If you have been taught how to swim correctly but constantly swim without thought, then the nuances of your stroke can change unknowingly back to your ‘normal’ and lazy stroke. A swimmer will be lost in a type of nose blindness. They may unintentionally swim poorly without feeling their error by being blind to how it feels.

On a pig farm, you will immediately notice the horrid smell. Most farms of livestock are very pungent like that. Animals in captivity eat a lot, grow fast and subsequently deficate a lot. Luckily for humans we stop noticing the smell quickly and we become blind to the smell. This is known as becoming nose blind.

Any sensation can be ignored and we become blind to it. Often a noisy fan in the background goes unnoticed until it is turned off. So that blindness becomes noticeable only during change. The sound was there but so constant that it becomes unnoticeable. The feeling of swimming, for example a long frontcrawl stroke, and also the feeling of resistance, can also become blind. This will happen over time just like spending time in the pig sty.

If your stroke causes a lot of water to bow up in front of you, or big splashes are generated forwards, or you sway from side to side but you continue to do it, then you have become nose blind to that feeling.

When a coach is trying to change a swimmer’s stroke, in the multitudinous ways possible, it is important to feel that change. If the change has less resistance then the feeling needs to be something the swimmer stays aware of. That feeling must be constantly thought about because formerly it was not felt. It is the vigilance of thinking that can become tricky. I like to call swimming and thinking; swinking.

Over time, like at a pig farm, we forget about the various senses impacting our bran. Without reminders by coaches, or by our own thought, strokes will gradually revert to however we swam before learning how to swim better. Then no change will be possible.