Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way To Swim Better, Faster, and Easier

A nice thing our school does is include an activity fee with our tuition. I'm not speaking in a facetious manner, I actually mean it. For $55 per semester, we get a membership at a gym located a couple blocks from the school. Normal membership costs more than $55 per month so it's a bargain. It is also one of the nicest fitness center I've seen.Last semester, Kevan (my carpool buddy) and I began going in early to use the gym. They have a wading pool with six lanes and a full length swim pool with eight lanes. After spending a few mornings running on one of the dozens of machines, my knees reminded me how much they detest it so I began spending more time in the pool.I can swim but it's anything but graceful. In fact, it's much like my skiing. I'm wild enough to jump off any double black diamond slope, <!--more-->and I'll ski it but I do not look pretty in the process. In fact, some people derive a fair bit of entertainment from it. My swimming is similar. I can thrash my way across the pool very quickly, but because my stroke is so inefficient, I cannot sustain it for long.One morning last October I'm thrashing across the pool, pausing at each end to catch my breath and this little lady in her mid-fifties slips into the lane next to me and begins swimming laps. For an entire hour she swam up and down her lane in graceful fluid motion before sliding out of the pool. That morning Mr. Obvious smacked me along side the head. I really did not know how to swim and it was time to learn.When I got home I did some research on swimming to find the best swimming manual available. What I found was Total Immersion.<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=mattsimerson-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=0743253434%2526tag=mattsimerson-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/0743253434%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82" title="View product details at Amazon"></a>On October 11, 2005 I purchased the book. It arrived a week later and I read the first dozen chapters and then started the drills. From that moment since, I had swum nothing but TI drills. One hour, twice a week since October.The Total Immersion drills have been teaching me balance and form. The TI instruction breaks down the process into three basic swim positions in which you must achieve balance; face down, right side, and left side. You do drills swimming in each position until you have achieved balance in all three positions. You also do drills that help you maintain your balance as you shift from one position to the next. I have done these drills so many times now that they are almost second nature.In addition to balance, other drills teach how to coordinate the appropriate muscle groups together to get the maximum amount of distance from each stroke. I practiced each drill until I could achieve it consistently and then moved on to the next. After five months, I've just made it to the tenth drill. The tenth drill is where all the previous drills start coming together and I feel like I am actually swimming.When I first began learning to swim the Total Immersion way, I counted the number of strokes it took me to swim the length of the pool as a reference point. The following example is four strokes: left, right, left, right. Basically every time an arm strokes from the extended position it is counted. My thrashing down the lane technique required 26 strokes to get from one end of the pool to the other.On Thursday of last week, I was practicing Drill #10 and found myself at the other end of the pool in what seemed like only a few strokes. So I counted to see just how many strokes it was requiring. The first lap required only 12 strokes. I couldn't believe it so I did another lap that also required 12 strokes. And then another. I had reduced the number of strokes required to swim the pool from 26 to just 12.Because my technique is so much more efficient now, I have achieved another milestone that I have not been able to do since I was in grade school. I can swim the length of the pool without taking a breath. I have two more goals to achieve. I used to swim the length of the pool and back. I want that ability back and I need to get my speed back up to my old thrashing speed. Both are coming, and it won't be long.There is a bunch of folks training for a triathlon in the pool with me each morning. I watch the drills they are being taught with. Yuck. They do give the athletes a good workout but they sure don't teach a person how to become a better swimmer. If you know how to swim, Total Immersion will make you a better swimmer. If you don't know how, it will teach you. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Total immersion swimming allows you to glide effortlessly like a fish. You don't fight the water. People on the outside watching you will marvel at the spectacle of your movement which feels Zen like.

"Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier" is an excellent guide to freestyle swimming. Terry Laughlin is obviously a very experienced swimmer and coach, and is generally good at explaining things. I was a total nonswimmer until last year, and now would say I am a beginning swimmer. I have had excellent instruction that uses similar techniques to those found here, though some of the TI-like methodology is used for somewhat more advanced students at my school. The point is that I found this book helpful even as a neophyte in the water, though I think the people who will profit most from it will be people who can already swim adequately but want to improve, although Laughlin stresses that anyone from beginners through competitive athletes can benefit. I like that the book clearly explains the objectives, e.g. reducing drag, "swimming tall," and the importance of balancing in the water and swimming on your side (among many others.) As a novice the thing that has helped me most is the concept of keeping one hand in the front quadrant at all times; that along with the mantra of "enter, extend, pause, pull" really opened my eyes to drastically more efficient arm movement.As for dissatisfaction with the text, I would say that the introduction to the Total Immersion (TI) program is far longer than it needs to be, and many chapters have far more verbose explanations than are necessary or desirable (I particularly found much of chapter five trying and somewhat off-putting.) Every time I found something vaguely annoying, though, Laughlin redeemed himself with an insight that seemed tailor made for me. We're all different, but I was especially grateful for the discussion of inflexible ankles in adult-onset swimmers (p. 117) and "Special Help for 'Sinkers'" (p. 113,) my two biggest challenges in the pool. In short, while the text is sometimes excessively lengthy, if you can concentrate on the truly important passages the book can be exceptionally helpful.What kept this book from being a true five star effort is the lack of photographs. Swimming is a very challenging thing to write about instructionally. Merely describing body positions and movements three dimensionally is taxing at best and impossible at worst, and while he tries, describing sensations is extremely subjective and idiosyncratic. This is why photographs taken in series emphasizing key points are vital, and this book has none. It has a very few rudimentary line drawings of a person in the water, but no sequential analysis of any significance (though there are a couple of illustrations featuring different parts of a stroke.) This is wholly insufficient in a book on any anatomically complex athletic endeavor. I, fortunately, purchased the TI DVD "Freestyle Made Easy," and watched it prior to reading this book. I think that as a beginning swimmer if I had read the book without first watching the DVD I would have gotten very little out of it, and would have probably given the book a lower rating. As it is I see the book as an indispensable companion for the DVD, and really think they should be sold as a set, the alternative being to profusely illustrate a new edition of the book with numerous photographs. The DVD is relatively expensive, and if you have some swimming experience the book will have more value on its own than it does for beginners like me, but in all cases the book and DVD are mutually reinforcing, and are of much greater help when used together. If you have to choose between the book and the DVD for budgetary reasons, there's no doubt in my mind that the DVD is the way to go.Despite my critiques, I do like "Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier," and found it quite helpful in my progress as a swimmer. While I suspect it's best for intermediate swimmers, it answers many questions about swimming and reveals numerous beneficial techniques for swimmers of all levels. If you want to be a better freestyle swimmer, this book can help you.

Purchased this book many months ago to fulfill a decades old desire to really learn how to swim. Though I could somehow once in a while barely manage to get to the end of a swim lane, it was always an exhausting experience compounded by a horrible breathing technique. After getting this book, I initially took some basic swim lessons to overcome internal fears of being in the water. I then worked thru the lessons in the middle of the book and kept going back to the pool to improve my skills after rereading the focus points of a lesson. I can now swim with much greater ease, fluency, and in sync with my breathing without losing control in the water. I did use flippers so I didn't have to initially expend effort on also trying to figure out the leg movements.The book is somewhat wordy (beginning and end), but repeatedly focus on the meat of the material (lessons in the center of the book), progressing to the next lesson only when you have reasonably absorbed the information and successfully practiced it in the pool, and you should be able to succeed in your quest to become a proficient swimmer. Also, make use of instructional videos on internet if you don't understand a lesson.I am thrilled that the instructions in this book allow me to finally enjoy being in a swimming pool. Thanks Terry Laughlin!