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Warum ist Schwimmen so hart

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If I’m So Fit, Why Is Swimming So Hard?

The water, not your fitness, is your swimming problem.

By Terry Laughlin

So you want to swim better but thousands of laps haven't made it happen? Well, you have plenty of company. Thousands who can run mile after effortless mile find themselves panting and exhausted after just a few laps. Swimming even frustrates experienced athletes who can comfortably swim a mile or more, but who have trained religiously for years without much progress.

The secret of continuous improvement-and complete satisfaction--is to replace boring workouts with purposeful, interesting, and engaging practice that focuses on the real reasons for your frustration, not your fitness, but how efficiently you use your fitness. A further dividend is a style of swimming that, among its many virtues, always feels good. And it's something that anyone can learn, by swimming with less muscle and effort, more intuition and awareness.

The Water Is Your Swimming Problem

The reason you're not swimming as well as you'd like is because you’re a land animal in water. Humans are "hard-wired" to fight the water rather than work with it. Elite swimmers have learned to overcome the "human-swimming problem" because: a) they’re gifted with a rare sense of how to be one with the water and b) they’ve spent millions of yards developing a preternatural grace and economy. Swimming is a frustrating struggle for everyone else because water is an unnatural, even threatening, environment. Our bodies were not designed to travel easily through it, and our basic instincts as land-based animals cause us to fight it, not work with it. Our discomfort creates tension; we respond with turbulent churning. Both keep us from moving freely and fluently. Since water is a fluid, fluent movement is essential to efficiency. The first step in mastering fluency is to understand what's holding you back.

Water is a Wall

In 1978, I began coaching at a pool with an underwater window. The first time I went down and watched my swimmers from below, I was spellbound by something I’d never noticed from the pool deck. As my swimmers pushed off the nearest wall, I could see that the most-sleekly streamlined ones traveled a looooong way before they had to begin stroking; for a few moments, they actually looked like fish in an aquarium. As soon as they began swimming on the surface, they worked much harder and moved much slower than they had just gliding sleekly under water.

And any swimmer not consciously holding a torpedo shape lost speed so dramatically during the pushoff that they looked as if they'd run into a wall. And they had. To a poorly streamlined body, the water is a wall. Instantly, I understood that the primary thing determining how fast my swimmers could go was not the training I gave them but the effect of drag on their bodies. I could finally see that the most valuable skill to teach was to streamline--not just on the pushoff, but down the whole length of the pool.

And why not? Water is over 800 times denser than air. In a medium as "thick" as water, the payoff for reducing drag at even the slowest speeds can be enormous. And, in a sense, water gets "thicker" yet as you go faster. Drag increases exponentially as speed goes up, so the good news is that the payoff for avoiding drag also increases exponentially the more expertly you avoid it.

Three Ways Water Slows You Down

Fast swimmers maintain the most streamlined position as they stroke; slow swimmers do not. But drag is not just some general retarding force. There are three distinct forms. Two can be minimized by changes in technique, one by changing your suit.

1. Form drag is resistance caused by the shape of your non-fishlike body. As you swim, you push water in front of you and pressure builds up. Behind you, your body leaves a turbulent swirl in its wake, creating an area of lower pressure. Higher pressure in front and lower pressure behind creates a vacuum that, in effect, sucks you back. (That's why drafting off other swimmers, as in circle-swimming, is so much easier. The low-pressure area trailing the swimmer in front of you sucks you forward.) Form drag increases as the square of your velocity. Thus, twice as fast means four times as much form drag.

Your body's size and shape determine form drag, and the best way to minimize that drag is to slip through the smallest possible "hole" in the water. You do that by staying as close as you can to a balanced, horizontal position, and by making sure all side-to-side movement is beneficial rotation that helps power your stroke—not snaking or fishtailing. TI Coach Emmett Hines puts it succinctly: "If you're perfectly streamlined--as in the pushoff--any motion will increase form drag." That means it's critical, once you begin swimming again after the pushoff, to make your propelling actions as smooth and economical as possible. Concentrate on keeping your shape like a long, sleek racing shell even as you pull and kick, and you'll be on the right track.

2. Wave drag. Just like a boat, you make waves and leave a wake while swimming. Wave drag is the resistance caused by the waves or turbulence you create. As Hines quips, "Making waves takes energy--all of it supplied by you." How much energy depends mainly on how big the waves are: Unlike form drag, which increases as the square of velocity, wave drag increases as its cube. So as you double your speed, energy spent on wavemaking increases eightfold.

The key factor in wave drag is how smoothly you stroke. A rough, choppy, or hurried stroke increases turbulence, and turbulent water increases resistance. That's one of the reasons a long stroke is such an advantage: It lets you use a slower, more-controlled turnover at any speed, which in turn means less turbulence, fewer waves--and less wave drag.

3. Surface drag is friction between the water and your skin. No technique can change this law of nature, but you can affect how it applies to you by wearing the right suit. Shed your billowy boxers for a a well-fitting lycra suit and just feel the huge difference it makes.

Tuning in to Drag

Besides the drag-defeating strategies noted above, the simplest and best strategy for slipping more easily through that wall of water is to pay strict attention. Every lap you swim.

First, intentionally create more drag. Push off the wall with your arms wide and head high. Then push off in the most streamlined position, and compare the resistance. Use that "awareness training" in your regular swimming to cue in to the ways in which the water resists you, and to the stroke changes—such as keeping your head in a neutral position or using your hands to "part the waters" before stroking--that enable you to feel less of it.

Second, use your ears. That's right. How much noise do you make while swimming? Do you "splash," "plop," and "plunk?" Sound is energy, and the less of your mechanical energy you convert into noise, the more remains to move you forward. More to the point, anything that results in noisy swimming is evidence of inefficiency. Working on "silent swimming" is one of the best ways to tune in more acutely to how you're flowing through the water, and can help you improve your fluency.

Third, use your eyes. Are there bubbles in your stroke? Goggles make it easy to tell, and Marathon swimmer and TI coach Don Walsh uses his to observe one of the most available pieces of "swimming knowledge" you can have about yourself. In fact for a full year of practice, he focused more on eliminating bubbles from his stroke than almost anything else, which is probably why he was able to complete the 28.5-mile Manhattan Island Marathon in 14,000 fewer strokes than his rivals.

That number is no figment. Walsh actually calculated it, by having his boat crew monitor his stroke rate and compare it with the other swimmers'. He swam just as fast at 50 strokes per minute as other swimmers did at about 72. That means in the nine hours it took Walsh to swim up the East River and down the Hudson, he took something on the order of 27,000 strokes, while virtually every other swimmer in the race – including many who finished behind him! -- ended up needing about 41,000. That many strokes would have sent Don halfway around Manhattan again! Viewed another way, he got a "free ride" of almost 10 miles by being so slippery. If you too slip through the water like Walsh rather than battling it, you'll see far fewer bubbles through your goggles, and there will be much less turbulence in your wake.

Finally, imagine your body has a kind of shadow trailing behind you as you swim. Remember, you're creating a wake similar to that of a boat and though it spreads a bit as it reaches your feet, it doesn't spread much. Consider that wake your shadow, and anything that slips outside of it as drag. Your feet, for instance, may be moving you along as you kick, but as soon as they slip outside your "shadow", they increase drag.

The Choice is Yours

You have a choice to make each time you arrive at the pool: Spend your precious time training hard to muscle up propulsive force and maximize aerobic capacity, or substitute focus and purposeful practice for some of the sheer physical effort, trimming drag and reducing the energy you lose to wavemaking. A single trip to any aquarium--whether for fish or humans--will provide dramatic proof that the smarter path by far is the path of least resistance.


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