Speed is a system. We coach all of it — and we show our work. These four pillars sit underneath every practice, every correction, and every conversation with a family.
A swimming race is a chain of connected parts — the start, the underwater, the swimming itself, the turns, and the way energy is paced across all of them. Coach one link in isolation and the chain still breaks. We teach the whole race as one system, so a gain in one place isn't quietly given back in another.
We measure success across a swimming life, not a single taper. That means age-appropriate loading, real skill foundations before specialization, and protecting a young athlete's motivation as carefully as their times. A swimmer who still wants to race at twenty is the outcome we're optimizing for.
There is no trade-off between technique that keeps a body healthy and technique that wins. The positions that spare shoulders, knees, and lower backs are the same positions that hold water and carry speed. We never chase a short-term drop at the cost of the athlete who has to keep swimming next season.
Improvement shouldn't require faith. We quantify the things that actually drive a time — cycle length, tempo, underwater speed, turn quality, and splits — and we put those numbers in front of families. When a swimmer gets faster, everyone can see precisely why.
The same body of sports science that powers SwimPredict powers the coaching — decades of published research on how swimmers actually get faster, distilled into what we do with your athlete.
Built on Jan Olbrecht's The Science of Winning — the interplay of aerobic and anaerobic capacity, validated on more than 10,000 swimmers, used to match a swimmer's metabolic profile to the demands of their events.
A proper taper is worth 2–4% — the difference between a wall and a best time. Sprint events want 3–4 week tapers, distance 1–2; volume drops roughly in half while intensity stays. We plan backward from the meet that matters.
Short course and long course are different sports wearing the same suit. Stroke-specific conversion factors — the same ones USA Swimming uses — account for turn frequency and push-offs, so goals translate honestly between pools.
Stroke rate measures cadence; SWOLF measures what that cadence costs. Elite swimming is a high rate and a long stroke — roughly 40–50 strokes per minute for distance, 65–80+ for sprints — and video is how we find where yours leaks.
Races are decided in the parts most practices skip: starts, breakouts, turns, exchanges. A rolling relay start alone is worth about half a second. Our race analyses grade every one of these, wall to wall.
Olbrecht, J. The Science of Winning (2000)
Hellard, P. et al., “Optimal Overload and Taper” (2013)
Mujika, I., “Tapering and Peaking” (2009)
Bosquet, L. et al., “Effects of Tapering: Meta-Analysis” (2007)
Colorado Timing Conversion Factors (USA Swimming)
Saw, A.E. et al., “Monitoring Athletes’ Self-Report” (2015)
Public pages cover the philosophy. The full playbook — the drills, the progressions, the measurement protocols, and the season planning — lives inside the member portal for enrolled families, where we can tailor it to your swimmer.
That's the promise. The methodology is how we keep it.