"TOTAL IMMERSION: THE REVOLUTIONARY WAY TO SWIM BETTER, FASTER, AND EASIER" by Terry Laughlin, John Delves

• Despite the fact that swimming is an essential life skill, it has never been taught correctly.
• Traditional (i.e., Red Cross) instruction teaches you to not drown rather than to emulate what works so well for fish.
• We call the TI method Fishlike Swimming, and the way swimming is usually taught Human Swimming. Conventional teachers and coaches focus on pulling, kicking, muscling your way through the water and endless laps to condition you for the ordeal of more and more laps—activities that mainly reinforce all that is wasteful about Human Swimming. TI instructors teach you to be balanced, slippery, and fluent—and to devote your pool time to thoughtful practice that turns these efficient movements into rock-solid habits.
• slipping your body through the smallest possible “hole” in the water has far more of an impact on your swimming than how you use your hands to push water toward your feet.
• Unless you count cross-country skiing, swimming uses more muscles than all other exercises.
• your fitness is an automatic dividend of skill building.
• Make no mistake: A good, efficient swimming stroke is one of life’s more complicated skills, far more difficult to perfect than the ideal golf swing or the picture-perfect tennis serve.
• Learning to cut that drag by improving your body position could well give you a 20 percent to 30 percent speed boost in just a day or two.
• Work longer, not faster, strokes.
• So goal one for anyone who wants to swim better and faster is a longer stroke. This can happen in two ways: (1) more push—using your hands and feet to thrust your body farther through the water by making each stroke as powerful as possible; and (2) less drag—shaping your body so it’s more friction-free, allowing it to travel farther with the power each of your strokes is already producing.
• In the water, drag is everything.
• Invest time and effort in improving your SL and you won’t lose it when you take a break from training.
• That’s why what you do between strokes is actually more important than how you take the stroke.
• three cardinal rules for going faster:   1. Balance your body in the water. 2. Make your body longer. 3. Swim on your side.
• The human body, you see, simply wasn’t designed to float efficiently in the water.
• Above the waist, we’re mostly volume; the lungs, after all, are just big bellows. That means we’re most buoyant between the armpits, rocklike lower down. It’s only natural that our longer, heavier end wants to sink.
• What happens if you push a beach ball into the water? Right. The water pushes it right back out. You have one place on your body that’s buoyant like that—the space between your armpits. Call it your buoy.
• You are not trying to float like a cork. You are trying to get your upper and lower body lined up nearly horizontal to the surface, with your hips and legs as close to it as possible.
• Longer boats go faster—and easier.
• If a longer vessel can go faster, a taller swimmer can too. And taller swimmers do.
• Well, as far as the water is concerned you can still grow, stretching your six feet to nearly nine feet from fingertips to toes by simply extending your arm overhead.
• FQS swimming means always keeping one or the other of your hands in that front quadrant.
• You just can’t be an FQS swimmer unless you’re also a well-balanced swimmer.
• Done right, FQS is nothing less than a revolutionary way of thinking about what your hands do for you when you swim.
• Don’t rush the process. Leave your hand extended before starting to pull back. Don’t be in a hurry to start stroking. Chant silently, if it helps: “Enter, e-x-t-e-n-d, pause, and pull.”
• One of the most enduring myths about our sport is that the correct position for swimming freestyle is lying on your stomach, turning your head to the side when you need a breath.
• The fastest, most efficient swimmers in the world cut the water on their sides, rolling from one side to the other with each stroke and staying on each side for as much of each stroke cycle as they can.
• The most efficient way to swim freestyle is to roll rhythmically until your shoulders and hips are a bit less than perpendicular to the water and to try to spend just a bit more time on your side in each stroke cycle.
• The longer you stay on your side in each stroke cycle, the farther and faster your body will travel.
• “If your body were a motorboat, your engine would be in your hips. Your hands are actually nothing more than the tips of the propeller blades.”
• Good body rhythms give you the power that the arms and shoulders simply deliver.
• First eliminate drag, then create more power. That’s exactly how you should work on it too.
• Power in most sports—swimming included—originates much lower down in your body. In most cases, the arms are just the “delivery system.”
• Arm swing is actually the last—and least powerful—of a linked series of actions, each of which takes its momentum from the one before.
• Make your hips the first part of the body to move in each stroke, and watch your power grow.
• As I’ve said over and over, swimming isn’t complicated. Swimming instruction is complicated. And that’s partly because it’s usually delivered by the dumptruck load, all at once and with no priorities.
• But remember: first a sleek boat, then a powerful engine, and only after that a good propeller.
• So learning a skill is best organized into a step-by-step process that breaks the big job down into bite-size parts, then recombines them so gradually that each step is easy to master.
• Practice, we must come to understand, merely makes permanent whatever you happen to be practicing. Good or bad.
• Muscle memory is what coaches call familiar, habitual patterns of movement.
• Once you learn a skill well, you can just let your muscles take over. Unfortunately, they’ll take over just as aggressively if you’ve learned a skill badly.
• The reason you want to be in the best possible shape is not to be a powerful athlete but a precision one—so you can keep using your high-level technique over longer distances, at higher speeds and higher heart rates.
• primary goal is to train yourself to stay efficient as you move everything faster.
• Learning any new motor skill is a similar problem-solving, trial-and-error exercise.
• The secret is to practice something you can do, not something you can’t. An easily mastered basic skill becomes the springboard for a more advanced one, and so on. You see results every step of the way.
• Obviously, the only way to make sense out of the wilderness of skill building is by a stepwise system of learning, and practice that’s organized to take the student through it.
• To learn a better way of swimming, you have to unlearn the one you’re stuck with, which means never doing it again. Every length you swim with poor form makes it harder to improve.
• Drills work by speeding up your learning curve, and that’s no small feat.
• Learning specialists tell us we pick up skills faster by breaking a complex movement series into manageable segments for practice.
• And the more you have to learn, the more you should drill—up to four times as much as your normal swimming if you really have your work cut out for you.
• drills build good skills only when they’re done well.
• Work no more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time on a new drill.
• Just as you did on the pressing-your-buoy drill, tell yourself you’ve got to lean on your chest as you swim. You may feel as if you’re swimming downhill. That’s good.
• Twenty strokes per 25-yard length is a meaningful benchmark for where the swimming wheat and chaff are separated.
• The only way to become a consistently efficient swimmer is to refuse to practice inefficient swimming.
• The phrase “practice makes perfect” gets it only partly right. “Practice makes permanent” is far truer.
• “Avoid practicing movements you cannot perform correctly.”
• “Never practice struggle.”
• The purpose of training is to maximize energy supply. The purpose of skill drills is to minimize energy cost.
• Energy conservation always produces greater improvement, faster.
• Until you learn to balance effortlessly without your arms helping, it is simply impossible to drill or stroke efficiently.
• Most important, when practicing Lesson One for the first time, use a shallow pool section, where you can stand up at any time.
• Effortlessness and stability are the key sensations of balance; learn them here then maintain in other positions.
• You achieve balance by “lying on your lungs,” which are the most buoyant part of your body.
• Athletes who are lean, densely muscled, or long-legged (and particularly those with two or more of these traits) commonly find that no amount of position adjusting allows them to achieve real comfort in the nose-up balance drills
• In general, “sinkers” struggle more with the first three drills, so my advice is not to endure frustration while trying endlessly to master them. Do them expeditiously and with a degree of patience to learn as much as a reasonable effort with allow, then move on to Drill 4, Skating.
• Practice each drill with no set time limit or number of repetitions in mind. • Stay with it until it becomes effortless. • Then continue a bit longer until you are “bored” (you can do it without mental effort). • Only then should you progress to the next drill or skill.
• Developing a stronger kick is unimportant; a more economical movement style is all-important.
• Being able to balance right on your side—shoulder pointed straight up—is the most slippery position you can achieve in the water.
• Most adult swimmers kick too much, not because they want to but because they feel their legs sinking. This kicking is not only nonpropulsive and energy-wasting,
• You greatly enhance your ease and flow with long, concentrated sessions of nothing but patient repetition of Triple Zipper.
• 70 percent of your swim speed comes from your stroke mechanics and only 30 percent from the muscles, the heart—all the systems that power that stroke.
• You can’t make the most of your training time if you don’t know why you’re training in the first place.
• Successful training is a gradual series of small adaptations instead of a sudden overload that puts you down for the count.
• Drag increases exponentially as you speed up.
• Progression—strengthening your body by gradually asking it to do more—is one of the most important fundamentals of effective training
• In training, stress simply means a workload imposed on the body.
• The body adapts to the specific stress imposed.
• Physiologists tell us that we need to train at least three to four days a week, year-round, to maintain basic fitness.
• The heart doesn’t understand or care what strokes you’re swimming or how many yards you write in your log. It knows only two things—how hard it has worked and for how long.
• Mastery is the intriguing process through which something that is initially difficult and frustrating becomes progressively easier and more pleasurable through practice.
• true Masters keep practicing primarily for the rewards of practice itself.
• When spending your precious time at practice—and to commit yourself without reservation—it’s essential that you be confident you’re following the right path.
• learning is immeasurably aided by feedback. And you can create feedback for yourself when a teacher isn’t available by finding a practice partner.
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