SwimMastery Switzerland

If we want to change anything in our swimming, we have to stay VERY focussed - otherwise we'll go back to default pretty quickly, actually as soon as we loose the focus.

The human brain is a lazybones: it wants to go back to what it already learnt.
So the brain thinks it's a huge effort to "unlearn" one thing and "relearn" something else instead.
But why is it so difficult - and why does it take so many focussed repeats to get the changes in the body?

The axons (nerve fibres) in the brain are projections of nerve cells.
And the job of the axons is to transmit information from the nerve cells to the muscles (and to other parts of our body) with electrical impulses.
Around the axon there is an "insulation" that's called myelin.
Myelin's best known function is to increase the rate at which information, encoded as electrical charges, passes along the axon's length. And the myelin is parted in segments.
Therefore the electrical impulse can travel much quicker from one side to the other.(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Saltatory_Conduction.gif)

When we learn something from scratch the axon is tiny and fragile.
And the myelin layer around just starts to grow around it.
The more we repeat the movement the thicker the myelin gets.
And the information travels faster.

If we have to modify something that is different but very similar to a movement we already learnt, the fragile new axon has to be "used" much more in a focussed way to make sure the layer of myelin gets thicker - and therefore a faster transmitter - than the "old" one.
Until the "old" one is fainting and disappearing.

That's why it is so hard to re-learn a movement that's slightly different to what we already learnt.
And our survival instinct as well as our human nature are pretty big spoilsports.

More about those in the next post.