TI Coach Bob Wiskera prepared this as a handout for the first day of TI Weekend Workshops he leads.  If you’ve taken a workshop, this should serve as a helpful reminder. If you’re teaching yourself with the aid of the Easy Freestyle DVD, it can help organize your thinking and planning.
 
Hearing is forgetting
Seeing is Remembering
Doing is Understanding

 

Your Workshop Goals
1. Break old habits and learn new movements.
2. Stop wasting energy by reducing drag and turbulence
3. Understand what works in swimming.
4. Replace the training model with a practice model.

Skill Set #1: Cooperate with Gravity.
Learn to be "weightless" instead of wasting energy with "survival stroking".
Long term you won’t devote many hours to this but initially and in the short term use these drills to imprint the empowering sense of being routinely relaxed.
"Once you feel that doing less or nothing at all is an option, you can be choosy about when to do something."
Drills:
1. Superman’s "Wide Glide"
2. Superman Flutter: Add a gentle kick. Do less!
3. Skating: Add some rotation by taking one stroke. Glide "off your stomach" giving attention head, hand, shoulder and hip positions. (Bonus: back alignment and/core engagement)

Skill Set #2: Swim with your body: Make gravity work for you
Drills:

1. Two pause SpearSwitch:
a. Pause at the goggles and consider a target for your spearing hand
b. Pause after the switch "off your stomach" and check head, hand, shoulder, hip and core positions. (See skating above)
2. Draw a line, think of shoulder-width rails or paddling a surfboard

Skill Set #3: Pendulum Motion Propulsion Use gravity to swim with less effort
"The sinking feeling" and "mass in motion tends to stay in motion".
Drills:
1. Hand out of the water Recovery: "Outrigger Canoe" or "Crescent Moon" recovery
2. Weight Shift Number 2/ Falling forward
3. Marionette arm rehearsal
4. Elbow Circle rehearsal
5. Mail Slot rehearsal, quiet swim without noise or bubbles
6. Two pause swim "Beware of sinking away from air"

Skill Set #4: Breathing Breath early and often. Use buoyancy. Avoid gravity’s effect
1. Wider tracks with core engagement add stability
2. Allow the chin to follow the shoulder to air, tuck your chin slightly, ‘see sideways’,
1 goggle in / 1 goggle out of the water.
3. Keep your laser low. Lay the back of the head onto the leading arm. Follow the spearing arm with the top of the head. "Go down to air" (I know this sounds crazy).