interesting contrast

same swimmer. 4 years time difference.

Went from TI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9C8D-GiiOo

To a windmilling style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvtROv1waeM

Maybe he has found the best of both worlds now in a standard stroke.
There is some source of upperbody power and catch thats hard to acces from the TI style. The broken arm catch is so typical.
At the same time the TI style can give  some streamlining clues.

Salvo had already spotted this guy a year ago

Yes, the ninja swimmer. If memory serves, this guy already had a swimming background bf TI. Not sure he learned much from TI in the end. To find the best from both worlds is something I'm after too.

Salvo

In the secondvideo he learned the high elbow catch, but as timing should better use front quadrant timing, otherwise loosing so much efficiency.

He looks much better swimming with 6 beat kick, to my mind. With the 2-beat crossover ("hide the foot", as SolarEnergy used to call it) he does not have enough rhythm or high enough stroke rate for it to really work. After each kick, his lower foot is sticking down, below the streamline envelope, creating drag.

I suspect this is what my own stroke looks like on a bad day when I'm getting tired.

Here below find my analysis with respect to 2 strokes:

1. TI STROKE:

we are not divers we are swimmers, TI focuses on diving not swimming!   That is why you cannot use it in choppy rough water.



2. NEW STOKE

In the below video he is better than all of them, should better develop this technique rather than dealing with extraordinary things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUCRrKlBdc

NC, why do you think its so hard to get a good catch in a TI stroke?


He also has a weird push action. His arm is already straight when its far underwater.

His windmill style is good for 21min33 for 1500 m, but I agree having an arm in the front is better when you reach max speed in the stroke.

However, 1:05 over 100m
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gimMT4wx6rs&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Windmill, splashing, spinning, and still 1:05

Salvo

You are all insisting on that workout or technique will provide you a considereable pace.  No, training mostly will increase your aerobic capacity and endurance. I know, hard to believe or admit, but dont worry you will understand/recognize/admit it after spending 20 more years in swimming, because in 20 years egos and ambitions can almost be killed by the time, time is the best medicine

I am swimming the 100m free still 1:03 like in my 17 years, did 23 years * 800 km (20.000 km) workout but still no difference, because the motor and the case (DNA) is the same. I am fiat500 cant be a golf or a lamborghini, can make a modified fiat500 by increasing the capacity only upto 10% by develoing lungs, cardiovascular system and build a bit muscles, not more, not this time in my life, because  am not designed for swimming/racing!

I had already given an example for this in my thread:

A real life example from my young club years(when I was 15-16 years old): 
Most of my teammates and I were swimming 29 seconds 50m and 13 seconds for 25m. One day a 13 year kid came to our club, that was his first time in the pool. He even didnt know any stoke technique, swimming head outside with sinky legs, but it was interesting that he could swim 1-2 laps behing us. Out coach realized him and asked for a 25m try. He swam 12 seconds. Then out coach gave us 10x400m set, took him to the 1st lane and dealth only with him. In a year he swam the 100m free 53 seconds and 4:18 400m free, took scholarship to the USA and flew away. He was also swimming 11 secinds for a 25m free when he got in the national team, almost no difference when compared with his starting point.

Conclusion:
Are olympians swimming with a better technique than yours? No, then there must be something except technique which makes the pace difference: power/ability/talent or whatever you call which is mostly determined by the DNA not with a hard work. I beg that he(ninjaswimmer) could swim also sub 1:10 100m 2 years ago. Manmaker exercise builds strength, build muscles and improves scapula, core and shoulder stability, it is a great way to gain power and endurance.

An excellent interview video proving my quotes, even I can all understand what they mention with my poor English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkqgJixK1DU

Any kind of body-using sports performance developes between the ages of 0 to 17, after the puberty you cannot expect any improvement, especially swimmer's carreer finishes at the age of 17, then they try to preserve their personal bests.

nightcrawler wrote:You are all insisting on that workout or technique will provide you a considereable pace.  No, training mostly will increase your aerobic capacity and endurance.

Which is fine for me. I'm not obsessed with speed, really (until last week I didn't even know my best 25m time). As the LoneSwimmersays, I swim in the pool to improve my overall capability of open water, so I can get out and confidently do what I love so much, which is swimming alone in open water, not relying on anyone except myself and my own knowledge and experience.

That said, I think we are saying the same thing about the ninja swimmer: I said that he swam 1:05 100m despite his not perfect technique. I also said that, if memory serves, this guy has a swimming background. So he probably has swum under 1:10 since he was a teen ager.

These conversations remind me of a chat I once had with Charles (aka SolarEnergy): with great honesty, he said that as a coach he had always failed with his students (mostly adult triathletes) when it came to develop speed. Most of them used to plateau around 35s for 50m. He just couldn't explain why they hardly ever reached 30s despite being super fit triathletes (and with a good technique as well), while he could hit 29s or less being out of shape. Remember that he also wanted to buy some expensive power meter to have a better picture of the "swim mystery" (ie what you call DNA), don't know whether he finally did it or not...

He also said that you can teach someone how to sit, not how to fart

So, pretty in line with your posts. By the way, from your posts and Charles', it seems that 1:10 over 100m and 30s over 50m are the lines that divide good from average swimmers, aren't they? As if a good swimmer is supposed to always swim 50m in 30s, even when he/she is out of shape. And the longer distances matter less because it's a matter of more or less training in that case.

Salvo

For some reason I feel very much resemblence with ninjaswimmer. Saw the swimming on the rooftop clip a few years ago and it really was like seeing myself swim as far as that is possible. Hope I am swimming smoother now.
Dont think he is a  child competetive swimmer but an adult learner.
His kick is also crap with his stiff ankles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF3VEFlQSJ4

Look at his swimming from 2009. This is clearly beginner style, Body is all over the place, dropped elbows, pulling over tge center,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP-9oWz0lic


Maybe its time to put the foot down this year and prove  adult slow learners can break 1.10m /100m.

So what do you think about unathletic Ledecky Nightcrawler?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhm4fOl8ZqY

SA wrote:So what do you think about unathletic Ledecky Nightcrawler?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhm4fOl8ZqY

Training hard appears to be her strength.

Next video does mention she got extra dryland work than the rest of her group.

SA wrote:So what do you think about unathletic Ledecky Nightcrawler?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhm4fOl8ZqY

Hi SA,
Actually swimmers dont think too much, they swim, just like I do
Today morning I did the below set, it is my personal best in this season:
16x75m crawl, int:75" (avg:60", best:57", AvgSPL:17,5)
20x50m crawl, int:50" (avg:39", best:36", AvgSPL:17,3)
24x50m crawl, int:25" (avg:18", best:17", AvgSPL:17,1)
500 arms easy crawl, with wall tether tied to my waist
4x25m crawl max speed, int:40" (all:14", AvgSPL:17)

Ledecky's success is due to her big extremities, flexibility, good understanding of feel for the water, love for the water, family support, motivation, and mostly chance of borning in a developed civilized country which is not located in middle east! When considered all, relatively she is not successful than me

Homo-sapiens couldnt have completed its evolution yet, for that reason when they cannot explain something they endorse it to the God! I believe that all the holy things(sh*ts)  were born from this reason or created by the mankind itself! Actually I cannot talk or write without any reference like others (SS's, TI's, etc holy founders).

I recommend you to read the below article about this, there is also science behind the scenes, I think this will be an answer for your question ...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-innate-talent-a-myth/

Is Innate Talent a Myth?
It’s appealing to think that “all it takes is a lot of practice,” but the factors behind elite performance are more complicated than that!

Elite-level performance can leave us awestruck. This summer, in Rio, Simone Biles appeared to defy gravity in her gymnastics routines, and Michelle Carter seemed to harness super-human strength to win gold in the shot put. Michael Phelps, meanwhile, collected 5 gold medals, bringing his career total to 23.

In everyday conversation, we say that elite performers like Biles, Carter, and Phelps must be “naturals” who possess a “gift” that “can’t be taught.” What does science say? Is innate talent a myth? This question is the focus of the new book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson and science writer Robert Pool. Ericsson and Pool argue that, with the exception of height and body size, the idea that we are limited by genetic factors—innate talent—is a pernicious myth. “The belief that one’s abilities are limited by one’s genetically prescribed characteristics....manifests itself in all sorts of ‘I can’t’ or ‘I’m not’ statements,” Ericsson and Pool write. The key to extraordinary performance, they argue, is “thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work.”

To make their case, Ericsson and Pool review evidence from a wide range of studies demonstrating the effects of training on performance. In one study, Ericsson and his late colleague William Chase found that, through over 230 hours of practice, a college student was able to increase his digit span—the number of random digits he could recall—from a normal 7 to nearly 80. In another study, the Japanese psychologist Ayako Sakakibara enrolled 24 children from a private Tokyo music school in a training program designed to train “perfect pitch”—the ability to name the pitch of a tone without hearing another tone for reference. With a trainer playing a piano, the children learned to identify chords using colored flags—for example, a red flag for CEG and a green flag for DGH. Then, the children were tested on their ability to identify the pitches of individual notes until they reached a criterion level of proficiency. By the end of the study, the children had seemed to acquire perfect pitch. Based on these findings, Ericsson and Pool conclude that the “clear implication is that perfect pitch, far from being a gift bestowed upon only a lucky few, is an ability that pretty much anyone can develop with the right exposure and training.”

This sort of evidence makes a compelling case for the importance of training in becoming an expert. No one becomes an expert overnight, and the effects of extended training on performance can be larger than might seem possible. This is something that psychologists have long recognized. In 1912, Edward Thorndike, the founder of educational psychology, wrote that “we stay far below our own possibilities in almost everything that we do….not because proper practice would not improve us further, but because we do not take the training or because we take it with too little zeal.” And, in Peak, Ericsson and Pool write that in “pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.”  

But does the fact that training leads to improvements—even massive improvements—in skill level mean that innate talent is a myth? This is a much harder scientific argument to make, and is where Peak runs into trouble. Ericsson and Pool gloss over or omit critical details of research they review that undermine the anti-talent argument. As one example, although they claim that the results of Sakakibara’s training study imply that “pretty much anyone” can acquire perfect pitch, the sample in that study did not include pretty much anyone. It included children who had been enrolled in a private music school from a very young age (the average age at which training began was 4). It does not seem likely that this non-random sample was representative of the general population in music aptitude or interest—factors that are known to be influenced by genetic factors. It’s also not clear whether the children had acquired true perfect pitch, because there was no comparison of the children after training to people who possess this rare ability—for example, in terms of speed of identifying notes or neural correlates of performance.

As another example, describing the results of a study of ballet dancers by Ericsson and colleagues, Ericsson and Pool claim that “the only significant factor determining an individual ballet dancer’s ultimate skill level was the total number of hours devoted to practice” and that there was “no sign of anyone born with the sort of talent that would make it possible to reach the upper levels of ballet without working as hard or harder than anyone else.” Not mentioned is the exact magnitude of the correlation—a value of .42, where 1.0 is perfect. The fact that the correlation was modest in magnitude means that factors not measured in the study—including heritable aptitudes—could have actually accounted for more of the differences in ballet skill than deliberate practice did. As it always is in scientific debates, the devil is in the details in the debate over the origins of expertise.

Ericsson and Pool also leave out a good deal of evidence that runs counter to the anti-talent argument. For example, they claim that professional baseball players have “no better eyesight than an average person,” but there is evidence to suggest otherwise. In a study published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology, Daniel Laby and colleagues assessed the vision of major and minor league baseball players in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization over the course of four spring training seasons. As David Epstein recounts in his book The Sports Gene, in the first year of the study the researchers used a standard test of visual acuity, and it turned out to be too easy. Over 80% of the players got a perfect score of 20/15, meaning that they could see at 20 feet what an average person can see at 15 feet. In the following seasons, using a custom test, Laby and colleagues found that 77% of the 600 eyes tested had visual acuity of 20/15 or better, with a median of about 20/13. Even for young adults, this is excellent vision. Overall, Laby and colleagues concluded that “[p]rofessional baseball players have excellent visual skills. Mean visual acuity, distance stereoacuity, and contrast sensitivity are significantly better than those of the general population.”

Another notable omission from Peak is a study of 18 prodigies by Joanne Ruthsatz and colleagues—to date, the largest study of the intellectual abilities of prodigies. (Given the rarity of prodigies, a sample size of 18 is very large in this area of research.) The researchers gave the prodigies a standardized IQ test, and found that all scored very high on working memory (most were above the 99th percentile, and the average score for the sample was in the top 1%). A major factor underlying the ability to acquire complex skills, working memory is substantially heritable. There is also no discussion of the landmark Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, started in the 1970s by the Johns Hopkins psychologist Julian Stanley and now co-directed by Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski at Vanderbilt. Now in its forty-fifth year, this longitudinal study has revealed that, even in the top 1%, cognitive ability in childhood is a significant predictor of objective occupational achievements in adulthood, such as earning advanced degrees, publishing scientific articles, and patent awards.

Based on our own evaluation of the evidence, we argue in a recent Psychological Bulletin article that training is necessary to become an expert, but that genetic factors may play an important role at all levels of expertise, from beginner to elite. There is both indirect and direct evidence to support this “multifactorial” view of expertise. (We call the model the Multifactorial Gene-Environment Interaction Model, or MGIM.) The indirect evidence comes in the form of large individual differences in the effects of training on performance. In other words, some people take much more training than other people to acquire a given level of skill. As it happens, Sakakibara’s pitch training study provides some of the most compelling evidence of this type. There was a large amount of variability in how long it took the children to pass the test for perfect pitch—from around 2 years to 8 years. As Sakakibara notes in her article, this evidence implies that factors other than training may be involved in acquiring perfect pitch, including genetic factors. This finding is consistent with the results of recent reviews of the relationship between deliberate practice and skill, which include numerous studies Ericsson and colleagues have used to argue for the importance of deliberate practice. Regardless of domain, deliberate practice leaves a large amount of individual differences in skill unexplained, indicating that other factors contribute to expertise.

The more direct evidence for the multifactorial view of expertise comes from “genetically informative” research on skill—studies that estimate the contribution of genetic factors to variation across people in factors that may influence expert performance. In a study of over 10,000 twins, two of us found that music aptitude was substantially heritable, with genes accounting for around half of the differences across people on a test of music aptitude. As another example, in a pioneering series of studies, the Australian geneticist Kathryn North and her colleagues found a significant association between a variant of a gene (called ACTN3) expressed in fast-twitch muscle fibers and elite performance in sprinting events such as the 100 meter dash. There is no denying the importance of training for becoming an elite athlete, but this evidence (which is not discussed in Peak) provides compelling evidence that genetic factors matter, too.

Based on this sort of evidence, we have argued that the experts are “born versus made” debate is over—or at least that it should be. There is no doubt that training is required to become an expert. Notwithstanding a report by North Korea’s state-run news agency that Kim Jong-il made five holes-in-one his first time playing golf and rolled a perfect 300 his first time bowling, no one is literally born an expert. Expertise is acquired gradually, often over many years.

However, as science is making increasingly clear, there is more to becoming an expert than training. Moving ahead, the goal for scientific research on expertise is to identify all of the remaining factors that matter.

its ridiculous people think so black and white about talent. Every body sees that Biles is a freak of nature made for her sport.
If I where a turner I would go nuts competing against this woman. Its just not fair. She has such a genetic advantage.
At school kids pick up on other peoples talents quite instinctively just like in the animal world.
You just know some people are way smarter, stronger, musical,  athletic etc than yourself.
At the same time we all have seen examples where an obsessive drive to achieve things can take people to a level never thougt possible.
Its scary so many very intellectual people seem to have a blind spot for obvious facts of live, living in a bubble where they actually believe in these extreme black or white ideas.
A lot of those types are totally buying all the TI stuff as a religion, to change the subject to swimming again.

Quite. The answer to nature vs nurture is nearly always "both". It's well known that Usain Bolt isn't the hardest-working sprinter in the world (he admits it himself). But, given his immense natural talent, he is hard-working enough.

I heard recently that Michael Phelps is rumoured to have a 12 litre lung capacity. The Olympic rower, Pete Reed, has a measured capacity of 11.68 litres. The average for an adult male is about 6 litres. Clearly no amount of training is going to give me lungs the size of Pete Reed's! In fact, I have a genetic condition (pectus excavatum) which reduces my lung capacity (and probably cardiac and pulmonary function too). However - and just to prove that genetics isn't everything - there is at least one Olympic swimmer with the same condition: US breaststroke medalist Cody Miller.

How these guys race to the finish after 10 K of swimming is simply unreal for normal people no matter how much they train.
Its simply the amount of raw power these guys have in spades thats unachievable with avarage talent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzJv-SZ41II

People tend to gravitate towards what they find rewarding,
What they are naturally good at.
Often you hear of younger siblings outdoing the naturally gifted elder, inspiration and genetics at work.

SA wrote:
Maybe its time to put the foot down this year and prove  adult slow learners can break 1.10m /100m.

Go for it Arnie!!!!

SA wrote:
Dont think he is a  child competetive swimmer but an adult learner.
His kick is also crap with his stiff ankles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF3VEFlQSJ4

Look at his swimming from 2009. This is clearly beginner style, Body is all over the place, dropped elbows, pulling over tge center,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP-9oWz0lic

Yes, however it turns out that:

- he started swimming in 1990 ( https://www.totalimmersion.net/forum/showpost.php?p=11949&postcount=20 )
- before TI he already swam 3k in 44 minutes ( https://www.totalimmersion.net/forum/showpost.php?p=8471&postcount=4 ) , which is 1:28/100m over 3k

Let's say, not a child competitive swimmer but neither a pure adult beginner.

Salvo

Reading those old threads, that Terencechi made some good contributions.

His old stroke before TI wasnt that bad despite the spaghetti midsection. He is back to that style for a large part with a better midsection and a better catch.
These are also the most important fundamentals of any strokestyle.