by Coach Mat | 7 Jan, 2018 | Breathing Skills, Breathing Trouble, Respiratory Training, Student Stories
What do you do when you have done your best to solve your breathlessness problem in the pool and it is still not enough? You followed the Checklist For Easier Breathing: You’ve worked hard on your fundamental stroke skills. You’ve worked hard on the...
by Coach Mat | 17 Dec, 2017 | Breathing Skills, Breathing Trouble, Discomfort, Increasing Ease, Internal Feedback, Mastery Process, Neurological Training, Practice Examples, Progression, Student Stories
I was working with ‘Ray’ in a private lesson. He presented a good example of how we could use the Checklist For Easier Breathing to diagnose his breathing complaint and pinpoint the possible solutions. To review, here are the four main features of easier...
by Coach Mat | 29 Oct, 2017 | About Coach Mat, Breathing Skills, Breathing Trouble, Discomfort, Physiology
The Checklist Here is a ‘short’ and essential checklist to help you survey your pattern to look for gaps or weak spots. If you’ve been to one of our training events you’ll recognize many of these points and remember what kind of drills we use...
by Coach Mat | 14 Oct, 2017 | Breathing Skills, Breathing Trouble, Design Principles, Drills For Skills
Stressful, disruptive breathing is one of the top complaints brought to us by swimmers seeking coaching help. Sometimes the swimmer can experience a great improvement in ease with just one or two little adjustments. But often there are underlying structural problems...
by Coach Mat | 11 Jun, 2017 | Breathing Skills, Breathing Trouble, Dry-land Training, Kaizen (Continual Improvement), Muscle Tension, Physiology, Plateau (No Progress), Relaxation, Sleep, Student Stories
After a swimmer has invested the time to thoroughly work through fundamental swimming skills, often the swimmer encounters some obstacles to improvement that are better addressed by training he needs to do outside the pool. Some major areas for improvement that emerge...
by Coach Mat | 25 Mar, 2017 | Breathing Trouble, Discomfort, Fear, Mental Training, Overcoming Fear, Test Swims
I’ve had some version of this conversation with a few different swimmers recently and the scenario is something like this: a swimmer is wondering how to work through the strong discomfort she encounters when swimming up to a certain distance in set – say...
