Coaches love to talk about mental toughness, yet it’s not really clear what mental toughness even is. In part I, I sought to make the...

Coaches like to describe swimmers as ‘mentally tough’. They certainly like to coach these swimmers. While most coaches will understand...

I’d like to take a different perspective on one of the commonly accepted paradigms in motor learning. If we’re going to be effective in...

Coaching is all about investing. We invest emotionally, we invest intellectually, we invest our energy, and we invest our time. As all...

PART I PART II PART III PART IV PART V PART VI In parts I-VI, we explored the three basic tasks of effective technical executions...

PART I PART II PART III PART IV PART V As described in part V LINK, rhythm and timing is greatly underappreciated and seldom addressed in...

PART I PART II PART III PART IV In part IV, we started to get practical with several approaches to help swimmers learn to minimize drag...

Part I Part II Part III Getting Practical In the first three sections of this series, we took a look at the fundamentals of great...

In parts I and II, I outlined the fundamentals of great swimming technique. These are the skills that coaches need to understand, and...

In part I, I laid out the case for an understanding of the foundations of effective swimming. The foundational tasks for swimming fast...

Swimmers swim fast because of their superior technique. While there are exceptions to this statement, those individuals are by definition...

Tapering. No topic in the swimming community is given such reverence, spoken of so solemnly, and surrounded by more mysticism than...

Great coaching is about facilitating change. To get faster in the pool, some aspect of performance needs to change. Better coaches are...

One of the major challenges for club coaches is to keep swimmers in the sport. One of the major challenges for college coaches is less...

In part I and part II, we explored two potential solutions for addressing performance limitations. At either extreme, we can take an...

When faced with performance limitations, we have to determine how to solve them. In part I, we explored the aggressive approach, with...

Coaches are constantly faced with choices that have potentially unclear outcomes. Because of the multi-factorial process that determines...

In part I, we explored the process of becoming a wizard, where any technical problem can be solved quickly and easily. Developing that...

In part I, we explored the concept of becoming a wizard, where no technical problem is insurmountable and results happen fast. We took a...

Many times, coaches claim skills can’t be taught. I’ve always resisted this notion, believing that we simply weren’t skilled enough to...

In part I and part II, we explored how innate characteristics can determine how swimmers move through the water, and distinguished...

In part I, we introduced the concept that skills are directly by the inherent structures that swimmers possess. As some of these...

In swimming, we have technical models that we tend to apply to our swimmers. In any swimming book, there are intricate descriptions...

Having interacted with a lot of teenage males, I’ve noticed that a lot of them play A LOT of video games. While it’s easy to claim that...