This week I received one of the regular messages sent by my good friend, Michael Bryant of Baltimore MD. Mike and wife Nancy have been TI students since 2008, having attended several TI workshops and camps. When they started with TI, Michael tore down the way he’d been swimming for 48 years and relearned from the bottom up. Nancy had never swum before.

Since then, Michael has completed six Ironman Lake Placid’s. Nancy has completed over 20 Sprint and Olympic distance tris. Michael says, “We are both dedicated to a healthy life style and TI practice is a bedrock of that life style.”

Michael heads his messages to me “From the Aqua Lab,” which is the term he applies to their practices, since both are committed to the Kaizen ideal of helping each other improve continuously—often via curious exploration.

Mike and Nancy at Lake Placid.

Mike and Nancy at Lake Placid.

 

Michael’s latest message:

The other day in the Aqua Lab Nancy and I worked on technique.  We alternated short reps of Superman to improve Balance with 25-yd reps of whole stroke, focused on Stroke Length. Nancy—who once needed 37 strokes to cover 25 yards—was easily holding half that number. However, I’d lately noticed Nancy had a “hitch” as her arm entered water.

I recalled a recent blog post of yours about bilateral breathing, where you mentioned a focal point of having “the chin follow the shoulder to air.” I reminded Nancy of that and the change was instantaneous and amazing.

Though Nancy had informed me at the start of practice that she would be doing no “speed” work, her form was looking so sleek and she was clearly moving faster that I suggested I time her for a few 50s.

I shared John Wooden’s quote, “Be quick but don’t hurry.”

Nancy’s times for 3 x 50 were 1:07, 1:06, and 1:03. This is the fastest she has ever swum! She was SO excited about her progress.

PS: Two days later Nancy did 3 x 50 in 1:02, 1:02, and 1:02. The 1:00 mark is about to fall!  ( I focused on the Rag Doll Arm arm on my 50s and lowered my time from 50 to 48 seconds.)

PPS: We understand that time is only one metric and it’s all really just information, but this sure was fun!

I was as excited personally as Nancy and Michael because:

  1. Nancy figured out how to improve her speed (i.e. strike the right balance between SL and SR) repeatedly and cumulatively quite a bit; and
  2. Their practices exemplify an improvement principle I have only recently come to recognize.

Train in the Right Zone

Previously I’ve written that, in a Kaizen approach to swimming, there are three possible categories or ‘zones’ into which all your practice activities can fall:

Comfort Zone: In this zone, you don’t tax or stretch your capabilities or skills. You stay with activities that are familiar and those you consider your strengths. This zone requires relatively little effort, discipline, or focus.

Learning Zone: In this zone, you seek to strike a delicate balance between your present capabilities and the difficulty of your task. You focus on finding and fixing weak spots. This is quite demanding mentally—but not always physically. Falling slightly short of your goal—just enough to feel success is simply a matter of time and patience—is good. That means you’ve got the skills-challenge balance right.

Failure Zone: If you fall hopelessly short—experiencing only frustration—you need to rebalance the challenge of what you’re trying to better match your current skill level.

If you are purely oriented to the quality of your swimming experience, or lifelong learning as a swimmer (which many TI swimmers are), you could fruitfully spend all of your practice time in the Learning Zone. However . . .

Stretch Beyond Your Present Capabilities

Recently—after reflecting on my practice habits since my early 50s—I recognized the value of a fourth category.

The Performance Zone. In this zone, you swim a time trial or speed-oriented set; enter an open water event or Masters meet, or perhaps train with a Masters or other coached group.

The stakes are higher, the measurement standard more rigorous, and you may accept the possibility of slight decline from usual standards in efficiency (sense of ease or control, or SPL) in order to match or exceed a previous speed standard; or measure up to other swimmers of your ability or greater.

Ideally you would spend most of your time in the Learning Zone, then test or apply what you’ve learned there during brief ventures into the Performance Zone.

This is precisely what Nancy and Michael did this week. In these practice, which I guesstimate were 45 or more minutes, they spent 90% or more of time and volume in Learning Zone and the final five minutes of each practice in Performance Zone.

But the self-realization value of that brief time in Performance Zone was probably greater than the rest of the practice.

In next week’s post, I will share detailed suggestions on how to expand on Nancy’s simple set of 3 x 50 to seamlessly blend Learning and Performance zone experiences in one extended set.

Lesson 4 of our 2.0 Freestyle Mastery Self-Coaching Course focuses on how to strike the right balance between Learning and Performance Zone.unknown-1