Do you seek more relaxation in your swimming experience?

This overall relaxation is actually a product of a balance between softness and stiffness around the body, and the balance of these shifts through the stroke choreography. Softness allows tissues to rest and joints to be moved while stiffness allows forces to be generated and transmitted through joints and tissues. Stiffness is what connects working parts of the body together. 

The overall sensation of relaxation is relative to the intensity that you intend to swim with. At low-intensity swimming, there would be a greater sense of overall relaxation, and less sense of it at high intensity, though one could still claim to be relatively relaxed at their highest performance level when they have the balance finely tuned.  This means that at either extreme the balance between softness and stiffness can be off and for less developed swimmers it most certainly is off. You can have too much softness or too much stiffness, or have some parts stiff when they should be soft, or vice versa.  

Refining that balance of softness and stiffness is a large part of the quality you will develop as you increase the intensity of your training. This aspect of training is what leads to efficient speed – getting the most increase in speed for each increase in effort per stroke.  

That might be a new and interesting concept for some of you. Let me give one practical application that most people could benefit from right away. 

While moving parts of the body at each moment of the stroke choreography might shift in their softness-stiffness arrangement, the arrangement at the center of the body does not shift. The posture remains neutral (as in maintaining a proper curve as if one were standing tall with good posture), lengthened and locked in place the whole time, and this stiffness is consistent whether swimming at low intensity or high. 

A common problem I observe with swimmers in the pool is a lack of appropriate stiffness along their spine, especially from the upper back down through the pelvis. When I see a lower body dragging deeper in the water than the upper body, I can guess that it is either a lack of connection via stiffness in that region or a misunderstanding of how to do it. 

You can make a bridge between what is familiar to do vertically on land under gravity to what you want to do horizontally and weightless in the water. On land, stand with good posture and then imagine the crown of the head extending toward the ceiling making you feel taller (without rolling your chest upward or tilting your pelvis forward). Now start going up on your tippy toes as if you were about to launch off the ground in slow motion; feel your guts pull up slightly toward the bottom of your lungs. The stiffness you need while swimming is very similar to the kind of stiffness you’ve just created in with that standing posture and action. That stiffness comes from lengthening the torso and holding it (not from contraction, like doing a crunch). And this level of stiffness is steadily held during the stroke cycle – it does not increase or decrease.  

That stiffness-from-lengthening-the-body ties the lower body to the upper body and forms it into a single long frame, from the top of the head to the feet. Then the propulsive force generated by the upper body pulls the entire body along with it. The lower body slides up parallel to the surface and behind the upper body, like a whole paddle board or a kayak sliding along, each paddle or stroke pulling the vessel along as a whole. 

Often I will see an energetic kick being used to prop up a disconnected lower body. A massive, or poorly formed kick can readily pull the pelvis away from the spine above it, as a cause for or a symptom of the lack of connection through the body. The evidence that you have achieved the right kind of connection, via stiffness, through the spine is that you can keep the lower body parallel to the surface behind the upper body without a flutter kick. In this arrangement a gentle two-beat kick would be sufficient, and, you would discover that a two-beat is way more relaxing than a flutter kick.

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