Editorial policy

The rules this site is written under. They exist so you can tell how much weight to put on any given sentence.

Sourcing

• Every number gets a source, and the source gets a link. Training formulas cite the paper. Records and standards cite the federation. Nothing is quoted from another blog’s summary when the original document is public.
• Primary sources beat secondary ones. World Aquatics for records and rules; USA Swimming and U.S. Masters Swimming for standards and results; peer-reviewed journals for physiology.
• Where evidence runs out, the text says so. A lot of swimming practice is coaching consensus rather than tested science. That is not a problem as long as it is labelled, and here it is.
• Where sources disagree, both are shown. Course conversion is the clearest example: there is no single official answer, so the site gives two methods and explains what separates them rather than picking one.

Review dates

Every guide carries a visible date. It is the day the page was last written or updated against its sources — not a claim that a person re-read it that morning, and not a timestamp bumped by a script to look fresh.

Pages that depend on data which changes — records, published standards — are updated when that data changes, and the date moves with them.

How AI is used

The prose on this site is drafted by AI. We say that plainly rather than implying a newsroom that does not exist. An AI assistant gathers the sources, writes the draft and adds the citations, under rules a person wrote and is accountable for.

What a person does decide: what this site covers, the rules above, and where the line sits when sources disagree. What no model decides is whether a number gets published without a source — see the next paragraph, and check it yourself: every figure here links to where it came from.

Any figure that cannot be traced to a named, linkable source does not get published, regardless of how confident the draft sounded. That gate exists because the failure mode of AI-drafted content is not bad writing — it is confident, plausible, invented numbers. The defence is not trusting us: it is that the link is right there. Open it.

A correction to this page. An earlier version said a person opened each page to re-check its figures, and that no page went up without a person checking the numbers. Neither was accurate, and we corrected it in September 2026. A page setting out the rules is the last place that should carry a claim that does not hold.

Corrections

Errors get fixed on the page where they appeared, and where the correction changes the meaning of something, the change is noted rather than quietly overwritten. Write to us via the contact page; a correction with a source attached gets acted on quickly.

Advertising and independence

The site is funded by advertising. Advertisers have no input into content, do not see pages before publication, and cannot buy a recommendation. If a page ever carries an affiliate link, it will be disclosed on that page.

What we are not

Not a swim school, not a coaching service, not a governing body, and not a source of medical advice. Training guidance here is general information for healthy adults. If you have a shoulder injury, a heart condition, or any difficulty breathing in the water, the right next step is a professional who can see you, not a web page.