How to swim without getting tired
How to swim without getting tired
I rediscovered my love of exercise with an easy and practical approach towards swimming.
JB: I originally wrote and published this post in late 2021. Pleased to report that my fiancée and I are now married, and I’ve kept swimming once or twice a week with a few short breaks.
So I gained a bit of weight over lockdown and started going swimming with my fiancée. With our wedding next April approaching rapidly, it’s as good a time as any for me to lose those extra pounds.
First time, we both did about thirty lengths of breast stroke, and it wasn’t too bad. We came back sore and tired, but both enjoyed doing some exercise together.
We kept going each week after that, doing thirty or more lengths of breast stroke. Each time with sore arms and shoulders, but a little bit fitter.
My weight didn’t seem to shift much, but I noticed a t-shirt I’d bought in August fit me better, no longer feeling super tight. So I likely developed my muscles, and muscle is denser than fat.
When I tried the odd length of front crawl, however, I was a mess. Bobbing about with my legs hanging down isn’t a formula for speed and efficiency!
Seeing others in the pool flying ahead with the front crawl made me want to improve my technique—whatever small amount I had—and catch up.
I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on swimming technique, but these didn’t really help. They emphasised propulsion through the arms, and this was exhausting. I could only do one lap of front crawl like this, gasping for breath and gulping the horrible chlorine-water.
I then remembered a blog post by Tim Ferriss on an approach to swimming called “Total Immersion”. He described how this approach made swimming easy and fun, so I picked up the book on the approach written by Terry Laughlin.
The approach is about balancing yourself in the water and making your body streamlined, rather than trying to charge down the lane with one powerful stroke after another.
You do this by concentrating on keeping your body, legs, and arms aligned in one line. Keep your head down in the water, using each rotation to inhale, and then softly exhaling in the water to combat the buildup of carbon dioxide.
Here are some more notes I took on the book, in the form of cues. They might sound weird, but I deliberately wrote them as easy-to-remember cues that I can apply in the pool.
Swim downhill. Lean on your chest as you swim and keep your head down. This is a cue to help you keep your balance in the water. Your chest is full of air, after all!
Smooth and easy. The shape of the vessel is more important than the power of the engine. Most freestyle swimmers will slog through their sessions, burning their muscles with inefficient technique. Your goal is different. You will glide through the water, perfecting your technique and getting fit in the process.
Breathe with your entire body out of the water. One of the most common ways that swimmers tire themselves out is by twisting their neck to the side to breathe. Instead, rotate your entire body.
Weightless arms. Fingertips thrust effortlessly forward. This cue encourages you to use your arms as balancers and rudders, not propellers.
Reach for the far wall. Each stroke, you gradually reach out to the end of the pool. This keeps you nicely outstretched, but in a relaxed and gradual way.
Swap hands. This cue tells you when to stroke your outstretched arm and replace it with your other arm, outstretched. Only stroke when your other arm is about to “swap” in its place.
Point your belly button to the pool sides on left and right. This cue encourages you to rotate with each stroke. Swimming on your side like this makes you much more streamlined and, as stated above, helps with your breathing.
Weightless head. Straight line from your head downwards. This cue encourages you to keep a streamlined and balanced posture. Holding your head up—as our instincts tell us—will slow you down and keep your legs down, which is very bad for streamlining your body!
Get fit while perfecting your technique. One of the best parts of this approach is that your focus isn’t on struggling and grinding, but getting more balanced and more streamlined, and with each visit you get fitter.
Hip whip. Drive through your hips. To propel yourself forward, you don’t put all the force through your arms as you stroke. Our arms and shoulders are weak compared to our hips, so we use those to propel ourselves instead. Each time you rotate, you kick through your core and your hips. With your body balanced and streamlined, you go faster and expend considerably less energy.
How’s it going so far?
I managed to front crawl for nearly a full hour the first time I used this approach, doing many more lengths than I could manage with breast stroke. As a bonus, I was faster than a lot of the other swimmers who formerly kept passing me on previous visits.
My only criticism of the book is that Laughlin, in his attempts to justify his core-based propulsion technique, uses some very dubious mathematics. He tries to argue that Newton’s Second Law (that the net force applied to an object equals the rate of change of momentum of that object) means kicking through your core and your hips generates more power, because they collectively have more mass than your legs. This argument left me shaking my head, because it places the cart before the horse. Yes, the hips are much stronger, but that is not caused by their mass as Laughlin tries to argue, and it is a totally backward understanding of the role of mass in Newton’s Second Law. Nevertheless I am grateful for Laughlin’s book. It is a treasure that opens up the sport of swimming to more people.
I have discovered the joy of swimming, and I’m excited for every new session in the pool. I gave up competitive running in 2017 after a series of disappointments and injuries. It feels so good to connect with another sport and see tangible improvements.