Discover your life aquatic

What is a Skill?

In Sensational Freestyle, a skill primarily refers to an action, performed by a swimmer, that is seen as a beneficial kinetic achievement in the progression of developing an effective front crawl stroke to a specific intended quality.

Front Crawl itself is a skill, yet a skill that requires the coordination of many postures and motions throughout its cycles. To ensure practice is manageable for our minds, we simplify the front crawl into component skills, and each of these component skills may further be simplified relative to participants' needs.

For example, Sensational Freestyle employs a posture, that we refer to as Streamline, as a fundamental skill for participants to work on, amidst other things, sensing how body posture quickly varies the effects of drag on the body and the corresponding exertion required to overcome this in our pursuit of movement. When there are unknowns or obstacles in Streamline alone as a skill, we can further simplify the focus. We can look to achieve success at component skills of Streamline, such as refining how we can adjust tension in, and angle of, the neck to use the weight of the head to affect longitude balance.

Whole Learning

Fundamental to the Sensational Freestyle system is to ensure that we mindfully advance skills. Roughly stated, what we mean by "mindful" in this context is, to use strategic practices devised with understanding of how to minimize the amount of time required for a person to uptake a new skill.

Swimmers Beware

With that in mind, there are four primary obstacles to participants of front crawl development:

• mind blocks of thought and emotion that lead a swimmer to approach their practice ineffectively.
• lack of body awareness such that the idea a swimmer has of their kinetic actions does not correlate accurately with what they are performing.
• lack of information about optimal technique which exponentially reduces their effectiveness at swimming this stroke.
• lack of habituation towards repeating their best practices such that even with understanding and experience with what works for them, they spend most of their practice doing what does not work.

Sensational Skill

Sensational Freestyle employs the following primary steps, correlating to the above obstacles, to ensure most of us quickly and effectively produce results:

• Mindset - start with a mindful approach, positive reinforcement, effective expectations, and clear suggestion of how your practice will effectively produce success.
• Body Sense - can you at a whim hit the variations related to a skill as requested by yourself or your coach?
• Discovery - Discover optimizations you value, either by information from valued sources (ex. coach) or from discovery of what you value at this time.
• Mental Space - Create more Mental Space to allow further development. Creating mental space comes from habituating something, making it very familiar to your brain/body.