Tri Swim Coach Podcast · Dominic Latella

Stop Chasing Pretty - #167

·53 min·2 clips

When gatekeeping coaches destroy confidence—and why 25 yards makes you a real swimmer.

Dominic opens by greeting the audience like a coach who is already partway through a rant. He asks for five-star reviews and tells listeners to send the episode to the swim buddy who needs to hear someone call out some BS in the sport. Then he admits he is still oddly emotional after watching Top Chef, which sets the tone for the rest of the conversation. From there, he pivots into a complaint about how freestyle is still often taught. He says he is tired of the same old aesthetic-first ideas and calls out the antiquated front-quadrant freestyle approach with its obsession with high elbows. He brings up the old keyhole pull cue as an example of the kind of language that shaped how people used to think about the underwater arm path. He explains it as drawing a curve out, then back in under the body, then back out again, and compares the phrase to the floppy disk symbol, since both are relics younger swimmers may not even recognize. The joke is doing real work. It makes the point that some coaching language hangs around long after the idea behind it should have been retired. He is careful not to claim there is one universal answer. He reminds listeners that people have different bodies and different needs. That matters because he is not trying to replace one rigid rule with another. He is trying to get people to stop worshipping the look of a stroke. The conversation then swings into the confusion around butterfly, dolphin kick, dolphin dive, diving, and synchro, with Dominic joking that coaches can blur those categories when they are talking too quickly. He points out that a dolphin dive is not butterfly and that the focus of the old cues was aesthetic, not speed or power. The rant lands on a simple idea: a stroke that looks nice but slows you down is not the goal. He remembers being told something looked great even when it clearly made him slower, and that memory becomes both the punchline and the warning. The episode keeps its loose poolside rhythm the whole way through. It talks like a coach correcting himself in real time. It uses everyday examples, old cues, and a little chaos to make a technical argument easier to hear. By the end, the lesson is less about one magic fix and more about refusing fake elegance when real swimming is on the line. The closing reset is classic Dominic: enough theory, keep swimming.

As heard by us

A blunt, funny reminder that pretty swimming is not the same thing as fast swimming.

Dominic Tello uses the opening banter and the old-school "keyhole" cue to push back on aesthetic-first freestyle coaching, while still leaving room for the idea that different swimmers need different things.

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Why you'd press play

If you want freestyle cues stripped of fluff, start here.

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