I’m on an improvement carousel….

And I love it. In fact I think I am addicted. If I walk away from any training session having learned something new about my stroke I have this wonderful sense of achievement and complete satisfaction. My brain just got its fix.

I love being in the circle of conscious incompetence to unconscious competence. Finding any small improvement opportunity in my stroke and working towards change is extremely satisfying. This morning I swam a mile freestyle, deliberately fluctuating between a 6 beat kick and a 2 beat kick. I found this subtle timing flaw in the 6 beat kick – my right foot was too slow at times. The rhythm was off. As I swam I could feel a slight increase in tension on the top of my right foot. It was causing the right leg to get stuck and not able to completely align. Conscious incompetence. Check. Once I softened the foot, I could feel a more hydrodynamic body line and the rhythm was fluid and steady. Conscious competence. Check. Then I cycled back into conscious incompetence – where else did this flaw impact my stroke and if I still had the tension in the foot, where could I feel it elsewhere in the stroke? It definitely impacted my extension through the right obliques and hip flexor and I could feel a slight vertical shift in body position. Releasing the right foot tension, I could then fix the alignment and remove the vertical shift – conscious competence.

As I was enjoying this cycle, I switched into backstroke, curious to see if I held the same foot tension in the 6 beat kick. Well what do you know…conscious incompetence. Release the tension, better alignment and more fluid rotational transitions. Conscious competence.

I didn’t want to get off this carousel…..

Coach Dinah