Lesson 2 – From Failure to Success

Tim Ferriss’s initial swimming goal was to win a New Year’s bet by swimming 1000 meters in open water by year-end. In April, after dozens of failed lessons, he was ready to concede defeat. After being introduced to Total Immersion, he experienced fulfillment he’d never imagined–overcoming a lifetime of fear and failure.

Paul Lurie’s initial goal was to swim for health. With the help of TI, he also realized an ambition he couldn’t have imagined at the start—inspiring thousands with a vision of ageless grace and learning.

If you’re reading this, you probably have one or more of the goals below:

To swim a short distance safely and comfortably.

To swim farther for health, fitness, and relaxation.

To swim faster—for personal achievement or competition.

To swim an ‘ambitious’ distance in open water, with enough ease to complete a triathlon–and enough enjoyment to want to do another.

Since 1989, TI has helped thousands of adults–mostly ‘late-starting’ swimmers—discover an entirely new way to swim. While their initial goals were usually modest, they discovered that TI brought them unanticipated benefits—primarily that swimming-for-improvement (not just endurance or speed) made them noticeably happier. Many even say it changed their life.

This occurred by working, patiently and thoughtfully, on solving a uniquely challenging problem: Trying–as a terrestrial mammal–to master an aquatic skill. Terrestrial mammals—dogs and deer as well as humans–swim with characteristic form: Four limbs churning to avoid sinking; head high to avoid choking.

Total Immersion has brought success to countless swimmers–who’d been left high and dry by traditional methods–because we use aquatic mammals as our technique models.

Traditional methods fall short because they follow a limbs-lungs-and-muscles approach, treating swimming as simply an endurance challenge. We recognize swimming as an evolutionary puzzle to solve.

As land-dwellers, our anatomy and instincts make any goal—from first lap, to first mile, to faster mile— if not impossible, then unreasonably difficult. Where traditional instruction brings most students to a dead end, TI is designed to prevent failure and ensure success via an innovative series of small steps that build both skill and confidence.

And, in addition, to teaching you to swim with ease and comfort, TI also shows how swimming can be a vehicle for:

Using your body intelligently and healthfully.

Exploring and fulfilling unrealized potential.

Discovering and developing new capacities.

A New Way to Free Style

Our answer to an evolutionary challenge has been to devise a groundbreaking technique–a historic departure from the ‘American’ Crawl. For nearly a century, this way of swimming freestyle was prized for its speed, but—without experience and advanced training—was too exhausting for most people to use for distance swimming.  Less experienced and uncoached swimmers nearly always chose breaststroke for longer swims.

Beginning in the early 90s, TI developed an entirely new way to swim freestyle because growing numbers of adults became interested in distance swimming—for triathlon and low-impact fitness. Many wanted to swim in open water. And few had experience or coaches.

When inexperienced swimmers with ambitious goals began streaming into our workshops, we began a decades-long process of modifying freestyle technique to transform it into an ‘Everyman’s Endurance’ stroke—designed to:

        1. Allow tireless swimming over long distances; and

        2. Equip self-coached swimmers to learn the essential skills on their own.

The stroke that has evolved is:

• Standardized like yoga asanas. In addition to Paul Lurie, you’ll see hundreds of examples of TI Freestyle on youtube, or at your local pool—easily recognizable by its easy grace, sleek lines, symmetrical recovery, and relaxed kick.

• Intentional TI isn’t a ‘naturally occurring’ stroke. The thousands who swim with TI form today started out with ‘human-swimming’ form (except for those who couldn’t swim at all) and made a choice to look and feel better.

• Learnable – Even when swimmers came to us for instruction, we typically had only a day or two to make enduring positive changes in their stroke, and prepare them to continue the process successfully on their own. Thus the TI Method is designed to be simple, efficient, and failure-proof.

• Never ‘Finished’ – You can acquire the skills to swim with more far more ease and enjoyment in a few months, as Tim Ferriss did. But there’s also a whole range of advanced or Kaizen skills offering a lifetime of further improvement.

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We created this video to let you absorb the distinctly aquatic characteristics of TI Freestyle–balanced, slippery, relaxed and working with the water.

Don’t just watch it.  Feel it. Then imagine how satisfying it would be to swim with effortless grace.

And remember: For 25 years–from age 14 to 39, my stroke wasn’t remotely like this. I began teaching and learning this style in my 40s–and am still improving in my 60s.

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Next: Lesson 3 – Solving The Swimming Problem