “You’re a sinker,” he muttered.
Should I pack my trunks and go home now? “No,” said Millerick, “some people are floaters, some are sinkers. It depends on body shape and muscle mass.”
I could still learn to be a good swimmer, but I would have to work that bit harder on my balance.
In a way, I was relieved that my video was so nasty. At least the coaches could identify my faults and help me fix them. And I no longer felt any emotional attachment to my stroke. Like a true convert, I was ready to throw away all I’d held dear and start afresh.
NEXT DAY, we were in the pool at 9am, running through a series of drills in which we introduced stroking movements and tried to twist our hips crisply from side to side. According to Millerick, most freestylers rely on kicking hard and scooping back handfuls of water. Instead, we were told to use a feathery, supple kick and forget about pulling back water. With our hands we would reach forward and “grip the water” as we rotated our bodies. I had trouble getting my head around this last concept.
A couple of the students asked Millerick for a demonstration. He seemed reluctant at first, then lowered his giant frame gently into the blue. He swam one 20-metre length in about six strokes, and it was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen in a swimming pool: graceful and sleek, and strangely reminiscent of a dolphin bulging and breaking the surface of the sea.
It was also eerily quiet; whereas we had splashed and kicked, the only sound now was of water dripping off each hand as it glided through the air.
After lunch, more drills. These were threatening to become tiresome until, after about an hour, I experienced what I can only call an epiphany. While performing an exercise called Double Zipper Switch, I suddenly felt that, rather than rolling aimlessly around in the water, my hips had clicked into gear and were propelling me forward, smoothly and effortlessly, like a corkscrew. Millerick noticed it too. “How did that feel, Mark? Better?” Wonderful though this feeling was, it proved fleeting. At the end of the second day, we were asked to swim another length for the camera, so the coaches could study changes in our technique. Most of us showed a marked improvement, with many reducing the number of strokes it took to cover 20 metres by as much as 40% or 50%. One man claimed he understood for the first time “how swimming is supposed to feel”. Another said he had “experienced a major breakthrough”. Even the three teachers looked impressed.
Annoyingly, when my turn came, I reverted to my old inept style, swimming more like a dog than a fish. Nerves, perhaps. My stroke count was down from 13 to 11, but I found it hard to conceal a stab of disappointment. Was I kidding myself, or had I really experienced, however briefly, “total immersion”? The thought was sufficiently tantalising to get me going to my local pool two or three times a week, studiously practising my drills. So what if the other swimmers stare? I am determined to stick with it, telling myself that one day I’m going to be able to swim like a fish. And if I can’t swim like a fish, I’ll swim like Kevin Millerick. If I repeat it often enough, it almost sounds like a prayer.
Mark Hodson
