2010 TI Coaches Manual Excerpt #2

[terry]

This is the second in a series of excerpts I promised to post here for critique and feedback of the ideas and manner of expressing it. I was extremely pleased with the quality of input on the 1st excerpt and know the final document will benefit from your contributions.

Our Mission To educate Healthseekers on the unique benefits of swimming for life enhancement and teach them how to achieve their personal goals through TI Practice.

Our Narrative TI Swimming is unique among all physical activities--and TI Coaches are unique among all fitness professionals--in our capacity to help you improve your swimming and your life.
• The basics: Swimming is aerobic, rhythmic, low-impact and improves muscle tone and flexibility.
• Swimming is the most efficiency-intensive popular fitness activity. (How well you swim is determined 80% or more by your efficiency. How well you run is determined 80% of more by your mileage.)
• Age is no impediment to improving efficiency and experience is an advantage.
• Swimming efficiency is improved by “problem-solving.” Problem-solving maximizes the brain benefits of exercise.
• Dr. John Ratey, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, in Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain: “The real reason we feel so good when we exercise is that it makes the brain function at its best . . . this benefit is far more important than what it does for the body; conditioning the heart and lungs are essentially side effects.”
• TI Swimming—because it is more efficiency-intensive, mindful and body-friendly provides the strongest combination of brain-and-body benefits among all fitness activities.
• TI Coaches have a better understanding of combining brain-and-body benefits than other fitness professionals.

Why Teach TI?
Virtually all current TI teachers are motivated to share their own transformative experience with others. Collectively we share a mission to change how the world thinks about and practices swimming. No other organizing in the swimming world has a shared mission of similar scope.
In a swimming sense, we will be asserting the world is round, not flat. We all recognize how seldom swimming works -- how rare it is for swimmers to achieve optimal outcomes.