Transcription
When I say, "If I can do it, so can you," I mean it very literally. This week, I'll prove it. The learning curve? I'll turn a novice swimmer into a long-distance swimmer. Every time I look at the waves in the open water, I get really nervous. With help from the master who taught me, I know these steps work. In just 5 days, Sarah is struggling.
Ah, I'm not doing it. I'm Tim, bestselling author and human guinea pig. I'll show you how to make the impossible possible by bending the rules. Together, I'll find the world's best teachers and push myself to the edge to deconstruct, decode, and demystify some of the world's toughest challenges in record time. If I can do it, so can you.
My history with swimming is a short, checkered history. I've always been afraid of drowning. I've always had a fear of swimming, an inability to swim. So it was one of my biggest insecurities and embarrassments up to my 30s. I used Total Immersion almost exclusively, and I did not have a coach. I was using paper books and I was using DVD footage. It was one of the most transformative experiences I've ever had in my life. This week's experiment is slightly different structure because I am not the student. I am a student, but the primary student is Sarah.
"Hi Tim, I'm Sarah from Seattle. I follow a lot of your advice, but I still haven't learned how to swim." Sarah was one of the applicants for the spot to be the student in the "Swim with Tim" competition. "My boys both love to swim. My husband can swim pretty well, and the reaction that I always get is, 'Wait, you don't know how to swim?' It is kind of embarrassing." The goal is to compress months of conventional training into just a few days so that by the end of the week, Sarah can swim a half mile in open water.
[Music]
"Terry, my good man." "Hey Tim, nice to see you again." "Great to see you. Welcome to Kona." Our guru this week is Terry Laughlin, founder of Total Immersion swimming. Terry is a professional swimming coach who is not handicapped, you could say, by conventional training.
"So what are you thinking of for this week in terms of the progression?" "Uh, we're definitely going to start in the pool, coming to understand how the human body naturally behaves in the water and make it a little more fish-like, a little less human-like." He was not conditioned to be a high-level competitive swimmer himself, and that means he brings a very novel eye to common problems, common fears, common technical issues that he now has very novel solutions for. "And then we'll take what we learn here and we'll move out to the beauty of the open water." "Those unconfined spaces can be a challenge for people."
"So good to meet you guys." "Nice to meet you." "Welcome to Hawaii." "Thank you." "Good to meet you." "Nice to meet you."
To get Sarah swimming fluidly in just 5 days, Terry will use the same techniques that got me swimming after everything else failed: sequencing, teaching in an elegant, logical progression where every tiny skill builds on what precedes it, eliminating failure points, avoiding skills or drills that are known to make novices quit, and last, engineering early wins. You need successes right off the bat to overcome fear and insecurities.
"All right, so we're going to be shooting the 'before' version of your strokes." The first thing we did with Terry was capture video of our before performances. "And we, I don't know if I want to watch this, but oh my goodness, it looks like a drowning something, but you don't even yet have a concept."
TR: All right, Sarah's baseline attempt at freestyle was normal for most people who really don't know how to swim. She was windmilling with her arms, kicking frantically with her legs, expending a ton of energy, plus she's unable to take a breath without stopping every few strokes. The first exercise we do is called Superman Glide, and the main thing that you learn from that is how to cooperate with, rather than fight, gravity. "I want my arms when I swim to to stay on these wide tracks, so I'm going to set those tracks. I also want my hands relaxed, not stiff." The Superman pose encapsulates a lot of technique and a lot of principle. You want your head-spine line to be straight, but the main thing that you're going to focus on is the feeling of the head being released. It's about becoming comfortable in the water, feeling your head supported by the water so you're not craning up or craning down and becoming hydrodynamic to make it easier to glide through the water.
"Okay, so let's take that directly into a little bit of swimming where you're going to push into Superman Glide. Really notice that your head is released, and then just take three or four strokes." "The first action, rather than this, is going to be right. You feel that easy swing to the outside?" "Make it an oval, more more like an oval." "Exactly. You're going to cut a slot with your fingers and slip your forearm through the slot that you cut."
Oh, after the stroke and entry, the body moves into what Terry calls skate position. "If I think about where my arms were in Superman Glide, I just leave my left hand there, and I want my nose pointing straight down, and put this hand in my jeans pocket, and then bring an arm forward and rotate." Most people think about swimming in terms of the upper body has a job and the lower body has a separate job, and we're going to think in in terms of bisecting the body down the midline into a streamline right side alternating with a streamline left side.
Sarah's freestyle stroke is coming along super beautiful, but she's wasting a ton of energy with her lower body. In Total Immersion, you don't have to kick hard or fast. All you have to do is tighten your glutes and abs and lightly flick the legs once per stroke just to rotate the body between left and right skate positions.
I have a lot of work to do. As I look out into the ocean since I've been here, I get nervous every [Music] time. We're leaving the pool; we're going to the sea; we're going to move to open water, and I feel I feel nervous about it. When open water, what we'll be working on is learning to control how your mind behaves when you get into a somewhat exposed situation.
"I suggest back and forth here, just a few Superman Glides, because first I want to see if he can just enjoy being moved around by the water." "Okay, ready?" "I think so." [Applause] [Music] "That's awesome. Isn't that a lot easier?" "That's awesome. Let's glide and add three to four strokes."
Open water felt amazing. I don't know why I haven't done it before. Well, cuz I was scared, but it felt amazing to kind of be buoyant and float in that water. I don't know why I was so scared of it. Today, I think this will come as good news that we're only going to introduce one new skill: breathing. We waited until day two to introduce breathing because it's scary; it's a failure point. In other words, if you introduce it too early, people tend to quit; they tend to get discouraged, at the very least. It comes down to three things: alignment, second [Music] integration, and finally, got to keep a long body line.
Terry is a master of deconstruction, taking a big skill and breaking it down into small micro-skills. So we're going to intentionally do something that looks like breathing, but you don't have to get air, and it's called nodding. It looks like this. Very importantly, the first few exercises don't require inhalation; instead, she's just moving her head to the right breathing position while still holding her breath. "Your chin is going to follow your left shoulder, right arm forward, chin follows left shoulder. Okay, that's it." So he's taking breathing, which most people would think of as one thing, and fine-slicing it into perhaps five or 10 different tiny exercises that, when easily mastered in sequence, lead naturally to, "Shazam, you're breathing!"
There's one analogy that really helped me at this stage. So in rock climbing, if you're here, what would you do if you have to reach something that's four or five inches up? Get closer to the wall, right? When I rotate, you see how my mouth is probably four or five inches closer to the surface of the water. So very counterintuitively, when you reach underneath the water, it brings your mouth closer to the surface.
"Is there a break-poop point for you, Tim, where you weren't able to breathe in the way that Sarah feels now, and then something?" "Qui— there was uh, initially for me, there was a huge fear factor with having water in my mouth as I'm trying to breathe. I had a lot of trouble learning even the basics of breathing for swimming. It was really problematic for me, and at that point, I had a breakthrough because I read a bit of advice: when you're having trouble breathing, just roll onto your back. And that's exactly what I recommended to Sarah, and then practice rotating back and forth so you really feel kind of like a chicken on a spit as you're rolling to breathe. You're just rolling too far, and it's okay."
The close cousin of avoiding failure points is facilitating early wins. You need early victories when you're practicing the first day, the second day, so you build them in. That is reflected in the exercises Terry chooses so that Sarah can come out saying, "Oh my God, that was so cool! I'm actually swimming! I'm actually swimming!"
Tim's been um kind of jumping and instructing along with Terry. I feel incredibly lucky because there's been a lot of similarities with struggles that Tim said that he had with swimming and that I have definitely had. "If I get these two different angles, that's it, that's it. Very nice. I'm starting to feel what that can feel like, what real swimming feels like, so I'm pretty excited."
It's time to see if Sarah can translate her new skills to open water. Terry suggests we go back to the cove and swim the perimeter. "We'll be moving from here to here, yeah, which is the same." Okay. [Music] Even though she has to turn over onto her back every time she needs a breath, it's a huge milestone to see Sarah covering some real distance, plus it's the first time she's swimming in water over her head.
"We're here. Hold on to complete back." For Sarah, it was apparently more challenging than it looked. "A lot of stuff I I had learned went out the way window cuz I was yeah, panicking a little bit, where yeah, I kind of had some water in my goggles and in my throat and in my nose, and I just started panicking a little bit, just like I'm not used to this. I'm used to standing up and resetting."
At this point, Sarah's made great progress. She can use the safety breath to swim continuously. She doesn't consider that actually swimming, and most people wouldn't, so we have to get her to rhythmic breathing, and that is the biggest hurdle for almost any novice swimmer. Sarah's already come light years towards learning how to swim, but as we get more into breathing, her old fears and old habits are taking her away from technique, and her progress is stalling.
"Yeah, I was frustrated earlier. I was even getting like a little emotional, like I can't do this." "The learning curve doesn't look like this." "Yeah, it's more of this type of experience." "Yeah, that's really helpful to know, like sometimes I'll learn something and do well and then hand it back down." Anytime you attempt to learn something quickly, it's critically important to expect frustration in the same way you would expect soreness after a workout. The key is to recognize it as part of progress and work through it. I've worked with thousands of people who had your anxieties, but I also have the advantage of having done it so many times with so many people, and I know if you follow the steps, they work. If you want to swim freestyle for long distances, you have to master rhythmic breathing. Rhythmic breathing is breathing on a regular cadence in freestyle with minimal movement, and it's extremely challenging for novice swimmers because there's very little margin for error. So the key in rhythmic breathing is that you're going to get a breath, and this sand is going to keep moving.
Okay, for Sarah, the next logical step towards rhythmic breathing is bringing one eye out of the water. So now you're getting used to what you see when you do rhythmic breathing. "Okay." "Okay. It's a different part of the sky." When we move on to actually taking a real breath, Sarah chokes, both literally and metaphorically. Her lifelong fear of choking on water is preventing any progress.
"It's weird." "Yeah, it is, but you're okay." "Yeah, I I do have a tendency to be like, I'm going to swallow that water that's in my mouth." Your mouth is barely coming out of the water for a split second, or even just a part of your mouth is coming out of the water, so you have to breathe while you have water water in your mouth. It's a very scary feeling, the sensation of water going into an orifice in her head. Uh, put the fear of God in her. "I want you to have your mouth open, or we're just going to go underwater." Okay. We conquered that fear very simply by having her bob her head underwater a few inches, allowing water to come into her mouth, come back up, and I asked her, "Everything okay?" "Yes." "Are you still afraid?" "No." And we moved on. That was all it took.
"Are you breathing easily? You comfortable?" Hopefully, Sarah can put everything together that she's learned and take her first rhythmic breath. "Good." "Good tip. You're good." "Very good. Very good." "Did you get air?" "Is the— I did get air. That was like a first for me." "And you didn't interrupt, which means it was a rhythmic breath." "It was one rhythmic breath, but was a rhythmic bre—breath. So that counts, right?" "Even one counts. It counts." "Yeah, you still need to maintain the exquisite timing you've been developing. You have to maintain a long, sleek body line, that rock climber body line." Taking one rhythmic breath is a huge leap forward for Sarah, but when she tries to link more than one breath together, she hits a wall.
Sarah is struggling to learn this skill, and I'm not surprised. It's the most complicated skill in all of swimming. One of the reasons Sarah's struggling to breathe is that her legs are dragging her down. Of course, if your legs are dragging, you're going to expend a lot of unnecessary energy and move very slowly. She needs to engage her glutes so her lower body stays more streamlined behind her. "Now, like, tense your abs a little bit to keep your feet together." I show her an exercise that utilizes the same muscles to give her an idea of how it should feel.
"I feel like I know I can do that, but then I try and I'm just like, ah, I'm not doing it." I guess it's just being frustrated with myself. It's a lot to take in. Sarah's been practicing with limited success rhythmic breathing ad nauseam now for a while, and at this point, she needs a break. So I decided to take her snorkeling to remind her of why she wanted to learn to swim in the first place: the joy of swimming, the discovery that is possible through [Music] swimming. While snorkeling, I show Sarah how to conquer her fear of diving underwater tomorrow without any snorkel. She has a much bigger fear to overcome: rhythmic breathing. The entire final challenge depends on it.
Sarah's last day, and her test will be to do the unthinkable: to swim a total of a half mile in open water in the Pacific Ocean, in water that's often times 15 or 20 feet deep. We're swimming a good distance across this bay, but the way to cut it down to size is you just take it literally one stroke at a time. Terry's told me this before, but even when he did his really long swims, the Jalter swim, Manhattan Island swim, he viewed as a practice session, not as a race.
Okay, caps on and goggles on, and we're ready. [Music] Ready. Towards the beginning, I I was kind of freaking out a little bit, still being in open water, and if some got in my mouth, I'd kind of get nervous and cough it up. Sorry. So she was overthinking in the beginning, and that caused her to swallow some water. To calm her down, I suggested that she'd just be thinking about the stroke she was taking at any one time. [Music] Once Sarah stops reacting to old fears and starts to focus on her tempo and technique, all of the micro-skills that we covered this week suddenly coalesce, and then an amazing swimmer emerges. Literally, by the end of that swim, she was going from one or two breaths at a time to 30 or [Applause] [Music] 40. "I kept on looking over, and I just couldn't believe she was still going. So I'm my God, she hasn't stopped yet. She still hasn't stopped. You know, 10 bre— 20 bre— 30 bre— 40 bre—"
If Sarah had a turning point this week, it was definitely this last swim. "I did the longest swim I could ever imagine. I can't believe that was me doing that in the water. I feel like I am a [Music] swimmer." I think it's important to underscore that Sarah exceeded my expectations, but she's not an anomaly. This is something that other people can [Music] do. If I can learn how to swim, then anyone can. So I just I would say just do it.
"That was so amazing. I'm just super stoked." "My wife can swim. I mean, that was amazing." This is going to be a totally different experience at the pool and at the lake. I've gone so long thinking I'm not, so I'm just changing my mind, like I am a swimmer now. "Yeah, someone says, 'Are you a swimmer?' 'Yes, yes I am. Yes I am.' That's crazy."
Hey guys, Tim Ferriss here. One of the things that kills me about TV is that you have to take all of this amazing footage—in our case, we had 5 to 6 days of 12 to 16 hours typically per day—and you have to chop it down to 21 or 22 minutes, which is a 30-minute show with the ads removed. It just makes me want to stab myself in the eyeballs with bicycle spokes. It's so agonizing. The good news is we have all that footage, and so we've taken huge extended scenes, we've taken interviews, we've taken tutorials, everything imaginable that we could get our hands on that we thought was really world-class that we wanted to put in, and you can find it at 4hourworkweek.com/TV, all spelled out, fur, etc. And we really feel like we could have made the best 2-hour documentary imaginable on the subject that you just saw, or had five different shows of equal quality, all different, with the footage that we captured. So please check it out. There's some amazing stuff, and you can also check out the podcast where I do very long—in some cases, two to three-hour interviews—with a lot of the experts in this show, and that's the Tim Ferriss Show, which was nominated one of the best of iTunes, which I'm very very happy about, and you can check out both. So find everything at 4hourworkweek.com. Xymon, by the way, you're right, if you want 4-Hour Work Week, do not work in television. Thank you for watching.