Learning to Fly, Part I

This past weekend I took my first lesson ever in how to swim the butterfly. It was an illuminating experience. I discovered that the stroke I’ve been executing for the past four years, the stroke I’ve been calling butterfly, the stroke I’ve swum in several Masters meets without being disqualified, is only a vague approximation of the stroke that’s going to get me to 200 meters.

So I’ve started over.

Particularly intriguing is that, although I’ve based my stroke on Total Immersion books and videos, and although my teacher was a Total Immersion instructor, what he taught me wasn’t what was in the books and videos.

“This is a new approach,” he said. “You’re only the third person I’ve taught it to.” The other two were his kids.

I should mention that the instructor was Shinji Takeuchi, the director of TI Japan, now teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. Shinji developed the TI approach to butterfly for the baby-boomer generation, the one that’s presented on the Betterfly for Every Body video. So when he says he’s come up with something better, it’s probably a good idea to pay attention.

Shinji’s approach is all about using as little effort as possible to move through the water, an admirable goal when doing the fly because otherwise, if you insist on, say, trying to go 200 meters, when you really only have enough energy for 100, at best, you look like an idiot. Worst case: you drown. Reducing my physical effort, increasing the distance I travel with each stroke, is something I’ve been working on for a while, and I thought I had made significant progress. Until I took a lesson with Shinji.

One of the things I’ve spent a lot a of time doing is body dolphins, wiggling myself through the water. That, apparently, is last year’s approach. Doing the fly efficiently is “not about undulation,” Shinji says.

The first thing Shinji taught me was the “Superman glide.” You push off the bottom of the pool – no, not the side; too much propulsion; it’s cheating – and with your hands out in front of you, you glide as far as you can. My first time, I go maybe 10 feet and drop to a standing position, gasping for air.

“See if you can go farther,” Shinji says. Eventually, I work my way up to where I can get across the pool in three glides. (It’s not until much later in the lesson that he tells me he can travel 18 yards like this.)

“My legs sink,” I complain.

“Make smaller bubbles,” Shinji says. Exhaling makes you less buoyant. Your legs are the first to go. “And you don’t need to exhale all the time.”

I try it. It works. I manage to get across the 25-yard pool in only two glides. Well, okay, not quite: I fall about 10 inches short. But here’s the curious thing. In the effort to extend the Superman glide, I have to figure out how to relax my entire body, because holding tension takes effort, and effort uses oxygen, and using oxygen makes me run out of breath, and running out of breath, ultimately, is what makes me have to stand up. Even “holding” my breath makes me run out of breath, because it takes effort to hold my breath. The trick is to relax and simply float, watching the tiles on the bottom of the pool glide slowly by, not worrying about whether you have enough air or not (your body will send you clear warning signals when it needs more), and occasionally blowing a few tiny bubbles.

The second drill is the new part. It doesn’t have a name yet. You push off, hands out in front of you and slightly to the sides, and using a very gentle flutter kick to keep you moving through the water, you press your head quickly down into the water and slightly forward, letting your hands move outward slightly and – this is the key – making sure you keep your hands at the surface. This is not the power portion of the stroke. That comes later. This is the setup.

What you’re supposed to feel when you press your head down into the water is the pressure of the water pushing back, forcing your head back to the surface. That’s what happens when you keep your hands at the surface. But of course, the first 10, or 15, or 20 times, I let my hands sink, so all I feel is my head going underwater and staying there. Shinji has me work on it standing in the water with my hands on the side of the pool, fixed, where they can’t move, and bobbing my head in and out of the water. I try it again in a floating position and, suddenly, it clicks into place.

Here’s why this matters: the hard part of the fly, the part that takes wears people out because it takes so much effort but doesn’t contribute much to moving you across the pool, is getting your head and shoulders out of the water, your head so that you can breathe, your shoulders so that you don’t have to drag your arms up through the water during recovery. If you incorporate into your stroke a move that uses the pressure of the water to push your head to the surface, you’re halfway there. Instead of trying to arch your back to bring your head and shoulders up out of the water, which takes a lot of muscular effort and wears you out, you’re conserving your energy, recruiting the physical behavior of water to do the work for you. Completely brilliant, and completely counter-intuitive. This is definitely not how I’ve been swimming the fly.

There was one more drill to learn, which is relatively old-school. This one also begins face down in the water, flutter-kicking gently for propulsion. “Put your hands at 2:00 and 10:00,” Shinji says, demonstrating from the pool deck. “Then move them to 4:00 and 8:00. Then back.” Here, the focus is on keeping your hands flat in the water, just below the surface, using as little effort as possible to move them back and forth. After a few lengths of that, it’s time to move on to lifting your hands out of the water for the return trip from 4 and 8 to 2 and 10.

That’s the easy part. Then you graduate to angling your hands, pushing the water downward slightly as you move your hands from 2 and 10 to 4 and 8, and – ready? – letting the water push your hands back upward on the return. The idea here is to let the water lift your hands to the surface, so that you have to use muscle power only to lift them from the surface into the air. It makes sense, but it’s very subtle, and more difficult than it seems. Half an hour later, when the lesson ends, I still haven’t gotten it to work.

There was more. Adding the kick. Attempting to breathe. Putting the various bits and pieces together into something that was supposed to resemble a complete stroke. All that went by in a blur. It’s all on video tape, but I’m afraid to watch it. For now, I’m going to stick with the three drills, as distinct and separate entities. Fortunately, I’ve got another lesson scheduled for next weekend.

Oh, and a word of advice. If you’re planning to try the Superman glide in your local pool, you might want to give the lifeguard a heads-up. What it looks like from the pool deck – Shinji had warned me this would happen; he was right – is that you’re lying in the water, face down, barely moving, with only an occasional small bubble or two escaping your lips. When the concerned young lifeguard came over this morning to see if I had died, wondering whether she was going to have to fish me out of the pool with a net, I was tempted to say I was pretending to be Superman, but I settled for: I’m okay. It’s a floating exercise.

Making Waves

Progress: I swam a 100 fly this morning.

I’m in DC now, visiting my sister, and I’ve been going to the pool with my brother-in-law, who swims every morning at 7:00. Yesterday I didn’t manage to get any farther than 25 yards at a time, but today I had a breakthrough.

Swimming the 100 wasn’t the breakthrough. Don’t get me wrong, it was exciting; I came very close to embarrassing myself thoroughly by shouting “Yes!” and pumping my fist in the air like an idiot, before a calmer interior voice prevailed and I chose instead to stand in the shallow water, hand perched on the side of the pool for support, panting quietly, while full consciousness returned.

But the breakthrough was finding a new level of integration in my stroke.

Since I was a little kid watching the Olympics on TV, I’ve loved watching people swim the butterfly, dreamed about being able to do it myself some day. But I’ve never had a lesson; no-one’s ever taught me how to do the stroke. I’ve learned what I know from gaping at other people, asking occasional questions, and studying Total Immersion (TI) videos, in particular the recently released BetterFly for Every Body, which has special tips for baby boomers, like me, foolish enough to think they can fly. (I don’t get a kickback for this, but TI makes more sense to me as an approach to swimming than any other method I’ve heard of, so I’m happy to spread the news.)

I started swimming seriously four years ago, when I turned 55. I had to do something. I was turning into a blimp, and just thinking about most other forms of exercise made me want to throw up. Two days after my 55^th birthday I joined a Masters team and started swimming two mornings a week, which I soon increased to three. I swam all four strokes, but my fly was a mess. It was good enough to get me 50 yards – I even did a 50 fly in the first meet I went to – but I was dead at the end.

About two years into my swimming “career,” I blew out my right shoulder, the result of 25 years of pushing around a little piece of plastic (otherwise known as a mouse) with my right hand while slumped at various precarious angles in a series of crappy chairs. I say my right shoulder, but it was actually a line of pain that ran from the top of my right jaw, just below my right ear, all the way down my neck, into my arm, then my hand and terminating in my thumb. It got so bad that I was unable to grip the steering wheel of a car or hold a sponge to wash dishes. The pain also had a second branch, which ran down along the outer edge of my shoulder blade to a spot on my right hip, roughly at the SI joint.

(Those of you under 30 who have not yet had this experience: I recommend looking into ergonomically sound work environments. And all that two-thumbed texting you’re doing on your phones, it’s going to catch up with you. I promise. You may think you’re invincible, but your body knows better. Our thumbs didn’t evolve to take that kind of abuse.)

As you might suspect, my “shoulder” pain made swimming the crawl somewhat difficult. Basically, all forward stroking was out, which nixed not only the crawl, but the breast stroke and the fly as well, although my physical therapist did say that I could do the backstroke in limited quantities, because if done properly, it would help open up my shoulder joint. So I did a lot of backstroke – for the record, I hate the backstroke – and a lot of kicking, and (this is where the fly comes back into the story) a lot of “body dolphins.”

A body dolphin is the basic body-wave motion at the core of the fly. Done right, it recruits the muscles that run along your spine, both in front and in back, and not much else. Exquisite efficiency. Think Flipper. In TI swimming, there are head-lead body dolphins, with your hands floating by your sides, and hand-lead body dolphins, with your hands out in front of you. In both exercises, your focus is on rippling your spine. TI focuses on pressing your chest into the water and releasing it, but I find it a more helpful internal image to think about the motion as starting from a spot about two inches below my navel. (No, not that spot.) This is also the spot from which, in tai ch’i, all motion in the body originates. And the spot from which, as the ergonomics expert I didn’t listen to 15 years ago told me, I should have been mousing. But if pressing your chest into the water works for you, don’t let me stop you.

When you start doing body dolphins, if you don’t know what you’re doing – I didn’t – you don’t go anywhere. There were actually a few occasions on which, in the early phase of my education, I went backwards. Mostly I remained stationary, or moved forward very slowly. But at least I wasn’t putting any strain on my right shoulder. Over time, I figured out how to wiggle my body through the water so as to achieve actual propulsion.

There was a catch, which I didn’t realize until much later, after my recent spinal surgery: wiggling your spine as a way of pushing yourself through the water involves two basic motions: flexion (the equivalent of bending forward, rounding your lower back), and extension (the equivalent of bending backward, arching your lower back). Because of chronic spinal problems that hadn’t yet made themselves fully apparent, my body didn’t do extension; my spine went from flexion to flat. If your goal is to swim butterfly, not being able to extend your spine, to arch your back, can be somewhat limiting.

Still, I did start to pick up the rhythm, the central wave, of the stroke. Or so I thought, until my shoulder got better and I tried to integrate my arms with what the rest of my body was doing. Then it all fell apart. I could do a wave; and I could do a stroke or two, but I couldn’t go back and forth. I’d push off from the wall, set up the wave, be cruising along just fine, hands out in front of me; I’d succeed in pulling my first stroke back through the water; but then, as soon as I tried to bring my arms up out of the water for the recovery, it would feel like I was dragging them up through a mile of concrete. The wave would fall apart, and I’d belly-flop down into the water, thrashing around for a while and hoping no-one was watching.

Fast forward: the breakthrough I made today was that I found a way to get from the wave into the first stroke without having the whole thing fall apart. I was able to set up a drill – three waves, then a stroke, three waves, another stroke – and keep the wave going smoothly as I transitioned in and out of the stroke, for the full 25-yard length of the pool. So while it may seem like doing a 100 fly was the day’s big victory, it was actually the minor accomplishment. The big victory was that I caught my first glimpse ever of the possibility of developing a fluid, fully integrated butterfly.

I think I’m going to celebrate with a mimosa. Maybe two. And then a nap. And it’s not even noon yet.