Great Workouts, Great Lessons, Great Book! 

I have been holding onto The Overachiever’s Diary for a few months now, planning on writing a long, detailed review about this new book by Army coach Louis Tharp, but instead I have decided to follow Tharp’s example, and keep it simple.

This is a great book. 

Tharp is a student and friend of swimming guru Terry Laughlin (Total Immersion) like the TI series, Tharp has managed to make the most nerve wrecking part of our sport humane, easy to understand and fun.

The title is a little is little deceiving, it’s not the diary of Tharp, but the training diary and notes that he made for his athletes while they were training.  Reading The Overachiever’s Diary made me wish that Tharp was my coach, besides providing you with great swim workouts, his explanations as to why you are doing these workouts, what to think while doing these workouts and various other facts are priceless.

If you don’t come from a swimming background and are like a majority of the swimmers in the sport, you have questions.  Questions about drills, equipment, terminology and more.  Tharpe does a great job of answering any possible question you may have and does it in a way that is easy to understand and follow.

The workouts are great, the lessons motivating, the book is worth the time.  You can click on the cover art or the name of the book to find out how to get your own copy.

Here is an excerpt from The Overachievers Diary for you to enjoy.

Friday, 8 June

Hi Everyone:

It’s summer and it’s time to find some toys for these couple weeks before you’re back training. But before we talk about the toys you can, and those you should not, use in the pool, I came across a typically short-sighted, misspelled Henry Ford quote. He said, “We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam (sic) is the history we make today.”

The thought was there, the action was there, but the elegance and accuracy was absent. That was Ford—hard-edged in a time in America’s history when that particular personality trait was rewarded. He wouldn’t have done well in a study group.
The quote, however, gains elegance when it’s applied to what you all did in Tuscaloosa April 21—“the history we make today.” But unlike Henry’s severely limited view of the world, his place in it, and its reaction to him, West Point is one of the few examples of the successful incorporation of history into the present. Ignoring history at West Point is not an option.
History will be respected and it will be made—and recorded—at West Point, just as it was at the Collegiate Nationals. Keep this sense of history and your contribution to it. Throw away the swimming toys.

Actually, you can keep a few toys—but probably not the ones you like. If a swimming toy allows you to swim faster when you use it and slower when you don’t, throw it away. I’m usually a pretty easy-going coach, but not with toys that produce a false sense of speed. This includes 99 percent of them, including beloved pull buoys, fins, and paddles.
Toys are aquatic crack. Here’s what happens to your brain on toys: it’s happy. Here’s what happens to your brain when the toys go away: it’s sad. You want to swim sad?

The pull buoy. A great invention that keeps your hips high in the water so you don’t have to. Too bad we can’t use pull buoys in a race. You’re responsible for your own hips while racing. But it gets worse. Because you’ve conditioned your brain to not have to worry about high hips, the two largest muscle groups—quads and glutes—fall into their maximum resistance position, dragging along behind you when there’s no pull buoy. Have fun with that—especially when you try to sight. You’ll raise your head and your hips and quads will drop even more. A few more degrees of drop and you would water walk.

But wait, you’re saying you can just kick faster and that’ll raise your hips and glutes; also, your wet suit has a floatation quotient that acts just like a pull buoy anyway, so why not use the pool buoy in practice? Both are true statements. You could also not stroke with your arms, and kick even faster in order to make up for it. And, you could limit yourself to events where the water temperature is below 70-degrees so you’d always be able to wear your wet suit. These are talk radio arguments—they sound good at the time, but ultimately they just make you stupid. You don’t want to introduce any inefficiency into your stroke that you then have to compensate for by recruiting the two largest muscle groups in your body—legs and glutes.

But there’s more. What else happens when you use a pull buoy? You disconnect your hips from your upper body. Your hips and legs just follow along for the ride while your arms do all the work. We work all year to generate power from your hips and abs, and transmit it to your arms and legs, and now you want to disconnect that? Not in my water you don’t.
Now let’s talk about the psychological damage caused by this innocuous piece of foam. First, there’s the aerobic disruption when you need it the most—when you’re starting to get tired and your stroke is starting to fall apart. Nobody ever uses a pull buoy at the beginning of practice. They wait until they are getting sloppy. They wait until the moment when they need to marshal their physical and mental powers to hold the stroke together, and instead, insert the pull buoy. This is not what you want to be teaching your neuromuscular system. But it gets worse.

What happens when you don’t have the plastic crack? You feel slow and sad. How’s this for an awful thought. You’re in the middle of a race, your stroke is getting sloppy, your heart rate is going up, and instead of moving into the planned phase of the race where you pull your stroke together, lower your heart rate and regain your pace, you spend time thinking how wonderful it would be if you only had your pull buoy. Of all the toys, the pull buoy is the most harmful in the water. However, on a pool deck it is a passable head rest if you want to lie down.

Fins. OK. Fins are not the pull buoy’s evil twin. They’re not aquatic crack, more like aquatic Percocet. They can be helpful for short periods, but addiction is quick and withdrawal is painful. First, the short story about why they are good—and it is a short story. If they are used for specific people doing specific drills, very slowly, they can help make the drill successful—produce the position and feeling necessary to understand why the drill is important. They are good for any drill requiring gentle forward movement through kicking when otherwise you wouldn’t move forward. But I really don’t even like them in this instance. If you can’t propel yourself with a gentle kick in order to do a drill, there is something wrong. Using fins doesn’t fix the problem—it just masks it. Fix your gentle kick first, then learn the drill.

But this is all irrelevant because people who use fins use them for speed—and we’re back to feeling good with them on and feeling sad when when they’re off. But it gets worse, as it always does with swimming toys. The kick is not where a triathlete gets speed in the water. Speed comes from the core. The legs and arms are the power delivery mechanisms, not the power generation system.

A gentle kick keeps your heart rate and lactic acid low and uses much less glycogen. Tri swimming is not an efficient use of legs compared with running and biking. When your swim is finished your legs should be eager to go to work. Some swimmers will use a rapid and efficient kick at the start of the race to gain early position, and especially in cold water, at the end of the race to get blood flow to them.
But, of course, there’s more. Using fins encourages a continuous kick, and tri swimming is more of a two-beat kick. So you’re not replicating the race environment.
Unable to justify full-size fins, some people will get the short fins and somehow rationalize that they are better. They aren’t. Save your money for a good wet suit.

Paddles. The orthopedic surgeon’s friend. The most common upper body technique issue is low elbows above and below the water. A high elbow above the water—as you are beginning to insert your hand in the water—allows you to bring momentum to the reach, maximize your length in the water, and to find a solid anchor point with your patient outstretched hand. A high elbow while you are taking your stroke provides maximum resistance from your hand and forearm for a huge catch of water, and most importantly, allows you to recruit your hips, lats, abs, biceps and delts for power. A low elbow during the stroke puts all the stress on the tiny four muscles known as the rotator cuff group—and they don’t like it.
When you use paddles, chances are good you’ll max out the stress on your shoulders because of low elbows. This causes sore shoulders after swimming, and this is never good. If the paddle people cared, they’d put a list of orthopedic surgeons in with every pair of paddles. It’s amazing that a simple step ladder has eight warnings, but paddles have none.
But there’s more. Suppose you have high elbows. Do you scull? If you do (and most people do) paddles encourage you to find the easy way through the water unless you are very attentive. And, when it comes to stroke, you want to find the most difficult way through the water. Except for the top swimmers, this is high elbow and straight back—no sculling. Try it. It is very difficult because the resistance of the water wants you to scull around it. When team member Dave Tyson realized this, his 100 yard practice time dropped from 1:30 to 1:20. But he’s a smart guy; he graduated first in his class.
But, of course, there’s more. We’re back to the psychological issues of paddles. Once you figure out how to go fast with them, well, unfortunately they aren’t allowed in a race. So, as you’re racing and thinking about how nice it would be to have paddles, you’re not helping yourself do well.

Kick board. It has two good uses. The first is a holder for practices. Wet the paper and stick it to the kick board. Prop the kick board against the starting block. The second is as a balance test. Stand on it in the water. You’ll see how the smallest movement can undermine balance. It’s a good thought to keep while you’re swimming, but it doesn’t always translate well from drill to swim. Using it as a kick board to improve swimming is like running behind a car to improve gas mileage. You feel like you’ve accomplished something, but the two just aren’t connected.

The kick board does what all the other toys do—it disconnects your stroke. But there’s more. It forces you to raise your head, which means your hips and quads drop, which means you have to kick harder to move forward. You can’t rotate in the water and generate power from your core. Instead, you are flat and generate power from your quads and hips while your arms hold on to the board. It’s like playing tennis with boots on. I’d say that among all the toys, the kick board is the worst—but I already said that about the pull buoy. At least the kick board has two acceptable uses.

The good toys. Yep, there are good toys out there. The definition of a good toy is that it makes you feel better when you stop using it and it forces you to incorporate every part of your stroke into the drill. This encourages integrated swimming and smart body management in the water. Usually, good toys also force you to slow down in order to appreciate what’s happening and imprint the right stuff into your neuromuscular system.

Fist gloves or fist swimming. Fist gloves help in three ways. First, they don’t allow you to rely on your hand as the propulsive force in your stroke. Second, they force you to stroke with high elbows. Third, they allow you to discover how much surface area can be recruited on your forearm to enhance your catch. The key to practicing with fist gloves—or fist swimming without gloves—is to retain your efficient whole-body swimming technique and count your strokes. The goal is to match your stroke count with and without fist swimming. The difference will be that fist swimming will be slower. When you go back to full hand swimming you should hold the same stroke count, but go much more quickly. This happens because fist swimming requires you to maximize your forearm catch and create power in your core and then transmit it to your arms and legs. It also requires that you maximize your streamlined position in the water in order to minimize resistance. Fist swimming allows you to become a thinking swimmer, not a muscle swimmer. It allows you to become intimate with the water and your place in it. It allows you to get connected intellectually, neuromuscularly, and emotionally. It allows you to set attainable goals and have fun reaching them in a single practice. And, it nearly free, and takes up virtually no space in your swim bag.

Tempo Trainer. This falls under the category of “whatever doesn’t make you crazy will make you a better swimmer.” Depending on your interpretation, the beeps from a Tempo Trainer can either result in much better race pacing or much higher levels of free-floating anger. It is a great toy because it gives you continuous feedback, allowing you to pace like a pro. There are two settings: per stroke and per length or set. Start out with the single beep per stroke that helps you create a perfectly timed stroke. Everyone who has used it in this setting immediately says it takes the pressure off of stroke mechanics. It tells you when to stroke. Your patient hand remains stretched out, you prepare your core to generate power and transmit it to your arm, your body glides with minimal resistance, your gentle kick prepares for a two-beat sequence, and then it beeps and you take your stroke—the stroke you have just set up for, the stroke you have just prepared your muscles and your mind to take.

Now move to the three beep setting and every time you flip at the wall it beeps. If you’re early or late, you can fix your pace. It is the cruise control of swimming, except unlike the one on your SUV, this one teaches you how to control your own cruising. But there’s more. Tri swimming is about consistency, and that means pacing. The only way to swim faster is to swim fast—smart—increase your consistent pace. Speeding up and slowing down doesn’t help for a whole variety of reasons that we can discuss later. In order to swim a triathlete’s 1000 meter race in 15 minutes, you need to swim each 50 yards in 45-seconds. The only way to improve is to swim each 50 yards in 44 seconds. Why? Because tri swimming isn’t about finishing first with a burst of speed at the end, or speeding up and slowing down during the race. This uses too much glycogen that you’re going to need for the bike and run. The only way to swim a tri is to sustain a consistent pace—and the only way to swim faster is to sustain a faster consistent pace. This is what a Tempo Trainer does—just before it drives you crazy.

Stretch cord. Don’t think I’m going to reverse my thinking and say it’s ok to muscle your way through the water using a stretch cord. That’s the easy way to misuse it. The smart way to use it is to swim out until you stop and then try to find a more efficient way through the water so that you begin to move forward again. When you reach your limit using the stretch cord you have the opportunity to work out how to swim more efficiently as well as powerfully. It’s the time to use your brain and let your body figure out how to manage under maximum stress. Pick a mark on the wall or the bottom of the pool so you can measure your progress. You will go farther each time if you allow your body and your brain to work together and if you have a good understanding of technique. When you go back to swimming, you and your body will remember how you swam under stress and—when you’re under stress in a race or practice—remember how you calmly worked out how to move through the water more efficiently and powerfully.

The worst toy of all, (and I know I already said the pull buoy and the kick board are the worst), is the one which allows you to ignore history. Maybe Henry Ford can ignore history, but you can’t ignore your swim history. The idea is to work with history. Improvement is incremental. You are swimming as fast as you can right now. Accept this and work with it. Appreciate small improvements. Good toys help you swim faster if you learn from them.