Swimming Made Easy: The Total Immersion Way for Any Swimmer to Achieve Fluency, Ease, and Speed in Any Stroke
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Автор: Terry Laughlin Об этой книгеSwimming Made Easy is guaranteed to help you swim better than ever in all four strokes. Refine your form and increase your pleasure with 10 lessons, illustrated with 150 surface and underwater photos. Ten chapters on self-coaching show you how to be your own best coach. A proven way to gain the knowledge to enjoy every stroke you ever take! SWIMMING MADE EASY? YOU MUST BE KIDDING! Countless millions around the world would love to be able to swim better -- not fast necessarily -- just efficiently and comfortably. But, for virtually all, swimming well enough to enjoy all its benefits remains an elusive goal. Too bad, because swimming can be uniquely beneficial – a non-pounding, joint-friendly fitness activity that exercises the entire body and is suitable for everyone from toddlers to seniors. Being able to swim well is a truly valuable gift – and an essential life skill. But here's the universal Catch 22: Humans are "hard-wired" to be inefficient in the water. Everything we do instinctively tends to result in clumsy flailing and exhaustion. Swimming really well requires expert instruction; the better the instruction, the more beneficial and satisfying your swimming experience. But traditional swimming instruction is almost universally ineffective, because it focuses on "Human Swimming" technique -- arm and leg churning, which just reinforces our inbred inefficiencies. As a result, "average" swimmers can only watch "good" swimmers with envy, assuming it takes "talent" -- or endless training -- to swim that well. The message of Terry Laughlin's groundbreaking new book, Swimming Made Easy, is that swimming well is not a gift reserved for a talented few, but something attainable by everyone. As U.S. Masters Coach of the Year Emmett Hines wrote: "Laughlin makes the effortless grace of elite swimmers accessible to 'average' swimmers with simple, logical, proven steps that make fluid, powerful swimming a HABIT rather than a chance encounter." This is the most hopeful message that lap, fitness or competitive swimmers or triathletes have ever heard. Until Laughlin's first book, Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster and Easier (1996), all previous books on swimming mainly recycled the same set of misleading and mistaken "rules" about what matters in swimming. They made the improvement process intimidating and confusing, and ultimately resulted in little progress. Laughlin's first book was an instant hit with readers because, as they reported, "It makes sense," and "This really works; I can feel a difference from the first lap." Where previous books had mainly prescribed laps and more laps or presented swimming technique as something akin to rocket science, Laughlin advised human swimmers to think and swim more like fish. Fishlike Swimming, as he dubbed his method, focuses on avoiding struggle and turbulence by learning to be balanced and "slippery" and learning to swim fluently before trying to swim far or fast. Since publication of the previous Total Immersion book, Laughlin and his associates have taught TI techniques to swimmers of all ages and abilities, from 4 years to 80-plus, from non-swimmers to Olympians and everyone in between. At every level the response has been enthusiastic. As JoAnn Della Torre, a swim instructor in Naperville, IL, said, "You can always spot a TI swimmer by his or her grace and flow." The new book, Swimming Made Easy, details the insights and lessons from thousands of teaching and learning experiences and breaks new ground in making the swimming-improvement process even simpler and more direct. It also provides foolproof steps and learning sequences for learning to be Fishlike in any stroke. Here's a sampling of some of the paradigm-smashing information in SME:
These examples are drawn from just the first half the book. The second half offers a detailed plan, with progressive and sequential how-to steps, that will allow any individual to become their "own best swimming coach." |