Creating meaningful technical change is simple.
You need to identify what matters and then patiently challenge your skills with a progressive training plan.
It’s simple, but it’s not easy.
To make the process easier, there are a series of questions you can ask yourself to ensure the change you’re making is the right one as laid out HERE and HERE.
Once you feel confident that the change you’re making is going to help you swim faster, it’s a matter of putting yourself in the right position to make that change happen. The challenge here is that your brain and body aren’t telling you the truth about how you’re moving.
Fortunately, you can learn to decipher the lies with the strategies I outlined HERE.
When you’ve learned to make the change, it’s time to train it.
With increasing training stress over time, you’ll make your skill resistant to ever increasing levels of speed and fatigue, exactly that stresses you’ll face in competition.
It’s a step by step process, that if followed with patience, works every time.
While these phases are laid out in a linear manner and should be followed in a relatively linear manner, you don’t have to do so strictly. If you’re still in step 1, it’s okay to perform some work in step 2. In fact, doing so will likely help your efforts in phase 1.
Likewise, if you’re in phase 3, you should definitely be performing work in step 1 and 2 to continue to build your skills. Not only will this help you continue to develop your skills, it will prevent you from performing too much hard work associated with racing which, will actually cause you to go backwards.
Of course, if you’re in step 4, you’ll still be training in steps 1-3.
Depending on your goals, you never may desire to progress beyond step 2 or step 3, certainly not if you have no desire to compete. At the other extreme, if you plan to compete in a championship setting, you’ll need to move all the way through step 4 to make sure the changes you create show up when it matters most.
While the change process is not an easy one, it’s a simple one.
Just follow the steps I’ve laid out and you’ll be well on your way to making technical changes that matter and enhance your performance.
Since most people won’t have the discipline and the patience to make change, make this process a secret weapon in your performance enhancing arsenal.
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