Do you “follow the black line” — just swim to get the yards in? Or do you swim mindfully – tirelessly evaluating and improving your stroke? Swimming mindfully – and purposefully – builds a better brain because it stimulates far more brain cells.

When you focus on improvement, sensory neurons take in sensory stimuli — touch, sound, sight – and send it to the brain to be converted into impressions or thoughts. Is your stroke splashy or quiet? Is your hand tipped up or down as you extend it? Do bubbles stream from it as you stroke? (We sometimes call intensely reflective practice like this Unconscious Competence.)

Motor neurons make adjustments to your stroke by firing different muscle combinations. Sensory neurons help you evaluate whether those adjustments improved your swimming.

To improve, your brain must do complex and intensive information-processing. It takes in sensory signals, compares them with prior experiences, assigns weight or value to each sensation, then selects, sequences and integrates motor signals. Info is flowing constantly back and forth between eyes, ears, skin, muscles and brain. This is called working memory. The more of this you do, the denser and healthier are the neural networks formed throughout the brain.

Here’s an example using the simplest skill taught in the Total Immersion Easy Freestyle sequence – Hanging your Head. Swimming with head held high is a powerful instinct among all terrestrial mammals – dogs, deer and humans too. It increases drag and exhausts muscles from head to toe.

To release your head to a neutral position you need to bypass an existing neural circuit (a “muscle memory”) that signals neck and shoulder muscles to contract. So you swim a lap—or better yet just five to six strokes—with the thought “Hang your head.”

As you swim your brain’s frontal cortex receives and analyzes proprioceptive (your sense of where body parts are in space and relative to each other) information on your head’s new position and it compares the new sense of a weightless head with the old one of a heavy head. It then sends that data to your cerebellum where it begins the long process of creating a new muscle memory – leading eventually to Unconscious Competence.

Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) Swimmers repeat this process for decades with dozens and dozens of small — yet consequential — stroke details. Each new Stroke Thought — and the evaluation and adjustment that accompanies it — creates its own unique brain circuit and integrates it into related circuits, creating an increasingly wide-ranging, complex and more integrated network for efficient swimming.

The complexity I describe is why we teach drills. Superman Glide for instance, is far simpler than whole stroke. This makes it easier to devote sufficient brainpower to releasing neck muscles and assessing/memorizing the new head position, increasing the chances you’ll maintain it in whole stroke.

Building brain circuits for hanging head and hands