The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [179]
In your first practices, breathe on every other stroke.2 Once you become more comfortable breathing on your “weak” side, I encourage you to practice breathing every third stroke, which will force you to alternate sides.
Remember to exhale fully and slowly while your face is underwater. If you don’t, you’ll need to exhale and inhale when you bring your head out, which will mean feeling rushed, swallowing water, and exhausting yourself.
Remember to exhale underwater, and “extend to air” (video: www.fourhourbody.com/extend-air).
Look for your hand.
7. Experiment with hand swapping as a drill. It’s difficult to remember all of the mechanical details while actually swimming. I short-circuited trying to follow half a dozen rules at once. The single drill that forced me to do most other things correctly is hand swapping.
This is the visualization I found most useful: focus on keeping your lead arm fully extended until your other arm comes over and penetrates the water around the extended arm’s forearm. This encourages you to swim on your sides, extends your stroke length, and forces you to engage in what is referred to as “front-quadrant” swimming. All good things. This one exercise cut an additional three to four strokes off each lap of freestyle.
8. Forget about workouts and focus on “practice.” You are training your nervous system to perform counterintuitive movements, not training your aerobic system. If you feel strained, you’re not using the proper technique. Stop and review rather than persist through the pain and develop bad habits.
Gear and Getting Started
Ready to give it a shot? If you have a phobia of swimming, you’re almost there. Don’t screw it up by choosing the wrong gear or the wrong pool. Some closing recommendations:
1. Gents, don’t swim in board shorts. I tried this in Brazil and it’s like swimming with a parachute behind you. Terrible. Get some Euro-style Speedos and streamline. Be cool on the beach and opt for efficiency in the water.
2. Get good goggles. I tried them all, from Speedo Vanquishers to Swedish swim goggles. In almost all tests, I needed to tighten the various straps every 100–125 meters to prevent chlorinated water from blinding me.
I now use nothing besides the much-acclaimed (and rightly so) Aqua Sphere Kaiman goggles, which are well sealed and can be tightened without removing them from your head. Leakage is nonexistent. These are the only goggles I’ll ever need.
3. Start practicing in a pool that is short and shallow. Use a lane in the shallow end (four feet or less in depth) and opt for a pool that is no longer than 20 yards. It’s easier to focus on technique in shorter pools. Once I adapted to 20 yards, I moved to 25 yards, and then (once I could do 10 × 100 yards with 30–45 seconds of rest between sets), I moved to an Olympic-sized 50-meter pool.
Hard to Believe
I never ever thought I’d say this but: I love swimming.
This is RIDICULOUS, as I have always HATED swimming. Now, whenever possible, I make time to do laps. It’s like moving meditation.
I’ll swim for two hours and sneak out later to get in an extra session. I still can’t believe it.
What about the one-kilometer open-water race? Oh, I didn’t forget about that. I wasn’t able to find a practical race scheduled near me in the last quarter of 2008 (as much as I would have loved to visit Bonaire, it was a bit out of the way), but my friend excused it. For good reason. Four months before my December deadline, I had gone home to Long Island to spend my birthday with my family and closest friends.
One morning, I woke up early and went to the ocean. I was calm, despite the waves,