Visualize Perfect Freestyle to Improve Technique

[Source: East Coast Cycos newsletter, in Tri-Rudy newsletter, April 22/09]

The more detailed and real you can make your visualization, the more effective it is likely to be.

By Matt Fitzgerald
Triathlete magazine

Do you ever feel that your arms and legs prevent you from swimming better?

After all, lack of knowledge clearly is not the factor that's holding you back. You're already familiar with the various elements of proper freestyle technique: floating high in the water, rotating from the hips, pulling with a "big paddle" and the rest. You have a very clear mental vision of what your body should do.

During workouts, your brain commands your arms and legs to move just like Michael Phelps's limbs do when he swims freestyle, but the muscles do not (or cannot) obey. If only you could get rid of your body and swim in your mind with the perfect technique you picture and intend there.

Actually, to some degree, your limbs really do get in the way of improving your swimming, and you can in fact refine your freestyle technique by practicing without your arms and legs. What makes this possible is the fact that the motor programs stored in your brain and activated to control your freestyle stroke are far more malleable than your muscles, which execute these programs.

In other words, your brain's motor centers can imagine and intend alternative ways of swimming far more easily than your muscles can adjust their movements. Thus, by temporarily replacing your real muscles with imaginary ones—that is, by visualizing yourself swimming—you can practice alternative techniques with greater freedom and make it easier to get your muscles to do what you want them to do when you return to the pool.

Your freestyle swim stroke—like every other motor skill—is produced through two-way communication between your brain and your muscles. The motor centers of your brain store programs for your freestyle stroke that were developed through previous practice.

When you decide to begin swimming, your brain selects the appropriate programs and executes them by sending electrical signals to the muscles, causing them to move in the programmed pattern. As you swim, your muscles send a constant stream of sensory feedback to your brain, providing data that enables your brain to refine and adjust the stroke.

Practice Visualization

It's this sensory feedback, or the feel of your muscle movements, that constrains your ability to fiddle with your stroke in ways that make it more efficient and powerful. When you practice your swimming through visualization, you replace real sensory feedback from the muscles with images of correct technique that you have captured by studying photographs and instructional videos and by watching better swimmers at the pool.

Armed with this data, you can easily see and feel yourself swimming with better technique while lying in bed with your eyes closed. When you imagine yourself moving, you activate the very same neurons (brain cells) that become active when you actually move. Frequent mental practice causes these patterns of neural activity to consolidate into newer, better motor programs for swimming.

When you return to the pool you can draw on these new programs. With your muscles factored back into the equation, you won't find it quite as easy to swim like Michael Phelps as you did in your bed, but it will be decidedly easier than it would have been if you had not used visualization.

Most athletes are unaware of just how much control the brain has over athletic movement. Your brain is the puppet master; your muscles are mere puppets. In fact, they are totally replaceable. By implanting electrodes inside the brain's motor centers, medical engineers have enabled quadriplegics to play video games with their thoughts.

In these cases, the visual feedback the patient receives from the movements of the character representing him on screen replaces muscle feedback. Through trial and error, the patient learns to connect neurons previously used to move his arms to the video-game character.

As an athlete wishing to swim better, you can exploit the plasticity and independence of your brain's motor centers, as highlighted by the above-described medical example, by connecting your freestyle swimming programs to images of perfect swim technique as seen in others.

All you have to do is gather some concrete and detailed images of the technique elements you covet and picture your body performing these movements for a few minutes each day while sitting or lying quietly with your eyes closed. Be sure to imagine the feel of swimming in this manner, as well. In fact, the more detailed and real you can make your visualization, the more effective it is likely to be. Throw in the smell of chlorine, if you can.

Studying the Power of the Mind

Perhaps all of this sounds like hocus pocus, but it's not. A number of studies have proven the capability of visualization to improve motor-skill performance beyond the level that can be achieved through physical practice alone.

For example, in one study subjects were challenged to toss a ping-pong ball at a target from a cup affixed to the crook of the elbow. Half the subjects practiced the skill only physically, while the other half practiced it both physically and through visualization. On average, members of the latter group improved their aim more rapidly than the others. Field studies involving skills that actually matter to real athletes have produced similar results.

New research suggests that everyone practices a de facto form of visualization to learn new motor skills during sleep. In a study performed at Harvard Medical School, two groups of right-handed subjects practiced a rapid typing task with their left hand, at the end of which time they were tested for improvement in the skill. Then they waited 12 hours and were tested for further improvement in the task.

One group was tested at 10 a.m., following a practice session, and was retested at 10 p.m. the same day without any additional practice. The other group was tested at 10 p.m. and was retested at 10 a.m. the next morning, after sleeping, and without additional practice.

Members of the first group showed a 2-percent improvement when they were retested. Members of the second group, who slept between tests, showed a 20-percent improvement the next morning without any additional practice of the skill.

In light of these results, I would suggest that the best time and place to mentally practice your swimming is at night, in bed, as you are preparing for sleep. Not only do you have nothing better to do in this situation, but taking advantage of the opportunity in this manner will ensure that your freestyle stroke is at the top of your subconscious mind as you fall asleep, increasing the chances that you will wake up a better swimmer in the morning.