Kaizen Swimming with Easy Freestlye DVD by Terry Laughlin - Part 2

Kaizen Swimming is something Terry Laughlin refers to the perpetual learning that a swimmer needs to aim for instead of the lap swimming that people indulge in. It is a philosophy that you can apply in all walks of your life. Swimming being a very unnatural activity for human being, it is important to keep learning and tuning. And that is at the core of Total Immersion philosophy of swimming. And here is how it looks like when you are a TI swimmer. Really awesome!

So I finished 7 sessions of swimming with Easy Freestyle DVD though I had a 3 week break due to a severe flu. Progress has been really good - from someone who struggled to reach the other end, I can swim very comfortably breathing bilaterally to the other end now. In fact, I was able to swim two laps without a break though a bit uncomfortably in the end.

The key focus of the Lesson 1 drills is to get you relaxed in water and to cooperate with gravity rather than fighting it, which makes all other things far more easier. Especially to get your breathing right, which is very important for swimming long distances. Once you are pretty relaxed in water and if you are exhaling well into water, things fall in place very nicely. Read this story of 1 length to 1 mile in 15 days!

The difficult one among the lesson 1 drills was the breathing one. Though I could comfortably turn to the sweet spot and breath, it was difficult to get back to the original position. Need more work on that. I also tried the first couple of drills of lesson 2 where the theme is finding "The path of least resistance" ! It seems a normal swimmer wastes around 97% of his effort in swimming, only 3% results in forward progress! It is no wonder that more than power, the techniques to avoid the resistance would give the biggest gain in your swimming.

So the lesson on relaxed swimming cooperating with gravity is pretty much drilled in I guess and the results are there to be seen. Now I need to get the more important things about the stroke in place.