[.ca] The Essential Swimmer (ISBN 1558213864)

From Amazon.com:
This is the essential guide to a successful swimming program for fitness and competitive swimmers alike, filled with concise, practical advice on everything from basic stroke technique to advanced training programs. It will teach you how to identify your own stroke, kick, body position, and breathing flaws, and provides innovative drills to correct errors in form. Steve Tarpinian is an experienced swimming coach and an Ironman triathlete.

The essence of training improvement:
It is a book you can count on just like if it was your coach! It covers every point involved in training and improving your swimming, from techniques to food... A great book for all ages!

Lots of useful info on strokes and training:
I used this book in conjunction with lone recreational work outs. I significantly improved my freestyle stroke in a few months after swimming most of my life. I had swim on YMCA and summer teams for a large chunk of my adolescence. I venture to guess it could be useful in one way or another for a person just starting out in a pool to a master level adult. It also includes info on other strokes but I used the book mainly for freestyle.

Excellent reference for the freestyle swimmer:
This book is a great tool for learning how to swim the freestyle, or just for pointers when you need to improve your technique. It provides drills for improving freestyle technique, and great tips on how to design swim workouts. The only problem I had with this book is that it does not devote any time at all to the other three strokes, as they are all compiled into one chapter which does not include any drills or pointers. The rest of the book, which includes tips on nutrition and stretching, is meant as a tool only for beginners. If you are new to swimming or don't have access to a coach, I highly recommend this book to improve your swimming technique.

Skillful, Exemplary:
The brevity of this effective, perfectly edited swimming manual is sweet indeed. Not one word too long, it will teach you to swim better than you ever have before, teaching you the fundamentals of freestyle, improving your freestyle, and then using a goal-oriented drill program, developing the four main strokes of swimming (freestyle, breastroke, backstroke, and butterfly). It touches on strength training and the brief nutrion chapter, which basically says, if you eat garbage (empty calories) insteady of health food (fruits and vegetables) is better than a lot of popular nutrition books I've read. Practical, resourceful, and knowledgeable, the books is truly like having a coach right there.

Excellent swimming book for all ages:
I thought that it was a great book for all ages. I improved my times by 11 seconds. It needed more instruction for drills and explain more about how to figure out your intervul times.