Design Principles | Mediterra Swim & Run

For Those Who Struggle with Consistently Performing Well in Practice

by Coach Mat | 1 Jul, 2023

A concern I’ve heard from some of my longer-term students – those that have integrated the skills we’ve been working on – is that they don’t feel like they can consistently get into their best swimming from practice to practice. One day...

How Do You Know You’ve Made An Improvement?

by Coach Mat | 4 Jun, 2023

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?

by Coach Mat | 28 May, 2023

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...

How Are You Tapping Your Two Fuel Tanks?

by admin.mediterra | 23 Apr, 2023

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...

The Purpose Of Measuring Stroke Length

by Coach Mat | 9 Apr, 2023

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...

When You Go Harder But You Can’t Go Any Faster…

by Coach Mat | 11 Mar, 2023

The traditional approach to swimming faster is to just go harder and keep at it until something breaks through. For some, that simple instruction might work. But for far too many it hasn’t. Regardless of what approach you take to developing technique or...