Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Welcome to the Renaissance: Swim Technique and Swim related Information is Consolidating


Turns - Flip-Turn Eyes from Glenn Mills on Vimeo.

Quality information about swimming is consolidating exponentially and becoming extraordinarily accessible. In fact, I think we are entering into not just a "swimming Renaissance" but a global one. I know that is a weird thing to say during this "Great Recession" that the planet is experiencing but perhaps some new economic paradigm emerges that takes us all to the next level.

I am going to make a bold statement here and declare that 6-months worth of content at the following sites will provide a swimmer with more knowledge and more useful information than a swimmer would have been exposed between the years 1900 and 2000.

That's not an exaggeration for today I can reference a video shot in the past 10 years of just about any gold medal swim in the Olympics, World Championships, European Championships, US Nationals etc, etc, just by plugging in a search term at You Tube.

For instance there is GoSwim.TV: Glenn Mills has extensively filmed and indexed the technical nuances of our sport making each swimming clip a Zen experience. New swimmers have learned how to do flipturns just by watching his stuff and this is just the free content.

Swimming World: though they keep most of the crown jewels in print or for sale, the results database, the swim conversation calculator, and most of all the cataloging of the successes and failures of just about every word class swimmer provides not just a bench mark for greatness but also what can go wrong. The second mouse gets the cheese and what could go wrong and has gone wrong and it is covered there.

Then there is Floswimming which is like the intellectual equivalent of some serious "swimming industrial espionage." Garret goes for it and he takes chances! He walks right up to the line and sometimes his toes cross over it; (Actually, that might be an under statement or one could say Garret has some pretty long toes), but the majority of his videos deliver insights that have never been put to paper or press and they are valuable.

1 comment:

Ahelee said...

I LOVE BEING A SWIMMER IN 2009!!

Tony, you forgot to add your BLOG to the mix here... Many many swim people get the highlights from YOU!

CHEERS!