How Do You Know You’ve Made An Improvement?
How do you know you’ve made an improvement from one practice session to another? By measuring failure, or rather, by measuring its reduction from one session to the next. If you repeat a challenging practice set and have measured what, when, where, and how and...
How Well Are You Benefiting From Your Training Failures?
In many settings in our culture, ‘failure’ is a personally-negative word, with unpleasant psychological or social implications. But in engineering, and in particular, in research and design, failure is an important, impersonal, and even positive output of...
What keeps you going, day after day, year after year?
There are some questions I sometimes ask myself or others to reflect on what supports one’s longevity in athletic activity, or I could use them to explore what might be standing in the way of doing it more if they haven’t found that consistency yet. How...
First, Build A Sufficient Fitness Tank
I wrote last recently on the idea of having two fuel tanks, one for fitness activities and the other on reserve for survival. Using that analogy as a reference point, and linking to the concerns I raised in the essay last week regarding knowing when you are ready for...
How Do You Know When You Are Ready For Your Event?
For the last two years, as a service to our local swimmer community, I have conducted private lessons as well as lake and river swimming clinics to help athletes in our area prepare for the swim leg of our local Ironman 70.3 Oregon race. In the Willamette River that...
How Are You Tapping Your Two Fuel Tanks?
Imagine that you, the athlete, have two fuel tanks, filled with resources that each of the performance subsystems (neural, muscular, metabolic, and mental subsystems) requires to function. The first fuel tank is the fitness tank, which has the capacity to support your...A Correction To The Calculations Of Stroke Length
One thing I love about writing blogs is the convenience of going back and correcting mistakes when I become aware of them. It was just pointed out to me that I jumbled two concepts into one at the end of the previous article The Purpose Of Measuring Stroke Length...
The Purpose Of Measuring Stroke Length
Concepts Stroke length is the distance your body travels forward on each arm stroke. How far you travel on each stroke is a direct indicator of how much work you accomplish and that work is a product of both strength and skill. Some people get more from their strength...