happylaps-book

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
happy laps
™
by Terry Laughlin
A Total Immersion Instructional Manual
Copyright © 2006 Total Immersion. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, printing, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Total Immersion,
Inc. For information, contact Total Immersion, Inc., 246 Main Street, Suite 15A, New Paltz, NY 12561. Revised: December 16, 2003 Total Immersion, Inc.
Congratulations
on purchasing
Happy Laps
. This is the most important video we have ever produced
because it is designed to meet the most fundamental need in swimming – how to swim for health, fitness or
pleasure with absolute comfort and confidence.
Happy Laps
is the first Total Immersion learning aid to
address the real basics: how do I swim without fear of sinking, how do I breathe in water, and how do I move
with such efficiency that I will be able to swim graceful, nearly effortless laps for as long as I like. While the
video is self-explanatory, this user’s manual includes guidance for a successful learning experience and
detailed tips for each step in the progression. For additional free articles on smart, satisfying swimming
please visit www.totalimmersion.net.
WHY TOTAL IMMERSION CAN TURN ANYONE INTO A SWIMMER
Swimming is the closest thing to a perfect exercise – a weightless, virtually injury-free, year-round body
toner that makes you feel great inside and out. But too few people ever discover that, because early swim-
ming experiences can be so discouraging.
It happens most to folks, probably not unlike you, who may be wary of the water to begin with, and who
quickly find themselves fighting to stay afloat, struggling for air, and probably reluctant to leave the shallow
area. For many people, that’s all the proof they need that they just don’t have what it takes to become a
swimmer. Or they may be discouraged by the prospect that – even if you can find instruction appropriate for
an adult with years of frustrating experience – it could take years to become a “real” swimmer.
But with Total Immersion, it doesn’t have to take long at all. As we’ve seen with countless thousands of
hopeful swimmers, you’ll be surprised how much you can learn each time you step into the pool. This self-
teaching book and video can be the first step in changing your swimming experience every bit as dramatical-
ly as all the Total Immersion students before you have. This TI program offers what has been for many aspir-
ing swimmers an impossible dream: a simple, clear, common-sense approach to learning to move through the
water easily, comfortably, and so pleasurably that your practice time becomes the healthiest, most reward-
ing, part of your day.
Too good to be true? No, it’s not. The hopefuls who hang up their bathing suits for good after a couple of
frustrating attempts are simply victims of two basic facts:
(1) Swimming, unlike walking or running, is a fundamentally unnatural activity for humans. We instinctively try
to bully our way through the water, throwing up a commotion that would mystify any easygoing fish – and
suggesting that nature never thought of us as aquatic beings in the first place.
(2) When we seek help for our churning, exhausting strokes, we’re often taught in a way that actually makes
it harder to swim easily, gracefully, and effectively.
Both problems are easily solved. First, we can get back what nature left out – a fish’s instinct for maximum
speed with minimum effort. Total Immersion has proven again and again that virtually anyone can learn to
swim easily, comfortably, and enjoyably. Second, we’re not permanently stuck with the bad habits we’ve devel-
oped. This video and guide will show you, step by step, a completely fresh way to move through the water, a
way I guarantee will make more sense, and that will make swimming easier than anything you’ve tried before.
SWIMMERS ARE MADE, NOT BORN
Swimming doesn’t come naturally. The National Swim School Association estimates that only 2% of all
Americans can swim a quarter-mile without stopping. The other 98% either can’t swim at all, or find it such a
struggle that they can manage only a lap or two before running out of gas. What these folks lack is not ability
2
or endurance, but awareness. Humans don’t have to be taught to walk or run, because those abilities come
naturally to us land-based creatures – but no one learns to swim well without at least some instruction.
Swimming well seems difficult because millions of years of adaptation to life on terra firma, ruled by the
laws of gravity, have made it exceedingly difficult to move easily in a fluid environment, ruled by the laws of
hydrodynamics. Humans in water are like fish out of water. A handful of us manage to muddle through with
extraordinary effort, but swimming well and efficiently has always been harder than it needs to be.
The crowning irony, of course, is that while we’re struggling mightily to become a skilled swimmer, an accom-
plished swimmer makes it all look impossibly smooth and easy. Anyone watching beautiful swimmers instinc-
tively appreciates what they do. And when we do observe the world’s best swimmers – both dolphins and
Olympic swimmers – we see the same qualities: grace, economy, and flow.
This natural ease, universal among sea creatures, is rare among humans, as the water-frothing lappers at
any health club pool graphically illustrate. It’s probably this stark contrast between fish gliding through an
aquarium, and our fellow humans churning up pools, that makes skill more impressive to us than raw power
ever could be. The serenity and grace of a middle-aged swimmer who can flow – like water itself – up and
down the lane, seems a more elegant accomplishment than the power-oriented speed of youthful competi-
tors. And that elegant swimmer could be you, whatever your age. For while most of us have little chance of
recapturing the power and athleticism that world records require, the grace and skill of that older swimmer
– who may be very much like ourselves – are within our grasp.
Ask Don Walsh, a Total Immersion teacher who decided to dedicate himself to stroke mastery at age 49,
then swam 28.5-miles around Manhattan at age 50 and 52. Today, Walsh is stopped regularly at his health
club by envious fellow swimmers, curious about how he learned to swim so beautifully. “There are plenty of
faster and more physically impressive people around here,” he relates, “but it’s my smoothness that seems to
fascinate everyone.”
Or take Mark Seides, a Total Immersion workshop alum, who resolved to improve his stroke after watching 72-
year-old Ben Reynolds glide up and down the pool one day. “There was this older guy swimming alongside me
and I’d never seen anyone look so smooth and relaxed in the water. I asked him where he learned to swim like
that and when he told me Total Immersion, I knew I wanted to learn the same thing.” And he did.
GOING TO FISH SCHOOL
So what can we learn by watching fish? First, of course, is that they move through the water much more
easily than we do. Faster, too. While the fastest human swimmers travel only about 5 mph at full throttle,
some fish have been clocked at over 50 mph. It not only looks easy, it is easy. Dolphins swim 10 times faster
than the fastest humans using a third less power.
They’re not “gifted,” they just know what all fish know: how to avoid drag, how to simply slip through the water.
Being slippery is far more important than being powerful because when you’re trying to move through water –
which is a thousand times denser than air – the water acts like a virtual wall. The harder you pull and kick, the
harder the water resists you. Small wonder we find smooth, relaxed, swimmers so fascinating. How can they
get so far, so attractively, on so little energy?
THREE MISTAKES EVERY HUMAN SWIMMER MAKES
To swim better tomorrow, you must understand what’s holding you back today. Chances are, you’ve thought
there was something wrong with you because:
3
(1) You find it difficult to float. The most common misconception is
the notion that you’re supposed to float on top of the water. This is,
in fact, impossible! No matter how “buoyant” you are, sinking into the
water is what the human body is designed to do – every part of the
human body, except for the chest cavity, is non-buoyant. The first
step to swimming well, to moving through the water with the great-
est of ease, is to learn to “sink cleverly” – in a horizontal position
instead of legs-first, like a capsizing boat. In a horizontal position, you
give the water much less surface area to resist, making progress far easier. You find your ideal body position
by getting your head aligned and redistributing your body weight until you feel the water support you. Once
you stop fighting to stay on top, you’ll be amazed at how much energy you have to move ahead. Our self-guid-
ed “Discovery Exercises” will take you through the steps that help you find this “floating sweet spot.”
(2) The water holds you back. Why do you tire so quickly? In large part because most of the energy you
expend goes into making waves and turbulence, not into effective propulsion. Again, this is the result of a mis-
taken notion most people have about how you’re “supposed to” swim. Most swimmers figure that since they
propel themselves by pulling and kicking, swimming better means pulling and kicking faster and harder. That’s a
good way to churn up the water and tire yourself out, but a bad way to gain speed. Again, consider fish. No
arms or legs, so no pulling and kicking. But speed to burn, with just a few tail flicks, because they are perfectly
balanced, beautifully streamlined and propel with fluent, whole body movements. Our self-teaching program
will teach you how to comfortably master the body positions that will allow you to slip through the water with
the greatest ease and then to use smooth and coordinated whole-body movements for propulsion.
(3) You run out of steam too soon. Even highly conditioned marathon runners wonder where all their fitness
went the minute they begin swimming. A couple of laps and they’re done for. Where did all that endurance
go? Here’s where: If you haven’t first learned to relax in water, to be supported by it, to slip through it,
almost any attempt to go faster will wear you out. Total Immersion shifts the focus away from pushing
harder against the water, to learning to work with it. When most of your energy and attention have been
refocused on keeping yourself slippery, you’ll be amazed how much easier it will be to swim any distance at
any speed. That’s why the fastest swimmer in the world today, Alexandre Popov, spends most of his practice
hours becoming slippery, rather than swimming hard. You will soon, too.
FIRST START PLAYING AROUND
When it comes to swimming well, kids have the right idea – swimming is just another form of play. The fact
that they’re learning as they play is a bonus. But in their water play, they gain an instinctive understanding of
the freedom and flow that being nearly weightless offers. Adults typically play too little and worry too much
about “getting it right” and in the process make improvement a struggle instead of a pleasure. And since
traditional instruction leads to frustration anyway, it just makes things worse.
The solution? Become a child again – in the pool, at least. Conventional wisdom says that to develop the
strength and stamina to swim better, you first need to grind out the laps. I say that’s a mainly a good way to
perfect your mistakes. You must first learn to relax and be at home in the water, or all those laps will do is
make your bad habits more permanent.
The foundation of the Total Immersion program is a series of thoughtfully-choreographed learning games and
self-awareness exercises – guided “play” that will put you in touch with your body again, and teach you the
same things that children learn when they have fun in the water. The most comforting aspect of this program
is that there’s no “right or wrong” about these exercises. In fact, you can gain a sense of greater freedom by
4
choosing, in some cases, to do the exercises “wrong” and discover how your body reacts when you do. You’re in
a safe place, so there’s no risk in making that choice. If you do each step with an open and curious spirit, you’ll
find that each step is designed to reveal how your body really behaves in the water which will help you make
informed choices on the smartest way to take advantage of those properties.
Step by step, you’ll begin to understand how to move with the water instead of muscling it out of your way.
Lesson One will show you how to become comfortable and relaxed in the water and how your body naturally
behaves in a fluid environment. In Lesson Two, you’ll learn which body positions allow you to slip through the
water with the least drag and commotion. Finally, in Lesson Three, come the skills of “fishlike” swimming, pro-
pelling yourself with unprecedented ease and speed by learning to swim with your whole body instead of just
your arms and legs.
HOW YOUR BODY LEARNS BEST
The most helpful thing you can do for yourself is to trust your instincts. The human body is a marvelous
learning instrument, teaching itself through routine life experience how to move, balance, lift, climb, and carry
– usually on land. Swimmers who began as children learned a lot of their “natural swimming ability” in the
same instinctive way. As a result, they usually can’t tell you how they came to swim so efficiently because so
much of what they do is intuitive.
The Total Immersion program gives you a second chance to acquire that “instinctive ability” for yourself – in
much less time than it usually takes children. We’ll guide you through a series of exercises that will let you
learn (as opposed to teaching you) how your body naturally behaves in the water, and how to become per-
fectly comfortable with that. Think of these exercises as structured playtime, a more organized path to
learning what child’s play at your local pool would have taught you years ago.
And for now, please don’t worry about “your stroke.” Though stroking and kicking are the starting point for
traditional instruction, we give them far less emphasis here. Once you learn how to move your entire body
easily and naturally with the water, it becomes almost inevitable that your arms will follow the efficient, fluid
pattern that propels you most effectively. With Happy Laps, you’ll explore your movements in the water in a
free and informal way before channeling your increasingly natural relationship with water into formal
strokes. And once more, please don’t think too much. Your senses will tell you how you’re doing. What feels
right, is right.
THE TOTAL IMMERSION “BUDDY SYSTEM”
While some swimmers will feel comfortable doing these exercises on their own, we’ve designed the Happy Laps
program to work best as “collaborative learning.” In teaching thousands of swimmers in TI workshops and
classes since 1989, one of the most exciting discoveries we’ve made was how dramatically a “Buddy” approach
accelerates progress.
In the Buddy System, swimmers learn in pairs, taking turns in two roles:
The swimmer, who learns the correct positions and movements with help from their partner.
The coach, who helps the swimmer find the right position, offers support as needed, assists with momentum
by towing or launching, then releases and continues observing the swimmer to assist in any way that may be
helpful.
5
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

radiodx.htw.pl