Swimming Faster, Ernest W. Maglischo. Mayfield Publishing Company, Palo Alto, CA, 1982, 472pp, ISBN 0-87484-548-3, and others. Reviewed by Dave Barney, Albuquerque Academy, NM.
The Bibles of Swimming Science
Many of us older coaches are well acquainted with the various volumes of work devoted to the science of swimming through the ages. Most of those earliest editions in the 20th Century were noble of effort but pale in comparison to the mighty tomes available today with their encompassing information about seemingly anything and everything to do with the applied science and theories of hydrodynamic propulsion, more commonly known to us old-timers as swimming. Much of the current contributions to the science of swimming cannot be found between the covers of a book, but rather in the sphere of high-tech, digitalized accessibility, including the inexhaustible wonders of the internet. So much for modernity.
But it’s books we’re dealing with in this piece From the Bookshelf. Ernie Maglischo’s body of work, sometimes referred to as the “Swimming Faster Series,” outdistances most all preceding works, including what was once believed to be the ultimate written word on the scientific investigation of competitive swimming: namely, “Doc” Counsilman’s epic book: The Science of Swimming, published in the late 1960’s and followed by his New Science of Competitive Swimming, published in the early ‘70’s. Before I dig into Maglischo’s late 20th Century contribution to our sport, it might be worthwhile to mention a brief chronology of the more notable publications in the first half of the 20th Century, some of which found their way into the vast inner-sanctum of what eventually became known as the Barnes Sport Library. Many of those books were put together by some of the most famous college and Olympic coaches in our sport’s history.
But before there were so-called coach/authors, there was George Corsan, a Canadian master teacher of aquatics who wrote two of the earliest books on the science of swimming: At Home in the Water published in 1914, and The Diving and Swimming Book published a decade later in 1924. Both books were published by A.S. Barnes & Company, a prototypical version of the Barnes Sport Library. Corsan was not a swimming coach per se, but he was an early 20th century swimming guru for many of the most famous swim coaches of that era, including Bob Kiphuth of Yale, Ed Kennedy of Columbia, Matt Mann of Michigan, Dave Armbruster of Iowa, and Charles “Red” Silvia of Springfield College. Beyond featuring what most of the succeeding books would have to say about teaching stroke, Corsan’s books included prose dedicated to other aquatic considerations: chapters devoted to teaching lifesaving for instance, as well as attempts to embrace the psychology of teaching small children to swim, not to mention entertaining the notion of “Why Women Should Learn To Swim.“ Another chapter entitled “Stunts and Fancy Swimming” addressed survival swimming with feet and hands tied together, an idea I remember making some use of in the late 1950’s when I was engaged by the Peace Corp to teach a drown-proofing initiative to Peace Corp candidates.
Next in line of those early books came to us in 1928, courtesy of Robert Kiphuth, the venerable Yale University and four-time Olympic coach. His book, entitled merely Swimming, contributed several new thoughts about the science of swimming, among them the ideas of what we know today as dryland conditioning and interval training. As an aside, I might add that Kiphuth’s design of his signature pool in the Payne-Whitney Gymnasium at Yale became the prototype for the design of a whole era of competitive swimming pools in this country and elsewhere, including the one I swam in at the University of New Mexico in the late 1950’s. Also of note is Kiphuth’s pioneer role in the Ritter-Jockers experimental process of what turned out to be the earliest attempts to create an automatic system for timing swimming races.
Matt Mann’s book Swimming Fundamentals was published in 1940. Where as Mann did the talking in this book, his scribe per se, Charles Fries, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, did the writing. This book contains a glowing Foreword, written by Ed Kennedy, Columbia University coach and editor of the NCAA Swimming Guide from 1932 to 1939, espousing Matt Mann’s contribution to the literature of swimming. The thrust of the book focuses on the fundamentals of stroke. One exception to this is the curious mention of the “fish-tail kick, featured by a photograph depicting the rhythmic thrashing of legs up and down and accompanied by the statement that “the fish-tail kick would revolutionize leg movements in breaststroke if only it were ever allowed.” Mann footnotes this statement by mentioning the on-going dolphin-breaststroke experimentation being conducted by David Armbruster at the University of Iowa, a two-decade experimentation, as it turned out to be, which ultimately led to the notion of an entirely new and autonomous stroke (separated from breaststroke in 1953) called butterfly. Most of the photographs in Mann’s book feature a fifty year-old Matt Mann himself demonstrating the nuances of stroke or groups of boys posing and practicing in water at his world-famous Camp Chikopi in northern Ontario. In this regard, I’m proud to say, like many others, that in some small way I’m a Matt Mann disciple, having taught sailing and coached swimming at Chikopi for almost two decades, albeit mostly in this new century of ours and certainly not in Matt Mann’s time at the camp stemming back to 1920.
David Armbruster, the venerable University of Iowa swim coach for more than four decades, put together three editions (1942, 1950, 1958) of his initial book Swimming & Diving. Collaborations in the third edition with Bruce Harlan, diving coach at the University of Michigan, and with University of Iowa ophthalmologist and medical illustrator Lee Allen, elevated the book to new levels of comprehension and set a standard that would be mirrored by many swim coach/bio-kineticists in the future There are no photographs in this book, but Allen’s drawings, created sequentially from photographs, leave little to the imagination and provide us with a frame by frame, as it were, graphic exposition of a dive or stroke. I am including Allen’s representation of a forward two and one-half somersault, pike dive here to give the reader some idea of the sequential excellence of his drawings.
Beyond the graphics, Armbruster’s prose is much more exact in explaining the sometimes obtuse matter of bio-kinetic principles. On the matter of organization . . . from cover to cover and from the listing of and excellence of its illustrations to its extensive index and its detailed analysis of stroke and dive, this book separates itself from previous books and opened the door, so-to-speak, for later coaching scientists to pursue the challenges associated with addressing modern research standards in print The first man to take on that challenge in the so-called modern era was James “Doc” Counsilman, the legendary college and Olympic coach at the University of Indiana.
Counsilman’s first book, The Science of Swimming published in 1968,initiated a whole series of books under his authorship, including The New Science of Swimming, and The Competitive Swimming Manual. While pursuing a doctorate degree in physiology at the University of Iowa, Counsilman fell under the spell of Iowa swim coach Dave Armbuster. Counsilman’s initial writings on the sport evolved from an emulation of Armbuster’s research methods but gradually expanded into what could only be called uncharted territory. Most importantly, perhaps, he found a way to explain complicated scientific principles associated with the sport in language that even non-coaches could understand. Although not the first to do so, his attention to the matter of filming swimmers underwater became a universally accepted practice by swim coaches everywhere and anywhere there was a pool with underwater windows. His contributions to the ideas of creating a pace clock to govern interval training sets, as well as his deliberations on the matter of lift vs drag in swimming was just a small part of that “unchartered territory” I mentioned a moment ago. Taken as a singular body of work, Counsilman’s books dominated the market and readership of swim coaches for almost a quarter of a century. What we are left with here is an echoing of “Doc” said this or “Doc” said that, or “Doc” did it that way, in short, the mantra of coaches everywhere.
Finally we come to Ernie Maglischo and his comprehensive guide to Swimming Faster series of books. To begin with, the immensity and degree of scientific expertise in these books, and how that expertise is presented is readily apparent. Swimming Faster is simply bigger, better-bound, fuller, more complete and exact, and more widely referenced and indexed than any previous volume in the literature of swimming science. For the most part, the books in this series are divided into three parts. Part I devotes itself to the notion of propulsive swimming and the mechanics therein: stroke, starts, turns, finishes, etc. Part II focuses on ancillary considerations applied to the physiology of training swimmers: i.e. energy metabolism, oxygen consumption, anaerobic threshold conditioning, as well as an examination of the parameters involved in planning the swim season. Part III addresses other aspects of training: pacing for all distances and strokes, warm-up, nutrition, etc.. The books conclude with a short sub-section entitled “Evaluating Body Composition.” Collectively, Maglischo’s narratives are chocked full of tables, graphs, photographs, and even a drawing or two, but, for my money, the drawings fall short of the magnitude of Professor Allen’s depictions in the Armbruster book.
Examining these books in a line is an interesting exercise. As you would expect, they increase in size incrementally. The oldest and shabbiest in my collection is the 1924 Corsan book. Its binding barely holds its pages together, a testimony of sorts to its almost century year-old existence. Furthermore, on the inside of the front cover is an ownership stamp, bearing a picture of a stately, columned-building, identified as the Library of The Ohio State University. Long over-due, I might add, from its September, 1932 return date. But where did it come from and how did it find its way to me? The only answer I can come up with after all these years is probably that it was given to me by my revered friend and once mountain-climbing companion, Bruce Bennett, venerable Ohio State University sports history professor and author of the widely circulated and much studied History of World Sport. Bruce Bennett died several years ago, but my many memories of him live on in my mind’s eye and on my bookshelf, as does the awareness of the other coach/authors I have mentioned in this review.
