It will help to have an understanding that reaching your potential for highest performance in swimming is dependent on how well you express strength through skill, and the essence of skill in swimming follows that series of connections - mind to body, body to itself, body to water ..read more

A productive training set induces soft failures at some point and your job is to prevent (or delay) a failure from occurring or correct it as soon as it appears. If you delay that failure longer than before, or correct and sustain it better than before, you've improved. When your practice sets no longer provoke failure, then it's time to increase the challenge level. This kind of training-for-quality game keeps you fully engaged in your practice.  ..read more

When we are in an engineering process to make a device or system better, we need to put it through demanding tests to find out what is working and what is not working well. We need to subject that thing to stresses that expose the weak spots so that those can be made stronger. When failures occur in the system, we note when, what, and how that failure occurred in order to learn from it and apply those lessons in the next step of development ..read more

There are some questions I sometimes ask myself or others to reflect on what supports one’s longevity in athletic activity, or I could use them to explore what might be standing in the way of doing it more if they haven’t found that consistency yet.  How much do I need to do this activity/sport with ..read more

You probe the limits of your performance system components in practice, revealing where the weak spots are, and then you work to increase strength and skills around those during your training, not waiting until the event to discover them. This is how you greatly reduce the risk of physical and mental injury and increase your longevity in the sport.   ..read more

While some difficulties are a normal part of the event, trauma should not be. It is not the responsibility of the event directors to protect you from that which your training should.  It is your responsibility to understand your personal situation and engage in a process that makes you sufficiently fit physically and mentally to do this event safely and with joy.  ..read more

The first tank is constantly replenished by the body, but at a rate that takes a whole day to refill when the balance of exercise and rest is set to what the body is currently adapted to (the type and level of activity that has been normalized). This constant rate of replenishment is why a few seconds rest between repeats can allow you to resume the activity, but you can only do that a number of times ..read more

Stroke length is the distance your body travels forward on each arm stroke. How far you travel on each stroke is a direct indicator of how much work you accomplish and that work is a product of both strength and skill. Some people get more from their strength and others more from their skill while the best get it from a proportional amount of both.  ..read more

In the previous article – When You Go Harder But You Can’t Go Any Faster – I discussed how stroke length and stroke rate are yoked together and suggested as an initial step that you get a baseline measurement of what your current comfortable stroke rate is. Once you have this you can (perhaps with ..read more

Here we are discussing the usefulness of voluntarily setting constraints in our fitness and health activities. Constraints are actually vital components that help all kinds of systems (including human bodies and teams of people) function at their best. Constraints help direct your energy, attention, and effort. A good arrangement of voluntary constraints can help your efficiency and creativity, or push you to develop a strength or skill that is lagging behind the rest.  ..read more