Understanding Swimming

If you were to distill books on swimming down to the absolute bare essentials, which ones would end up on your shelves? A search in Amazon books for 'swimming' resulted in 168,168 'finds' although the symetry of the total number makes me somewhat suspicious. When you sort the list by bestsellers the first 'real' swimming book is Terry Laughlin's Total Immersion at number 257. Barnes and Noble ('the Web's premier destination for books') turns up a mere 1,758 but second on their best seller list is the splendidly titled My Boys Can Swim!: The Official Guy's Guide to Pregnancy.

There must have been thousands of swimming books published since the first in 1538 by German professor of languages, Nicolas Wynman, but what are the essential ones from a coaching viewpoint; that's today's question?

In order of date of publication I would go with:

The Science of Swimming (1967)
James 'Doc' Counsilman

This book revolutionised swim coaching. Some of the concepts and theories are somewhat dated now but it's still the single most influential book ever published on swim coaching. Strangely, you can pick up used ones for peanuts on the Web. I was privileged to meet Doc a couple of times and his quip, "I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken', still makes me smile.



Howard Firby on Swimming (1975)
Howard Firby

Probably the most unknown and important, paradigm-changing book ever published on swimming. If you want to know where Bill Boomer and Milt Nelms got their ideas, look no further. I used to sit on the pool deck in Vancouver listening to Howard talk and watching him mould his legendary plasticine models, knowing I was in the presence of a genius. Only 2,000 copies were ever printed so you need a water-diviner, metal-detector, tarot-card reader, archaeologist, a tuned-in medium and lottery-winning luck to find one. I have two copies ... and the answer to the next question? 'No.'

Howard also gave me original 35mm slides of every illustration in the book plus additional ones he didn't use. They need printing and mounting as a display somewhere.

Swimming Faster (1982)
Ernie Maglischo

This book slapped everyone across the face in 1982 as much as Counsilman's did in 1967. I remember the first time I saw and handled it as though it was yesterday; I was on camp in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and it had been published only a day or so earlier. I hurriedly bought a copy, devoured it and have been influenced ever since. (Image courtesy of Dave Pease because I have no idea where my copy is!)




Maglischo followed up with Swimming Even Faster, a development of the first book, and Swimming Fastest, a complete re-write running to a Harry Potter-length 790 pages. In this book Maglischo owned up to a huge mistake in the earlier books where he advanced arguments for 'lift' theory of propulsion which misled coaches for years. His U-turn is recognised as one of the bravest admissions in coaching.

For my money the first book is the best. It's split into two major sections, physiology and technique; the technique chapters are classical, with their step-by-step analysis and description; unsurpassed in my opinion.

Coaching the Young Swimmer (1986)
Kurt Wilke & Orjan Madsen

This book should be chained to the wrist of every age group coach world-wide. If you want the definitive model of long-term swimmer development, this is it. Out of print and rare as hen's teeth on the Web, but search hard and be prepared to pay; it's worth it. Kurt is an absolute master of coach education and swimming knowledge and Orjan, currently heading up German Swimming and a best friend of mine, has taught me more than anyone else about this sport.

The Science of Winning (2000)
Jan Olbrecht

I'm lucky enough to be acknowledged in the introduction to this book as partly responsible for publication. I first met Jan when I was visiting Orjan Madsen (see above) in Cologne in the mid-1980's. Orjan was Jan's PhD supervisor and they were researching lactate dynamics. I think I learned more in one week than in any other single week of my life.

This book, currently out of print but soon to be republished, popularised a concept little known to the coaching community; capacity and power. In 1991 I had identified that the energy delivery systems could be developed in both capacity and power and many years later, following the publication of Jan's book, I conceived the idea of encapsulating it all on 'one piece of paper'; The Cone! The Science of Winning is not easy to read, being highly scientific and detailed but, if you are serious about 'understanding swimming', it's well worth the effort.

Conclusion
Other coaching books may be interesting and informative (especially one from 1970 by the current agent of the former England football manager, Sven Goran Eriksson, with me on the cover!), but these five are essential. Interestingly there's a big 14-year gap between Coaching the Young Swimmer in 1986 and The Science of Winning in 2000 whereas the other gaps are much smaller; maybe not a lot was learned in the 1990's. It would be neat to correlate changes in world swimming standards with the publication date of these books. I wonder what the 'lead-time' is between revolutionary ideas, their dissemination, their practical implementation and the 'scores on the boards' results?