Sometimes you need to embrace awkwardness to make progress
One of my favourite experiences while swimming is feeling at one with the water. It’s a sense of unity, weightlessness and effortless movement.
One thing guaranteed to spoil this experience is trying to make a change in my swimming technique.
The moment I focus on adjusting my catch or the timing of my kick, my flow is disrupted. It feels stiff, awkward and slow.
Yet if I don’t do this, my swimming technique will stagnate. It may even get worse as I accumulate inefficient habits that feel comfortable but slow me down. It’s a paradox at the heart of swimming: how do we embrace technical improvement without losing our sense of fluidity?
Renaissance humanists believed in continuous refinement – the endless pursuit of mastery, shaped by both intellect and artistry. Yet they also valued intuition and the connection between mind and movement. Michelangelo, allegedly, spoke of “finding” the figure within the stone rather than forcing it into being.
The parallel in swimming is to allow technique refinement to emerge through an interplay of focus and feel, rather than purely rigid effort.
The way I do this is as follows:
- Before I swim, I think about and visualise the technique point I want to work on.
- During my warm-up, I focus on this technique and executing it properly.
- In the main set, I strive to find flow. I think about swimming smoothly and easily, and staying relaxed even while trying hard. I don’t forget the technique point, but it’s no longer my focus.
- In the cool down, I go back to focusing on the technique point.
There is a lot of science behind swimming, but there’s artistry in mastering the movement patterns. Renaissance thinkers were often both artists and scientists, and we must be too as swimmers.
