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when I was in highschool, I was on the swim team. While I was able to perform all of the strokes well enough to be competitive, I specialized in the butterfly stroke. In the swimming community, this stroke is known for being the hardest to learn, the hardest to master, and the hardest in terms of movement. I was able to master this stroke well enough to get to state after only three years of experience as well as set some pool records at meets I had competed in. I was also a lifeguard at the YMCA and when word got around that I was a state swimmer in butterfly, I had a young club swimmer approach me and ask me to teach them how to swim fly. Naturally I said yes thinking it would be easy because I was so good at fly. However, I couldn't have been more wrong. I found it very hard to teach fly because I found it very hard to describe what I was doing while swimming. The problem was that the knowledge of how to do the fly was in my procedural memory, meaning I knew how to perform the motor skill but i had a difficult time explaining it. If the knowledge had been in my declarative memory it would have been easier to teach because this memory stores facts and explicitly defined knowledge which would make the stroke easier to explain.

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Form is perhaps the most crucial aspect of a successful butterfly stroke. When my form wrong, fly became very hard to perform. It's not like freestyle where it's possible to muscle your way through bad form without too much effort. Intrinsic feedback is feedback that is naturally available to the skill. I received the intrinsic feedback from the stroke by feeling that I was moving slower through the water and feeling like I had to move water out of the way instead of gliding through it. This intrinsic feedback would have been useless without my coach giving my augmented feedback. Augmented feedback is feedback that is given in addition to the intrinsic feedback of the task. My coach would give me augmented feedback saying that I "didn't brace my core enough which caused my feet to drop and push through the water." This augmented feedback allowed me to know what went wrong in order to fix the intrinsic feedback that I had while swimming.

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I don't have to practice today Coach....I can just IMAGINE doing it

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I don't have to practice today Coach....I can just IMAGINE doing it

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During my swimming career, I would often employ the theory of mental practice and specifically internal imagery. Internal imagery is defined as imagining yourself performing a skill and experiencing the sensations that are expected in the actual performance. I would sit in the team chairs before the race with my hood up and pump up music blasting in my ears imagining the race in my head. I would imagine the quiet before the buzzer and the feeling of weightlessness as I jump off the blocks. I would then imagine how everything would go quiet as I entered the water and how many dolphin kicks I would in a tight streamline before breaking through the surface with two powerful strokes. I would then imagine the sound that my arms and feet would make and how the cadence would feel. I would imagine the feeling of my chin never leaving the surface of the water as I kept my core tight and only breaking the water enough to take a quick breath before plunging my face back into the water. I would then imagine getting to the wall and imagine what the wall would feel like on my fingertips and how I would bring my knees to my chest to do my flip turn. I would imagine entering the same hole that I came out of during my turn to make the transition as fast as possible. I would then imagine finding the cadence and the rhythm of my stroke again for two more lengths. I would then imagine how making the last turn would feel and how welcome that sight of the touchpad would be knowing it was my last length. I imagine being 4 strokes out, burying my head, and taking the last few powerful strokes. By the time it was time to race I had already finished the race in my head. This helped me to focus on the race and to know what to expect during the race. I knew that my lungs would be screaming for air when I turned for the 75m and my arms and legs would burn and beg for rest....but I also knew how it would feel to make that last turn for home and get the extra burst of adrenaline needed to kick hard, finish the race, and beat the competition.

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3 stages of learning, 3 years of swimming

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3 stages of learning, 3 years of swimming

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Fitts and Posner presented a three stage model of learning involving the cognitive, associative, and autonomous stages. In the cognitive stage of learning performances are heavily based on cognitive or verbal processes and the subject. During most of my first year of swimming, I was talking myself through the stroke while swimming. I had to keep giving myself verbal cues in my head to remember how to do the stroke. The second stage of learning, the associative stage, is defined as the loss of verbal cues, determining the most effective strategy, and detection of errors. During my second year of swimming, I had learned the fly well enough to no longer have the need to talk myself through the stroke. I had also determined what breathing strategy was most effective for me and I could also feel when something was wrong with my stroke. Even though I could feel that something was wrong with my stroke, I didn't know how to correct the errors I was feeling. During the offseason between  my 2nd and 3rd year I transitioned into the final stage of learning, the autonomous stage. The autonomous stage of learning consists of the task being largely automatic with reduced attention demands and the ability to detect and correct errors. During my 3rd year of swimming I was able to feel something wrong with my stroke, and be able to correct it during the race or practice without input from my coach. Whether it be not bracing my core, not holding my breath between strokes long enough, or coming too far out of the water with my strokes. The stroke itself became autonomous to the point that I didn't have to think about what I was doing. During practice this meant that I could sing a song to myself in my head and during a race I could focus more attention on my peripheral vision and slightly turn my head to either side to determine how much of a lead I had on the other competitors.

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The law of practice states that gains that are made in a task will start to become systematically smaller as practice continues. This was perhaps the most annoying thing that I ran into during my swimming career. My first ever 100m Fly race I finished with a time that was around the 1:40 mark. It was comically long and excruciatingly painful. by the end of that year I was able to get that time down to 1:15. I had dropped 25 seconds over the course of three months. My first time my second year was around 1:10 and my final time at conference was 1:01. It was only a 9 second drop over the year but I was still pleased with it. Then my final year came. I started with a 59 second time during time trials at the beginning of the season. I was feeling on top of the world. I had broken the minute mark which is a huge accomplishment for any flyer. However....my final time at high school state was 56 seconds and my final club state time was 55.12. I had only been able to improve by just 4 seconds over the course of about 6 months. My improvements became smaller and smaller as I got better and practiced more, just as the law of practice says it would. needless to say I would have liked to drop more time...but it was still enough of an improvement to edge out the competition