Understanding Your Stages of Development

There are three general stages to the development of your performance that you may expect to go through. As your technical skill increases, your strength, and eventually your speed will increase.

Swim Easier

When you make the first fundamental improvements in your body control and shape, you should experience a great increase in ease. You may not swim faster, but it will be so much easier to swim the distances you were doing. When you remove the unnecessary struggle against gravity and water, you gain enormous savings in energy and you lower stress in the brain and body.

 

Swim Farther

With your body at more peace with the natural forces, you are in better position to concentrate on improving the shape of your body. That improved shape means you slide through the water farther on each stroke. With more distance per stroke, and more energy freed up, the natural response is to swim farther because it feels so good to do so. Your practices can involve more total distance and you’ll sense more confidence to enjoy longer swims and races.

 

Swim Faster

Then you will learn ways to improve the precision and coordination of your propulsive movements – because the lack of precision and coordination cause a lot of power to leak away from your speed abilities. You’ll first discover how to swim faster with the power you already have available.

With such economy in place throughout your body and in your stroke control, now you can work on adding more power to the stroke with a higher sensitivity to those details which will conserve that power rather than waste it. You’ll get more speed improvement for the amount of effort you put in, than if you were still so wasteful with your power.

 

Circular Development

I want to encourage you to view your development as a a circular process.

You may have a big improvement goal in mind, but consider that big journeys are accomplished with a series of small steps. There are layers of skill to develop on the way to your ultimate abilities.

The training process we use works on each level. At each new level we go back through it. You just increase the quantity and quality objectives on each new level.

By following a circular development approach you will experience occasional jump-up in ability followed by plateaus of deep practice (a.k.a. deliberate practice) where the improvement in your foundation skills cannot be readily seen, although you are concentrating on them intensely. The work in the plateau phase will set you up for the next jump up in ability. Your body will know when it is time.

To use another analogy the work on the plateau is when you are sinking roots in winter to support the next outward growth phase, when branches extend in the next spring season.

So, you have these jump-ups in ability that will come after a season of dedicated plateau work. And, you have certain kinds of jumps to look forward to – first you learn to go easier, then you learn to go farther, then you learn to go faster.