competitive swimmers as freedivers

[Kars]

Esom you're such a challenging communicator.

Allow me to explain to you in detail how I perceive your written words.

"a ex competitive swimmer may "work out" in the water to good parts of his or her training."

This is a very confusing sentence to me. The only way I can make sense of it it replace the word 'good' by 'improve'.

"In swimming this works for a certain extant as the aerobic power is crucial and on the adaptation side sensitive to "simple loading". in distance diving this works even less, i suppose."

- This sentence is totally dependent on your previous sentence for understanding. When I assume the 'improve' word replacement I can understand: "In swimming this works for a certain extant as the aerobic power is crucial", but I'm lost on: "and on the adaptation side sensitive to "simple loading". What do you mean by 'simple loading'? " in distance diving this works even less, i suppose." - I think I get it when I think that aerobic training benefits even less long dynamics.

Next paragraph:

unlearning and deprogramming...
i think the (intuitive) answer to the question "what is diving technique?" can be seen as a frame of our possibilities in learning.
maybe "where is diving technique located?" is significant too. - or was this integrated in the earlier question?
maybe we should talk more about "technique". i feel the use of this term is chaotic

"i think the (intuitive) answer to the question "what is diving technique?" can be seen as a frame of our possibilities in learning. "

So diving technique is: "Frame of our possibilities in learning"? - please clarify.

"maybe "where is diving technique located?" is significant too. - or was this integrated in the earlier question?"

- Where is diving technique located? Now I need to ask you for your definition of 'Diving technique'. I'm sure you can come up with something special and unique - No I was not asking 'where diving technique is located'.

"maybe we should talk more about "technique". i feel the use of this term is chaotic"

In my mind 'technique' describes 'how to do something'.

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Foxfish, I think you're right the aggressive attitude isn't the attitude that gets records in freediving.

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Haydn, I share with you the view that swimmers have a good feel for water and efficient way of propelling through the water, at HIGH speed. Now you know that designs of cars are very different for the different types of races.
Race car engines are NOT designed much with fuel economy in mind. Power per weight is much more important. Now if you've worked hard, for many formative years!, to be a hydrodynamic "race car", you should not be surprised that a simple bulky road car can outdo you in a distance race.

The idea that one can simply can go further if one simply swims faster is false.
The feeling may be there because when you swim fast your mind is less aware of the sensations of suffocation.

Love, Courage and Water,

Kars

 

[chrismar]

Hi Chrismar,

I've met the man on several occasions in the pool, sharing each other some info on what we love. He told me that on the first 50m of a 100m sprint he doesn't breath. So the not breathing for sprints looks to me like the norm for top athletes. It's also the way how I win freestroke from friendly sprint races

I think having a competitive swimmer history is has both advantages and disadvantages. Since the advantages already got mentioned, what are some of the disadvantages?
For one, I think the association of being in the water and having speed and time in one's mind. Another is having the body pre tense muscles in anticipation of fast and powerful swimming. In all a lot of unlearning - deprogramming work.

You're right - his first 50 only has one breath before the turn. It's his second 50 that he breathes every 2.

Have you tried to get him into a monofin? He'd be quick, if nothing else...

 

[mermaidgirl]

I don't believe I ever said it wasn't possible for adults to get a proper monofin technique. Maybe Carla disagrees with me here, but I think it's much easier to learn the monofin than it is to learn a decent breaststroke kick. And for the purposes of freediving, I think most people can learn technique that's good enough.

I agree, Jody. Adults can learn a viable dolphin kick and frog kick but it will never be as 'fluid' as one who achieves flexibility in the required areas as a child. It's like if I tried to learn gymnastic moves, now! I could never be flexible enough.
Although, that should not preclude anyone from learning to freedive. The kick technique does not have to be a limiting factor, as many have already said. Conversely, some people ( Sara Campbell) have praised my kick but obviously, I am no WR diver I have all sorts of other issues.

 

[Haydn]

My 'swimming fast' is relative. My sprinting days were over aged 16. But when sprinting in the 70s, it was definately no breathing until at least two arms strokes after the 50m tumble turn. In the years immediatly preceeding getting into freediving was long distance Channel Swimming.

The essence of which is finding a pace which lasts all day, but if you increase it by say 10 armstrokes a minute, you run out of steam within the hour. So you get a feel for how much energy you can safely put in without over tiring. Of courswe, we would always tarin too hard and get overtired after a few hours , then we have to swim too slow for an hour or so to recover, then we get cold and disillusioned. The key was to swim just fast enough to get the job done. When I swam with the monofin, it just seemed more comfortable to swim it a fair bit faster than everybody else. I reckoned they had no feel for the ratio of energy spent and O2 consumption.

I trained 50m dynamics, one after the other going every 45 seconds and would carry on for an hour. So the pace was good. But interestingly, I could never string 75m dynamics together without having a very long rest period and even more telling, every 75m I did made me concerned for my safety. I was always struggling to make 75m. Whether I tried to get them done inside 45 seconds or slower than 60.

I reckoned I had therefore developed the correct pace for me. Not too fast, not too slow, because I had efficient O2 at that pace.

Of course, if a speed swimmer can swim 100m sprints with one breath (and without the prep time freedivers give prior to their swims), you can see that sprinting with the monofin would require maybe a 90 second effort to cover 200m. That does not seem outrageous. But it has little to do with genetics and everything to do with the swimmers prior training.

Likewise, I remember seeing (at a Swiss comp) a 175m dynamic take over 4 minutes (unbelievably slow) I couldnt swim that slow if I tried and at that comp I got a red card with a 4 minute static. It was the swimmer versus the breath holder. My first dynamic comp and I came third, compared with the winners distance who smashed the world record (not an Aida comp though) . Thats another story....

 

[mermaidgirl]

those of you who know me already are aware of this but
An important fact that I neglected to mention is that I am 'old' and started freediving when I blew out my shoulders (butterfly) and couldn't master's swim. In the US ( where the best swimmers in the world are !!) we have comps in which you compete in your age group up until age 90+.
I took a class from William and I was already 'old' and had never dove before. I think I could manage because I had always swam and had a good breath hold and water skills. Equalization was not natural but the streamline and kicking were.
I always encourage mature people to give it a try. Age does not have to a limiting factor, if you have the desire.

 

[Kars]

Haydn,

I got a fair bit of your difficulty, and I would really love to gain some more understanding. Maybe we here can find some new insights.
Ok, one thing is they fin you use greatly influence the speed that is ideal. A sprint fin is only working efficient at a high speed. I too can swim for a long time 50m with my mono with short breathing intervals. However when I get to your 75m' I too need relatively long recoveries. Recently I noticed how tense my shoulders are/get while swimming. That's got to account for something. BTW I got a nice static according to Eric's formula. Another thing why swimming faster is the balance. One needs much less correction and thought. I think the difference may lie mostly in how fast our muscles abort O2 burning. When I make long swims I notice that I don't exit with full legs, though it was on the edge of samba. If there is a way to measure muscle responses and characteristics I would like to compare. I think that great dynamic people have muscles that go to acid formation quicker. Anybody any ideas?

 

[esom]

kars, you challange me too for sure! ... ok bit by bit. some will feel unclear again. maybe you like the idea that there is also a downside of clearity as it´s sometimes crystalline- crystal clear.

let´s go.-

"good parts" should be "big parts" or "to a good deal" so quantity comment no judging. just "working out"- maybe i invented this, what i ment was: simple loading! what i mean in both cases is that you do something without being aware a lot, by this your possibilities of improving technique is quite limited though. differently said you are doing it to your "body". ... aerobic power is sensitive to "simple loading". you can think of this as parameter describing an adaptational process- from outside of course*. i think in competitive swimming you can gain the illusion of mild "success" by following this path. an experience which may hinder your development as a freediver. clear?, agree?


*it´s intriguing to me how i get into a certain language that reflects ideas i want to point out as being problematic :blackeye
it´s like a trap one can choose unclearity or illogicality ... and still be unclear, like me. lol

this so far...

 

[esom]

So diving technique is: "Frame of our possibilities in learning"? - please clarify.

Hm. interesting what you made out of this! have to think about this...soon

what i wanted to say is that one´s idea of technique can be seen as a frame.

somehow i like this as a definition of technique.
anyway i felt i commented on unlearning and deprogramming with this quote


how using the word "technique" can benefit our disscussion, not only this thread*, is another subject.
i agree with your definition, still i think on this forum we have only wrong answers to this, because we are typing and not diving. so if we agree on your definition we have to be careful to not mess things up.
anybody else who feels this should be a subject?


*although it´s of particular importance here, because we need to relate two "how´s".

 

[maui400]

In my opinion and I as far as I could read from most posts, it brings a great advantage if you are or have been a competitive swimmer. The advantage is of course technique, body shaping and flexibility.
But the probably most important part in freediving - relaxation - is something which also has to be trained (and some never really learn it).
I've participated in a "finswimming meets freediving" workshop with the German national team in finswimming. (Btw., as mono rooky I learned quite a bit, but I don't consider my mono style as appropriate)
Anyway, as the swimmers did their max. in DYN for the first time, all of them did 100m right away. One girl even did 137m. That was really impressing. On the other side she was actually the whole day jumping around like a rubber ball.
Thus I doubt the girl would get much further in future, unless she learns to relax.

 

[Kars]

Sorry Andreas to get back at this, but I just feel the need to explain your suggested improvement's are NOT clairifying the structure of the sentence.

"a ex competitive swimmer may "work out" in the water to good parts of his or her training."

Replacing the words:

"a ex competitive swimmer may "work out" in the water to big parts of his or her training."

Now I'm not a teacher in English, and I used to obtain low and very low scores in high school for especially foreign languages.
But let me explain by using the words "work out" and "to" I expect a word that describe a direction, such as 'improve'. This word is then followed by what is subject to the direction - improve what? Now if I fill in "big parts of his or her training" then I get the following illogical sentence:
"a ex competitive swimmer may "work out" in the water to improve big parts of his or her training."
In math, leaving out the extra's, and replacing the working out words with the single word 'training' the structure looks like:

swimmer trains to improve his training.​

This is very confusing to me in the context of the previous discussion.
After this exercise in deduction I see that this in a way may describe parts of what you and I like to do in order to become more effective teachers and coaches. But it still is a strange and confusing sentence structure to me.
I can go deeper in the light of your concept of 'training' being a premeditated set of exercises in order to yield a fairly certain result. Practicing and working out is not training, so in a way I just made a mistake by replacing "working out to" with training.

swimmer works out to improve his training.​

So the swimmer is working out in order to understand his body and then with that information build a good training program.

But then again this whole write up is just a guess of what it is you might mean with your words. I think it can be beneficial to write unclear, plural meaning language for it encourages the reader to consider more possibilities. But on the downside it takes a long time to decipher, to read, and the possibility for misconceptions seem exponentially increasing when the content is build upon, expanded. In other words if the first statement in unclear, the rest of text is not comprehensible. Like missing the first turn of a road book text journey.

kars, you challange me too for sure! ... ok bit by bit. some will feel unclear again. maybe you like the idea that there is also a downside of clearity as it´s sometimes crystalline- crystal clear.

let´s go.-

"good parts" should be "big parts" or "to a good deal" so quantity comment no judging. just "working out"- maybe i invented this, what i ment was: simple loading! what i mean in both cases is that you do something without being aware a lot, by this your possibilities of improving technique is quite limited though. differently said you are doing it to your "body". ... aerobic power is sensitive to "simple loading". you can think of this as parameter describing an adaptational process- from outside of course*. i think in competitive swimming you can gain the illusion of mild "success" by following this path. an experience which may hinder your development as a freediver. clear?, agree?


*it´s intriguing to me how i get into a certain language that reflects ideas i want to point out as being problematic :blackeye
it´s like a trap one can choose unclearity or illogicality ... and still be unclear, like me. lol

this so far...

Well I think I need some more practice, even training maybe, in order to be able to fully understand your thoughts.

Without going into another swamp of details I would say I get the feeling I understand about 85% of the text after "simple loading!"
In my mind I now believe that "Simple Loading" is describing a work out that has no particular goal other then having nice sensations, stopping when the easy part ends and going further demands focus discipline.

*it´s intriguing to me how i get into a certain language that reflects ideas i want to point out as being problematic :blackeye
it´s like a trap one can choose unclearity or illogicality ... and still be unclear, like me. lol

This is to me another beautiful example, but maybe it's my mind that is not able to tune in, maybe I happen to read many contradictions in your phrasing. I have a hard time in understand what parts relate to each other in your sentences. Maybe try a simpler sentence structure? The complex structures you present are really confusing.

But you may want to become a politician, a CEO, who can use extremely complex sentences to have most, if not all, audiences guessing what the meaning is, and feeling dumb for not understanding your long complex sentences.

Here is an example, called Green speak, Alan Greenspan (Former Federal Reserve Chairman) is using this method to serve journalist with uncomprihenceable complex sentences in order to avoid saying "no comment", "dealing with follow up questions" and - God forbid! - " clear and unequivocal truth".

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgslHJXDDWA]School Sucks Podcast #114: Discovering Doublespeak! (Part Four) - Greenspan's Gobbledygook - YouTube[/ame]

"it´s like a trap one can choose unclearity or illogicality ... and still be unclear, like me. lol"

Maybe just read that out loud and see how that sentence is confusing, LOL.

What I think you mean:
- it´s like a trap, one attempt to be clear and logical ... and still be unclear, like me. lol

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On "technique" as a framework.
Sure I can see technique contains not just 1 way and or principle, but many.

What would you say are the main types of contents of the framework 'technique'?

 

[esom]

Hey Kars,
good you ask again, and thanks for the feedback! i think i want to put it short and end up not being understood - beginning at the end:

What I think you mean:
- it´s like a trap, one attempt to be clear and logical ... and still be unclear, like me. lol

no, actually that was one of the better thought sentences and it still makes sense to me after i read what you wrote.
using a kind of language while criticising the latter has paradoxic potential, although it might be seen as clear. and logics and paradoxes are no friends.
this is off topic anyway. so don´t mind if it doesn´ t makes sense.

In my mind I now believe that "Simple Loading" is describing a work out that has no particular goal other then having nice sensations, stopping when the easy part ends and going further demands focus discipline.

i think you got me wrong again. simple loading for me can be done light and heavy, with or without a goal. the little concouisness is my point.
training like this is only loading the "body"- which works sometimes for sure, in particular for building aerobic power.

this was the part i really tried to be as clear as possible before


i wanted to be not too clear about technique and i hope the answer why is partially possible to get out my writing.
i still have problems there but i´ll think some more about what else i want to say about technique.
i feel i dont confuse things here, because technique was a very soft concept before - and will always be, which i really appreciate. still, be able to use is challenging and rewarding i think. to use it writing and speaking on a forum we need to use it together.
maybe its not a "writing subject" at all at this stage of creating the "technique" concept. i don´t know

ps: looking forward to listen to green speak, thanks