How I Learned to Love the Exercise Lap Swimming
Swim for fitness. It sounded easy: I already knew how to swim. So one day I was standing on the pool deck and looking at all the other happy swimmers, from fast athletes to solid elderly women swimming slowly and steadily. I was going to join their ranks, but I was completely unprepared.
When I pushed off the wall to swim my first length, I began to sink. I waved my arms so as not to drown, and then I started kicking, but then my legs sagged and became useless. Then I thought I was suffocating, so I forced myself to surface, gasped for air, and dived again. When I finally got to the end of the first lap, I grabbed the edge of the pool, sucking in air. The old woman slid next to me, touched the wall with her hand, and then with her foot, and serenely slipped away. How can I be like her?
I started from scratch, although I “knew how to swim”
To begin with, I signed up for a swimming class. It helped, but it wasn’t exactly what I needed. The instructor suggested that we can swim, but not very well (true and true), and that we need to work on improving the mechanics of our movements in the water. That was also true. But he didn’t start at a fairly basic level for me.
Many swimming lessons for children and adults focus on how to move the arms and legs. If you are a natural born swimmer, you will understand how to put everything together so that your body works like a sleek, beautiful machine. But some of us are not born swimmers. As a child, I had swimming lessons, and in high school I got a few more physical education lessons. I knew how to swim in the sense that you can push me into the water and I won’t drown, but I didn’t learn to swim the distance, and I didn’t understand how to cover the distance like those lap swimmers.
A program called Total Immersion was the thing that changed the situation for me. I started a book called Total Immersion: A Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier , but the author, Terry Laughlin, has a whole venture that includes books, videos, and training camps. You can also find local trainers who use the technique.
In the book, I contained 100 pages of swimming philosophy (skim, but not skipped) followed by detailed descriptions of twelve exercises. They begin by learning to swim without drowning and gradually develop into a fully functional freestyle stroke .
I liked this method like nothing else. His exercises will teach you to slowly and consciously find your balance in the water, and then develop a relaxed, light stroke. If you find yourself failing, you are encouraged to go back and spend more time on simple exercises.
There are worshipers around TI, as the devotees call it, because this approach works for many people with experiences like me. Most of all, we need to learn how to relax in the water, not fight it, and how to be rational and efficient so as not to waste energy.
Of course, no system works for everyone. Some swimmers find the initial exercises boring or frustrating because the program does not include specific strength and speed exercises (instead they are expected to develop as a side effect of good technique). As with anything, feel free to choose any trainer or program that suits your style.
I found balance in the water
I’ve always heard that it is difficult for men, thin and muscular people to swim. They drown (because fat floats) and find that their legs are especially heavy in the water. So maybe my body composition is to blame. Or maybe I needed to kick more to keep my feet afloat.
But Total Immersion turns the immersion problem into a balance problem. Everyone has a point of balance, so everyone can find a way to make their body lie completely horizontally in the water. Take it from the chronic sinker: it really is. I was able to learn to swim from a book , which I never did in my previous lessons.
This is how it is explained in the book:
Swinging your legs vigorously to compensate for the way nature has arranged you will tire you out … What you really need is the best way to get those hips back into place.
And there is one. I call this “pushing the buoy”.
This is how it works. What happens if you push a beach ball into the water? Right. The water pushes it back. You have one place on your body that moves like this – the space between your armpits. Call it your buoy.
Push the buoy into the water and the water will push back. But keep pushing that buoy and instead you will have the water push your hips up. Just what you want. Just letting the pressure of the water bring them to the surface takes far less energy than trying to support them by beating them with your feet.
On the first day in the pool after reading these words, I floated facedown in the water, pushing my chest and head down so much that my body became flat in the water. The book offers several mantras for the correct image: “Lean on your lungs” and “Swim downhill.”
I did this first exercise, balancing and pounding my way around the pool track – like a kickboard exercise without a kickboard. Over the next weeks, I did the rest of the exercises and eventually was able to swim in a freestyle that seemed if not fast, then at least relaxed .
The full immersion is based on similar exercises, and you can see all of their cheat sheets here . After you master simple swim and jerk, you move on to variations in which you roll smoothly from side to side, where you slide with your hand in front of you like a spear, and where you gradually build up your arm. free “stroke” movements.
Aside from the initial exercise that teaches balance, full immersion is beneficial because it emphasizes the need to stay relaxed (so you don’t get tired) and maintain a smooth profile so you don’t struggle with water resistance. Or, as Laughlin puts it, you open a little hole in the water and slide through it.
I met other swimmers and got feedback
Ready for the next step, I searched for the local veterans swimming program. The word “master” is used differently in different sports. In swimming, these are just adults, so you don’t need to be an experienced athlete to participate. If you took swimming lessons as a child, perhaps competed in high school or college swimming competitions, then you can go to the masters club when you outgrow them. It’s like an adult swimming team.
But you don’t need any prior experience, and master clubs are usually beginner friendly. The one I signed up for certainly was (and you can find it near you here ). There were weekly workouts in which the faster and average swimmers trained together with a little help from a coach. And for newbies, myself included, there was a more instruction-oriented session.
I was also lucky: the trainer used the same exercises and techniques as me. Each lesson began with a video that we watched in street clothes; then we met in the pool and put the stuff into action.
True live coaching was even better than books and videos because a coach can give you direct, personalized feedback. I knew what I was trying to do (say, pull my elbow high out of the water), but only an observer could tell if I was really doing it and how well.
It was around this time that I moved, and there were no beginner classes at the craftsmen’s club in my new city. But they did have a tight-knit community where people were happy to help each other, and from time to time they opened a clinic where they could swim in front of the coach and ask for directions. So that was helpful too.
I learned to read workouts and created one especially for myself
So what are you actually doing in the water when you lap swim? Of course, you can jump and freestyle back and forth for an hour. This is an option. But like running or any other sport, your workouts don’t have to be the same every day.
You can always return to full immersion exercises if you started with them like I did. You can spend most of your time exercising and still be a good swimmer. (Laughlin jokes, “Fitness is what happens to you when you practice good technique.”) But there are many other options.
You can create your own swimming workouts using websites such as Active and the aptly named 100 Swimming Workouts . Any swimming or triathlon site will have a ton of workouts to choose from. They are usually listed based on how many total meters a workout covers, so check your reality and think about how much distance you are likely to cover in the time you planned for your workout. For reference, most sports pools are 25 yards or 50 meters long . (If you’re not sure, your pool is probably 25 yards. Fifty is a huge number).
Swimming workouts are usually based on short intervals: a couple of laps of a given stroke or exercise followed by a certain amount of rest, and you repeat this set several times before moving on to the next. Here’s an example of a 100 swim workout routine :
Total Distance: 600 yards
- Warm up for a 100 yard crawl (rest between laps if necessary)
- 4 x 50 yards crawling at rest: 30 between each lap (try to keep the same time for each lap)
- 4 x 25 yards crawling, changing breathing patterns (breathe every 4th stroke in the first two, then every 2nd stroke in the last 2)
- 2 x 50 yards of your choice of strokes with rest: 30 between each lap (try to do the same time on each lap)
- 100 yards for a warm-up crawl (swim slowly and relax)
So, when you get to your 25-yard pool, you will begin with four stages of the forward crawl, also known as freestyle. Swimming competitions are often held in “freestyle” where you can literally swim in any style you like. The fastest stroke is a forward roll when you pull face down and alternate arms. All swimmers I have met call this movement “freestyle stroke.”
After that, you should do four 50-yard intervals, which means going up and back. They call it a “circle,” while many swimmers call it two circles because they are two lengths. It does not matter. You know why? Because when swimmers want to be specific, they say “50 yards” or “25 yards” rather than the number of laps.
Swimming workouts often give a certain amount of rest in each set – here it is 30 seconds. The idea is to train at a pace yourself. If you need more rest, it means that you have pushed yourself too hard. Swim the next set at a more relaxed pace, instead of getting tired and spending more time recovering.
Obviously, you will want to make sure the workout matches your skill level. Sometimes I would take a tricky workout (writing it down on an index card in a bag or waterproof notebook ) and tweak it to give myself a little more rest or close the distance as needed.
I also learned to read the “pace clock, ” or that giant stopwatch-like thing, on every deck of the pool. It’s like a regular watch without an hour hand that will help you measure your training sets (and rest) in seconds and minutes. You usually start your circle with the second hand at the top, and then when you finish, you just need to look at the current position of the hand to see how much time has passed while you were underwater. You don’t need a wristwatch, but it can be comfortable (waterproof, of course) if you choose to skip intervals from time to time to practice long-distance swimming.
Within a year of starting my swim, I was able to jump into the pool and swim a solid mile without stopping: all freestyle, slow and relaxed, with a fairly effective if not perfect stroke. I have never mastered flip turns and have never been super fast. I’m not an Olympic swimmer or even an athlete, but I could slide up the pool, touch the wall with my hands and feet, and slip away like it was nothing.
Illustration by Sam Woolley .