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Another component of being a competitive swimmer, and one of my favorite parts of swim meets is competing in relay events. This is where speed and accuracy really play an important part, especially in the exchange between swimmers. No one wants to be the person who jumps in early, and disqualifies their entire relay team, therefore it's super important to get your timing correct. Although speed is important and your team obviously wants to win, it is important not to forget about accuracy and make sure that you dive in at the right time.
There is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. You could either focus on speed and jump in too early, and get first place, but disqualify and not have your relay score any points for your team. Alternatively, you could jump in late and be more accurate, however losing the speed and get last place. Therefore you have to really focus on getting the correct timing so you don't have the negative consequences of the tradeoff. In a relay exchange there is anticipation for the swimmer on the blocks who is diving in next. There is receptor anticipation, which is being able to accurately anticipate how long something will take to happen, which in this case is anticipating when the swimmer that is swimming in will touch the wall. Then there is effector anticipation, which is being able to accurately anticipate how long it'll take you to perform the task. In a relay exchange, it would be how long it takes the swimmer on the block to wind up their arms and jump off the block. Therefore, a swimmer wants to have good knowledge of how long it'll take them to perform the dive, as well as how long it will take the other swimmer to swim into the wall so they can more accurately anticipate. In the picture below, you can see that the person diving off the blocks had a good sense of anticipation, as they are able to accurately dive off the blocks as the other swimmer swims into the wall.

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If you asked me if I would rather swim in a lake or a swimming pool, without a doubt I would choose a pool. I love the clean and clear water, the smell of chlorine and the fact that I can see where I am going. If I am trying to get a good swim workout in, I like to be able to count the yardage , which is much more difficult when not in a 25 meter pool. However, I have participated in numerous open water events, usually which are the swimming portion of a triathlon. In this case, the water can be choppy, murky and there can be a current making it much more difficult to swim. I wish I could say I love swimming in Earth's natural swimming pools, but truth be told, I would much rather swim in a man-made clean, heated pool.

That being said, as I said before, swimming in a pool and swimming in open water are two very different things. The differences can be made apparent when we classify the sport further, using Gentile's 2D classification system. This system is divided into two categories, the function of the action and the environmental context. The function of the action is further split into body transport and object manipulation. Body transport refers to whether a person must change location when performing a skill. Both open water and lap swimming require body transport, because you are constantly changing positions as you move down a lane or from one side of the lake to another. Additionally, both open water and swimming in a pool does not require object manipulation, as there is not a ball or other player (swimmer) you have to manipulate to perform the skill. It is just your body making the movements, instead of using something else. If we look at the second category, environmental context is further divided into regulatory conditions and intertribal variability. Regulatory conditions are elements of the environment that influence the moves you make. Swimming in a pool would have stationary regulatory conditions, since typically, there are no elements in the environment that would cause you to adjust your movements. In open water swimming however, there could be environmental hazards to watch out and adjust your movements for. Intertribal variability determines if regulatory conditions remain the same from one performance to another. In a swimming race in a pool, there is typically no intertribal variability, as the pool remains standard size and depth for each race. However, if a person were to swim in an open water competition, the environment could vary, and intertribal variability may occur, due to the weather conditions, choppiness of the water, other swimmers next to you (not divided by a lane line), and other factors.

In the GIF below, Mickey is swimming in open water, where regulatory conditions are not stable and there may be intertribal variability.

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As a swim lesson instructor, I mostly taught kids, but I did teach a couple of adult lessons, which is much more challenging, for a couple reasons. One of the hardest things to teach a new swimmer is how to move in the water. Unlike air, it takes more work to move in the water, and it's a feeling that's really incomparable to anything else. In addition to being surrounded by water, you are also supported by the buoyancy, which almost feels like you're floating. You feel as if your body weighs nothing, and you are off in space. If you can imagine the first time you tried floating on your back, you were probably terrified of laying back and letting the water hold you up. Most people are, and that's perfectly reasonable. It can be scary, especially since it's a new feeling that we can't perform outside of water. However, once we get the hang of it, and understand how to move with the water to stay afloat, we can stay upright and have a relaxing float, like the hedgehog in the gif below.

It can be really hard, especially for adults learning to swim, to get a good understanding of moving and adjusting their body in the new environment. This confusion of our body in a new environment is due to proprioception. Proprioceptors are the receptors in our muscles, ligaments, tendons,  joints and vestibular apparatus which tell us where our body parts are in relation to one another, and our general orientation in space. This is often referred to as our "sixth sense," because although it is not commonly known as a sense, it still plays an important role in how we take in the world around us. Adjusting our proprioceptors to the feeling of water, and how our bodies move in water is something that's especially critical in the sport of swimming. If you aren't able to sense how your body parts are moving in relation to others, or if you're not able to sense your orientation in the water, you won't be able to coordinate the movements needed to perform any of the strokes.

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Throughout my childhood, up until about 8th grade, I used to practice once or (usually) twice per day, for several hours. I was dedicated to the sport and really loved the progress I was making. I remember spending hours just working on the smallest of things that would improve my times, sometimes only by milliseconds. I loved the practices right before swim meets because we would always spend at least half an hour working on starts and turns, since often times these were the areas we could drop the most time on.

When performing a start off the blocks, the swimmers must process the information in different stages. The first stage is stimulus identification, where the swimmer has to sense that the stimulus has occurred. Influencing factors in this stage include the clarity, intensity, modality and patterns in the stimulus. Really the only two factors that would be important in the influence of a swimming dive would be the intensity of the stimulus (if the buzzer is loud or soft) and the modality (since the buzzer is a sound, which is processed faster than a visual cue). The next stage is response selection, which is deciding on the appropriate response to the stimulus. The most influential variable is how many stimuli there are and how many possible responses. In this case, like I said in the previous box, there is really only one stimulus and one response, so there's not multiple S-R Alternatives in this example. The third stage is the response programming stage, where the performer must prepare and initiate a response. Along with these stages comes the concept of anticipation. There are two types of anticipation, event or spacial and temporal. Spatial anticipation is predicting what will happen in the environment, whereas temporal is when an environmental event will happen. Spatial anticipation of a swim start is that the buzzer will go off to start the race, and the temporal anticipation is predicting the foreperiod, or the time between the "take your mark" (warning), and the buzzer (stimulus). Short forepreriods can catch the swimmer off guard, and therefore relay a longer response time, whereas a longer foreperiod builds up anticipation and the swimmer can react faster. However, sometimes a swimmer builds up too much anticipation and starts before the buzzer goes off, which is known as a false start. The image below shows a swimmer who clearly false started. The swimmer below was probably anticipating too much, and some other stimulus set him off.

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Coordination, or the patterning of head, body and/or limb motions relative to the patterning of environmental objects or events, is critical in the sport of swimming. In a race setting for example, the entire body must work together in order to make a quick and effective dive into the water. Coordination of your arms, legs and core is of extreme importance in order to make sure you don't belly flop (like the kiddo in the GIF below). Coordination is not only required in a race setting, but in performing any of the four official strokes as well. The strokes are butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle (front crawl), all of which require bimanual coordination. Breaststroke and butterfly, require symmetric movement, meaning both hands are doing the same thing at the same time. In contrast, backstroke and freestyle require asymmetric movement meaning the hands are moving at the same time, but are doing different things. These movement patterns can also be explained in terms of the phase relationship, or how the muscles performing the action relate to each other. In-phase means that the hands are doing the exact same thing at the same time, breaststroke and butterfly would be examples of this. Anti-phase means that the muscles of one hand are doing the exact opposite of the other, as in freestyle and backstroke.

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As a 20 year old with over 15 years of swimming experience, it's no surprise that I am basically part fish. Swimming comes as naturally to me as walking or riding a bike. However, swimming is actually quite a complex skill if it is broken down into its classifications. First of all, like other sports or movements, it is in the domain of motor skill, meaning that the quality of the movements of the skill is hugely important to being successful. Furthermore, when you look at the primary musculature of the movement, it is a gross motor skill. This means  that while swimming, you use larger muscle groups in the body, which requires a lot of energy. The video below shows all of the muscles (highlighted in red) being used while performing front crawl. The larger muscle groups include the muscles in the arms, legs, back, which are all used simultaneously to perform the stroke. Additionally, swimming is a continuous skill, meaning the beginning and end are arbitrary, unpredictable, and rhythmic and repetitive in nature. Unlike hitting a baseball or shooting a basket, there isn't a specific end point to the movement, and as pictured below the movement is smooth and continuous.

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One of my favorite things about being a swimmer while I was a kid, was participating in the All City Swim Meet. In this three-day-long event near the end of July/beginning of August, swim teams from all over Madison compete for the title All City Champion. Kids ages 4-18 are able to swim up to four individual events and two relays, in order to try and earn points for their team. This is the best time of the year for several reasons. First of all, you get to camp out with your best friends for three days in your teams tent. You also get to swim your favorite events, that you've worked hard for all summer. Third, there's always a Chocolate Shoppe Ice cream food cart. Enough said. All in all, this is THE best part of the summer when you're a swimmer as a kid.

With all the fun that comes with the All City Swim Meet, there's a lot of hard work that goes in before hand. Since swimming is a race which depends on how fast you can swim, reaction time is super important to consider when trying to improve your times. To start a race, each swimmer stands with their feet planted steadily on the block. The official says "Take your mark," and the swimmer reaches down and grabs the front ledge of the block with their hands, while the muscles in their entire body are tense and ready to spring forward. Then the buzzer goes off, and the swimmers dive in as quickly as they can, and begin the race. The time it takes on the block, between the time the official says "take your mark," and the time that the buzzer goes off, is a measure of performance outcome. Furthermore, it can be measured by simple reaction time or the time its takes from one suddenly presented stimulus to the initiation of one possible response. In this case, the buzzer is the presented stimulus and the time it takes for the swimmer to get off the blocks is the simple reaction time. Furthermore, reaction time can be divided into pre-motor reaction time and motor reaction time. Pre-motor reaction time is the time it takes to detect that the stimulus has occurred, to manipulate the information to figure out how to respond, program a response and send it to the muscles. The motor reaction time is the time it takes to build up enough force to move the muscles and complete the dive. Once the swimmer begins their response movement, they must correctly perform a dive. Furthermore, the time it takes for the swimmer between the initiation of the response, to the completion of the dive is known as the movement time. Both reaction time and movement time are measures of latency, which can be combined into one term: response time. Response time is the sum of the reaction and movement time. The response time in my swimming example, would be from the time the buzzer goes off, until the swimmer has completed their dive. It is then up to the swimmer to exert as much effort into their race as they possibly can, to get the best time possible.
In the image below, you can see that each of the swimmers is in a slightly different position due to the fact that they each have a different response time. The swimmer that is the closest to us appears to have the quickest response time because her head and shoulders are submerged in the water, whereas all the other swimmers only have their hands in the water.

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With so much experience in the pool, I decided to be a swim lesson instructor while I was in high school. If I can do it so easily, it should be fairly simple to teach it to others, right? WRONG! I actually had a more difficult time explaining things to the kids in my class because it came so naturally to me. I had the movements stored in my procedural memory, therefore I was able to perform the necessary movements non-consciously and automatically, without really having to think about it. As for my students, let's just say they weren't quite there yet. I tried my best to explain verbally, as well as demonstrated the required actions, but like presented in the Fitts and Posner 3-Stage model of learning, they had to progress through the cognitive and associative stages of learning, before they could reach the autonomous stage. The cognitive stage is where most of the kids I worked with were at. In this stage, learners are determining strategies to perform the skill, and often perform inconsistently, but also making dramatic gains. Learning to swim freestyle, or front crawl, is tricky because there are so many movements and different parts of the stroke. A student in the cognitive stage of learning front crawl, will often struggle to make the correct arm movement of pulling the water, and then reaching over the head to place the arm back in the water. Students will usually understand what I am asking them to do, but still need verbal cues to make the correct motions. It takes a lot of practice to make the correct movement, but once the strategy is maintained, the student will often move onto the associative stage. In the associative stage, the learner makes more consistent, but more gradual advances in their performance. They are also able to detect when they make a mistake in their movement, without the instructor giving them verbal feedback of the error. This stage is usually seen with older kids in higher levels of swim class, who have a good understanding of the basics of the stroke movements, but still have to consciously think about their stroke and make improvements. Then, after a lot of practicing comes the autonomous stage, which is largely automatic, meaning less attention is required and the learner can easily detect and correct any errors made.