Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Bilateral breathing swimming practice - 6/24

Today I did another relatively short session concentrating on learning how to breath from the left side. Right away, I noticed that major improvements had been made - however after only 90-120 seconds or so, I was still getting out of breath even on a slow power setting. That told me I was still being inefficient in whatever motions are necessary to take a breath.

Not knowing exactly what was inefficient, I kept at it. Swimming is one of those activities where its very difficult to maintain really sloppy form - since the water is so drag inducing (as opposed to air when running or cycling), I think the body tends to find ways to decrease extraneous motions. So in some things, it may just be better to keep practicing and let the muscles rather than the conscious part of the brain figure things out.

After a few 'sessions' of 2-3 minutes, things started to come together. To test things out, I swam for a couple minutes alternating sides, to start warming up to that sequence of motions. By the end of the evening, I was able to breath bilaterally for several minutes relatively comfortably.

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