Self Correction | Mediterra Dojo

Improve It By Feel

by Mat Hudson | Jan 28, 2017 | Internal Feedback, Self Correction

Coincidentally, this topic has come up several times in the last week, and so I will offer some encouragement on it.

When practicing a body position or skill on your own, without the coach present…

How do you know if you are doing it correctly?

The short, simple, but difficult answer is this: you must learn to feel it.

And this all comes from setting up your own feedback system.

As you read through this, please read the very last section also – that will improve your understanding of what your definition of ‘correct’ should be.

Build Your Feedback System

To feel it, you must first develop body awareness which is the ability to pay attention to the sensation coming from your whole nervous system that tell you where your body is at and what it is doing in water is the first step. Your nervous system is constantly sending signals to your brain from all parts of the body. When you ignore all other thoughts in your head and pay attention to only the sensory information coming from your nerves that connect throughout your skin, muscles and joints.

Side thought: Does it sound difficult to ignore all those other thoughts? That is exactly what mindfulness training helps us do – control the attention. If you are having a hard time doing this in swim practice, you may consider taking up some basic mindfulness training at home. Just 5 or 10 minutes a day, every day for several weeks would greatly improve your ability to control your attention.

Once you engage body awareness you can notice how your body is positioned and how it is moving. This is using your proprioception which relies upon that internal sensory information, not eyesight.

Next, you have to deliberately associate a sensation with appearance. For every position or motion you must connect ‘How Does It Look?’ with ‘How Does It Feel?’ This is the crux of the matter. You can start by looking, but you must finish with feeling. For each body part, for each piece of the movement, in order for you to sense if it is closer to the idea or farther away you must notice the sensations that tell you whether it is closer or farther away.

Imitate To Acquire Feel

You may look at an ideal example from a photo, from the coach giving you a demonstration, or from a video. Memorize this demonstration of position or motion – burn it into your mind. You may even use visualization to first practice this motion, memorize and develop expectations for how it should feel.

Then you must imitate that body position or motion. First, stand (in rehearsal) or lay down in the water (in drill position) and look at your body part if you can to make sure it is positioned or moving as you intend. If possible, stand in front of a mirror or reflective window so you can see yourself to check that your body is matching the ideal image in your mind. Then turn your eyes away as you keep doing it – you may even close your eyes – so that you must feel that position or motion. Look back again to make sure it is still doing what you intend – then remove your eyes so that you must feel it. Go back and forth.

To do this you may use some techniques for self-correction described in our library:

Whole Stroke Requires Feel

Once you move from drill to whole stroke, you can’t see most of your body or movements yourself (unless you have a video camera – but even then, you only see it after you are done moving). By this point you must have the ability to feel the motion and notice whether it is closer or further away from your ideal. Otherwise, what are you controlling your body with?

Here are some rehearsals videos (found on our Video Tutorial page) you may view to imitate the rehearsals and work on acquiring the feel for each:

Once you are swimming whole stroke your control panel consists of mostly of internal sensory information. Your ability to swim smoothly and to control energy use depends on your ability to monitor those signals coming from your body and make adjustments with the skills you have developed during countless hours in practice.

The Ability To Change

Lastly, I want to encourage you with this – not only are you training your body to swim more skillfully, you are learning how to train you body – reshaping your body is a skill itself.

Here is the basic message: you are trying to do it correctly the first time, but the fact is, you won’t be perfect. Even your understanding of ‘perfect’ is not perfect. Simply practice doing it better today than you were doing it yesterday. Make changes that take you in the direction of what you currently believe to be the ideal, and that is good enough to strengthen this skill for making changes. Next time you are with the coach you may receive an updated understanding of the ideal and then you will make changes according to that new information.

Every time you practice making improvement toward an ideal you have in your mind – even if that ideal is not ‘correct’ – your ability to make changes increases! So, when you receive new insight you can make changes and make them stick faster.

So, do your best today with the understanding you have today.

Here are a couple posts that may explain more of this:

Correcting Your Stroke By Yourself

by Mat Hudson | Nov 3, 2016 | Self Correction

Have you experienced some sore spots, strange sensations, or actual pain while swimming recently?

Even I have. My body is not ‘old’ but I can feel my vulnerabilities as well as any one can.

Once while spending some weeks back in the local pool for my practices instead of in the sea I started to get some shoulder aches.

Over the years, if I switch back to a pool, or back to open-water, it takes a couple weeks to adjust my mind and body to the different training environment. Swimming in the sea and swimming in the pool are similar only in the fact that both are done in water, but most of the similarities stop there. (That’s why you should practice in the open-water as much as possible, if you intend to race there!).

Upon getting in the pool for the first time this year (to swim, not to teach) the front part of my shoulders started to ache a little bit, especially the right shoulder. This rarely happens when I swim in the sea. I knew immediately that something about being in the pool must be making me change the way force is going through my shoulders.

So, right away, while I was swimming, I did some evaluation to find out where the problematic changes may be. This what I found:

1. First Underwater Stroke (pull)

After pushing off the wall and gliding to my break-out point, when I make the first underwater stroke, I always start with the right arm. I noticed that instead of setting the Catch and ‘press the ball straight toward my toes’ my tendency on only this first underwater stroke is to push out to the side at the beginning of the Catch, rather than press straight back. I was using the push of my Catch hand to rotate my body somehow (rather than the core), and this was putting a strange load on my shoulder. This is exactly what I saw in one of your videos a few weeks ago – one of you who was complaining of shoulder pain – and once you corrected that and a few other details the pain went away.

2. Open Turn

Since I am training for open-water swimming, not pool competition, I often choose to do open-turns rather than flip turns. (Good flip-turns are slightly faster than good open-turns, but they put you in oxygen-debt because you have to hold breath much longer). When I came to the wall, I would reach with my lead arm to touch and hold, add a little force to pull my body close to the wall, then push away from the wall, all with that same arm. This put a strange load on my shoulder – something I definitely do not do when in open-water – and in the pool I would do this more than a hundred times! That adds up.

3. Glide From The Wall

After the turn, once I get into streamlined body position, and push off the wall, I place left hand on top of the right hand (to create the arrow-head in front of my body), hook the thumb of my left hand over the edge of the right hand to hold the arms together, and then (I noticed) I pull each arm against the other with the thumb-hook preventing them from pulling apart. This was creating tension on the front side of the shoulders also.

So, I found 3 places where I was changing the load (the force) I sent into the shoulders, all because I was swimming in a new environment. I practiced these self-coaching skills:

I was mindful. I was always paying attention to the signals (the pleasure and the pain) my body was sending.
I was careful – I gave serious attention to those signals and was more loyal to responding to them than to completing a workout plan.
I immediately scanned my body, movements, and stroke pattern for more details, more specific information.
I evaluated my environment to see what were the differences between sea and pool to find what could cause me to swim differently.
I found 3 possible problem spots, and studied each one to find out what specific moment in the movement could be causing problems.
I chose a correction for each one, and started testing those solutions to see if they would work.

I am pleased to report that with those three corrections I was able to remove the soreness in my shoulders. It may not have been just one of them alone, but all three adding up to my shoulder soreness. Though I have found the solutions, I still have to keep those three corrections as focal points during my pool swims in order to prevent the old habit from creeping back in and causing my shoulders to ache.

Each of these focal points come at just one moment in the swim, at the wall and right after. So the rest of the swimming time, away from the wall, I can direct my mind back to normal whole stroke focal points. If you experience any strange or painful sensations, you can practice the same process for finding and correcting it.