Our recent Triathlon Swim Camp (March 1 to 5 in St Petersburg FL) offered two instructional sessions each day. The camp featured six 2-hour pool practices plus four 90-minute open water practices. The first three pool practices—morning and afternoon on Day 1 plus the following morning—were technique-intensive; the next three blended technique with introduction to TI Smart Speed training methodology.

During our 1-day Effortless Endurance Workshops, instruction relies heavily on technique drills, with coaches providing a great deal of hands-on guidance in the water for every participant. With the luxury of far more coaching time at the Tri-Swim Camp, we taught almost entirely through Whole Stroke with Focal Points. We had coaches in the water at each session, but their hands-on assistance was more selective—directed where a camper struggled with a particular mini-skill.

The whole-stroke/minimal-drill approach to learning can work equally well. Every TI student should employ it at some point. Drill-intensive learning accelerates the process, but should always be followed by, well, a lifetime of Whole-Stroke Focal Point practice. Anyone can start with whole-stroke practice and achieve mastery of TI technique, but it places considerable demands on the student’s strength of focus—and mental endurance.

This was reflected in a comment by Tri-Swim camper Art Mannarn midway through the morning of Day 2, as we layered breathing-skill focal points over previously-taught focal points for Balance and Streamlining. This can be an especially challenging moment in the learning process, as breathing is the most likely activity to disrupt body position and shape.

While taking a break between practice reps, Art exclaimed, “Wow, this is mentally exhausting!” This led me to ponder the nature of mental stamina. It turns out that we develop mental endurance almost exactly as we do metabolic (or cardiovascular) endurance. And since mental endurance is the keystone, it’s important to understand it. So here’s a quick primer.

Fuel Supply

The brain runs on exactly the same fuel as the muscles—oxygen and glycogen. And there’s great symbiosis between physical and mental activity: In several experiments, research subjects were asked to solve simple mental problems—memorization, reasoning, or calculation. They did so first in a rested state. They then took a test of similar difficulty after 20 minutes of aerobic activity. A high percentage of subjects raised their scores following exercise.  Because training increases circulation, the brain—like the muscles–receives an increased supply of energy during exercise.

The Effect of Work

The popular phrase “The mind is a muscle” is more true than most of us know: The brain and muscles both respond to work—or exercise—in the same way. The muscles become larger and develop a better network of capillaries to deliver energy through the bloodstream—and take away the byproducts of work. This is also true of the brain. Advanced scans—fMRI and PET scans—show increasing mass in areas of the brain that have been made to work harder. This reflects an increase in the gray matter that performs the motor control, sensory perception, and decision making that is critical to building new skills. And the white matter which connects one region of the brain to others, making those new skills easier and more fluent.

Increasing Efficiency

When muscles perform work, they increase in size. By adding more motor units to a muscle or group of muscles, the muscle can perform a given task—e.g. lifting a 25-lb weight—with more ease. When the brain performs work, that region of the brain not only increases in size, increasing the number of neurons available for the activities described above. Each new rep of a task–for instance integrating a new breathing skill with a recently-learned body position skill—results in two exciting changes to the brain:

  1. The brain develops more robust neural networks (by adding neurons to the circuit which directs the skill) that carry the signal to the muscles performing the task. A stronger signal leads to more consistency—and fewer errors–in that movement.
  2. The brain also ‘learns’ the task—becoming more precise in turning on just the right combination of motor units (and turning off those that need to relax). This reduces the amount of muscle tissue needed to perform the task effectively.

Both decrease energy cost, meaning ‘precious’ energy can go farther.

Mental Endurance

So, mental endurance looks a whole lot like physical endurance. As you do more repetitions of a specific task, the muscles involved in performing it gain in size and blood supply, allowing them to perform the task more times before fatigue. At the same time, the brain develops in ways that mean it gets better at the motor control, sensory perception and decision-making necessary to achieve mastery of the skill—and makes the working muscles operate more efficiently. And these adaptations occur many times faster in the brain than in muscle. So there’s a strong case for training that targets the brain first and muscles second.

Tomorrow’s Race

Tomorrow morning (Sat March 11), I’ll swim the 1650y (1500m equivalent) at the New England Masters Championship in Boston. I’ve swum this event with greater frequency since my cancer diagnosis. For nearly 50 years, I’ve used it as my primary gauge of my current swimming speed. And especially over the past year, registering to swim in one brings a pleasant sense of urgency and meaning to my practices.

Two weeks ago, I resumed swimming after a 7-week layoff required for a nasty gash in my lower left leg to close. I described my first day back in the water in the blog How to Resume Swimming After a Layoff.  My goals on that day were to experience the ‘deliciousness’ of being back in the water and to measure what I was capable of. I found that I could swim 200 yards in 16SPL and times ranging from 3:40 to 3:35 (1:47 to 1:50 per 100y). With my 25y stroke count and pace per 25y, I was able to calculate my tempo at 1.28 sec. per stroke.

In the two weeks since, I’ve patiently improved my pace and increased my tempo at a 16 SPL stroke count. At every moment, I focused on ease—on feeling the very controlled effort I must maintain for most of tomorrow’s race to maintain a steady pace for 66 lengths in a state of compromised physical conditioning.

Yesterday, in my final practice before the race, I did the following set with a Tempo Trainer, while also keeping track of strokes per length and my time for each swim.

14 x 100 on an interval of 2:10/100. I did two each at tempos of 1.27, 1.26, 1.25, 1.24, 1.23,1.22 and 1.21. I focused on keeping my stroke count consistent (striving to avoid added strokes) while swimming with as much relaxation possible.

By keeping my stroke count consistent, while incrementally speeding up tempo (.01 sec every other 100), I saw my 100y pace improve gradually from 1:38 to 1:35—despite making no effort to swim faster. Instead, I simply focused on executing strokes of consistent quality and ease as the tempo got faster.

I finished this 1800-yard set by swimming 2 x 200 at 1.2-second tempo, doubling repeat distance while increasing tempo by another .01 sec. Again, I was able to hold 16 SPL. Consequently, my 200y times were 3:10 and 3:11.

This is a pace improvement of 9% in just two weeks, illustrating how quickly the brain can adapt to training which targets it. I could not have made even a fraction of that much improvement in my aerobic endurance in such a short time frame. But mental endurance can improve with lightning speed.

In next week’s blog, I’ll write more about Mind-Body training that targets brain and muscles together.

Improve your ability to build mental endurance with our downloadable 1.0 Effortless Endurance Self-Coaching Course. Fourteen short videos illustrate the skill-building drills and skills to be performed in a series of logical steps. The companion workbook provides detailed guidance on how to use Focal Points for each step.toolkit.jpg-274x300