The April 20 edition of the NY Times included an article about a project to build a supersonic car — one capable of 800mph of land speed, which would make it the first vehicle to break the sound barrier on land. The car’s builders are adding aluminum wheels to the fuselage of a fighter jet. This points out once again the fact that, whenever a body needs to move through a "fluid" medium (air molecules behave like water molecules when set in motion) the most important factor is reducing drag by gradually separating the molecules it must pass through. When you fail to do so, the turbulence that results greatly limits speed and greatly increases energy consumption.  These photos illustrate the importance designers place on sleekness in any object intended to move  through a high-resistance medium:

The jet-fighter-fuselage-turned-supercar

Another design for a car meant to break the sound barrier

 

The 180-mph Shinkaisen Bullet Train 

 Which brings us from engineered design to evolutionary selection. The Barracuda can go from cruising lazily to streaking at 25mph while barely causing a ripple. And it does so in a medium that’s nearly 1000 times denser than air. Its sleek shape is the primary reason why.

What all of these have in common is a tapered leading edge and smoothly shaped shaft, like a spear or an arrow. The role of the leading edge is to gradually separate air or water molecules, so the shaft can pass through that space in the medium with a minimum of resistance or turbulence. When the leading edge is blunt or the shaft irregularly-shaped, a tremendous amount of resistance is caused, and the moleculars become disturbed, causing vortexes, turbulence, etc that also contributes to drag.

Which brings us to the "human swimming body." By design it looks nothing like a fish. By instinct it just wants to pull and kick — a perfect prescription for creating drag and turbulence . . .

Unless we think differently. When standing at this end of the pool, ready to make our way to that end, our normal thought is: "I’ll get there by pulling and kicking." If you hope to minimize drag and turbulence, then your thought process should shift to "Streamline my Right Side, then Streamline my Left Side." Freestyle technique then becomes a matter of rythmically alternating streamlined positions, one side then the other.

We chose this image for the cover of the Easy Freestyle DVD to leave a compelling message: The essence of Freestyle technique is spearing yourself into a position like this. Pulling and kicking are just details. This is what matters.

 

The difference between Easy Freestyle and other ways of learning swimming — indeed how Easy Freestyle has progressed beyond previous TI videos — is that the first 4 of its 7  lessons are designed to teach and reinforce Active Streamlining, in a series of complementary steps, as this screen shot of SpearSwitch in Lesson Three  illustrates:

 

Read Part Two.