In the 90s I read an interview in The Swimming Times with a coach who said something like, ‘I use every device possible to minimize resistance and maximize streamlining’, in order to get kids moving faster. He coached several junior champions so he must have been doing something right? His tips for breaststroke included:

🤢Shrug the shoulders into the neck for a rounded back

🤢Hide the knee caps (in other words, tighten the buttocks and pull the knee caps towards the backs of the legs and towards each other, for streamlining)

🤢Rub the ribcage with the elbows, for more streamlining, when coming out for air

🤢Glide, ‘as though jumping through a flaming hoop’.

Alexander would have considered instructions like these dangerous because he believed that cultivated habits are the hardest to change.

When I last went for a swim with Cheryl, she said that there seemed to be a lot of tension in my right shoulder during my breaststroke, when pointing my arms forward in ‘the glide’. ‘Try not pointing your arms forward’, she suggested. So I tried letting my arms go forward without stretching them, keeping my back wide and shoulders quiet. But she could see I was still creating the same problem. ‘Try actually not pointing your arms’, she suggested. ‘But I’ve got to glide haven’t I?’ I asked. ‘You can glide without pointing your arms’, she said. And, cultivated habits being hard to change, I struggled to get my head round this.

But it subsequently occurred to me, you don’t even have to glide! It’s always useful, in Alexander work, to give something up, at least temporarily, that you feel you have to do. 

Following straightforward laws of anatomy – which Alexander did when he asked us to think, ‘neck free, head forward (and up), back lengthening and widening, knees forward and away’ – the head and the limbs should be in front of the back, not in line with it and definitely not behind it. In the support of the water, face down, this means the head is resting in the water, looking down, and arms and legs are hanging loose from the back, like tentacles.

Anything we do against our natural anatomy is asking for trouble. So stretching , tightening the shoulders and pointing the arms, pulling the head into the body, tightening the buttocks and ‘hiding the knee caps’, in the name of streamlining, are doings that need to be stopped.

So have a go at letting everything hang, forget about gliding and think like a jelly fish instead of trying to copy elite swimmers who’ve been told to do things like hide the knee caps. What does that change,  for your breath under the water, tension in your neck and back, your mental state and, finally, the actual quality of your movements? You might not win any races but if you’re feeling great in the water and doing yourself no harm, you are winning.