No Retirement Necessary

by Coach Mat | 26 Jan, 2013

Coach Terry shared an article from the NY Times Online with me today. I nearly started crying. I am completely confident that an experienced TI Coach can guide you to achieve your Ultimate Potential along a unique and effective path. TI Philosophy, and I dare say, TI...

Using Drills

by Coach Mat | 22 Jan, 2013

To carry on our discussion of How To Use Drills, I will provide an outline here for how they can be incorporated into your practice time. If you haven’t read it already I point you back to the previous post Using Focal Points to scan that first. This post will...

Using Focal Points

by Coach Mat | 21 Jan, 2013

I have been getting some great inquiries by email lately and want to lay out some things in one place that should address a common thread of need-for-understanding I’ve seen in several inquiries. How do we use drills in practice? I will get to that in the next...

Meta-Cognate

by Coach Mat | 19 Jan, 2013

Challenging situations are made up of repeating patterns… It’s very difficult to see these patterns when we first enter a challenging situation, but, over time we begin recognising them – or at least learning how to deal with them more effectively....

Break It Down

by Coach Mat | 17 Jan, 2013

Are you struggling and frustrated with something in your swimming? It may be too obvious to state this, but then again it may not… at least in the context of solving our swimming problems. In order to solve them, we take the complexity of our problem and break...

Wet Fingers

by Coach Mat | 10 Jan, 2013

I am fascinated by physiology, and I am guessing many of you are also. Here’s an article on ScienceMag.com that I caught wind of from Daily News Of Open Water Swimming: Wrinkles Help Fingers Get a Grip   Recent photo of Antalya Mountains-City-Sea by my friend...

Training Pace Perception

by Coach Mat | 7 Jan, 2013

It may or may not be surprising to you to learn that holding consistent Pace is one of the most important skills for any swimmer desiring to race or accomplish a particular distance goal for the best possible outcome. This applies to 50 meters sprints to 1500 meters,...

Body Composition For Swimming

by Coach Mat | 2 Jan, 2013

I was typing out some thoughts on how body composition affects swimming on a TI Forum thread and thought it would be good to share the same here… Perhaps this will also help explain why we make the search for “The Path Of Least Resistance” the...

Private Virtual Competition

by Coach Mat | 29 Dec, 2012

This is how a virtual competition (with Sun Yang or any swimmer in the world you choose!) might work: Pace is a simple calculation of Stroke Length (SL) x Tempo. We will use SL because it is a universal measurement – it doesn’t matter what length pool you...

Best Head Position?

by Coach Mat | 27 Dec, 2012

When I do childrens lessons I keep a 20m section of rope in my swim gadget basket. I tie a small loop in one end. Then I give that loop to a swimmer, have them get out in the pool to the end of the rope. I stand on deck ready to reel the rope in. They will lay flat on...