STAT News Review

Review by Ann James, MSTAT, editor, published in STAT (Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique) News, October 2006

This book started life as a series of 12 articles in British Runner magazine in 2004-5 and was published in one slim volume last year. After an Introduction on the holistic benefits of swimming, Part One, Swimming Fundamentals for Land Lovers, covers the three main strokes: backstroke, breaststroke, and front crawl. Two ‘lessons’, or chapters, are devoted to the last of these strokes, because of the complexities of the breathing. Part Two, Train without Strain, covers the practicalities of kitting yourself out, training regimes, and preventing injuries. Appendices describe the swimming holidays organised by the author and his approach to teaching children.

The sub-title of this book is Lessons for Land Lovers, and the original articles were aimed at non-Alexandrian runners, so it is full of reminders about letting go, allowing the water to support you, not being obsessed with your times, allowing the air to come in on its own, and so on. The final lesson of the book gives a possible eight-week training plan for a novice triathlete, and I was pleased to see that each week includes a day of rest!

As a fairly competent, fairly regular swimmer, but a non-athlete, I don’t really fit the profile of the target audience for this book. Nevertheless, after reading the relevant lesson, it was not too difficult to tweak my preferred stroke – breaststroke. The same goes for my backstroke. Front crawl, however, was a different matter. I am really a beginner in this stroke, and the breathing in particular has always been a mystery to me, so I was relieved to discover I was not alone. The author describes how “you will see people contorting their face, twisting their neck, lifting their head away from the surface and gasping as though this breath could be their last.” The secret, it seems, is to co-ordinate the breath with the rotation of the body which is going on anyway as part of the stroke. This may be obvious to many, but for me it was a revelation. Another useful idea, especially for someone like me who has a tendency to over-extend at the shoulders, is that of swimming along two railway tracks, rather than a monorail.

There are some lovely pictures of poised swimming, taken at various stages of all the different strokes. But in the limited space available in this book, it may not be possible to show or describe the complete sequence of movements for each stroke in such a way that the reader is likely to be able to perform it reasonably accurately. This, of course, is the problem with learning any practical skill from a book. Nevertheless, as the title implies, the fundamentals are all there, and with repeated attentive reading, followed by plenty of calm, means-whereby practice in the pool, maybe even I could learn to front crawl from one end of the pool to the other.