Questions and Answers - February 2003 edition
by Dan Thompson

Q."Coach Dan, I am reading all the swimming stuff that comes my way, but I’m getting that déjà feeling again. It’s the feeling I get from the ladies magazines at the check-out counter—like I’m seeing new lipstick on some re-run ideas. At least your stuff is . . . well, different. But what I crave is something daring, something even . . . provocative.

Can you do an O’Reilly on swimming? I hear you were good at stuff like that. -–jaded Jack"

A. Yes, I was too good at stuff like that. But just for you, Jack, and anyone else tired of re-fried flummery, here is a re-written piece of iconoclasm that didn’t go down so swell with the powers that be.

CORE-BODY TRAINING:
THE FUTURE IS NOW!

PART I

Coaches, I'm betting your swimmers are CORE BODY WEAKLINGS. Here’s how to “pump them up!"

OK, already. The secret is out. Boomer is chic. The revolution cascades among the ranks of coaches and competitors alike. Even the old guard wakes up to the new reality. Terms like elimination, body torque, and plyometric rebound alter the vocabulary of coaching.

But have our root beliefs really budged?

[In case you’re wondering, the core body is what’s left of the swimmer’s anatomy after dissecting off the arms and legs. It’s a torso with a head still attached.]

Yet what is this new quantum? Why did Meagher, Barrowman, and Popov leap-frog into the twenty-first century?

Because, coaching comrades, they were living models of . . .

The Core-Body Manifesto

· Speed is the product of Rhythm, Power, and Position.
· Rhythm, Power, and Position are centrifugal.

Which is to say:

Speed is a function of power and body alignment,
generated by rhythmic core-body movements,
that pulse outward through the arms and legs,
in wave-like or rotatory patterns,
to produce repeating cycles
of streamlined body alignments
and propulsive sweeps of the hands and feet.

But why were we not enlightened sooner to this key reality? Why does swimming seem to lag behind? Because, I'm sad to say, swimming is stuck in a flat-earth mentality (FEM). That is, if a thing looks a certain way, it must be that certain way. FEM is an outlook that mistakes effect for cause. It cures ailing stroke mechanics by making a science out of symptoms — solving the drunkard's stagger by re-designing the lamp pole! What FEM calls "flaws" in technique are but innocent compensations for deeper, less tangible errors at the core of the kinetic chain.

Had we seen sooner the earth was round, and had we the fortitude to set sail on this new quantum, we'd have whipped the juiced up Germans — and done it with something ennobling — the beauty of a better idea. It should have been done. Our current clean performances routinely outstrip the former efforts of those husky mannweiber. And Mr. July, fully equipped with a better idea and the guts to exercise it, annually shames the suspect sport of road cycling.

Our forward thinkers have made the core-body quantum leap, and there has followed from it a sort of trickle-down lip service. But in truth most of us have at least one foot still mired in FEM. We do not trust the new vision quite well enough to give it comprehensive application in our daily programs.

So I ask again, why were we blinded? Why are we afraid?

Recall the movie line?, “Mizz Gump, your boy is . . . different.” Well, swimming is different.

First, unlike terrestrial anti-gravity sports, swimming gives a flotation assist that cushions poor technique. Water is a perpetual set of training wheels that makes swimmers look better technically than they really are.

Second, core-body action in swimming is more subtle, more counter-intuitive to our terrestrial perspective. It's just plain harder too see. As creatures who get about by using our core bodies to lever our legs against the solid earth, the idea that such leverage can be obtained against something slippery like water seems otherworldly. Books abound that teach the importance of stance in generating core-body power on land. A masterful example is Ben Hogan's, The modern Fundamentals of Golf, Simon & Schuster, 1957. But the most revered textbooks of physiology continue to deny core-body mechanics in the sport of swimming.

To get beyond this cognitive block requires a degree of mental abstraction that feels uncomfortably non-Newtonian. In the core-body physics of swimming, water is leveraged on a rhythmic fulcrum always in a state of flux. Newton’s billiard table becomes a fluid medium, and playing on it requires a new set of mental sea legs.

Yet children see it every day! At any marine aquarium — fish, dolphin, otter — their beautifully undulant movements scream the obvious: Vertebrate locomotion in a fluid medium is core-body based! The core-body dynamic of terrestrial sports — so patent in the movements of throwing and hitting (itself a form of throwing) — derives from motions used in water by our aquatic forbears.

Third, swimming suffers a kind of thought inertia I call the "Amadeus syndrome." Those proclaimed to be swimming's chief lights and glories, though often appearing otherwise, find ways to obstruct challenges to the hidebound assumptions of their own established wisdom.

It took Coach Counsilman decades — in the latter half of the twentieth century, for heavens sake — to convince the sport that swimmers are not glorified paddle-wheelers. One is reminded of Newton’s attempts at convincing his colleagues of the simple nature of spectral light. Despairing finally of ever getting through to them, he refused to discuss the matter any further.

Perhaps Counsilman’s advantage was sheer perseverance. But what is it in human nature that makes a maverick ossify? Having made the great breakthrough, Counsilman later exemplified the Amadeus syndrome by detracting core-body theory.

The remarks of two Nobel winners come to mind: 1) Solzhenitsyn's at Harvard, that in the West "…the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independently-minded people from giving their contribution to public life." And 2) Plank's more salient remark, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but by convincing a new generation that grows up familiar with the idea from the beginning."

We can get only so far with mileage, weights, nutrition, medication, professional swimmers, faster water, shark-skin suits, and training science trapped in the old mentality.

Sadly, today's glitter is tomorrow's dust. The time to find tomorrow is today!

—TO BE CONTINUED—

Send your swimming technique questions to Dan Thompson at thommed@bellsouth.net.