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I started swimming when I was four years old. It seemed to be a natural process for me, but I hadn't perfected any skills at age four. I first went through Fitts and Posner's Three-Stage Model. In the Cognitive Stage, my breathing was not rhythmic and I choked on water often. When I tried to take my head out of the water, I would breathe up instead of to the side. When I tried to breathe to the side, I started to sink or over correct and flip onto my back. I hated swim lessons because I knew I could teach myself and didn't like being told what to do. I practiced by myself constantly until my parents signed me up for the swim team. During this period of swimming alone, I had to learn how to problem solve on my own and figure out what worked for me. I was fairly inconsistent, but I improved a ton. With the help of my coaches, I started making small improvements where I could breathe to the side and not flip on my back or choke on water. I had moved in the Associative stage. Because I was getting help, I was able to detect my own errors a little more often. If I felt myself turning too far or got water in my mouth, I would slow down and make the necessary correction. I could tell that I was doing something wrong, but I couldn't change it in the moment. I had to stop and think about what strategy would work best for me. With more practice, I started to pick up my errors more often and I was finally able to correct them as they were happening. Some people are stuck in the Associative stage forever, I was happy to be making these improvements. At this point, I was in the Autonomous stage. When I was in high school, during a less serious summer league meet, I actually waved to my parents in the stands during my race. I was able to do multiple skills at once without messing up or losing my rhythm.

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During a relay start, there's a lot going through the mind. It's a lot of pressure to be on a relay at the NCAA championships, especially when gunning for a spot to be an All-American. That is, unless you disqualify your relay with a reaction time that is too quick. Reaction time is considered to be the amount of time that it takes to respond to a certain stimulus. In the swimming world, it can be a little confusing in terms of relay starts. The object of a relay start is to be as quick off of the blocks as possible, and you do that by starting the process to dive in before the swimmer in the water even hits the wall. A swimmer on the blocks is allowed to complete as many steps of the relay start as they want, as long as their toes don't leave the blocks before the swimmer in the water touches the wall. This is how the start is able to be so quick. Any time between .10ms and .30ms is considered pretty good and considered safe. A time that is .00ms to .09ms is a little more risky because any reaction time that is -.01 ms or quicker, can get a team disqualified.

There's a lot to think about during a relay start. When to go, where to aim, and what the heck am I actually going to do when I dive in. How many kicks will I do and how will I make sure I'm faster and more efficient than anyone else in the field? Speed and accuracy might be a nice trade off for the hard work we've put in all season, right? Did you get that one? The speed-accuracy trade off is when you sacrifice how accurate you should be for speed, and in some situations it can really screw you and your team up. At the 2017 Championships, I almost disqualified our relay with a .01ms reaction time, .02ms away from losing our seventh place All-American finish. Being in a heat with swimmers this high of caliber switched my brain to the impulse stage and I didn't think about any error or feedback from previous races,  I just went. I got lucky enough to have a good race, but I almost ruined it for us because I was too focused on my speed rather than worrying about accuracy.

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A motor skill situation I am very familiar with is bilateral breathing in swimming. It is important to breathe to both sides in order to be able to spot the competition on both sides of you in a race, and for health purposes to keep from the neck getting knotted and hurting one's posture. When someone first learns to swim, they may have trouble breathing to the side so it would be helpful to perfect one side first. Once one side is learned, it should be easier to switch to the other side as well. As both sides are well learned, bilateral breathing would be the next step in which young swimmers practice breathing to both their right and left side multiple times within each lap. This is what I had to do when I was learning how to become a better swimmer.

The concept of bilateral transfer can be confusing to some, but it's easy to understand when given examples and when explained well. Bilateral transfer is the ability to learn a motor skill that has already been mastered on one limb of the body. The transfer is meant to make the learning process easier for the opposite limb, due to cues that should already be known. Generally, the motor skill would have been previously learned on the dominant side of the body.

When I mastered the skill of swimming, I did so by breathing to my left side. I was able to swim well for a long time without the potential of choking on water or sinking at all. However, as I stated above, learning to breathe to my left side was equally important for multiple reasons. I started some practices by breathing to my right side because warm-up is generally more chill. During the middle of practice, I would switch back to breathing to my left side because it wasn't as challenging to do a tough set the other way and I wanted to see if it would transfer over to me breathing to the same side I started the practice with. I did my warm-down breathing to my right side and I always noticed that it was easier to breathe to that side at the end of practice than it was at the beginning. I started to do that every practice and it created a Positive Bilateral Transfer for my breathing. I have now mastered both sides of breathing and do not have to worry about choking on water, unless I'm swimming in a lane with a guy and their wake hits me in the face as I'm trying to breathe.

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Who would have ever guessed that swimming and volleyball have something in common? One is a land sport and one is done in the water, but I suppose they both are completed in pretty minimal clothing. When I was younger I played volleyball. I started in fourth grade and I played all the way up until my freshman year in high school. We always had to do a vertical jump test in volleyball tryouts, and I was pretty good at it. It requires a lot of leg strength, and considering I had noodle arms at the time, I enjoyed being strong in one part of my body. In swimming, starts can be really well related to a volleyball vertical jump. It's the same motion and uses the same muscles, but starts in a slightly different position. While I was good at the vertical jump test, my starts weren't very powerful and I didn't get far out over the water before I entered. At some point, my friend told me that I should pretend I'm doing the jump test during my start because I was so comfortable with it. It's something that I had never thought of and it was genius. My starts really improved from it and I became so much more powerful when diving into the water. This would be considered a positive transfer because a previous skill that I had learned, helped me improve a skill that I had really been struggling with.

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Before coming to college, I didn't have much lifting experience. I was really weak and I didn't understand how technical every single lift could be. In my senior year of high school, I started lifting on my own a few days a week after swim practice. I wasn't really sure exactly what I was doing, so I never did all that much. I tried to do squats a few times, but I could barely do more than the bar and I felt like everyone was watching me struggle. When I came to college, the idea of a weight coach was foreign to me. I loved that someone was going to focus solely on helping me become stronger. Squats ended up being one of our focus exercises for my Freshman year and I wasn't very excited in the beginning. Just because I was in a different atmosphere didn't mean that I could add any more weight to the bar than I could back home in high school. My weight coach came over to me at one point and was confused why I couldn't add more weight, because I appeared to have strong legs. He watched my technique, and we discovered that my knees were turning in when I was trying to push up instead of pushing my knees outward. I wasn't using all of my power to my advantage. Once I was able to get some augmented feedback, I was able to enhance my skills. Augmented feedback is information that is provided about a task and comes from a source external from the person performing. That feedback was my weight coach. The squats were something I could have gotten better at on my own, but never might not have ever realized how much stronger I truly was and it would have taken me forever to reach that higher performance level.