This video will save you a lot of time and frustration. We will share with you what we
have learned these last 5 years of research and in more than 20 years of swimming experienced
that my brother and I each have. The video format is different but it is the best way to help you
improve as soon as possible.
Aaron is good at every sport, especially running and cycling. But when he goes into the pool he
gets tired really fast. This is a problem because in 5 months he will do an ironman competition.
The competition begins with a 2.5 mile swim (3.86 km swim), and Aaron cannot swim more than 100
meters without stopping.
Our goal is to help him swim without getting tired. As you can see he has several problems.
It is evident that he is fighting the water. We are not going to fix it immediately
but we will take him though the shortest way to success. It's tempting to tell him not to
cross his arms when swimming, or to bend his elbows. Even the most detailed oriented of you
will tell him not to bend the knees so much. But that won't help. We have to start with
the solutions to the biggest problems that will benefit him the most in the least amount of time.
The first thing we have to do is
tell Aaron to push himself off the wall. This way, we remove complexity and discover basic things.
These types of exercises help all levels of swimming. So don't feel that if you
are more advanced than Aaron, that this wont help you. As you can see, he does not have a
good sense of horizontal balance. He doesn’t even have a small amount of CO2 tolerance.
These two things make him anxious, so he moves his legs a lot and his heart rate increases as
he tries to move in the water. The challenge of swimming smoothly is lost in the first 5 meters.
Let's start with tolerance to excess CO2. When you
are taught to swim as an adult, it is incorrectly assumed that this concept is already mastered. In
reality, the fear of excess CO2 in your lungs is one of the most primitive and powerful instincts
we have. In fact, you can lose the function of the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for
fear, and your brain will still freak out if it detects excess CO2. With any stressful situation,
such as getting into a very cold shower, the first thing you instinctively do is to inhale
more frequently to get more oxygen. But that's a conversation for much later. For now we can help
decrease that reflex with a simple exercise.
It all starts with bubbling. It consists of taking air and blowing it slowly through the nose
under the water. This is very easy for Aaron, so we increase the difficulty by telling him to
hold his breath for ten seconds before releasing the air slowly through his nose. After a couple
of tríes Aaron succeeds. The next thing is to hold the breath for 15 seconds and blow the air
through the nose for at least 5 seconds. If it becomes too easy, let him do it 5 times,
taking one breath before putting his head back in. After this exercise, Aaron feels calmer in the
water. We go back to pushing from the wall as far as he can. We see that he still doesn’t
have horizontal balance, but at least he holds his head underwater longer.
The problem starts from the push. He doesn’t pull
his chest deep enough and his body is at a wrong angle when he pushes. To correct this we tell
Aaron to go under in first and then push. He uses his arms to sink in but he overcorrects and pushes
down to the ground. He struggles to rise up to the surface and panics. Back to the bubbling.
Now that he is calm,
he tries to adjust the angle. The problem is that his feet rise to the surface before he puches.
There should be a straight line passing through the feet, hips, and hands parallel to the ground.
He now pushes himself properly. Now we tell him to push harder until the feet pass the 5-meter mark.
It may seem like a silly exercise to some degree,
but he's learning a lot more than Denise. Denise has been trying to get her feet up for several
hours because they sink too much. She believes that by kicking faster and harder she will be able
to lift her legs. She saw a video on YouTube where she was advised to squeeze her glutes,
but that advice isn’t working either. Denise gives up determined to leave a very negative comment on
the YouTube video.
Meanwhile Aaron discovers that it is easier to go far if he tightens his core muscles. He manages
to pass the flags that mark the 5 meters with his feet and unlocks his first challenge. Now Aaron is
level 13 on the SkillsNT table.
He is excited and wants to keep learning but the best thing for now to come back the next day.
After 10 hours
of writing code for a new skills nt app and 5 1/2 hours of sleep, Aaron returns to the pool.
There, he discovers that his skills have
leveled down. But we don't have time to explain everything to him today. So after a short warm-up,
he goes back to the pool to do his bubbling exercise, holding his breath for 10 seconds and
releasing the air through his nose for 5 seconds.
Then he does 3 pushes from the wall until his feet pass the flags. Now is time to swim.
Aaron tries to
do 25 meters of smooth swimming but we have to stop him again. He pushes off well and can take
more strokes without breathing but his knees keep sinking. Now we put a pull boy between the knees.
We do this for two reasons, to get his knees up and to stop him from moving his legs too much.
Although we already
told Aaron that he does not need to move his legs as much to move forward and he understood,
his body wants to keep moving them instinctively. So with the pull boy between the knees, he
is are creating the muscle memory to tell his body that he can swim without having to move his legs.
He does 4 x 25s that way. He leaves
the Pull buoy and tries to swim without moving his legs as much. A little better at first but
he quickly goes back to the same thing. Obviously, muscle memory is not created that quickly.
Now we take the
exercise to the next level of difficulty. The pull buoy between the feet. This helps him tighten his
feet but he cannot keep it in place. He tries it several times until he succeeds. As you can see,
Aaron doesn't give up without a good fight.
He tries to swim freestyle again but is now worse
than before. His feet are uncoordinated and he can't keep them close to the surface of the water.
So we take him back to the wall and tell him to
push and just do three strokes without breathing. This time he keeps the legs high in the water, but
he doesn't understand why. The reason is simple. The same thing happens on a bicycle. When you go
faster it is easier to keep your balance.
Since Aaron has enough speed when pushing off the wall, he manages to keep the balance for
a few seconds. He takes the opportunity to take three strokes without breathing.
He gets excited and
wants to sim the whole length of the pool. But as soon as he breathes, his technique goes back
to where he started. So we tell him to do 5,6 and up to 7 strokes without breathing after the push.
This begins to give him the feeling of moving through the water in a good position.
The next thing is to teach him the correct
breathing technique while swimming.
88% of the body weight in freestyle is under water at all times. Keeping that 12% of your
body weight above while keeping the rest of your body close to the surface is quite difficult. With
the whole head out the percentage increases from 12% to 16.5% approximately. Which means that it
is 35% more difficult to swim breathing with the whole head out than with only half the head out.
If you don't believe it, you can try the exercise called Tarzan and see for yourself.
Aaron's problem is that in his mind
he has the image of elite swimmers swimming above the surface. It is true that they get to a speed
that allows them to be more above the surface, but even they have most of their body under water.
For an Ironman long distance swim, it is not the speed or the technique that we want to achieve.
It is best to find the most efficient way to swim through the water and not above it.
To correct Aaron's breathing
we tell him to keep half of his face in the water when he breathes. But there is a gap between the
words he understands and what his body is used to doing. And if you give the body a choice,
it will always do what is familiar.
The next challenge to improve breathing technique is to do 25 meters side kick. And when breathing
take only part of the face out. The problem now is not the horizontal balance,
but to keep the balance on the side of the body. It's not easy either to stay close to the surface
while on your side.
We will first have to correct that kick before we can correct the breath.
Skilla has a
great to kick. If we look closely at what Skilla does, we can see that the knees bend a little.
The kick starts at the hip and the movement goes through the leg all the way to the toes
like a whip.
The hips make the knee sink a little, then the foot, and the tip of the whip are the toes. Then,
the whole leg goes up extended. While one leg goes down the other goes up.
That was too much information for
Aaron to apply in the pool. For now, the best thing is for him to stretch a little and have
enough time for breakfast.
We are working on what we think will be the best mobile app for swimmers. But it is secret
and it is not ready to be used. Would you like to be one of the first users to try it?
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See you there! Swim fast!