The battle of the sexes
Men and women can often learn much from each other in their basic approach to swim coaching and teaching mixed groups or couples can often be very beneficial. Men may learn that, maybe they don't know it all after all, whilst women may find that a little bit of belief in their abilities rubs off on them from the men.
Finding your Batman T-shirt
Wouldn't it be great to approach life knowing that anything was possible and anything was achievable?
Setting goals
Our goals should serve as motivation and inspiration for us. Set the wrong ones and they will either be too easy to achieve or too hard and actually act to de-motivate rather than to drive us forward.
Muscle memory: myth or mastery?
It is vital to remember that muscle memory is a two-edged sword. It can help you become very good at something but equally can train you to be absolutely terrible at something.
Summoning The Genie of Fluidity
If you concentrate too hard on achieving the seemingly impossible, it will remain just that; impossible
Are you having a Dry January? Not likely!
If you want to achieve something or improve something, you don't need to wait until a particular day to start working towards it. Just go for it!
Can a frog on a bicycle help you swim better?
In order for a cue to be effective, it must be clear, achievable and measurable. If it isn’t, the effects on the stroke will be at best negligible and at worst detrimental.
Why failing can be more important than success
There will always be DNF's for any significant endurance event and we should remember that they represent an extremely important group for everyone taking part...for any challenge there has to be a risk of failure
Time to get in line
The fundamental point of efficient swimming is to displace as little of the water as possible as you move through it and past it. And the position in which you are doing that at the maximum is during Streamline.
Short and sweet
When learning a new movement pattern the average attention span is surprisingly short and it is important to stop before the processing power of the brain has been exhausted
Practice really does make perfect
The student must spend time away from the lessons practising by themselves. This is when the magic happens!
Why learning from the best is not always a good idea.
A study in the US showed that a whopping 91% of swimmers aged between 13 and 25 reported at least one episode of shoulder pain. It's a shocking and completely avoidable statistic. Make sure you are not studying and copying habits which may lead you to add to those figures.
How Are You Feeling?
Your swim coach may well get you to perform a drill and then ask you how it felt. And although that sounds like a simple question it's one that many of us are simply not used to answering with any level of detail.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
The acquisition of new skills is recognised as being as much in the mind as it is in the body. But it is perhaps less obvious that a significant part of this is simply to recognise one's own level of competence.
Getting into cold water swimming. And getting out again.
If you stand on the shore, dipping in one toe at a time you'll probably never pluck up the courage to get in. However, to take the “Geronimo” approach and leap with gay abandon from the jetty is equally ill-advised.
Don't pay attention to your hands. But know exactly what they are doing !
Turning off muscles is often more difficult than engaging them. Go to any public pool and you will see hands doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things...
Location!, location!, location!
Surely the whole point of doing drills is to try and repeat the same actions in the same way, over and over, in order to imprint them into ‘muscle memory’, isn’t it? Yes, it is. And this is why you should try changing something else about the drill.
Do SwimMastery Coaches Know ‘The Best Way’ to Teach?
SwimMastery have worked with thousands of people around the world and we’re open to the possibility that some new students could come along and present problems we haven’t tackled before and new ideas will be needed.
Learning How You Learn
The surprising thing is, as per my own experience, the way you initially choose to learn something may not be the optimum way for you to learn it. Therefore, knowing what works for you and what doesn't is invaluable in saving you much time and money.
Must There Be A Drop In Performance When Improving A Skill?
This immediate slow down or disruption to performance can understandably be alarming to the advanced athlete... who expects corrections to come easily and quickly, at virtually no cost. But this may be a consequence of a short-term viewpoint and some lack of understanding of how the brain works. In the long-term view, we understand that neural circuits have to go through a process when being altered - the more complex the change and the more complex the conditions will be for its ultimate application, the more patient the athlete will need to be with the retraining process.