by Coach Mat | 7 Dec, 2019
If you want to swim farther and/or swim faster, you have to be both more skilled, and stronger. Some people focus on just one or the other. But you can develop both of those together if you require both in how you go about your training. I trust you are already sold...
by Coach Mat | 9 Nov, 2019
This is an addendum to the post The Tension Behind Relaxation… Some Examples Of Tension And Relaxation In Freestyle There could be hundreds of focal points for building appropriate tension and relaxation throughout the stroke – far too many to discuss in a...
by Coach Mat | 26 Oct, 2019
You’ll see from time to time in elite swimming, especially in the shorter/faster events, that a swimmer may have a ‘gallop’ or ‘lope’ which is a slight up/down motion of their head and upper body during the stroke cycle. This gallop is...
by Coach Mat | 26 May, 2018
We most often think of water as a whole body or continuous substance. But really, from another viewpoint in physics, it is a soup of individual water molecules, or little electrical balls all jumbled, bumping and swirling together. And if you want to swim forward in...
by Coach Mat | 18 Nov, 2017
Here is something I explain to my swimmers when we’re building (or re-building) the freestyle stroke for the first time. This is meant to help students on each extreme: those who are too anxious to start moving faster, and those who are too reluctant to add more...
by Coach Mat | 11 Oct, 2014
Some weeks ago I had an email discussion with my TI Coach colleague Bernardo Blanco in Spain. We were discussing the asymmetry observed in certain elite swimmers, and whether we should imitate this asymmetry or practice a symmetrical stroke. Coach Bernardo was going...
