How to Achieve Total Body Awareness in Swimming (Do you know what your body does in the water?)
I don’t have to tell you that swimming is a wonderful sport with countless benefits, but many people unfortunately struggle to realize their full swimming skill potential to enjoy those benefits. It might sometime seem, there is an impenetrable wall which a swimmer cannot get through to reach the next level. This could also be referred to in the sports terminology as a plateau. Whether, the plateau means that your times are not getting faster or swimming just does not seem easier or you just cannot get passed a particular skill. This could be very frustrating and often times can also lead to the sport abandonment which is, of course, quite sad. No matter of the swimming level you are at, reaching a plateau in some point of your training or learning is just a reality and it will happen. What if I were to tell you though that there is a secret passage way through every plateau to get to the next undiscovered world. It is just like in the Jules Verne famous novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth, one just needs to find the right passage and new amazing world full of mind boggling discoveries awaits on the other side.
Ok, that is enough of the philosophical mambo jambo. What I really wanted to talk to you about today is the mindful body awareness control in the water. If you feel like you have reached your plateau, perhaps gaining a total body awareness could just be the hint you need to get to the next learning stage.
Do you know what happens to your legs during a breath? Have you ever paid attention to what your hands do when you push off the wall? These and many more body awareness questions is what separates successful aware swimmers from the mindless individuals who just go up and down the pool without even a thought about their stroke. Fair enough, if someone does not want to learn to swim properly, mindless swimming is a way to get away from the real world and relax, but mindless swimming with a proper technique would definitely give them much more pleasure and relaxation. Total and controlled body awareness is a key to a successful and enjoyable swimming experience. Learning to swim or improving on your swimming skills can be at times an overwhelming task as there are million and one things a swimmer should think about, a proper head position, above the water high elbow recovery, hip rotation, front high elbow catch, nice narrow kick during Freestyle or proper breathing rhythm. Putting all of these body movements together and control them in a proper way is a magical thing which comes with a lot of practice, however, if a beginner swimmer tries to think about all of the above swimming aspects at once, it is usually a disaster and it always looks awful.
To help us with this, we break the stroke down to miscellaneous swimming drills instead of swimming the full stroke all at once. If you read this blog regularly, you have heard me mention many swimming drills which are specifically designed to work on one part out of the million and one that you should think about. This drill isolation technique is the only way to learn the proper swimming body movements and then imprint them to your muscle memory. It is like with reading. If I were to put in front of you the Jules Verne adventure book, I mentioned earlier, when you are five years old, you might look at me in dismay and it will feel overwhelming, however, if I teach you your ABCs first and then build gradually on top of those skills, by the time you are ten years old, you will reach for the book with your own initiative and will devour German professor Lidenbrock’s adventures in full immersion within several days.
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| Arm moving away from middle body line |
I’ll not discuss any particular swimming technique drills here today, but I’ll point out and isolate a couple of unconscious movements that you more than likely are guilty off. I’ll focus mainly on freestyle as that is the most common stroke, but the same thought process applies to everything you do in the water. One of the toughest thing to learn for a swimmer is to separate and control different parts of your body. For example: when a swimmer takes a breath during freestyle, it usually means their entire body rotates at the same time with the head as one big stiff piece of styrofoam float. Unfortunately, this is not the right way to swim freestyle and it causes many problems. If your body is stiff and it rotates as a whole at the same time with your head, your front arm will more than likely shift from being nice straight and pointing forward to being driven to the side (in other words, crossing over the imaginary line in the middle of your body or going too far away from it). This causes your body to go in a snake-like (zig zag) direction instead of forward. So, lesson number one, relax your body and make sure when you take a breath to the side you do not take your body and arm with it. The proper way to do this is to rotate your hips and then slightly after that move your head separately to breath by rotating your neck when you are on your side. Also, lubricate that shoulder joint of the arm that is extended forward and keep the arm stretched out forward. As you can see, a simple breath requires the coordination of a lower shoulder joint looseness, hip rotation and neck rotation. All separate, controlled movements which have to happen almost at the same time. Hence total awareness of your body movements while swimming.
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| Scissor kick for balance support |
Another big issue is spreading ones legs too far apart during one kick cycle. You will notice this flaw usually during breathing again. A swimmer with this problem will appear to have a normal narrow kick, but during the breathing stage of the stroke, he/she will spread the legs apart in the horizontal direction, like a slow motion scissor kick. So the pattern of the kick could be something like kick, kick,kick, kick, kiiiiiiiiick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kiiiiiiick etc.The reason this kick happens is the fact that the swimmer uses the big slow kick for balancing support during the breath. Next time you are in the pool with fellow lap swimmers, watch underwater from behind and see if you can spot this irregularity in the kick. Then try to become aware of it during your own swimming. I guarantee that you have it in one size of the kick or another. To fix this scissor kick problem, you should re-read the paragraph above in regards of lubricating your shoulder joints:). The loss of balance feeling which causes the scissor kick is usually caused by the cross over of the lower arm during the breath, so by being in control of your separate body part movements and not crossing over you will eliminate the scissor kick flaw. You can also kick to a beat in your head and if you skip a beat, then you know you have the scissor kick syndrome 
. OR just rub your toes against each other with each kick and if there is a period without a toe touch, you know you got it bad.:).
There are many more of these small nuances that are done on an unconscious level and unless a fellow swimmer or a coach points them out, the swimmer in question will never notice them. So remember, next time you are out there doing your thing, practice total body awareness and try to notice what each separate part of your body is doing. Pick one part of your body and follow its movements in your mind through one lap and see if you can visualize exactly what it does. Ones you discover an issue, find a drill (not a full stroke) which helps to fix it.
