Categories: >Swimming

Total Immersion Swimming and Muscle Memory

I’m reading the book, “Total Immersion Swimming”. It’s a method of improving your swimming technique.

The book talks about how your muscles build neural pathways for movements that you repeat many times over, so that the muscle can repeat the action without you having to think about it. They call it muscle memory. It’s how we walk, or ride a bike, or even type on a computer without thinking about each motion. It’s extremely difficult to erase muscle memories and replace them with a new ways of moving muscles.

The Total Immersion Book talks about using drills to replace the old muscle memories with new ones. Drills are ways of moving your body through a motion in a way that it doesn’t recognize as the old motion, so you can build new nueral pathways without fighting the old memories.

I’ve been swimming 3 days per week with a Master’s swim team since mid August. For the first month, I spent a lot of time doing drills and pretty much ignored the workout sheets the coach handed out. Now I try to keep up with the workout pace, but it’s hard. I am still fighting my old swimming habits, especially if I try to swim faster, or longer. There are brief moments when I really feel like I have it right, but then I lose it. It’s so frustrating sometimes!

The book also says that once you correct your form and streamline your body to minimize drag, you will see an incredible increase in speed. I haven’t seen that yet 🙁

carolyahoo

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Maria says:

June 15, 2010 at 6:53 am

I'm working with Total Immersion now too. I've always done the breast stroke, but I'm trying to develop an efficient freestyle as well. Do you have any updates to share regarding your sucess (or frustration) with this method since your last post?
P.S. I think I'm going to check out pose running too...the run is my weakest event (not that any of the three are lightning fast!)