How to be Idle in the Water.  Ian Cross

"All strenuous exercise will reinforce the existing coordination of the body or the lack of it. The amount of mal-coordination present and the strenuousness of the exercise will determine the good or harm that will result" Patrick MacDonald, The Alexander Technique As I see It

Tom Hodgkinson, author of How to be Idle, said, “All good ideas come from idleness”.  This fits with the principle of The Alexander Technique. When you’re trying too hard to make something happen, your ability to think is impaired. The more I work with people in the water, the more I see this to be true. And when I observe people swimming in public, it’s even more obvious.

In The Art of Swimming and Master the Art of Swimming Steven Shaw talks about the importance of exploration, learning through play and working on yourself in the water. He taught me, “All you need is a stretch of calm water and an open mind.”

The aim of  Alexander Technique work is to ‘carry out an activity against the habit of life’ (F.M. Alexander).  As Steven Shaw points out in his books, it is very useful to complete a sequence just once, for example, one complete breast stroke or one arm change in front crawl.  Swimming or learning to swim shouldn’t just be about getting exercise to gain aerobic fitness.  It is an opportunity to improve our co-ordination, to organise our awareness. We should aim to get out of the water in a better mental and physical state than when we got in. In other words, we don’t want swimming to excite our fear reflexes.

I try to get across to Swimming without Stress pupils the value, and the beauty, of ‘carrying out an activity’ in the water against the habit of life. The trouble with people who want to learn to swim or to improve their swimming is often their eagerness to be swimming up and down, clocking lengths, because that’s what everybody else does. To go to the water and be prepared not to swim lengths, at least until you’re satisfied that you can do so without strain, takes a certain amount of boldness, a willingness to go against the grain.  But, as far as we’re concerned, if you plan a sequence of movements, such as getting the head out to inhale in breaststroke without straining your neck, followed by an effortless frog-like kick which moves you forward in a new glide, and carry it out successfully, you can get in the shower and go home!

Since I met Steven Shaw thirteen years ago I have been working like this, in small, calm stretches of water on a daily basis. And it’s done much more for my swimming and for me than all the lane swimming I used to do.

A key feature of swimming, which is emphasised by swimmers who use the Alexander Technique,  is that every propulsive movement is preceded by a rest phase. Action comes from rest.When we’re working on carrying out an activity against the habit of life in the water, this is the thing we need to remember. The habit of life is “to do”. We’re not good at resting, at idling, at non-doing. We prefer to ‘do’. Most recreational and fitness swimmers aren’t very good at the non –doing element of swimming which ease in the water depends on. So here are a couple of hints at non-doing for the breast-stroke.

1. As you raise the head to breathe after a breast stroke glide, work on not tightening your neck and doing nothing with the arms until you’ve moved your head to look at your hands.  99 people out of 100 will move the arms too quickly, before moving the head, and too forcefully. This means that the head won’t lead – it is a principle of all animal movement that the head leads and the body follows – and the arms, instead of supporting the process of breathing, will hinder it. The universal pattern which gets in the way of breast stroke breathing – the ‘habit of life’ that we’re trying to break- is a primitive or baby reflex called the moro reflex. Anxiety about breathing makes us ‘do’ too much and what we do is tighten the neck, pull the head back forcefully against the spine, tighten the arms and pull them back. Recognising this tendency is half the battle. But even good swimmers using breast stroke repeat this mistake over and over again. More of the same – swimming length after the length, hoping that the relaxation will come - won’t stop you doing it. But a bad back might.

2.  If you attend to your neck, and allow your spine to lengthen as you raise your head to breathe, there’ll be a connection, right down through your spine, of the head and pelvis. As your eyes, ears, nose and mouth break the surface, your pelvis will sink. If you don’t tighten your lower back, the hips will be free so the non-doing element of the breast stroke kick- the ‘recovery’ where the hips and knees bend ready for the kick- will happen very easily. Most people don’t give this connection a chance to work.  If you pull your head out of the water, you’re likely also to pull the legs up. And internally, you’ll be, as my Alexander teacher once said to me, “all over the place”.