When designing training sessions, the goal should always be to optimize the opportunities to improve performance. We want to provide as...

Over time, our performances reflect our averages. Meet performances are typically the average of our training performance. Championship...

Going Dry Part I Going Dry Part II Going Dry Part III Going Dry Part IV Going Dry Part V Going Dry Part VI Going Dry Part VII Planning a...

Going Dry Part I Going Dry Part II Going Dry Part III Going Dry Part IV Going Dry Part V Going Dry Part VI Planning a Season and a...

Improving ‘mental toughness’ is critical to providing swimmers with the best opportunity to perform to their potential in training in...

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...