All Exercises Are NOT Created Equally

I’ve been talking about THE most important aspect of improving your swimming- creating change.

Without change, there is no progress!

So, if you want progress, you have to change.

The challenge is that change isn’t easy.

However, I showed you three simple steps you can take to make change a lot more consistent, and your progress a lot more dramatic.

To create change, here’s what needs to happen.

You need to-

1. Identify the most important skill to change

2. Pick the most effective exercise(s) to learn that skill

3. Design workouts that effectively facilitate learning

Previously, I talked about how to identify the most important skills for you to improve.

With those identified, you want to figure out the best way to learn those skills.

If you haven’t noticed, I don’t talk about a lot of different exercises.

There are only a few I use.

That’s not by mistake.

However, it wasn’t always the case.

In fact, the opposite was true.

I used to use anything and everything.

If I saw a coach using an exercise, you could be sure I was going to start using it as well.

I thought the more the merrier.

That was until I realized that while athletes were entertained by the novelty, they weren’t improving nearly as much as I’d hoped.

I found that more often than not, students are the best teachers.

More times than I can count, athletes have helped me solve the problems I was trying to solve for them!

I was coaching a guy named Ryan, and he was getting frustrated by all of the variation.

Frustrated, he exclaimed, “how about instead of doing ALL these exercises, we just do the BEST ones?!?”

Thanks to his wisdom, I knew the way forward.

Instead of trying to use as many exercises as possible, I decided to only use the BEST exercises.

I ruthlessly eliminated exercises, keeping only the great ones.

I realized that great exercises are simple- ANYONE can do them.