Why do we swim so many laps?

Have you ever wondered, during practice, what is the point of swimming all of these laps. To do repetitive boring drills, or pointless sets over and over again. Sometimes you don’t even get tired, but coach insists that it is the only way to get better. On this video I will explain why repetition is essential to improvement and in the next video I will explain why it might be bad for you.

All of our muscles are moved by nerves. These nerves carry mini electric charges that make our body move and therefore swim. These nerves are connected to your spine and brain. So if the brain processes all the information, why is it so difficult to change your swimming technique once you understand how you are supposed to move. Your brain gets it, but your muscles don’t seem to get it. The answer is Neural Pathways. These are like the roads for those electric charges of the nerves. The first time you do something new, these pathways are like dirt roads. The brain struggles to send the signals to your muscles in time and with the right amount of force. The more you do that activity, the bigger the roads get, until they are like highways and then like high speed trains and your brain has no problem sending the signals on time, and suddenly it all feels easy.

The same is true when you swim, with every lap you are making those neural pathways a bigger smoother lane. This is called muscle memory. The problem is that if you miss practice a few times, those pathways will not be as smooth, until you start doing laps again. Think about that the next time you get bored during practice, you are just exercising the memory of the muscle.

In the next video I will tell you why you won’t get better every time you practice. In fact, sometimes practice will make you worse. Stay tuned.

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