Self-Coaching 101

The purpose of this course is very simple: we want you to learn how to compose a series of practices for yourself that will reliably improve your fitness and technical abilities.

It might seem complicated to try to do this at first, but by going through this design process systematically, with simple explanations and instructions, we believe you can do it.

You may go slowly the first time, but once you feel how it works when you try your own practices, you’ll quickly internalize the principles and become more confident about designing practice series to solve specific skill and performance needs you have.

Why Teach You How To Coach Yourself?

Designing intelligent practice plans is what most people hope their coach will provide for them.

Why then would we give you this information rather than keep it a secret and keep you dependent on us?

Coach Mat formed Mediterra Swim to liberate athletes from boredom, injury, and needless dependencies on systems that don’t consistently produce good results. He learned from a long and painful route how to listen to his own body, to take care of it and train to his healthful potential. He wants to help people like you more quickly get into that position where you can take care of your own basic health and training needs as an athlete. No one is in better position to take care of you than you are. Mediterra’s training events and online programs like this one are all aimed at helping set you up to coach yourself.

Even the best athletes in the world still train under the guidance of a coach, but each athlete should understand how training works so they can cooperate with it better, allowing the coach to take them even farther. You will continue to benefit from experienced coaching (which follows your value system), but the foundation of your well-being as an athlete comes from your ability to maintain your own body and have at least a basic understanding of how to train yourself to achieve specific skill and fitness goals.

While you are studying these concepts we continue to study and practice too which keeps opening up new depth and breadth of things to teach you. So, we are not worried about running out of ways to add value to your athletic experience. 

We are still here designing advanced training plans to spare you the time – even after acquiring this understanding you may still want us to provide such services to you. But with this understanding for how training works you will be able to cooperate with those principles and plans to a much greater effect.

From this course we hope you will become familiar and comfortable with the basics of the training process to design plans for yourself, if you would like to. If you are content with what you have learned from this, and ready to swim away and train on your own, we are totally pleased. If this new understanding makes you pleasantly discontent and want to learn even more about advanced training, then we have our excuse to keep working together.

The course is intended to provide you with a ‘brief’ tutorial on how to coach yourself through a series of practices toward a specific skill and performance goal.

Intelligent training includes quite a few inter-related subjects which all add up to a rather complicated situation for athletes to figure out on their own. We can reduce that complexity only so far before beginning to undermine the intelligence behind it. Yet, we want to save you the time and effort of trying to figure all of this out on your own.

This course is attempting to provide you with that ‘brief’ tutorial. We have stripped down the complexity to some summary explanations, then provide you with links to read more about the topics in our online library if you would like to.

Your Assignments

There are only a few assignments given throughout this course, but they will be very valuable to you. The assignments are not about getting a grade – we don’t offer any. Rather, when you do the assignments you produce something you can immediately use in your own training. That is the point.

If you do the assignments at the time they are presented in the course, by the end you should have fairly complete intelligent practice plan for achieving one of your short-term goals.

For this purpose, we urge you to be ready to work on the assignments when you study that section. You will need either a paper notebook or training journal set aside for collecting your assignments and notes, or set up a system on your favorite digital device for doing this (such as using Evernote).

Where ever you choose to take notes and write out your assignments, keep it in a special place that is convenient for you to use.

Follow The Examples

As you work through this course we will periodically provide examples to demonstrate how you could apply the concepts at different levels of challenge.

We urge you to follow the examples which will challenge your weakest area rather than choose the example that allows you to lean upon your strengths. This is primarily what training is meant to do – strengthen that which is weakest. Your performance system will only be as strong as the weakest part of that system.

This involves a discipline that comes with a mastery mindset. When you feel a disparity between your technical skill and your fitness you need to aim your training at that weaker part which is holding you back – and the mastery mindset is what leads you to enjoy practice like this rather than be frustrated by it. Use the systematic approach outlined ahead to work on your weaknesses in practice and enjoy the process.

Use The SC 101 Forum

We have set up a Self Coaching 101 forum topic for this course that will be accessed by other students in the course and monitored by our staff.

Please use that forum topic to leave all kinds of questions and feedback about the course, such as…

• What topics or explanations need improvements or more elaboration, or more examples?
• What additional subjects related to this course might be helpful to add?
• What subjects or ideas do you personally find most useful?
• Do you see any bugs in the function of the course or website?
• Are there any links broken?
• How is this course changing your view of swim practice?

There are endless possibilities for what you might improve in your swimming. How do you sort through all these possibilities?

With respect to your biggest goals, we recommend that you master the fundamentals first and set short-term training goals that require you to master these skills. This course is laying out the principles for practice which apply to all levels, but the examples given will focus upon Level 1.

“Short-term” in this regard means skills that you can integrate (turn into habits) in approximately one to three months.

These fundamentals of Level 1 include the internal skills that permit you to control your body position, your movement patterns, and how you expend energy. In terms of fitness at Level 1 it would be good for you to be capable of comfortably swimming shorter distances skillfully before you try to work on goals that require advanced skills and fitness.

This course is emphasizing Level 1 skills. You may read about how Mediterra organizes these skills into Levels Of Proficiency.

There at Level 2 and Level 3 skills, as well as skills specific to open water swimming. Those are covered elsewhere. Your mastery of these Level 1 skills will put you in position to more easily develop the advanced skills, and make swimming so much more enjoyable.

Level 1 Technical Skills

The internal technical skills represent your ability to control your own body, to put it into position, to hold that position, and to create precise movement patterns. As these skills get stronger, they will – over weeks, months and years- enable you to achieve more externally – to swim easier, to swim farther, to swim faster.

We are confident that you can learn to swim so much farther and faster than you imagine, but still you should start with small goals on the fundamental level and work your way up.

Level 1 Distance Achievement

People are beginning swim training at so many different starting points – each has a different history, a different body, a different set of personal conditions which affect their potential. For those starting from zero we recommend working through a Level 1 series of skills and distance achievement goals. Your skills, your fitness, and your confidence will grow together as you do.

• First goal: 1 length of marvelous strokes
• Second goal: 100 meters of marvelous strokes
• Third goal: 400 meters
• Fourth goal: 1000 meters

Of course, if your fitness and swimming experience already enable you to swim one of these longer distances with your old stroke pattern, consider setting new distance goal according to only how far you can swim if you set a much higher technical standard for yourself – when you raise the standard, you may not be able to go as far at first.

In this way, when you combine a technical standard (qualities) with a fitness standard (quantities) this will likely urge you to consider a shorter distance for your short-term goal. Rather than think about how far you can go, think about how far you can go with higher quality than you have ever had before.

Examples of Goals

Here are a few examples in terms of quantities.

Example A

• I will swim further than 200m without stopping.

Example B

• I will swim 400m faster than I did last year.

Example C

• I will swim 1000m in 18 minutes.

For this assignment you are going to design your short-term training goal. As you go through the course you may revisit this goal and modify it when you get more insight. That is expected. But start with a first draft now.

Considering the technical skills we should master at Level 1 – which two or three skills do you feel are highest priority for your to work on right now? Which skills are weakest for you?

Describe specifically what those would look like and what those would feel like when you have mastered them to a new level.  What will they feel like and look like when they have become a habit for you?

Consider the distance achievements you could aim for at Level 1, if you were to do it at a higher technical standard. What distance should you set for your first goal?

Achieve Suitable Stroke Length

In the pool we measure stroke length by counting strokes on each length, in terms of Strokes Per Length (SPL)

By far, most people who are starting to train have a stroke that is too short, and therefore inefficient in the use of energy. very few people start with a stroke that is too long.

No mater what side you start on, you will aim to improve your stroke length, moving it toward an idea (or optimal) length that is suitable to your body, and your event. You should use shorter repeats for this work, and gradually increase the distance as you control over stroke length improves.

To measure your stroke length and keep track of it, you simply count strokes on each length of the pool. For encouragement on counting strokes you may read:

• Why Count Strokes?
• How To Count Strokes

And, what is an ideal stroke length (or SPL) for you? Read about your Green Zone SPL.

And, then you should consider if there are some reasons to adjust your expectations for how long your stroke should be. For more you may read When To Modify My Green Zone Range?

Achieve Consistent Stroke Length

The next skill objective is to maintain a consistent stroke length, or in other words maintain the same stroke count on every length of the swim.

• Can you do that for 2 consecutive lengths?
• Can you do that for 100?
• Can you do that for 400?
• Can you do that for 1000?

You might be capable of swimming this distance in terms of fitness, but when you add a higher technical standard, can you accomplish this same distance with that higher standard of quality?

Increase Distance

Once your capabilities have improved so that you are able to use an SPL within your Green Zone, or at least improved your stroke length in that direction, and once you can consistently maintain that same stroke length over that entire distances you are training for, you may now consider increasing the challenge by increasing the distance you need to maintain that skill over.

Before we zoom out to view how a series of practices works together, we will first zoom in to look at how to build a single practice.

We will start with examining how to design a single set within that practice.

In our form of practice when we train with quantities (such as distance or speed) we always always combine those training qualities (technique). This is how we train the body to be efficient in how it uses energy – not just moving muscles but training those muscles to prefer a certain way of moving.

So, the first things to identify when planning your practice set is what specific technical skill you will work on.

You may want read more about the segments of the stroke in The Sections of the Freestyle Stroke.

Consider what part of the body or stroke section you want to work on, such as the head position or recovery arm.

Choose one skill project for each practice set.

Even if the main purpose of the set is for fitness conditioning, consider what part of your stroke is most vulnerable to deterioration under the stress of this set and make that your skill project. Every stroke, especially when taken under fatigue, is programming your brain to swim this way under similar conditions.

For the skill project you have chosen, within that part of the body or stroke section choose the specific focal points you will use during this set.

You may choose up to three focal points, but we do not recommend that you try to work with more than that. The brain can only handle so many things at once. By having one to three focal points you may strike a balance between taking enough time to train each one and having some variety in how you apply attention during this set.

For more on this you may want to read What Are Focal Points?

For your live training experience or your copy of one of the TI videos you may have a list of focal points that you have already practiced using.

You may find an outline of the standard TI drills with list of standard focal points of TI’s Perpetual Motion Freestyle series and the Ultra Efficient Freestyle series on our Freestyle Drill Resources page.

And you may enjoy sampling the additional focal points we have created and collected on our 101 Focal Points page.

Related to the training goal that you have stated already, with its quantities and qualities, choose a skill project of higher priority that you feel you need to work on.

And, for that skill project list up to three focal points that you will use for it – focal points A, B, and C.

There are several ways to train your body to swim as your intend. We will list the main activities we use, in their order of increasing complexity for the body and brain.

There are links to read more about what these are, if you are not already familiar with them.

Visualization

You may or may not have experienced or read about the power of visualization training.

In visualization you are not moving your body at all, you are just using your brain to image yourself moving through a part of the stroke of the whole thing.

If you are not familiar with this, you may read What is Visualization?

Visualization can be just a minute or two. You can do it just like you do intervals of drills.

For example, imagine taking 20 strokes (cont them!) and then rest for 10 seconds. Repeat 3 times.

Rehearsal

If you have attended a TI workshop or series of lessons, most likely you have practiced using rehearsals.

A rehearsal is done standing on the deck or in shallow water. You are standing up, working under gravity rather than laying in the water where you have to float and hold balance. In this position you can only work on some parts of the upper body or some rotation movements.

If you are not familiar with rehearsals, you may read What Are Rehearsals?

Rehearsals can be done in for 5 to 10 repeats with rest or a drill between. Plan to rehearse on both sides of the body.

Drill

If you have been training with TI you know what drills are, or what we intend for drills to be like.

Drills have you laying in the water. They can be nearly stationary in the water, to moving slowly, to moving just part of the body, to whole stroke.

If you are not familiar with them, then you may read:

• What Are Drills?
• Guidelines For Using Drills

Drills can be very short – just 3 or 4 seconds, or 3 or 4 strokes. They could be up to 8 strokes, about the comfortable limit for holding your breath. And they could be a full length (with interrupted breathing or rhythmic breathing).

Be careful not to turn it into an exercise for getting to the other wall! It is about training precision, not accomplishing distance.

Drill Plus Strokes

You might also do a more stationary or passive drill (like Torpedo, Superman or Skate) for 3 or 4 seconds then take 3 or 4 more whole strokes while holding the same focal point. This also should fit within your comfortable limits for holding your breath.

8 Strokes

You may take just 6 to 8 strokes, again within the comfortable limit for holding your breath.

Why hold breath? You probably should exhale gently while doing the drill so that your body does not get so uncomfortable with the buildup of carbon dioxide. But, if it is not the purpose of the drill, turning to breath can be disruptive to the body and it often takes 2 or more stroke to reestablish best balance and stability. That will use up a lot of precious drill time.

These short segments of strokes will take you only about 10 meters, just a fraction of the length. You might do a drill out past the flags then turn around to do the drill back to the wall, if lane sharing with other swimmers permits.

You may then increase this short segment of strokes by inserting a breath into the middle. Set up with 3 strokes, then turn to breathe, then reestablish your best body position as quickly as possible.

1 Length

The next increase of complexity is to swim whole stroke for a single, full length. This will require some form of breathing, either interrupted breathing or rhythmic breathing.

If you are not familiar with this, you may read What Is Interrupted Breathing?

The idea behind ‘one length’ is to swim just one length and rest or do a drill before doing another length.

Multiple Lengths

Why take all those baby steps before swimming multiple lengths?

If you need a reminder you can read Why Work In Small Pieces At First?

Eventually, you will be ready to swim multiple lengths continuously because you were able to swim single lengths consistently with your best form – reaching the quality standards you have set for yourself.

Now you can choose a number of lengths that correspond to your weakest point of performance. If fitness is weaker than technical control then set the distances of the repeats around that limit. If technical control is weaker than fitness, then set the distances around that limit. You need to bring the weaker system up to proportional strength with your strong systems, then challenge them together.

If you would like some examples of ways to arrange intervals of multiple lengths you may read Try Different Interval Patterns.

~ ~ ~

Between each of these activities and each of the repeats you will take some rest.

But what kind of rest? And how much?

You may read about Passive Rest Intervals, Active Rest Intervals, and Nasal Breath Intervals. In addition, you may read about Work:Rest Ratio and How Much Rest Should I Take.

Keep in mind what systems you are challenging and how recovered you want those to be when you begin the next repeat.

For some sets you want to be completely recovered so you have all resources available for the next repeat. And for some sets you don’t want to be completely recovered because you are training your body to maintain quality in the midst of that fatigue.

There may even be sets where you will not allow yourself any rest so that you must exercise under the challenge of increasing fatigue or waning attention.

So, the training purpose of the set should influence what kind of rest you choose and how much.

~ ~ ~

In the previous section you studied how to design a single practice set. Now you will look at the components that go into an entire practice session.

There could be a lot of ways to organize a practice, but here is a logical way to organize your time.

Divide the practice into three sections: the Warm-Up, Main Sets, and the Cool-Down.

The Warm-Up is where you prepare the body, brain and mind to work, and to work together harmoniously. We will repeat this later – the higher the quality of your warm up the more productive your main set can be.

The Main Sets are where you present the main challenges for your skills and fitness and work to solve those.

The Cool-Down is where you review what you have just done and prepare your body to leave on a positive note.

~~~

Before you even get in the water, let us point out that you can further increase the quality of your practice time by creating a routine to follow on the way to the pool – this routine would prepare you to be fully present and engaged in your practice time. Your approach will affect your experience in practice.

The idea is to form a Swim Preparation Habit that sets you up for the most positive and productive practice time.

To be inspired about this further you may read Your Swim Prep Habit.

The fact is, you may have a routine already. But have you thought through that routine? Is it carefully planned out? Are all the things you do chosen for how they contribute to your practice? Some are and likely some are not.

Consider the activities that may be a part of anyone’s routine on the way to the pool (all the way to entry into the water):

• Gathering your swim gear from their exclusive drying spot.
• Checking supplies in your swim bag.
• Restocking supplies in your swim bag.
• Reviewing your results from last practice.
• Reviewing your practice plan for today.
• Setting your main intention or objective for this practice.
• Envisioning your upcoming practice on the way to the pool.
• Choosing silence or special music to prepare you for practice.
• Choosing your locker or spot in the changing room.
• How you fold and store your clothes.
• How you put on your swim attire, in what order.
• Before you get in the water who do you talk to, what about, and why.
• When and how you rinse in the shower before entering the water.
• How you arrange your gear beside the pool.
• How you breathe before you enter the water.
• What you focus your attention upon before you enter the water.
• How you enter the water.
• How you begin your first length.

This assignment has a few parts.

Step 1

Practice awareness. Think through all the moments that happen in a typical approach to practice. Simply take inventory of those events.

Step 2

Consider which events have a negative impact on your practice. For each one come up with at least one way to either remove or reduce this stress.

Step 3

Consider which events have a positive impact on your practice. For each one come up with at least one way to protect or improve this part of your routine.

Step 4

Consider anything you could add to your routine that would make it even better.

Step 5

For at least the next 4 weeks, for each week, choose one of these improvements and apply that to your routine for the entire week. The following week, keep that improvement going and choose another improvement to make to your routine.

~~~

We need to stress the importance of the warm-up time. The better your warm-up the more productive you can be during your main sets because your brain and body will be prepared to work at a much higher level. Please do not be impatient; do not take short-cuts with your warm up time. 

For more encouragement you may read these articles:

• Why Tune-Up
• Tune-Up Quick Guide
• How To Construct A Tune-Up
• Out Of Tune

What if you are not feeling so eager when you get to practice?

For encouragement and a recommendation on how to work with this, you may read How To Leave The Pool.

Here are some activities that we recommend for your warm up time:

• Silent Swimming
• Slow-Motion Swimming
• Switch between alternative strokes (breast, back, fly)
• Fist Swimming
• Alternate short distances of slow-medium-brisk swimming
• Skate Position kicking with short fins
• Backstroke Skate Position kicking with short fins

Here are some general recommendations – you may think of exceptions to this, but in general these may help you:

• Start as gently as possible and keep it gentle until you feel energy increase and feel your body ‘pulled’ into more energetic movements.
• Keep motion within comfortable range of motion (passive flexible range). Don’t force your joints to stretch – let tissues lengthen and joints open up naturally through gentle rhythmic motion.
• Use breathing, and particularly use the exhale as one of your initial focal points.
• Add some variety of movements like switch between different strokes that you can do gently and comfortably.
• After 5 minutes or so, add a variety of intensity.

Examples For Warm Up

Example A

• 6x 50 whole stroke – gentle
• 2x (50 breaststroke + 50 backstroke)
• 4x 25 Skate Position kicking with fins

Example B

• 300 Silent Swim
• 3x (50 fist + 50 hand)
• 2x 100 Slow-Motion whole stroke, new focal point on each round

Example C

• 600 Slow-Motion whole stroke
• 3x (50 slow + 50 medium + 50 brisk)
• 3x (100 focal point swim + 50 breaststroke), new focal point on each round

The Cool-Down is where you let your body systems slow down, the waste products to more easily be drawn out of your muscles and let your mind reflect on what you just accomplished and how that should influence the next practice.

Physically, the cool down activities should correspond to the kind of work you did in the main set.

Move your body gently in the same movement pattern as the main set, allowing those muscles and joints to dissipate the waste products. 

Move your body gently in the counter-movements to loosen tissues that might have tightened in support of hard, repetitious work in the main set. For example, swimming in backstroke moves the shoulder join in the opposite direction as freestyle. Swimming in breaststroke moves the shoulders and hops in ways very different than freestyle and backstroke.

At the very end, move in a way that is very pleasant. Leave the pool with positive physical and mental sensations flowing through you.

Some activities that we recommend for cool down:

• Silent Swimming
• Pure Pleasure Swim
• Backstroke Skate Position kicking with fins (continuous breathing)
• Underwater dolphin (well within comfortable breath hold distance)
• Pool skills work (discussed in a later section)

Use this time to reflect on what you intended to accomplish, what you actually accomplished – including points of improvement and points of failure. Think of ways today’s results should influence your next practice plan. Set a new intention for your next practice while the sensations are fresh and strong.

An amount of variety and choices in your practice week is a good thing, but too much can have negative effects.

Think of your practice as a sandwich. The warm-up and the cool-down represent the two pieces of hearty, healthy bread – it stays fairly steady from practice to practice – while the filling is the main set – which may be different from practice to practice. For consistency keep just two or three warm up and cool down routines in your list of options, then allow the variety to come from the changes in your main sets.

As a matter of fact, for a period of weeks we may recommen that you keep your warm up fairly similar from practice to practice. When you do this you have a very consistent situation at the beginning of each practice in which to scan your body and mind and notice any differences between the previous practice and today. By keeping the conditions of your approach and warm-up routine the same, internal differences in your body and mind will become more pronounced when they are unusual.

This will allow you to make better interpretations as to what is causing the difference in how you feel today. If it is a positive thing, then you can consider what you may do to protect this cause and replicate it. If it is a negative thing, then you can consider what changes you may make to avoid or prevent it again.

So, make your warm-up fairly routine from practice to practice, with occasional variations in some part of it. Plan your cool down to match the kind of main set you have done. You may have a cool down routine for each of your practice types (we discuss those types in the next section).

Looking at the activities and guidelines given in this section design 2 different warm-up routines and 3 different cool-down routines.

Warm-Up

Aim to make your warm up last at least 10 minutes long (of continuous movement) and perhaps up to 15 or 20 minutes long. The total distance could be 500 to 1000 meters.

Let these warm up routines include both gentle movement in your main stroke style and either add some variety with other stroke styles or add short pieces of varied intensity.

Cool-Down

You will come back to this assignment to revise it once your have some additional insights from the next section. But start your design now.

Aim to make your cool down at least 5 minutes long (of continuous movement). Let one activity gently move your body in the same stroke style of your main sets. 

Let one cool down routine include movements counter to the main stroke style or very different to it.

Let one cool down routine include some kicking in Skate Position – backstroke or face-down Skate Position

Let one cool down routine include a Pure Pleasure swim.

Now that you have studied how to design the pieces of a full practice session, we will discuss how to compose a series of practices that work together to develop both skill and fitness, taking you toward your short-term achievement goal.

We will propose a couple ways you can create a series of practices that take you through an orderly progression to develop your abilities.

Straight Series

This involves a single practice type, peformed in a consecutive series.

For example:

• Day 1: Attention Practice 1a (progression step a)
• Day 2: Attention Practice 1b (progression step b)
• Day 3: Attention Practice 1c (progression step c)
• Day 4: Attention Practice 1d (progression step d)

In this series, you would design a single Attention Practice and then modify each set in one way for the subsequent practice, making it slightly more challenging each time.

By working through a straight series of practices, where you repeat the same practice with small, careful adjustments in the challenge level, you can really notice cause-and-effect and detect fine details of progress you are making.

The downside is that you are not working the other performance systems for several days while you spend several consecutive practices working in the same dimension like this. If you are just starting swimming, or just starting to rebuild fitness, this may be a good way to start gently – especially in using Attention sets which work the physical body more gently while building up the motor control required to safely handle higher work loads. 

Cyclical Series

Another approach is to use multiple practice types, in a certain order, and repeat them over multiple cycles.

For example:

• Week 1: Attention Practice 1a, Distance Practice 1a, Tempo Practice 1a
• Week 2: Attention Practice 1b, Distance Practice 1b, Tempo Practice 1b
• Week 3: Attention Practice 1c, Distance Practice 1c, Tempo Practice 1c

Just as with the Single Series, you design each practice then create slight modifications for the next time you do that practice type, but during the week you work through a few different practice types.

By working through a cycle of practice types you can work on all of the performance systems, with each practice emphasizing a particular performance system.

Plan For Repetition

In both approaches to a series of practices you are establishing some repetition. You brain needs repetition in order to build the circuits for those skills.

And, repeated practices allow you can get familiar with how that practice works and how your body responds to it.

Rather than randomly bounce around from skill project to skill project, constantly changing what you work on and how, choose just one to three skill projects for the practice cylce and work on just those.  There is room to be flexible and add some other things of interest, but be patient and persistent to work with repetition to acquire the skills.

Plan For Consistency

Be consistent about keeping to your practice schedule and routine. This consistency is what builds habits for how you live and practice, and this consistency builds habits for how you perform the training activities.

Practices need to be frequent enough and provide enough routine so that your brain can acquire the skills and strengthen them. By working on the same few skill projects consistently over a few practices, over a few cycles your brain has a much better opportunity to adapt and find more economical ways to apply that skill.

You may be in a situation right now in life where you can only manage to schedule 1 or 2 practices per week. If this is your situation, then let’s be grateful that you can schedule these practices and use that precious time well.

But, if you have the option we highly recommend 3 to 5 days of practice per week, with at least one full physical rest day.

Plan For Variety

The principle of repetition and consistency can possibly lead to some boredom and urge your brain to tune out of the training activity.

It is also important to combine variety with repetition. They are not necessarily opposed to each other. Rather than creating variety by changing the skill projects frequently (and thus reduce your ability to develop any one of them) you keep the same skill project and change the mode in which you are practice that skill. Work on the same skill with different practice types.

By taking one skill and practicing it in different modes over the cycle, you make that skill much stronger, more resilient under a wider range of swimming conditions.

Here is an example of how you could spread out a larger set of skill projects (A, B, C, D and E) over a 4 week cycle:

• Week 1 and 2: Three skill projects A, B, and C
• Week 3: Three skill projects B, C, and D
• Week 4: Three skill projects B, D, and E

You have room for only so many projects in a week. But you may work through some of those projects slower, and some faster than others. So, once you are done working on one project you can fill that space with another on your list.

Gradually Increase Intensity

Another way you will create variety while repeating or cycling through practice types is by gradually increasing the challenge of those practices.

Design the first practice set to just barely start to challenge your weakest performance system. Then if you feel you were fairly successful with that assignment, increase the challenge level by one increment the next time you do that practice set.

• Practice Set 1: Starting Challenge Level
• Practice Set 2: Starting Challenge Level + 1 step increase in challenge
• Practice Set 3: Starting Challenge Level + 2 steps increase in challenge
• Practice Set 4: Starting Challenge Level + 3 steps increase in challenge

You may increase the challenge level one week, but then keep it at the same challenge level the next week in order to give your body more time to adapt. You need to evaluate your progress is adaption to decide how soon and how much you can increase the challenge level and still stay within your sweet spot of challenge.

Change Just One Variable

To increase the challenge level in a ‘scientific’ way you should change only one variable of that practice set and keep the rest the same. This allows you to more easily notice the cause-and-effect in your results, from one practice to another.

If you kept the practice variables the same, but get a different (better or worse) result, then you can more easily search for the reason why.

If you changed just one variable, making the practice slightly more difficult, and you get the same positive result as last time, you may be encouraged that your abilities are increasing. 

If you changed just one variable, making the practice slightly more difficult, and you get much more failure than you expected, you may realize that this was too much, too soon. You may need to get back to the previous practice plan and repeat it exactly as it is until you feel your body has had enough time to adapt and increase its abilities. Then try to practice with increased difficulty again for a test.

Here are the main variables you can change:

• Hold distance, decrease distance, or increase distance
• Hold intensity, decrease intensity, or increase intensity
• Hold skill standard, change skill focus, increase skill standard

Note: Intensity may be affected by changing the stroke length (stroke counting), and tempo, pace and perceived effort (RPE). Make any of these slightly more challenging and you have just increased the intensity of the set.

There are different ways you can increase the challenge of the set, from one practice to the next. If you are designing another set to follow the previous one you may want to …

• Hold all variables the same and compare to the results last time you did this set to see if there is progress.
• Hold most variables the same but change just one variable to make this set slightly more challenging than last time.
• Hold most variables the same but decrease just one variable because you experienced too much failure the previous time you did this set.

Example of Practice Cycles

Here is an example of a 7-Day Practice Cycle:

Day 1: Attention Practice, Strength & Conditioning

Day 2: Tempo Practice

Day 3: Strength & Conditioning

Day 4: Distance Practice

Day 5: Stretching, Rest

Day 6: Pace Practice

Day 7: Rest

Here is an example of a 9-Day Practice Cycle:

Day 1: Attention Practice, Strength & Conditioning

Day 2: Tempo Practice

Day 3: Stretching, Rest

Day 4: Distance Practice

Day 5: Attention Practice, Stretching

Day 6: Rest

Day 7: Strength & Conditioning

Day 8: Pace Practice

Day 9: Rest

Go back to your previous assignment where you designed two Attention Sets, a Distance Set, two Tempo Sets, and a Pace Set.

Look at each one and lay out a plan for creating a 4-step progression for each one of those sets. For each practice set decide which variables will stay the same, and which single variable you will slightly increase the challenge for over the course of that progression.

Now, consider how many week this series will need – it may be 1 to 5 weeks long.

Now that you have a plan laid out for a series of practices, let’s consider how you will actually work through it.

It is almost certain that what you end up doing will deviate from the original plan. As a matter of fact, if you’ve designed the practices to take you into the sweet spot of challenge you will have weaknesses exposed and encounter failures which should cause you to adjust your plans.

In this section you will study how to practice in a more organic way – a way that is responsive to the signals your body is sending – allowing your observations and results to influence how you progress through each set.

What makes your practice have high quality, high productivity is the feedback system you have in place. Feedback tells you what is going well and what is not going well so that you can protect or correct that.

By using your feedback system you can test for your strengths and weaknesses and then design your practices to improve your weaker areas.

 You have two main kinds of feedback which are equally important, and are used together:

1. External feedback – anything that can be measured by an external device or observer, like time, stroke count, tempo, speed, heart rate, duration of rest, etc.
2. Internal feedback – anything that is measured by your own senses and intuition, internal sensations, like physical ease, breathing ease, precision, relaxation, effort, smoothness, flow, enjoyment, etc.

As we discussed earlier in this course, for every practice set, including warm up and cool down you have indicated the quantities (those things which correspond to external feedback) and qualities (those things which correspond to internal feedback) to work with in that set.

When you have clearly indicated these quantities and qualities you are in position then to measure these and compare to previous results. By this comparison you are able to identify strengths and weaknesses, and get an overall sense of progress.

Pick Just A Few

As a reminder, although there are many quantities and qualities you could possibly measure, in each set use only a few. Your brain has capacity for only so many things to monitor and process.

So, as a rule-of-thumb, choose just two or three to design the set around, and always have at least one of them be a quality to measure.

In every practice set there are two levels of skill you are working on – the first is obvious and the second is not.

1. A specific swim skill – some feature of your body position, movement pattern, or attention you are working to improve.
2. The ability to change something about yourself. 

Even if you are not sure the change you are making is the best idea or good enough, you are still practicing the ability to make something change in yourself. The more you practice accepting new insight and making a change accordingly, the better you get at changing yourself.

This should be very good news to you because over the course of your swimming life you will likely be making hundreds of modifications to your stroke due to new information, changing goals, age-related adaptations, etc. So, becoming adept at making changes is more important that the actual change you make! You may periodically change your mind about what to change, but you can count on the fact that you will be making a lot of changes over your life time as a swimmer. 

And in order to deal with a frustrating level of perfectionism in your attitude about getting things correct the first time you may read Stroke-Change Skill and Correction Vs. Over-Correction.

The presence of failure in practice is an important part of the feedback system. A well-designed practice set should take you into a level of challenge where failure is possible, even likely.

Failure is when you do not achieve the quantities and/or qualities that you have assigned for that practice set. This is why you clearly state what the quantities and qualities for the practice are so that you can measure them.

Objective failures – failures in quantities

• You did not achieve the time
• You did not hold steady SPL
• You could not hold steady tempo
• You could not finish the distance
• You had to add time to your rest moments

Subjective failures – failures in qualities

• Effort went up dramatically
• You lost relaxation in a part of the body
• You lost concentration on a focal point
• Your control over a body part fell apart
• You lost precision
• You lost synchronization of propulsion parts
• You lost rhythm
• You lost ease of movement
• You lost smooth transfer of power
• You lost enjoyment

We not only accept feedback about failure in our practices, we seek it out. We have a positive relationship with it.

To understand more about our positive relationship with failure you may read Test For Progress And Weakness.

The whole point of practice is to seek out points of failure in our skill and fitness under controlled situations so that we can see where we are making progress and what needs more work. We have precious little practice time so this helps us keep it focused on what matters most to our progress. Practice is for strengthening weaknesses, not for hiding behind strengths.

When you encounter failures you need to interpret them in order to know what needs to be worked on. Failure may fall into one of these three categories:

1. Metabolic failure – you fatigued (the whole body) too early
2. Muscular failure – your muscle power dropped (a part of the body)
3. Motor failure – your precision fell apart

All three are deeply intertwined but for training purposes it helps to divide them into these categories. #1 and #2 are mostly about physical fitness, while #3 is mostly about neurological fitness (= skill).

When failure comes in a practice set, you may experience a mixture of these. But if you examine carefully, you may notice that one of them came first and provoked failure in the others. That careful examination gives you clues where your primary weakness is for this set.

To understand more about how to recognize the differences in signals you may read Three Kinds Of Failure and Subdividing Your Performance System.

There is a very simple answer for this.

Success is doing it better than you did yesterday. Success is getting out of the pool a bit better, a bit more aware, a bit more skillful, with a bit more understanding that you had when you got in.

And more specifically – success is doing better in this particular practice set, on this particular metric than you did yesterday. Success is a general feeling, but it is also a very specific measurement.

Your improvement is a long-term process and your understanding of what is ideal and your understanding of how to make progress toward that is going to evolve over time.

For more encouragement you may read:

• Leave The Pool
• Correction Versus Over-Correction
• Your Abilities Expand

By this time in the course your completed assignments so far should include a plan with several practice types arranged into a weekly pattern, and spread out over several weeks, with slight increases in challenge planned for each subsequent practice.

But what if you don’t perform according to your plan? What if you don’t succeed at the challenge level set in this practice but the plan has the challenge increasing on the next practice?

Like every plan, it rarely survives contact with reality. Actually, this is expected, and the plan is still very important despite this confrontation. The plan shows you the necessary steps of development ahead of you, but your performance in those steps determine the pace you go along in that plan. 

When your results urge you to adjust – to increase challenge or lower it – you have a much better idea about where you can make changes in practice sets and have an idea of the impact of those changes. The fact is, if you are creating a genuine skill-building practice plan that you will run into some challenges that will require more time to work through and other challenges that you pass through quickly. When you are working in new territory (in terms of skill and fitness) you are not sure what time your body will need to work through the growth challenges it encounters – the only way to know is to go forward with your intelligent plan and adjust along the way.

Like anyone, you may want to see continual signs of progress. You may expect to be able to increase the level of challenge, practice after practice, week after week until you reach your goal. But this is not how your skills and fitness will develop.

Just like the seasons of the year, your development process will have seasons. And, just like the variability in weather and other forces acting on the natural environment, you will have variability in your personal conditions from day to day, week to week, and throughout the year.

There will be periods of time where you can regularly increase the level of challenge. Then there will be times when progress requires that you keep the same challenge level – your body needs more time to work on the this level to develop hidden internal features that will make increases possible.

Just as you may use repeats in a practice set to work on the exact same challenge repetitively, you may also repeat practices a few times, without modification, in order to work on the exact same package of challenges to give your body more time to adapt to them.

Influence of Personal Conditions

When you encounter some results in practice that were not as good as you expected them to be you should consider the conditions you find yourself performing in. The practice set must be appropriate to the condition you find yourself in on this day, and you may need to adjust your expectations accordingly. You could do the exact same practice two days in a row, but have a difference in performance because of a difference in the personal condition you were in when doing the second practice.

Sometimes you need to keep practice sets the same in order to see the impact of your life outside the pool. When sleep, stress and nutrition vary in your daily life, you will notice the limiting effects in your practice.

The more routine you keep certain parts of your practice (such as the warm up) the more apparent those variations in your condition will be to you.

If a practice was starting to feel easy right before an illness struck, you might repeat that exact same practice after the illness to test how quickly your body is recovering. After a short illness your performance may experience a little set back, so you would do well to keep your expectations for the first practices at the same level as before, or even a little less. You may need to repeat a few practices that you did prior to your illness, so you can revive your body to that previous level of performance.

If you experience a major illness that takes you away from training for more than a couple weeks, you may need to go further back in your training plan to repeat practices at a lower challenge level. You may not need to repeat all of it in order to regain your former capabilities, but you will need to have some days or weeks of careful rebuilding. The number of practices and the pace of increase depends on your personal condition after the illness.

Need For More Adaptation

When you are working through a practice and it seems to be in your sweet spot, but when you try to increase the challenge level and there is too much failure right away, then you may need to stay at this current level of challenge for one or more practices. Your body and brain may be telling you that you need more time to work at this level in order to develop all the unseen systems that make visible improvement possible.

This may be likened to the work a tree is doing in the winter. No outward growth is visible but below the surface the roots are doing their job to get ready for the next spring, to support the outward growth of branches and leaves and flower and fruit.

This winter work may be identified as the plateau which is a necessary part of the training season.

Even when you have an intelligent plan, and practice persistently, there will be these natural plateaus in your visible performance while your body and brain do deep, hidden work to prepare for the next step up in skill. This requires patience with the process. The simple solution for that patience is to just fall in love with the process of practicing mindfully.

You may read more about working in the plateau in George Leonard’s classic book called ‘Mastery’. It is a must-read for mindful swimmers.

Observing Flaws In The Foundation

It is likely that you will also notice weaknesses or failures in foundation skills while you are working on advanced skills.

Should you stop the practice set and change focus to work on those foundation skills? Aren’t they higher priority?

It is possible, but you need to consider how critical is it that you improve that foundation skill right away? Is it good enough for the moment, allowing you to work on other parts of the stroke and fitness?

You may read more about this in When To Keep Or When To Change A Set.

This course anticipates that most Level 1 swimmers are practicing primarily in a pool.

The pool is filled with water to swim through just like in the sea or lake. But unlike open water it is also blocked in by walls, and usually filled with other people swimming very close to you. There are skills that you need for working within these walls, and swimming around others – especially if they are not swimming as nicely as you are.

So some of your practice time each week should be devoted to improving your pool skills until they become reliable habits for you. The better your pool skills are, the more adaptable and peaceful you may be, even under less-than-ideal pool conditions.

Etiquette

Since you often have to share lane space with other swimmers, most pools have some sort of rules or etiquette (and some seem to have none!).

Even if the others are behaving badly, you are still going to have a better chance of having a peaceful swim if you yourself are courteous to others as much as is reasonable.

Be friendly from the beginning. Ask the name of your lane mate.

Take initiative to ask an incoming swimmer to share the lane with you.

If there are lane lines you may ask your single lane mate if you can split the lane where each person takes one side of the lane, or if there are more than one person sharing ask to share in a circle swim where everyone swims on the right or left side, going in both directions.

Pass a slow swimmer very carefully, so that you do not run into someone coming from the opposite direction, or bump the person you are passing, or try to pass them too close to the wall where they may turn into you.

If you plan to do a turn, aim for the center of the lane wall. If you plan to stop at the wall aim for the corner on the side you are swimming on (don’t cross the turning zone in case someone is turning), and leave the middle open for the swimmer behind you to do a turn at the center.

If possible, modify your rest intervals, allow them to fluctuate, in order to fit within the pattern of the dominating swimmer.

Move to another lane to do work that is much faster or much slower than the speed your lane mates are working at.

Consistency

Just as you want your stroke length and tempo to be consistent in order to conserve energy, you also need your performance at the walls to be consistent so that your measurements for each length make sense.

The push-off. The distance that you glide. The break-out as you emerge from underwater. Your first breath. How you reach the far wall. How you make the turn. Variation in your position, your precision, your timing, your effort at each of these will affect the speed you start and the distance you have to stroke through on each length.

These skills will be described below.

For Pool Swimmers

Obviously, those who swim in pools most of the time need these pool skills. This is the environment where you swim and the walls and the other people are going to be a regular part of the activity of swimming. The better your skills are for handling lanes, walls and people the more enjoyable practice time will be.

For Open Water Swimmers

Because most open water swimmers spend some part of their swim practice in the pool, they also need these pool skills.

Just as with pool swimmers, the open water swimmer should train to be consistent in their pool skills, but there could be different value for certain techniques. Some of those will be mentioned in below.

Starting from the in-water start, the push-off from the wall should be consistent – the position of the feet, the position of the body, the push off angle, depth and force.

Before pushing, the feet are placed in the same orientation, and at the same depth each time. This requires the whole body to be positioned the same way, holding the wall in the same way each time.

Just before pushing the body lays down underwater, the arms extend, the hands overlap to create an arrowhead shape pointed in the direction of travel, parallel to the surface.

Then the legs push powerfully to send this streamlined body forward in a course parallel to the surface – not aimed upward nor downward.

And press with the same amount of force each time so that your path and breakout point may be the same.

The glide is from the moment of push-off to the moment the body is about to break the surface of the water.

The body is as long, straight, and pointed as it can be.

The first half of the glide is motionless. At the second half, just as peak velocity seems to wane, some swimmers may start to flutter kick and others may do a dolphin kick, while some may just keep their legs stiff and toes pointed until the first underwater stroke.

Eventually, the pressure of water will start to push the body upward toward the surface. You should keep your body parallel to the surface, pointed in the direction of travel. Let the body come up evenly, parallel to the surface.

Just as the body is about to break the surface you begin the catch and underwater stroke with one arm, while the other slides into Skate Position to deliver the force of that stroke force forward.

The head should come up to the weightless head (neutral) position, just as it would be on any other stroke, and this puts the torso in position where the stroking arm can now come out of the water and begin the first recovery swing.

After working through this course we hope you will feel more confident about designing your own practices in a way that takes you toward your performance goals.

But it is possible this all still seems quite complicated. We would like to offer some additional comments to help you get started and get more comfortable with this process.

It is likely that you still don’t feel totally confident on how to do this. Just like when starting to learn a new way to swim with TI, you need to go through the process a few times until it starts to feel familiar. Then you start to notice how parts work together and you notice other details you didn’t previously. It all starts to make more sense.

That may be similar to what you experience when first trying to create your own series of practices using principles that take you way beyond the one-dimensional kind of training we experience in conventional practices. To work with more powerful practice principles you need to take the time to get acquainted with them.

If you really want to grasp this, we urge you to go through this process of designing your own plan and then using it – do it three times over the next three months.

Pick one modest achievement goal, one for which you already know the drills to use and skills you need to improve.

Then make a practice plan for 4 weeks, with a half week of rest at the end (to fill out the whole month, or end on a weekend, for convenient scheduling).

Select three practice types – we recommend Attention, Distance and Tempo to start with, to fill 3 practices per week. If that still seems like too much, then choose just Attention and Distance.

Then design your sets for each practice type, for the first two full practices. That will get you started. Once you experience those two practices you can begin adjusting the quantities and qualities in those practice sets to get them closer to what really fits your current skill and fitness level. Then you can continue to follow the recommendations in this course for making slight increases in challenge over the rest of the month. 

Once you have gone through this for one month, you’ll have some experience with it. You will be in much better position to design a series of practices for the second month. You will know what you know and you will know what you need to ask us questions about. That is when you can send us an email to ask those questions – either the answers are in the course, or we need to improve those answers, or we will know from you we need to add them to the material.