Most adult swimmers know the frustration. You take lessons. You watch videos. You try harder. And front crawl still never quite makes sense.
Brian Holliday lived that frustration himself. He spent years struggling with his own swimming before deciding to rebuild his understanding from the ground up — two years in the pool, twice a day, five days a week. Not swimming. Figuring it out. Through his unconventional application of Alexander Technique principles, he rebuilt his relationship with the water entirely. Then he turned what he’d learned into an online coaching programme and began working with adult swimmers virtually, applying the same philosophy.
What he discovered: the problem isn’t technique. It’s the way we’ve been taught to think about swimming.
His debut book, Why Front Crawl Feels Hard: Stop Copying, Stop Struggling, Start Swimming Your Way, takes a different approach entirely. Rather than giving swimmers more technique to copy, it helps them develop their own understanding of how their body moves, how their mind works, and how the water supports them.
Think of it as the swimming equivalent of The Inner Game of Tennis.
The book explores practical concepts including Tone Awareness — the conscious sense of how much muscle tension you’re applying and whether it’s actually helping — The Pause — a moment of deliberate stillness between strokes where the swimmer tunes into their senses and experiences the present moment — and Faulty Sensory Swimming Perception: the phenomenon where what your body thinks it’s doing and what it’s actually doing are two completely different things.
It’s a thinking book, not a coaching manual. And that distinction is exactly what makes it different.
Brian Holliday is an Intuitive Swimming Coach based in the UK, working virtually with adult swimmers who feel stuck, tense and trapped in overthinking.
Image by Brian Holliday
About the Author: Brian Holliday
