SwimMastery Switzerland

If we want to change anything in our swimming, we have to stay VERY focussed - otherwise we'll go back to default pretty quickly, actually as soon as we loose the focus.

The human brain is a lazybones: it wants to go back to what it already learnt.
So the brain thinks it's a huge effort to "unlearn" one thing and "relearn" something else instead.
But why is it so difficult - and why does it take so many focussed repeats to get the changes in the body?

The axons (nerve fibres) in the brain are projections of nerve cells.
And the job of the axons is to transmit information from the nerve cells to the muscles (and to other parts of our body) with electrical impulses.
Around the axon there is an "insulation" that's called myelin.
Myelin's best known function is to increase the rate at which information, encoded as electrical charges, passes along the axon's length. And the myelin is parted in segments.
Therefore the electrical impulse can travel much quicker from one side to the other.(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Saltatory_Conduction.gif)

When we learn something from scratch the axon is tiny and fragile.
And the myelin layer around just starts to grow around it.
The more we repeat the movement the thicker the myelin gets.
And the information travels faster.

If we have to modify something that is different but very similar to a movement we already learnt, the fragile new axon has to be "used" much more in a focussed way to make sure the layer of myelin gets thicker - and therefore a faster transmitter - than the "old" one.
Until the "old" one is fainting and disappearing.

That's why it is so hard to re-learn a movement that's slightly different to what we already learnt.
And our survival instinct as well as our human nature are pretty big spoilsports.

More about those in the next post.

Our brain does not like multi-tasking! Part one

I recently read an article (found on XING, written by I. Gerstbach) about multi-tasking in the work environment:
Emails, phone calls, messages, tasks, all should be done at once.
As long as we are able to do several things simultaneously we think that we are really productive and we save a huge amount of time.
But our human brains are not made for multi-tasking.
We make more mistakes, feel more stressed and are much less efficient.

And the worst thing:
the brain slowly but surely loses it's ability to stay focused for ONE task.
Our brain is dulling and we forget how to distinguish important things from those of no importance.
So in the long run also our thinking skills are affected adversely.
Every time we start with a task and change abruptly to another one our brain has to deal with a temporary loss of attention.
This is called the "switching costs effect".
And our brain needs a few minutes to re-reach its full potential again.
So the more we hop from one task to another, the more time and energy we lose.

You might ask yourself what all of that has to do with swimming?
A lot!!!
Stay tuned - part two will be coming soon...