MC Breathing Jill.hu

[Admin Mediterra]

[Jill Hummelstein]

 

Hi Mat.

My first week consisted of acquainting myself with the material–still not finished with that. One subject leads to another and I follow the links. One link leads to another. In short, I tried without fully preparing the Attention Practice 1.1 swim.

 

 

My main observation is that yes indeed I made progress on keeping my head level when I turn to breathe, reaching up with my mouth instead of my head and starting to bring awareness to how much I exhale through my nose. This self coaching stuff is cool as all get out. Very profound.

And I’m up for the plethora of information on the subject of what it means to self coach. Limiting the skills in the Attention 1.1 set to ten minute sets is key. Either I end a set with a healthy neck and a relaxed mind, yet hungry to learn more about each of those skills.

And in the case of the exhalation, I cannot figure out how much to exhale and at what rate yet.

But this is the first time I have focused so intently on the exhalation and I am very interested in how to learn what amount to breathe out in order to have a successful inhalation. And how to fit it into the rhythm of the whole stroke. I’m engaged in the process and see my failure to perform this skill as pointing me to what I need to work on.

 

Already I feel more smooth, balanced and freed from a stiff neck. On the other hand, everything else (i.e. targets, wide elbow swing, pause with hip at the entry) falls by the wayside as I focus on the skills in 1.1. This is a little worrisome, that my SPL shoots up. Still, the material is fascinating enough for me to want to keep at it.

 

In regard to the baseline test swim, my questions are:

 

 

1. I cannot swim 1 x 100 comfortably. I can force myself do 100’s and I have in the past, but I will probably not be anywhere near a state of ease. Maybe this is why I stop myself? I’m not willing to pass through unease to get to ease? Anyway 50’s I can do so so. 75’s are a stretch but sometimes I can pull them off with a low SPL. Do you think I can perform this test doing 16 x 50 with 10 second rests?

 

2. Or I could not complete the test as you describe and still take the first three measurements. I don’t have a swim watch for the last two.

 

I think this course is great and I’m psyched to learn how to breathe.

 

 

[Jill Hummelstein]

 

Baseline Test Swim on1.29.17:

 

 

Total time:17.51. Counting was a little fuzzy at times. I might have swam two to four extra laps but we’ll leave it at this.

 

 

4 x 200 with 10 second rests

 

 

Average SPL: 22 in a 25 yard pool

 

 

I was surprised my arms were not tired. And how much more stable and balanced I was since the last time I was on a masters’ team and did yardage.

 

 

Halfway through breathing was not easy. I wasn’t getting enough air, gulping on the inhalation and breathing out to hard on the exhalation.

 

 

I was not that tired and I suspected that the way I approached the test was off. So I swam some 3 x 100 and it was easy and faster and I could maintain focal points. 50’s were also a breeze and I was considerably faster. What I suspected was that I slowed down too much for the test because I was worried about not being able to do the distance. Slowing down took me out of an easy breathing pattern and I couldn’t find a good rhythm to my stroke.

 

Now that I know I can swim 4 x 200 I will try to not to hold myself back just so I can make the distance. This is going to be a huge learning curve for me. I’m not sure how to pace myself if I go beyond drills and start to add in yardage.

 

 

[Mat Hudson]

Hi Jill,

FIRST TEST

You need to set up a test situation that you feel can actually perform, even though it may provoke a little failure. As noted, you want it to reveal specific weaknesses from those failures, but overall, the test needs to be within your range of capabilities.

So, breaking it up into 50s is fine. Establish clear pattern that has a certain amount of rest and certain amount of work, so that we can compare results next time.

Let’s say you did 16x 50 with 20 seconds rest the first time. The next time, when you feel stronger and more skilled, you can either reduce the amount of rest, or increase the repeat distance and if you accomplished the test with the same sense of effort, this would be an indicator of progress, because you accomplished the same amount of total work with less rest and felt just as comfortable or more so.

Or you could set the test to challenge you just past your comfortable distance with a set like 10x 75 (total 750)

You may find that after 4 or 5 of those 75s that you actually get into a better rhythm and it starts feeling better on that 3rd length.

CHALLENGE LEVEL IN PRACTICE

You will need to modify the assigned repeat distances in practice to fit your weakest link – you’ve identified the approximate distance at which you start to struggle significantly – that 50-75 range.

But you need to make a guess as to what it is that triggers your sense of struggle or stress at that point.

The fact is – you were swimming much farther than 100m continuous when we were in the sea in Kas. So, this urges us to consider what it is about swimming in the pool makes going past that distance so stressful? Is it the way you are exchanging air (inhale, exhale)? Is it something to do with turns at the wall? Is is something to do with swimming between walls? (many of us feel compelled to swim harder in the pool because the walls make us feel more ‘destination’ oriented – ‘gotta get to that wall!’ so the effort level is higher without realizing it)

I have no doubt you are actually capable of swimming 500+m continuously, but something is tripping a psycho-somatic response in the pool.

WALK-SWIM

What we are looking for is your ‘walk-swim’ gear –  just like you could walk a marathon if you felt too tired to run, so too, there is this low-effort rhythm that we want to find for you that enables you to just keep going and going, if you choose.

Your appearance while swimming looks quite good for the purposes that I don’t see a technical reason why you should be to tired after 50. So, it makes me suspect internal things – tension, breath management, and mind, and subconscious emotional reactions to chemical changes in the body under sustained effort.  (interesting how swim coaching leads to psychology! I should get another degree…)

The purpose of this course is to go through technical pieces, the technical foundation under the act of breathing to

1) reduce you respiration intensity – use less effort to swim, less effort to breath and you just don’t need to breathe as much!

2) make it easier to get to air so that it causes less and less disruption to your flow through the water.

These will have an effect on your speed, your endurance, your sense of effort, and your emotional experience.

So, you just need to work through the pieces, piece-by-piece and see what strengths and weaknesses you discover, and let the process bring about a good composite result toward the end when the pieces weave together to make #1 and #2 happen.

COMPETITION FOR WORK ON OTHER SKILLS

I hear this concern from others too – you start concentrating on breathing skills and you notice other skills that require your focus seem to degrade. You know you can’t focus on everything at once, so how do you work on breathing but not lose in those other areas?

First, breathing is priority because poor breathing causes so many problems with energy waste, stress, and takes up mental/emotional space. Get this puzzle solved (or at least greatly improved) and you free up so many more resources to use when you go back to work on the other skills.

Second, easier breathing is totally dependent on your most fundamental freestyle skills – you must pay attention and work on the most important features of your body position and movement patterns – all those things we work on in Superman, Skate and Recovery drills. So, those most essential pieces are going to be protected and improved when you do thorough work on breathing.

This then puts those ‘other’ skills into a different category – other skills like kick, catch are advanced skills that are also dependent on that same foundation. You may not be able to focus on the kick or the catch while working on breathing, and you may feel that those suffer because of it. But you are keeping the foundation tuned, and likely any improvements on the foundation which benefit breathing will also directly benefit kicking and catch as well. It’s a win-win.

Bottom line – you’ve felt motivated to work on breathing right now by some high price you’ve paid for having inferior breathing. You’ve just got to focus on this right now and set aside concern for any other advanced skills – you can work on those next, once you acquire improvement in this breathing section first.

First things first.

One thing at a time, in sequence of priority.

 

[Mat Hudson]

I wrote the previous comments in the context of your first report. And now I will make these in context of the second…

BASELINE TEST SWIM on 1/29

So, in the absence of my reply you pushed yourself and did 4x 200 somehow. Perhaps that was a good thing!

We see that you can swim past 75. Besides breathing harder, what did you experience in your body or mind past that point as you were swimming these 200s? What do you think is underneath that symptom of breathing harder?

You noted that you didn’t feel so ‘tired’ – in terms of muscle tiredness, or overall energy depletion? Yet, something was making you breath harder as you got half-way into the test swim.

How much rest did you take between those 200s?

You may feel ‘failure’ or weakness in some form in all the performance systems, but we’re trying to identify what the weakest member may be – metabolic, muscular, motor, or mind.

If all you’ve done is very short pieces (50 or less), but you’ve done many of those each practice and practice many days per week then you must have some sort of ‘fitness’ that is specific to that kind of task – your are fit in a narrow range. It may be that you just need to go into that discomfort of working on slightly larger pieces and expand the range at which your body and mind are comfortable working – all sorts of changes will need to be provoked and repeatedly, regularly provoked in order for your body and mind to make the adaptations which will turn 100-200 swimming into something more comfortable.

I do think that it will be easier to move from a 200 swimmer to an 800 swimmer than it is to move from 50 swimmer to 200.

So, with that said, if you feel my interpretation fits close enough, you may just need to embrace  these longer repeats with all the initial physical discomfort, but go into it as an explorer rather than a slave (to the strict assignment). You are still in control and can make adjustments by your own judgment in order to keep yourself in that sweet spot of challenge in each practice. I think you know what that is when you get into it.

 

 

[Jill Hummelstein]

Week Two going into Week Three:

Breathing was hard from the beginning.

It could have been I was intimidated. Or I am not conditioned, despite swimming three times a week and running three times a week. Sometimes I hold my breath when I take off from the wall and approach the wall.  When I leave the wall I blow out too hard through my nostrils. I definitely lose my breath then. And start to gulp rather than sip.  Then a cycle of gulping and blowing out too hard starts. It’s hard to get out of this cycle.  More difficult to breathe to the right. Balance is off. I over rotate my head. I don’t get enough air.  Half the way down a length I get out of breath.  When I breathe to the left side only I can breathe a little easier but not all the time. Breathing to the right side only doesn’t allow me to catch my breath.  When I go down to 25’s, 50’s it’s easier to breathe. I think. I need to verify.   When I focus on something else besides the 3 focii in MCB 1.1 it’s easier to breathe.

 

I did the above test 2.5.17. Yesterday, 2.8.17 I swam 1 x 100 at 3.59.

I lose stamina and effortless breathing around 75’s. My arms tire. A feeling of not moving. I lose form. My spl shoots up from 19 to 23 or 24. My legs sink.

When I go back to 25’s or 50’s I regain my breath and my spl goes back to 19. I glide and use less effort.

Here are possible guesses as to what is happening:

1. I have been sick with the flu for over a month. It is low grade but it does effect my lungs and overall energy. But because I’ve trained for so long with focus, swimming, or running, is the only time I feel good. All else–the coughing, the lack of energy– goes away. To focus with my mind while using my body has always made me feel good.

2. I have a significant injury to my TFL, QL, glut medias on the left side.

3. Perhaps I’m not in shape and I need to inject more interval training in my workouts.

4. I have lost effortless breathing in both swimming and running my entire life. My breathing pattern might be very off as a lifelong habit. And my breathing pattern might be off in daily life as well. I notice I don’t always breathe fully as I go about my life.I have had a fair amount of trauma. My anxiety might be chronically high. Swimming always soothed me until I tried longer distances.

I’ve made a little progress since my last swim test. I don’t hold my breath coming toward and away from the wall.

If I find my stoke falling apart while I focus on the points in 1.1 I shift attention to what I think is off and that helps my stamina, which helps me breathe easier

I slow down and my tempo and that slightly helps.

I breath easier to the right and that slightly helps.

I try to soften the tension in my arms. I don’t know if that helps.

When I focus on other points besides the focii in MCB I breathe easier.

Possible fixes: I have been to a physician and he has confirmed an unusual tightness in my diaphram. He also thinks I might be iron deficient, which would affect my ability to absorb oxygen. He took a blood draw. I will get the results next week. He said my lungs are week. Another physician told me many years ago that my lung capacity was very low. He measured it with an instrument.

Morally, I’m at a low point.  This could be because I’ve been sick for five weeks. And I watch people swim back and forth and I feel left out.

I think going from 25’s and 50’s up to 200’s was too much. I could do it but it was not effortless and I could not breathe easily. My plan is to work up to 100’s.

 

 

[Jill Hummelstein]

I am resending you the first part of my notes that got scrambled when I pressed the “submit” button:

 

Week Two going into Week Three:

1. 4 x 200 minute rest

Start at 30

1 X 200=33.53

1×200=38.43

1×200=48.32

 

Notes on this test:Breathing was hard from the beginning. It could have been I was intimidated. Or I am not conditioned, despite swimming three times a week and running three times a week. Sometimes I hold my breath when I take off from the wall and approach the wall. When I leave the wall I blow out too hard through my nostrils. I definitely lose my breath then. And start to gulp rather than sip. Then a cycle of gulping and blowing out too hard starts. It’s hard to get out of this cycle. More difficult to breathe to the right. Balance is off. I over rotate my head. I don’t get enough air. Half the way down a length I get out of breath. When I breathe to the left side only I can breathe a little easier but not all the time. Breathing to the right side only doesn’t allow me to catch my breath. When I go down to 25’s, 50’s it’s easier to breathe. I think. I need to verify.  When I focus on something else besides the 3 focii in MCB 1.1 it’s easier to breathe.

[Mat Hudson]

Hi Jill,

Just as you described in the ‘About Mindfulness’ comment, I suspect that you need to dial in your approach to the time in the water, which will put you in a better mode when starting to swim. And that starting mode should be in the ‘walk-like’ way of swimming that you could do for hours if needed… or we need to work to develop that mode so it is always available to you.

And, third, to identify what you can use as your ‘reset routine’ whenever you lose that mode while in the midst of your practice. It is something like a drill or simplified action that brings your body back into your control and your mind back into peace, into this moment.

Things to develop:

1. The approach
2. The walk-swim mode
3. The reset routine

This is an outline anyone and everyone should have (for the whole variety of life events!).

[Jill Hummelstein]

Nothing to report except I was sick for the past week. The second sickest I’ve ever been.

For the first time in years I did not think about swimming at all. I thought a lot about how to stop coughing.

[Mat Hudson]

Stinkers! I am sorry to hear that you were wiped out so severely.

I thought we were avoiding it all until the New Year and since then we’ve been reeling from illness, at least two or three of us (out of six in the house) at a time. It’s clearing up this week finally.

When you get back in the water be gentle on your return to normal level of activity. It’s good to ease back into it, even from a neural standpoint. If I’ve been out for longer than usual I like to make the first couple swims just pure pleasure – just get in and do what activities I feel drawn to and let my body warm up its relationship to the water again.

[Jill Hummelstein]

 

I tried out the pool yesterday to try to clear my lungs and see what it felt like to join the land of the living and move again.

Since I didn’t have the energy or concentration to do much I limited myself to 25’s and got reacquainted with what it means to swim. Muscle memory kicked in. This is good and bad. I’m glad my body remembers and at the same time I want to move beyond habits.

I held myself back to be gentle and observant. My way of letting myself warm up was to lengthen, glide, stay underwater, play around with all four strokes (another great topic and thread to start would be how to play around in the pool and to discover how the body feels drawn to move).

After a while I focused on stretching out in freestyle and that instantly gave me a low SPL, 18. It was so good not to use muscle effort but observation effort. If I tried to do too much else, such as the focal points in 1.1 MCB I lost my sense of coordination and glide and enjoyment.

The constraint of having very little energy and gunky lungs allowed me to enjoy what I could do. It also gave me insight into why my SPL goes up when I attempt continuous yardage without stopping at the wall: I lose my sense of lengthening.

This morning I took a Restorative Exercise Class, a body of work developed by Katy Bowman up in Sequim, Washington. It’s  exactly what I need right now to learn how to realign my pelvis. Frequent injuries keep preventing me from running  and sometimes swimming. I have to find out and address the underlying causes. The teacher said something like this: “Don’t make your body move in a way that’s uncomfortable. Find your boundaries and move within those boundaries. Over time your boundaries will change.”

My last swim was like that and you’ve been saying as much: find something I can do, stick with that until my body tells me it’s ready for more.

[Jill Hummelstein]

Today’s swim 2.23.17 was the best.

 I prepared by belly breathing in traffic on the 405.

And I practiced short sips of air on the inhalation and slow exhalations a few minutes at a time in the car as well.

I gained the sense that any change in the rhythm of breathing–from sedentary, mundane, unconscious breathing–is uncomfortable. And then, in an observant state of mind,  I get use to the new pattern.

And so this realization carried over into the water. I followed a set to the T: tempo pyramid adding a second onto TC starting at 45, 7 x 50, and then subtracting a second starting at 47. 10 seconds rest to reset TT. Level head looking at the lane divider on the way up. Quick sip of air on the way down.

The more I did it the better I got. I noticed I adjusted unconsciously in order to establish an acceptable rhythm of breathing. In other words I don’t know what my body was doing to make breathing easier even though breathing wasn’t fluid or easy. I noted I wasn’t getting enough air on the inhalation. And I told myself, chill, Jill, this is a new rhythm. Sometimes I swallowed water. And burped. And coughed. And hacked. Often I had pressure in my lungs from lack of breath. Often I mistimed the exhalation and ran out before the inhalation. And yet it all worked out.

I told myself to be uncomfortable was ok. Or I rested a few seconds longer at the wall to catch my breath or,  mentally prepare to abide discomfort again. It wasn’t hard. The constraint was to see if I could tolerate the stress of a new breathing pattern. And I could.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to replicate whatever it was I did besides tell myself it’s ok to be uncomfortable. I’ll keep doing it to see if I can maintain the mental equilibrium to find a rhythm of breathing.

I had the distinct sense I had my wits about me more than usual today. And I felt very supported by you, Mat, by the thoughtfulness of your lesson plans and how they do add up to acquiring skills.

Today’s swim was the most relaxed I’ve ever been. It was a flow experience in that I felt very little resistance physically and mentally. And it was a great feeling to establish a bow wave consistently.

[Mat Hudson]

BOWMAN

Coincidentally (or not) I listened to a podcast with Katy Bowman and then got her book Movement Matters – its waiting on my stack here for me to work down to it. I really resonated with the things she said – no wonder! She’s in Sequim? I should try to attend a class with her sometime.

It’s true – the form of proper skill-building practice we do (or should do) in TI will expand our mobility without having to force it. I’ve experienced improvement in posture and shoulder mobility over the years because of this.

MOST RELAXED SWIM

So, we might say your illness, your setback actually helped put you in position where your expectations (your demands) of yourself were reduced and you could swim with different priorities, and get different results.

I think it may help to have someone you trust, an ‘authority’ of sorts on the result you are after, to give you permission to approach this from a different direction.

Now, why would we ever want to carry through with a swim practice outside of Flow, if we have the option to enter into it????

That’s the center of what I am after in my swimming – Flow – and everything I do is aimed at getting into it as soon as possible, sustaining it, recovering it when lost, and improving it, and training to make it last longer and Flow under more difficult conditions.

But I first have to get into it. Everything is begins and ends with this.

 

 

[Jill Hummelstein]

New breathing warm up and whole body warm up before I get into the pool:

On my ferry ride I get out of the car and practice balance on a ship. I do one leg balances that stretch my hamstrings, hip flexors and toes. The rocking of the ferry adds extra challenge.

On the freeway I practice “tactical breathing” (there’s a free tactical breathing app but I don’t use it): breathe through my nostrils for four counts, hold for four, exhale through my mouth   for four, and hold for four.  Repeat four times. Not only to I focus on deep belly breathing; I also try to breathe into my back thoracic spine. Breathing into the latter gives me a strong sensation of what the girth of my diaphram feels like. It’s pretty tight and I’m hoping this exercise will help make it more easy to expand my ribs. I also observe any mental/emotional/body changes.

I’m enjoying warming up on dry land to give my entire body a gentle wake up. I practice the fall matrix, another way of saying that I’m taking myself out of the usual planes of motion and getting down on the ground. And back up again. Four times at least and ending in a three point push up.

In general I’m slowly weaning myself off of furniture and trying to get down on the ground as much as possible in order to wake up and use all the muscles in my body.  It’s a slow process. Being on the ground encourages movement and play simply because my body feels supported and because there’s more points of contact for sensory input. My body craves the sensory input that a chair can’t offer. Barefeet is also happening as much as possible. Before I enter the pool,  I am down on the ground, rolling, pushing up, falling back down, stretching, exploring what parts of my body call for more sensation.

I try, throughout the day, in preparation for the next swim to hang. A good game is to find things to hang from. Stretch my serratus anterior, neck, anything tight. If someone is willing I ask them to tap my laps to get them to fire for a pull up. You men out there won’t need anyone to tap you.

I’m experiencing a renaissance of loving my body. My head and neck are integrated for the first time in my adult life through rolling patterns. Rolling patterns are basically sequential dissociation of body parts in a dynamic stretch as you roll. And in general I’m stronger through physical therapy exercises that target my core and gluts.

It all shows up in my swimming. I  am more balanced and stable and able to stretch out languorously for split seconds. To have the skill to slow down enables me to tinker in interesting ways with timing (i.e. I observed that turning my head back into the water after a breath and then rotating my foot soon after my face is in the water feels very efficient. It’s an action that I uncoupled today; or at least it’s a new focal point, to feel the face turn back into the water, which triggers a foot rotation).

The essence of my report is that I’m enjoying my body outside the pool again. And it’s making swimming smoother.

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