Miscellaneous

Terry passed away from cancer complications on 10/201/2017, at only 66 years old. He was a large inspiration in my take of how to tackle swimming. He focused on the concepts of mastering technique and efficiency instead of focusing on improving fitness/VO2max. He viewed swimming as an art form, training with short repetitions(to prevent fatigue) of proper technique rather than with poor technique in a fatigued state.

My favorite video (below) of his ideas, is the presentation he gave at MIT where I studied. Unfortunately, this was the summer before I enrolled and I was not able to be there.

He has influenced many people, most notably Tim Ferris founder of the 4-Hour-Workweek.

I was lucky enough to meet his daughter once at a YMCA pool in NewYork while she was teaching a workshop. I hope his teachings will continue to be passed down through his daughter and other instructors.

To learn more about his teachings, please visit totalimmersion.net

A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.”
—MARTIN H. FISCHER, PHYSICIAN AND AUTHOR

Tim Ferris, author of the four-hour workweek talks about the importance of  learning not from the best , but from someone in the top 5% with exceptional circumstances. He mentions that instead of learning how to swim from Michael Phelps who broke a world record at 15, people should learn from Shinji Takeuchi who didn’t even start swimming until 37.

The two reasons for this are as follows:

1. The top 1% often succeed despite how they train, not because of it. Superior genetics, or a luxurious full-time schedule, make up for a lot.
2. Career specialists can’t externalize what they’ve internalized. Second nature is hard to teach.

Today, I will be applying the same concept to mobility training/flexibility. Instead of studying a contortionist or a tiny female gymnast, I will study a 240 lb. body-builder who can shoulder press 135lbs for reps while doing the splits. His name is Jon Call aka Jujimufu, here is his Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jujimufu/?hl=en.

After digging into numerous dark corners of the internet, I managed to find his sketchy website where he has a mobility tutorial. Link is below. He is a goofy individual, but do not mistake him for a fool.

http://trickstutorials.com/index.php?page=content/flx3

Want to learn how to maintain strength, endurance mobility and prevent weight gain during a vacation? Grab a free e-book  where I offer the short bodyweight workouts and nutrition plan that I use that still allows do this without sacrificing your relaxing vacation.

A few months ago , I created a platform called “Swimbuddy” that allows two swimmers to race each other remotely.

http://swimnology.com/2016/04/09/swimbuddy-a-remote-swimming-platform/

I submitted this project to a competition organized by Dream it. Win it. Code it. Dream it. Code it. Win it. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization launched by Cristina Dolan, the MIT Club of New York, the MIT Enterprise Forum of New York City, and TradingScreen to celebrate and reward computer science education amongst high school students, college students, and young women.

I am happy to say that Swimbuddy won the Fiverr Imagination award!

When I was awarded on stage, the MC asked me if I raced Michael Phelps with the swim buddy.

After the award ceremony, I had a lot of people come up to me. It was great to hear so many people telling me how much they liked Swimbuddy. Even one of my competitors told me that my project stood out and was their favorite. A few people, asked me if I was going to make this into a start-up or get it working for the Olympics.

Want to learn how to maintain strength, endurance mobility and prevent weight gain during a vacation? Grab a free e-book  where I offer the short bodyweight workouts and nutrition plan that I use that still allows do this without sacrificing your relaxing vacation.

Virtual Reality has been around since the 1950s, but due to the lagging technology back then , it died out. However, Virtual Reality is increasing in popularity again as the technology is finally there to support it.

I recorded the NEWMACS Swimming and Diving Championships with the Ricoh Theta S show below. It is the best in the market for consumers at less than 300$ and is extremely user-friendly. It uses two wide-lens fisheye cameras and stitches the two images together automatically. The resolution is not as good as the professional method of attaching 12 go pros to a mount and stitching them together. However the gopro method costs thousands of dollars and the software to stitch the images is also expensive and takes hours of blood sweat and tears to do. Furthermore the stitching with the gopro is never perfect and you will notice them in the VR.

Here is the link for some of the photos I took:

https://theta360.com/users/67447?utf8=%E2%9C%93&select=image

and the video is below

The one problem with the Ricoh Theta S is that although the resolution is good when taking still pictures, it is lowered when recording a video. The resolution for video is technically 1080p, but because of the much much larger FOV it is not nearly as crisp. However, many companies such as Samsung, Nikon, and Sphericam are releasing their 360 cameras that can record 4k quality in the spring (of 2016)!

If you purchase a VR headset such as the google Cardboard, you can watch this video in VR! There is no doubt in my mind that in a decade or so everyone will be watching all sporting events this way. Parents will no longer have to pay for expensive tickets and hotels to watch their kids swim and will be able to do so in the comforts of their own home, while still feeling present at the meet.

Warning: This post is an extremely mathematical one.

I often think of technique as an optimization problem. There are hundreds of different parameters varying from body position to breathing pattern and the goal is to find a combination of these parameters that maximizes our efficiency. When solving an optimization problem it is important to try your best to avoid a local maximum and instead try to find the global maximum. Simulated Annealing is one approach to this.

This is the best analogy I have for Simulated Annealing.

Imagine being on a large mountain range (with many hills), and you are trying to find the highest peak. However it is very foggy and you can only see one step ahead in every direction. The simple strategy to finding the peak is to just keep taking the neighboring step that takes you higher until there is none left. However the problem is that you may get stuck on what is called a local maximum. It is a peak but not the highest peak. Simulated Annealing deals with this by occasionally taking steps that takes you to a lower spot (in hopes that you will reach an even higher peak later). How often does it take a lower step? Simulated Annealing uses a measure called temperature to determine this. The higher the temperature the more likely it is to take a step that goes lower.

The temperature changed as the optimization goes on. In most Simulated Annealing algorithms, the temperature starts very high and slowly decreases as time goes on. This is called a Cooling Schedule.

Optimizing technique in swimming or any discipline involving repetitive movement patterns should be viewed the same way. Start the season with a higher temperature and slowly decrease it as you get closer to championship meet.

So I encourage everyone to increase the temperature and make a jump down once in a while.  The worst that can happen is you find out the new “hill of technique” you are on is not as optimal as the previous one. In that case you can always revert back to the old technique or try another hill.

This semester I’ve been lucky enough to be an RA at the MIT Media Lab Fluid Interface group. After finishing the semester I decided to take a few days to build a pair of smart goggles. I was able to create a pair that could tell you the current time, your splits, your stroke rate and the amount of laps you’ve done all in real-time. Furthermore, the total materials I used cost less than 30$ (excluding a smartphone)!

Below is the display that the swimmer sees. I used the accelerator of the phone to detect each stroke to calculate the stroke rate and each push-off to calculate the laps.

What’s next? I would love to tell you but I shouldn’t for reasons explained in my previous post!

Want to learn how to maintain strength, endurance mobility and prevent weight gain during a vacation? Grab a free e-book  where I offer the short bodyweight workouts and nutrition plan that I use that still allows do this without sacrificing your relaxing vacation.

Being both a dancer and swimmer for many years, I can say there is a great similarity between the two.

I practice a funk style dance called locking. Although there are many variations, there are only about 10-15 moves in the dance. Even though I have been practicing for over ten years, I have not achieved mastery in the dance.

You may think I’m a slow learner, but ask yourself this.

Swimming has five moves. Freestyle, backstroke, butterfly, breaststroke and the dolphin kick. How long have you been swimming and have you mastered all five yet?

I surely have not.