Different Strokes

Why Do Human Beings Find It So Incredibly Difficult to Swim?

-By Kim McDonald
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 11, 1999;
Of all the possible ways for us to get from here to there under our own power, swimming is by far
the least efficient. Sure, we can float, tread water or paddle on our backs with relative ease. But to
move through water at even a slow walking pace requires significantly more energy. In fact, world
champion swimmers can barely travel at 5 miles per hour, whereas a suitably motivated dolphin
can hit 25 mph.
The principal reason is that water is about a thousand times denser than air. Unlike running, cycling
or other common forms of human locomotion that transfer most of our muscle energy into forward
movement, swimming requires us to expend way more than 90 percent of our energy simply
overcoming fluid resistance.
Of course, the density also provides a few perks. It means we can float, more or less, near the
surface, depending on our proportion of body fat and the volume of air in our lungs. [click on
picture below.] And it allows us to position ourselves horizontally so we can at least move through
the water like a sleek racing boat or torpedo, rather than an upright statue or barge.
What determines the way we move? At its simplest, swimming is yet another manifestation of
Newton's Third Law of Motion: Our hands, arms and legs push against the water; simultaneously,
the water pushes back in an equal and opposite reaction, propelling us forward.
But there's much more to it than that. Many scientists contend that the principles that govern our
movement through this aqueous medium are, strangely enough, the same ones that keep an F-15 in
the air and allow motor boats to plow through the water. Fluid dynamics tell us that our motion
depends on two basic factors: propulsive forces that we exert and resistance, or drag, that we
encounter. No matter how streamlined we try to make ourselves, the drag is formidable. That's why
sheer strength won't make you a better swimmer and why a little knowledge of physics can come in
handy.
Olympic swimmers are able, at best, to convert only 9 percent of their energy into forward
movement while swimming the front crawl or freestyle, the fastest and most efficient of the four
competitive strokes. (On average, the butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke follow in speed and
efficiency.) Most of the rest of us use as much as 98 percent of our energy overcoming water
resistance.
What a Drag The main reason for this spectacular inefficiency is that our forward momentum is
limited by form drag, the resistance due to the shape of our bodies moving through the water. As we
move ahead, water pressure builds up in front of us; at the same time, we produce a large turbulent
area behind us, which has a much lower pressure. That pressure imbalance creates a force -- from
high pressure to low -- that tries to push us backward. Form drag increases with the square of the
velocity, and depends critically on the frontal area of the moving object.
That's why boat designers build racing hulls long and narrow, instead of short and stubby. And it
helps explain why many of the world's fastest swimmers look more like professional basketball
players than weightlifters. American swimmer Matt Biondi and Russian swimmer Alexander Popov,
Olympic gold medalists and world record- holders in the 100-meter freestyle, are perfect examples.
They are thin, long-limbed and stand at 6 feet 7 inches and 6 feet 6 inches, respectively. To
minimize form drag, competitive swimmers concentrate on pushing their torsos down in the water,
while keeping their hips up. This compensates for the natural buoyancy of the upper body, allowing
them to swim horizontally -- instead of diagonally, with their legs dangling downward from the
surface. That reduces the head-on or frontal area affected by drag. Many good freestyle and
backstroke swimmers have also learned to roll their bodies from side to side, lifting one shoulder
out of the water with each stroke. This results in a narrower body profile. It also lengthens their
reach, and hence total body length, making possible a longer and more efficient glide. (If you've
ever paddled two similar-shaped kayaks of different lengths you may have noticed that the longer
kayak, despite its greater weight and displacement of water, glides farther with each stroke of the
paddle.)
In addition, the side-to-side roll produces a twisting force that adds a rotational component in the
direction of travel. This helps to propel swimmers forward, like the twisting of a screw through
wood, and allows them to use their hip and torso muscles, as well as their arms and legs.
Competitive swimmers also try to minimize frictional drag, the "stickiness" of an object as it moves
through the water. A baggy swimsuit or excess body hair create rough surfaces that increase
frictional drag. So many swimmers use tight-fitting suits and often shave the hair on their bodies
before big races.
Making Waves Perhaps the most pernicious form of drag is wave drag. Unlike form drag, which
pulls us from the back, wave drag pushes from the high-pressure area we produce in front of us.
When we swim, splash or make any sort of movement in the water, we create waves. As we propel
ourselves through the pool at faster and faster speeds, the waves that form in front of us grow larger
and larger, building into a wall of water that limits our forward movement. Unlike most forms of
fluid drag, which grow as the square of the velocity, wave drag increases as the cube. So when you
double your speed through the water, the retarding force of wave drag increases eightfold.
Ted Isbell, a professional engineer who is also the swimming coach for Channel Islands Aquatics in
Oxnard, Calif., says many top swimmers discover that they can move faster by kicking underwater
for a considerable distance immediately after a turn (instead of rising quickly and swimming on the
surface) because wave drag is largely eliminated underwater. Isbell thinks underwater dolphin
kicking -- an undulating motion with both legs together -- may be one area where short, stocky
competitors could have an advantage over their taller, thinner rivals who have a decided advantage
at the surface. Because an object moving underwater is affected largely by frictional drag, he says,
minimizing its surface area reduces the resistance it will encounter: "Since a short, fat object has
less surface area than a long, slim object, ship designers have designed submarines with short,
round, fat hulls, while they have designed surface ships with longer, slimmer hulls."
Another factor affecting wave drag is how smoothly one moves on the surface. Because waves
carry energy, the waves that a swimmer generates from any jerky or unnecessary movements in the
water represent losses of energy. That's why the muscular guy swimming in the next lane, thrashing
his arms around like windmills in an effort to speed up, doesn't seem to be making as much forward
progress as he should.
In fact, scientists studying athletes competing in the 1996 Olympics found that swimmers who used
fewer strokes per lap were actually the ones most likely to win. Popov, the current world record-
holder in the 100-meter freestyle, concentrates so much on maintaining perfect form and
minimizing the number of strokes he uses to cover each pool length that he never seems to be
swimming hard when training.
As a result, he has been able to minimize both form and wave drag, which become increasingly
more important at race speeds. His coach, Gennadi Touretski, bases his unorthodox method of
training on the basic principles of hydrodynamics and on watching fish swim. Fish and other
animals, Touretski says, increase their speed by covering more ground with each movement, rather
than increasing their rate of movement. When Popov won his first Olympic gold medal at the 1992
Olympic Games by beating Biondi in the 50-meter freestyle, he covered the distance in 33 strokes
compared with Biondi's 36.
Terry Laughlin, founder and director of Total Immersion Swimming, a swimming-improvement
program based in New Paltz, N.Y., tells swimmers that by counting their strokes they can eventually
learn to eliminate needless movement and maximize their efficiency.
"Stroke counting is important because it's the clearest marker of how well you're using your
energy," he says. "Only about 2 percent of the human race swims with instinctively long strokes.
The rest of us have powerful instincts telling us to swim faster by stroking faster." Popov and other
elite swimmers "can easily swim the length of a 25-yard pool in seven or eight strokes," says
Laughlin. "Whenever I count strokes during lap swim at the local Y, the average stroke count is 25
or higher."
When Push Comes to Shove If increasing stroke rate won't make you faster, what about pulling
harder? Or, like a kayaker with a bigger paddle, pushing more water behind you? When I began
swimming competitively back in the 1960s, coaches viewed swimmers as paddleboats propelled by
the backward push of water. The most efficient way of moving forward, they told us, was to grip the
water with your hand and pull straight back from your head to your hip. High-speed underwater
films of the best competitive swimmers at the time, however, revealed that their hands followed a
weaving, S-shaped path. Then in the 1970s, James "Doc" Counsilman, head coach at Indiana
University who achieved fame as Mark Spitz's coach, filmed swimmers with flashlights on their
hands in a darkened pool and discovered that most of the hand and foot motions of competitive
swimmers were up and down or side to side, rather than front to back.
That provided evidence to scientists that swimmers were moving themselves forward primarily
through lift, the same principle that keeps airplanes aloft. Airplane wings have a curved upper
surface, so air moving over the top travels a bit farther before reaching the back of the wing than
does ir that flows directly under the wing.
Daniel Bernoulli, an 18th century Swiss scientist, discovered the principle that faster-moving fluid
has lower pressure. In airplanes, this puts the lower pressure above the wing and higher pressure
below. The resulting force causes the plane to rise, or lift.
Bernoulli's principle also applies to liquids, but for swimmers the lift is horizontal, rather than
vertical. This is because lift propels a body in the direction perpendicular to the force of drag
resulting from the high- and low-pressure differences. And the drag forces involved in propulsion of
swimmers, according to some sports scientists, are produced primarily by the up and down motions
of the hands and feet.
Some sports scientists also contend that swimmers move forward like propellers through the water
by changing the pitch of their feet and hands as they move through their S-shaped stroke pattern.
About 80 percent of the propulsive power in freestyle comes from the arm strokes, they estimate,
while about 20 percent comes from the kick. The downward motion of the kick, like the downward
sweep of a dolphin's tail, produces a pressure difference above and below the foot. As the foot
moves over more distance, which can be accomplished by bending the knees and increasing ankle
flexibility, propulsive force is enhanced.
The downward motion of the hand, which is pitched at an angle as it enters the water, allows water
to travel faster over the knuckles than the palm -- thus producing a low-pressure area above and a
high-pressure area below. According to Ernest Maglischo, a scientist and swimming coach at
Arizona State University, as a swimmer's hands and feet change direction and pitch, the water
flowing around them is also changing direction, so that they act like the blades of a propeller.
Or Maybe Not A number of other scientists don't buy these explanations. They say the surfaces of
the hands and feet aren't sufficiently large or curved to produce enough lift to propel swimmers
forward at the speeds they are swimming. And because swimmers don't spin their arms in the
shoulder joints and complete only a half-stroke at a time, they say the propeller analogy isn't valid
either.
While some scientists have gone back to the idea that propulsion is due simply to backward motions
of the arms, most others admit that they have no idea. "To be honest, I don't think anyone has a
handle on it," concedes Isbell. However swimmers may be propelling themselves by the actions of
their hands and feet, Laughlin contends that it is aided in the freestyle and backstroke by "core body
propulsion," achieved by rolling their hips and shoulders with every stroke.
"Swimmers are dynamic," says Laughlin, "not static," and "body rotation in swimming generates
power just as it does in baseball, golf or tennis (or in throwing a javelin or a punch): A
biomechanical chain reaction occurs, in which the legs propel the hips, which power the torso,
which drives the last link in the kinetic chain -- the shoulders and arms.
"The most powerful movements don't start and stop in any one joint; when we employ precise body
mechanics, power ripples through our bodies like it does through a cracked whip until it finally
arrives at the point where it's released. "But there is one key difference in how swimmers use the
kinetic chain compared to land-based athletes. On land, the chain reaction starts with twisting the
body away from the direction of the swing while the legs are anchored to the ground, an action
known as elastic loading, similar to a rubber band being stretched. The hip cock acts like the handle
of a whip, throwing the energy upward through torso, shoulders and arms with increasing speed and
power.
"Since swimmers cannot anchor their feet to the ground, the hips cannot act as a whip handle,
making it essential that you focus on moving the entire torso. When we are swimming with
maximum effectiveness, it is torso rotation that thrusts the recovering hand forward into the water at
the same time that it drives the propelling hand back. "We increase stroking power not by lifting
weights, but by shifting from passive body roll to dynamic body rotation, pressing into service the
stronger muscles of the torso that feed power to the arms." For most of us, however, swimming can't
be perfected by thinking about every movement we make. It has to be drilled into our nervous
systems by constant practice and, most importantly, by a good coach.
"The best swimming is more art than science, as exemplified in the world's best swimmers, who
demonstrate a grace, economy and flow in their swimming that is incomprehensible to most of the
rest of us mortals," says Laughlin. Kim McDonald is a science writer at the Chronicle of Higher
Education.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company