How often should I practice?

[Admin Mediterra]

The quick and simply recommendation is… 3 times per week, as a minimum.

Very generally speaking, with 1 or 2 practices you may maintain what level of skill you have, but the brain and body need a bit more frequent stimulation to grow to a new level of skill.

But your progress is dependent on the quality of your practice, more than the quantity.

It would be better to have more frequent, short practices if you are mindful during those practices.

It is less useful to do infrequent, yet long practices – the brain can only handle some much stimulation in one session. It thrives on more frequent cycles of challenge-rest-adaptation.

But, in the end, practices when you can, as often as you can. You still need to deal with real life each week. Let swim practice be a refreshment in your weekly schedule not a drudgery.

Also, keep in mind that TI practice is predominantly a neuro-muscular activity – it is directly stimulating the brain to build, strengthen and maintin neurologic control and efficiency over body position and movement patterns. These are, in a way, hard-wired skills, once you have them, and then require very little maintenance to keep them strong.

In contrast, power-oriented swimming requires continuous hard maintenance – muscles are like leaky hot-air balloons – they need a continual pump up. To build up their power over a certain point (for higher intensity swimming) one has to work them hard and constantly to keep that level of power. It’s a possible (and traditionally popular) way to go about swim training, but it is expensive in time and energy. We feel TI provides a much better way to go about this.

If you are technique-oriented, then you can go through a season of time to intensely work on bringing your skill up to a new level, then reduce the frequency of practice, but keep the quality of practice high, in order to maintain that level of skill.

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