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.