I started swimming using TI a few years ago, after several years of trying to figure out a good from by myself. Based on my experience, I think TI has given some positive contribution to swimming, but offset by what I think is a wrong idea of what efficient swimming is. First the good...
The positive contribution was to illustrate, in terms that one can easily understad, some basic freestyle form. For example, before TI I used to hear widely differing opinions on how much one should rotate during freestyle or backstroke. For example, I have a friend, who in her teens, more than 15 years ago, used to do competitive swimming, which swims flat and does not rotate much. That way of swimming, while good for her, was too hard for me. By ‘allowing’ rotation in free and back, TI has made things a lot easier for me. Of course, this is not only a TI approach, but Terry Laughlin has made these pieces of information more accessible.
Now, the bad...
Several years after, I find several negative aspects in my swimming that I believe derive, at least in part, from TI, as they are largely related to the several hypotheses about swimming that are ingrained in TI, like press buoy, leading with the elbow, glide, 2bk is preferable, etc. For example, after 2 years swimming with a 2bk, I found a flutter is more comfortable for me in the pool. It is different in the sea. I still kept a horizontal body position with a 2bk, but it just feels easier, and more rythmycal, with a light flutter. I can imagine som Ti swimmer saying ‘oh you are unbalanced, crap, you are doing it wrong’. Very well, so are many others. And it’s not that we have all spent 10 minutes on it. And it’s not that we are all incapable, as we can otherwise bike, run or do some other more complex things in life rather well.
Another example: the glide kills the flow of the stroke. It just destroys it. Water is just too dense to glide effectively, as it has been discussed here before. I find that by keeping my lead arm moving, the stroke flows much better and in spite of a higher stroke count, I can swim longer, faster and more comfortably. Isn’t this, by definition, a more efficient stroke?
I agree with a previous poster that TI is an elegant hypothesis, but falsified by the experience of many swimmers and coaches. Apart from Shinij and Terry, I am still to see a TI swimmer who is (i) smooth AND (ii) fast. Most people who swim TI appear to me to be imprisoned into some analytical, dogmatic box. They justify this, as hotman does, by postulating that most people practise wrongly. When I was practicing martial arts, there was always this talk of remote masters in inaccessible regions of China imparting exclusice knowledge for a select few. Well, that was not Kung fu, if the Kung fu 99.9% of the other practicioners in the world was something different. Now tell me, if the vast majority of TI swimmers are slow, and frankly, not that smooth at all in the water, where is the real TI? If it is some ideal, platonic form then that is no good to me.
The thing that bugs me the most is this arrogant and vaguely puritan idea that TI is THE minful approach (whatever mindful means), while other swimmers just splash and plod along, without regard to form. I don’t see this. Instead, I see many young kids in the local pool, and many other pools, having fund and swimming very, very well. They don’t splash much, they don’t appear ungracious, and they can be fast. I don’t hear them going overly paranoid over years about the angle of the forearm respect to the head or the absolutely perfect timinh required for a kick, and how everything has to be perfect to breathe comfortably (to see this, check the TI board, any randomly picked thread should do).
They swim just fine, and kick just fine, and breath just fine. Without this entire obsession about years of training, neural imprinting, etc. that seems to me to be an excuse for the fact that TI simply is neither easy to learn, nor effective. In fact, I found at some point that all the attention to the details of the stroke can bordeline the obsessive, and make it very, very hard to achieve the purported smoothness. And I know enough fast and clever athletes who have put some effort into TI, and are otherwise successful in other techincal endevours, but somehow, with TI seem to just keep trying but going nowhere, until they give up and then get better again.
Surely, the proof of the pudding should be in the eating…