Swim Chi is a programme of exercises for improving movements and techniques for swimming mainly freestyle, drawing on Tai Chi principles, and is primarily land-based.
Swim Chi provides exercises for people to improve their swimming, especially later life swimmers, whose bodies have picked up habits that can hinder their swimming.
Swim Chi provides a way to master the movements and rhythms of swimming. It creates and enhances mindfulness of your body, enabling you to improve what you are doing, by increasing your bodily awareness and providing guidance for comparison and what to aim for.
Swim Chi incorporates many of the elements and principles of Tai Chi. This includes the importance of the ‘inner’, in order to use the centre and ‘connect the harmonies’ to enable the whole body to work together.
As with Tai Chi, the exercises provide improvement in their own right, but their ultimate benefits come from enabling you to become more mindful of your own body and swimming, so that you can continually improve and adapt in the way that best suits you.
Swim Chi is about making swimming more enjoyable, so that it is easier and more efficient to swim, by improving awareness and technique. Your speed and endurance should improve, but Swim Chi isn’t a hard coaching programme aiming to maximise these elements through strenuous workouts.
Swim Chi has four main elements:
- The Swim Chi Form
- The Swim Chi Form movements as exercises
- Applying the Swim Chi Form to swimming and training
- Cold and Ice swimming: Mastering mind and body
The Swim Chi Form
The Swim Chi Form is the key part of Swim Chi. Tai Chi brings together many different practices, with one of the most important being the use of ‘Forms’. Forms are a sequence of moves that are learnt as a whole (not dissimilar to ‘kata’ in other martial arts). Most schools of Tai Chi will be based around a main form such as the Yang Style Long Form, or Cheng Man-ch’ing’s Short Form. These Forms are based on martial (fighting) applications. The Swim Chi Form is for the application of swimming.
The Swim Chi Form movements as exercises
As with Tai Chi forms, the moves within the Swim Chi Form can be performed as individual exercises, with many having variations beyond the move in the Swim Chi Form. This has similarities with Chi Gong (Qi Gong), another key part of Tai Chi.
Applying the Swim Chi Form to swimming and training
Swim Chi is primarily land based, but the ultimate aim is to improve swimming, and various methods and techniques are provided for using Swim Chi to do this.
Cold and Ice swimming: Mastering mind and body
Swim Chi includes cold and ice water swimming as its highest element. This is not for everyone, and some Swim Chi practitioners may never attempt it. Which is fine – there is no expectation or pressure placed on anyone.
Cold water swimming generally means outside and unheated i.e. rivers, lakes and sea. To be cold, it should be no more than 15C, and many people consider cold water swimming as needing to be below 10C. However, the ultimate challenge is ice swimming, which is below 5C!
Ice swimming is included as part of Swim Chi as it is the ultimate act of mindfulness for the swimmer. The body reacts strongly against entering cold water, with everything the swimmer is feeling saying, ‘Don’t do this!’ To successfully ice swim, the swimmer needs an acute mindfulness of what their body is experiencing, what it is capable of, and to be able to ignore the panic that they are feeling. At the same time, they need to be aware of anything happening to their bodies that they do need to react to! It takes many sessions over several seasons, and a lot of dedication to become a proficient ice swimmer.
The pinnacle challenge in ice swimming is to swim an ‘ice mile’, as accredited by IISA*.
*We consider ice swimming to be water below 5 degrees centrigrade, in line with the main associations such as the International Ice Swimming Association (IISA) and the International Winter Swimming Association (IWSA).
PLEASE NOTE Ice swimming can be extremely dangerous. Do not attempt without proper preparation and precautions.