I've just taken up swimming myself, and this is exactly what I was looking for: a good technique which builds up your stroke. I'll definitely be trying it out.
For anyone out there who wants to start exercising but hasn't started, give swimming a try. One tip that changed my mind completely about swimming: wear goggles. I'd never worn them before, but it really made swimming much funner for me.
I just started swimming yesterday. Do you recommend getting a coach or can one learn swimming by himself? How long does it typically to start swimming? I've just learnt to swim at the moment.
If you can spend the money, get a coach that will take a video of your stroke above and below water. The feedback from watching those videos will be invaluable.
Learning swimming is like learning Lisp. The ultimate objective is grokking the 'glide', which is similar to that 'profound enlightenment experience' you get when finally grokking Lisp.
Prior to that, you struggle to push yourself through the water, fighting with every stroke and kick. After, you're just sliding through the water, letting the water do almost all the work, and you hardly even have to kick anymore (more to stabilize your body and provide torque to your stroke than to propel).
The key is to understand that the longer a vessel in the water is relative to its width, the faster it can go in a straight line with the same propulsive input. This works with people too. So when you swim you want to make yourself as long as possible for as long as possible.
You do this by keeping one arm extended straight in front of you, perfectly inline with the side of your body, until you bring the next arm forward to replace. Pull with the first, keep the second extended until you can bring the first back up to replace it again, repeat.
Also, rotate your body into the water. Submerge the shoulder and side of your body of whichever arm is extended. Rotate back each time you switch arms. This keeps the longest part of your body constantly in the water.
It feels weird and unnatural, until you start feeling yourself gliding (by 'glide', I mean keeping your momentum between strokes), and that's the point of enlightenment.
Of course, you have to do other things as well, like keep your entire body in as straight a line as possible. Many fail at this by keeping their head and shoulders too high, which pushes their waist and abdomen down into the water, creating too much hydrodynamic drag to glide.
Total Immersion fixes this with their 'Pressing the T' idea. Eg, your shoulders form the horizintal bar of the T and your spine forms the vertical bar. Your center of buoyancy is somewhere in the middle of verticle bar, perhaps a little toward the top. If you force yourself to press the horizontal part down into the water, it rotates your lower part upwards (like a fulcrum around your center of buoyancy).
That keeps your upper and lower body more equally submerged, reducing your hydrodynamic drag and better enabling you to glide.
If you have trouble mastering this on your own, then a coach would be good. Other alternatives are to join the local US Masters Swim Team (where I first heard of Total Immersion), or a local, well-organized triathlon team. Alot of Tri teams will have swimming workshops where they video your stroke, have a pro swimmer/coach critique and fix it, then make you practice it.
Swimming is generally the most difficult part of tri's for most people to learn, so the teams that are halfway serious devote alot of attention to improving their members' swimming.
For anyone out there who wants to start exercising but hasn't started, give swimming a try. One tip that changed my mind completely about swimming: wear goggles. I'd never worn them before, but it really made swimming much funner for me.