Re: What's done vs. what to do

>It's easy to see how a 
>stroke is swum by just watching the best, but on the rare occasions when 
>one can peek into the mind of the best swimmer, what you see is very 
>often not what you get.

The weakness of much writing about swimming technique is that it has been based
on observing, then reporting, on what various analysts see when they watch
elite swimmers. They most often report their observations in a level of detail
that is far beyond what any swimmer could possibly process in the fraction of a
second it takes to complete a stroke. Ernie Maglischo, for instance, devoted 18
pages of his 2nd edition, Swimming Even Faster, to describing and analyzing
what happens from catch to finish in the freestyle armstroke. But the amount of
info that can be effectively processed while executing it is limited to one or
two salient focal points -- each quite broad. So the highly technical approach
may be okay for academic study but is usually of little value in helping a live
swimmer.

Those coaches who are the most effective teachers recognize those limitations
and are never wordy in teaching. They employ visual (peer modeling or video
examples), doing, pithy vivid feedback, and having the swimmer teach someone
else.
Terry