Why this is not an app
Dan spent a year with an engineering team trying to automate exactly this. Pose detection on side-on swim footage, twenty-seven metrics, the lot. It reached about fifty percent accuracy on the measurements that mattered most, and fifty percent is worse than useless when someone is about to rebuild their catch around it.
So the project was stopped. The framework survived, because the framework was never the problem — it is a genuinely good rubric and it is what Dan scores against. What could not be automated was the judgment about which of your faults is the one causing the others.
Most technique faults are compensations. Fix the fault underneath and several symptoms disappear at once. Fix a symptom and you have taught yourself a new habit for no gain.
That call is the whole product. A machine cannot make it yet. Dan makes it himself, on every submission.
What you get back
Three videos and a document. This is the exact structure Dan's clients receive.
1 · Technical threshold 10–12 min
Where your stroke stops holding its shape, what changes when it does, and the mechanical evidence for it across your laps. This is the video that explains why your pace falls away when it does.
2 · Your key metric 8–10 min
One focus area, chosen because it is upstream of the rest. What it is, how to see it in your own swimming, and how to control it. Not a list of nine things to think about.
3 · Quick summary 5–6 min
The short one you actually watch on the pool deck before you get in. Same content, stripped to what you need in the next ten minutes.
The Stroke Blueprint written
Your full fault hierarchy in priority order, the correction pathway, and a conditioning framework built around your collapse point rather than a generic programme. Includes your threshold set, calculated from your own 400 metre time.
It is the document you take to your squad coach.
What you send
- Four lengths of freestyle, filmed side-on, above water.
- The same again below water if you can get it. If you cannot, say so — Dan has a full above-water scoring path for exactly this reason.
- A recent 400 metre time trial, so the threshold maths has something real to sit on.
- One line on what you are training for and what is frustrating you.
A phone in a cheap waterproof pouch, held by a friend walking the pool edge, is genuinely enough. The filming guide that comes with the book covers the framing, and getting it wrong is the single most common reason a submission has to be redone.
- Three annotated videos with voice-over, roughly 25 minutes total
- The written Stroke Blueprint
- Your threshold set, calculated from your own 400 metre time
- One round of follow-up questions by email, answered by Dan
Five working days from the moment your footage lands. If your footage is not usable, Dan tells you before charging you.
Not ready for this? Start with the $5 book. It contains the threshold test and the filming guide, and it will tell you whether you want a second pair of eyes at all.
Questions
How is this different from a coach watching me at the pool?
It is slower and more careful. On the deck a coach gets one look in real time. On video Dan can go frame by frame, compare your fresh laps against your tired ones, and actually locate the point where the stroke changed. That comparison is the part that cannot be done live.
What if I am a beginner?
Say so when you submit. The analysis is genuinely different for a swimmer who is still fighting for balance — most of the pull metrics get switched off, because scoring your catch when your hips are sinking would tell you nothing useful.
Can I send footage from a race or a squad session?
You can, and it is often revealing, but send controlled footage as well. Race footage shows you collapsed. Controlled footage shows what you are collapsing from, and Dan needs both to tell you anything worth acting on.
Do you keep my footage?
It is kept while your analysis is active and deleted on request at any time. Nothing is published or used as an example without you saying yes in writing.