Lesson 3 – Solving The Swimming Problem

At 20 I thought my inborn ability would allow me to progress no farther. At 40, I began rebuilding my stroke based on three Elements of Efficiency. After learning them, I swam faster at 55 than I had at 20, and even broke national open water records. At 62, I feel my stroke mastery is far from finished.

Like Tim Ferriss I grew up near the ocean, but was more fortunate. I learned to swim by the age of 10 and swam competitively in high school and college.  Yet, like Tim, I experienced my own sense of failure.

From age 15 to 18, my training got progressively longer and harder, and my times improved steadily.  At 19, when I stopped improving, I worked even harder. That only made me ill from overwork.  In my final year of college, at 20, my times regressed so much, that I felt relief when the season ended and I was able to ‘retire.’

Because I’d done everything my coaches asked of me and more, I thought I must have hit a ‘speed limit’—the farthest my inborn ability could take me. It never occurred to me that the problem was with the wasteful way I swam. I’d gotten all I could out of my inefficient ‘human-swimming’ style.

Many people have had similar experiences. Though they were fortunate to progress beyond barely surviving to swimming longer distances–and perhaps even complete a mile or more in open water in a triathlon–the vast majority of swimmers hit another wall, that someone called Terminal Mediocrity: “No matter how much I swim, I never get faster.”

The reason we feel we have to claw our way to even the smallest gains is in our DNA.  Swimming is almost as alien for humans as is locomotion on land for aquatic mammals.

But while the human body becomes an ‘energy-wasting machine’ in the water, the human brain is a ‘problem-solving machine’ and our land-dweller’s DNA provides a lifetime’s worth of problems to solve.  The best measure of this is that untrained swimmers convert only 3% of energy into forward motion, while dolphins convert 80%.

The historic innovation of the TI Method is in teaching the efficiency ‘secrets’ of dolphins to human swimmers. Over the past 25 years (and hundreds of thousands of students), we’ve refined a process for teaching three essential elements of ‘fishlike’ efficiency–Balance, Streamline and Whole-Body Propulsion.

When I saw the transformational effect of these skills on all our students—including those with decades of experience–though I was already 40 and had swum a marathon and won medals at Masters Nationals–I stopped training and racing for several years to finally learn the right way to swim.

Three Elements of Efficient Freestyle

Each element addresses the two major causes of energy waste among human swimmers—moving around in water and moving the water around. All are counter-intuitive—the average swimmer would never think to do them, unless directed. They work best when learned in the order listed below.

1. Balance gives you physical comfort; the ability to control your body position; and an unprecedented sense of physical relaxation and mental calm. Balance is the easiest of the three skills to learn and provides immediate and dramatic improvement in your total swimming experience.

2. Streamline is the most specifically ‘fishlike’ of the three skills. Water is more than 800 times times denser than air and—where aquatic mammals are naturally streamlined–the human form is almost ideally designed to maximize resistance. First, shape and align your body to more closely resemble a dolphin’s body. Then learn to stroke in ways that minimize wavemaking, turbulence, bubbles, and splash as you move through the water. Reducing drag will immediately let you swim faster with no more—and possibly less–effort.

3. Whole-Body Propulsion skills teach you to work with the water, rather than against it. We teach two categories of Propulsion skills. The first is to take advantage of available energy and power—from body mass, gravity and buoyancy—before generating muscular forces. The second is to swim with your whole body–instead of just arms and legs.

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This video illustrates both ‘human’ swimming and ‘fishlike’ TI technique. The first section, shot in a pool (when a lap swimmer entered the next lane as we were filming my videographer couldn’t resist fitting him in the frame for comparison) contrasts the naturally occurring inefficiencies of terrestrial technique with the consciously acquired skill of TI’s aquatic technique.

The second section–shot in San Francisco Bay at the World Masters Open Water Championship– shows what happens to human-style swimmers when the water gets a little rougher, compared with how TI’s fishlike style adapts easily to any conditions.
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Next: Lesson 4 – Remove The Struggle