How Stroke Improvement Makes Swimming Easier for Adults

Many adults can swim but find it tiring, awkward, or frustrating. The secret isn’t more laps — it’s refining your stroke technique. Stroke improvement training breaks the stroke into manageable steps, helping adults move through the water with less effort and more enjoyment.  Chicago Blue Dolphins provides the adult stroke…

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How Adult Swimmers Benefit from Technical Drills

Drills aren’t just for kids. In fact, adults often see the biggest breakthroughs when complex strokes are broken down into smaller pieces — balance, breathing, recovery — and then rebuilt into smooth, confident swimming. Why Drills Matter Swimming has too many moving parts to fix all at once. Trying to…

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3 Reasons to Not Completely Disregard “3 Reasons You Should Be Doing More Kick”

I was checking out my company’s Facebook page this morning and saw that my office manager had posted an article entitled “3 Reasons You Should Be Doing More Kick.”  To preempt any comments such as “I’m a triathlete.  I thought that I wasn’t supposed to kick.”, I thought I would put…

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Misconceptions on the Freestyle Straight-Arm Recovery

I was going through my stack of swimming rags yesterday, and I came across an interesting analysis of the straight-arm recovery in freestyle in Swimming World’s December, 2014 issue (“Freestyle Straight-Arm Recovery” by Rod Havriluk).  The article’s main intent is to put to the test the conventional wisdom that a…

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Tempo vs. Speed — Why improving efficiency makes a faster stroke feel slower

When I was teaching Week 4 of my Monday night triathlon swimming class for the Chicago Triathlon Club, I had a swimmer ask me why she felt slower after we had started to rework her timing, balance, and vessel shape.  I’ve introduced the Total Immersion Perpetual Motion Freestyle stroke drills…

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Finding the Right Pair of Goggles (Pt. 2 — For the Blind)

If you are blind like me, swimming has always been a little challenging because I couldn’t see the pace clock, other swimmers, the practice on the board.  Since I’ve started to do more stuff in open water with my team in the last 10 years, it’s…well…game over out there.  The…

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