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working on it, even before doing drills, is to practice slipping your hand and arm into the water silently. If you do that without making a sound,you will almost certainly end up with a deeper catch than previously. You can also reinforce this by tipping your fingers down each time you extend your hand forward - particularly while breathing opposite that hand and on your first stroke following pushoff.
    Swim "Downhill"
    We no longer emphasize this as much as previously, but for "balance challenged" swimmers - and particularly lean triathletes who have weak kicks or rigid ankles (from years of running) - consciously shifting weight forward - "leaning on your lungs" - remains very helpful. Press in until you feel as if your hips are light, as if the water is simply carrying you. The ZipperSkate drill (Lesson Three in Chapter 10) will help give you a greatly heightened sense of how this should feel.
    Drill with Total Patience
    The most important advice I give to the 20% of workshop attendees who are "balance challenged" is to do as little swimming as possible. Until you have at least the basics of balance, you will almost certainly "practice struggle" to an unacceptable degree while doing whole-stroke swimming. It is essential to take all the time necessary to patiently move through the basic balance drills until effortless support begins to feel natural. Don't swim and don't even do much advanced drilling. Just stay with the most basic drills — Lesson One in the drill section that begins on page 76 — almostto the exclusion of everything else.
    Use the fistglove ® stroke trainer
    After mastering Lessons 1 through 3 (see pages 74 to 95), one of the simplest and quickest ways to further develop your basic balance skills, while doing "switch" drills and whole-stroke swimming, is to wear fistglove® stroke trainers for 50 percent or more of your pool time. These latex "mittens" tightly wrap your hand into a fist and make it impossible to use your arm as a support lever or to muscle your way through the water. They force you to use your torso for balance and support and encourage you to use much more finesse while swimming. Soon, a weightless arm is your only option.
    Should I Use a Pull Buoy?
    Once a swimmer has learned balance, he should never use a pull buoy again; a balanced body is its own perfect buoy. The basic problem with pull buoys is they provide artificial balance; take the buoy off and it's lost. If you really commit to imprinting a neutral head position (starting with the Fish and Skating drills) and slice your hand in at a steeper, deeper angle (find and imprint the right position in Skating and ZipperSkate drills; continue reinforcing it in all Switch drills), you'll soon learn how it feels to have your hips and legs effortlessly supported and how that can free your arms to simply glide forward without the buoy.
    What about My Wetsuit?
    Wetsuits are universally popular with triathletes for one primary reason. They instantly solve the balance problem. Yes, they help keep you warm in cold water but, more important, they make you comfortable and confident. In Chapter 20, I'll give detailed guidance on how to use that freedom to maximum advantage in a race, but for now just be aware of this: The greatest advantage offered by a wetsuit is the freedom to slow down your arms, lengthen your body on each stroke, and end the frantic churning. If you happen to do some wetsuit swimming in pool or lake, focus more on slowing your arms and lengthening your body than on anything else, and recognize that you are imprinting the balanced-swimming form. Then when you swim without your wetsuit, try to keep the same feeling of leisure, control, and flow.
    Just as a balanced body fights the water less, the laws of physics also say that a longer body will slip through the water more easily than a shorter one. And, happily, there are ways to make our bodies "longer" too — at least as far as the water is concerned. So now that you've