ABCS OF MENTAL TRAINING: Y IS FOR YOUNG ATHLETES

BY AIMEE C. KIMBALL, PHD

Swimming is a lifelong sport. Many people learn to swim as a toddler and continue through the days when their knees can no longer handle pounding the pavement. While many people swim just for fun in the summer months or on trips to the beach, many choose to dedicate themselves to swimming competitively. This article addresses some tips for young athletes who want to be successful in competitive swimming.

Train Hard
You’ll hear it from your coaches: the harder you work, the easier competition is. Training hard not only prepares your body for “easy” success, but preparation also lays the foundation for confidence.

Don’t just go through the motions at practice. Focus on getting better, faster and stronger with every lap. It's your choice. You can just show up and exert minimum effort, or you can be physically and mentally present and train like you want to be a champion.

Be Coachable
You'll experience many coaching styles in your swimming career, some you will love and some you will not. Regardless of your personal opinion, keep an open mind. Your coach is in this role because he is passionate about the same sport as you and wants to help you improve. If you write him off because he teaches you something different than a previous coach or because he doesn't communicate the way you'd like, you may be passing up an opportunity to further develop. Over time you will learn what works for you and what doesn't. Eventually you will get to a point where you feel comfortable talking to your coach about your training. If you disagree with your coach, engage in a discussion and allow him to educate you on his philosophy and the science behind his training methods. Being open to new ways of training and alterations in technique is the only way you will improve as a swimmer.

Understand Growth and Development
During the middle school and high school years, your body will go through incredible changes. Understand that these changes will often positively impact your speed, but there are times during the growth process where you may get slower or become less efficient.

While you are in the midst of your growth spurt, you may see your times improve significantly. When this growth period is over, you may not drop time at the rate you were. Don't let this impact your confidence. You may be in a phase where improvement has more to do with your body than your training. Also, keep in mind that others may hit their growth spurts after you, so someone you used to beat easily may now be able to keep up. Don't assume your hard work isn't paying off. Others may just be catching up to you in the development process.

Find Balance
Swimming is an exhausting sport. You train before and after school and exert more energy before 7 a.m. than some athletes do all week. While it is a very time-consuming sport, it is important to have a life outside of swimming. Try other sports, be in student council, take piano lessons. Find other activities that you enjoy so swimming doesn't consume you. Because swimming is often year-round and starts at a young age, balance is key to avoiding burnout and continuing to enjoy the sport for years to come.

Address All Components
Swimming requires a commitment in and out of the pool. Mental training, healthy eating, stretching, and dry land conditioning are all important factors in long-term swimming success. When you address everything that impacts you in the water you will be more prepared, more confident, and better able to handle the rigors of swimming at a competitive level. Obviously I am biased, but I truly believe the mind has a tremendous impact on success. Your work ethic in practice, your ability to push through pain, your confidence at meets, and your ability to control anxiety are just some of the mental components of swimming. The earlier you start addressing your mental game, the more likely you are to have what it takes to transition to higher levels of competition and to make the most of your physical ability.

Summary
There are lots of things to consider when choosing to be a competitive swimmer. Overall, if you love the sport, are willing to work hard at it, and focus on continuing to improve, you can have a long and successful swimming career.

Make it great!
Dr. Aimee

Dr. Kimball is a Mental Training consultant in Pittsburgh, PA. She is an Association of Applied Sport Psychology Certified Consultant, and is a member of the American Psychological Association, the United States Olympic Committee’s Sport Psychology Registry, and the USA Swimming Sports Medicine Network. She works with athletes, coaches, and parents to help them achieve success in sport and life. For more information contact: AimeeKimball@aol.com.

Taken from usaswimming.org

Note To Swimmers... We See You

Posted by Glenn Mills on Nov 04, 2013 01:26PM

Swimmers need to understand something:  When you're standing above the surface, you see SO much more than people think.

Being a coach gives you a great perspective on what's going on below.  As a swimmer, I was always amazed at how my coach was able to see someone breaking the flow of the group.  It could have been someone stopping because of a sore shoulder, or two swimmers whacking their arms in passing, or someone fighting a calf cramp.   Any number of things can break the flow, and it's easy to spot this from on deck.  

Aside from the more "legitimate" reasons for a break in the flow, there are "other" reasons.  Coaches see these, too, even though the swimmer may think otherwise, and believe they're getting away with something.   A pull on the laneline here, a one-handed turn there, throwing in a couple of armstrokes during a kick set, pushing off the bottom every once in a while, trying to disguise the fact that you're just not making the interval.   For what means?  Who are you really fooling?   Spend a couple of hours on deck or in the stands and you'll begin to understand.  Coaches (and parents, for that matter) see everything.

Sometimes it's a game that we coaches play.  We tend to watch the people out of the corner of our eye who have a known tendency toward cutting corners.  In our own mind, we need to come to grips that at the end of the season, we really have done all we can to try to help all swimmers succeed, but there is really only so much we can do when the swimmer isn't taking an equal part in the responsibility of their own season.

What are the measures we can take when we see someone cheating, cutting corners, attempting to hide that they're just not making it, or not applying the techniques, stroke changes, and adaptations that we're suggesting for them to make to improve as a swimmer?  Here's a quick list of solutions from soft to harsh.  Rest assured, however, that they can all be used to maintain a level of actual commitment to the sport.

1.  Talk to the swimmer and make sure they realize that we see these actions taking place.  Give them the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe the swimmer didn't realize she was instinctively doing something wrong.  Or maybe he didn't know that what he was doing was breaking one of the "written" rules of swimming or one of the "unwritten" rules of swim practice or swim etiquette.    It's our job to educate the swimmer, or at least make sure the swimmer understands what they were doing was wrong, and then tell them the proper actions, or what we expect from them in the future.

2.   Yell at the swimmer. Yeah... add a bit more harshness to the message.  Not all, but some athletes need that level of interaction to get a point across.  While not the preferred method, it's part of the game.  Some coaches yell, some don't, but it doesn't have to be a negative situation.  Yelling can be a way of making a point stick, and the skill of yelling constructively is an acquired act.

3.  Punish the swimmer.  There are many types of punishment, but swimmers should know that their actions have consequences.   It's not that their actions will physically harm the swimmer or another swimmer.  It's that their actions will hinder them from having the tools necessary to reach their potential.  They'll not have the training and discipline necessary to swim as fast as they can at the end of the season.  Maybe they won't be tough enough to look their competitor in the next lane in the eyes on the last lap, and win through an effort level they learned in practice.  Punishments can be everything from repeating the set, to push-ups between the set, to removal from practice.  The last having to come with a message that what they were doing during practice was simply purposeless, and there was no sense in them continuing.

4.  Removal from that training group. Not all swimmers belong in their training group just because they're old enough, or even because they're fast enough.  Training groups are set up so the athletes in that group share a common goal for end-of-season performance.  Training groups are set up so that all the athletes in that group have similar long-term goals...be it swimming in the local championships, the state championships, all the way up to the Olympic Games.  If you're the one athlete that isn't following the pattern that was set forth for that group, then maybe the group below would be more in line with the effort, focus, or attendance habits of that athlete.  A training group isn't a right bestowed by age or speed.   It's an honor.

5.  Removal from that team.  Sometimes, and thankfully rarely, swimmers are asked to leave the team because their goals, actions, or practice habits detract from those of the other swimmers on the team.  This is the sacrifice of one to better ensure the success of the many.  We as coaches absolutely dislike this final method.  We choose to coach because we love to see children succeed.  We thrive on helping them accomplish things that are hard to accomplish.  We feel pride when we watch them take the skills learned in their swimming career and transfer them to a life career...seeing them make a positive impact on society.  Removing someone from the team is a final solution, one that comes only after exhausting all other solutions.  But at some point, the coach needs to weigh the amount of time, effort, attention, and emotional energy it takes to reform someone who's cutting corners...against the amount of time lost from helping the swimmers who are doing EVERYTHING that's asked.  Finding this balance is the hardest part of coaching.   It takes a mature coach to understand when it's time to stop trying. 

Swimmers need to ask themselves:  What is my reputation on the team?  When a coach asks for something, can the coach expect that I'll do it, or will the coach have to watch, intently, to see if I'm cutting corners.  Have I turned my coach into a babysitter or even a police officer?  Do I take away from the other members of the team, or do I inspire those around me to be better?

How do you want to be known as a swimmer?    Trust me, we as coaches standing on deck KNOW who will do what we ask, and who will cheat or not do what we ask on the next set.  

Which kind of swimmer do you want to be?

Burn Your Goals To Become The Person Of Your Dreams…

A couple months ago one of my golfer’s sent me her goals in a text message, and I responded.

“I want you to burn those.”

I knew my response was harsh, but I had reached a breaking point.

EVERYONE WANTS TO WIN.

No one is sitting around at the beginning of the season saying

“our goal is to finish last place in the conference”
“we want to have the worst shooting percentage in the country”
“we want to have a mediocre season”

You never hear this!

I think goals are like wishes.

The beauty of sports is winning and losing is defined for us, therefore we need to spend ZERO time on it.

I believe 100% of our energy should be on the process, controllables, and more specifically in this case, our commitments.

So, I told my golfer, “Burn your wish list. I want to see your commitment list. I want to know what you are committed to sacrificing and doing with your 24 hours a day to close the gap between where you are at, and where you want to be.”

Remember, one of the greatest coaches ever, John Wooden, won 10 National Championships, and he NEVER talked about winning. He focused on the process. He started with the basics. The first day of practice he showed the freshmen how they should put on their socks, and tie their shoes. It worked out pretty well for him both in terms of results, and more importantly in his relationships with his players long into their lives.

Three weeks later my golfer blew out the field and won the tournament with the person in second finishing 5 strokes behind her. The next tournament she didn’t play as well, but she is starting to understand you cannot control goals, but you can control your commitments, and paradoxically by letting go of the results you can actually play better.

I know that for many of you removing goals is like taking away your training wheels or your ‘blanky’, but it’s long over due. At some point your training wheels are more of a hindrance than a help. You can’t make sharp turns around the bend, you can’t hit the brakes and power-slide, and you cannot fly off of jumps! No one has ever competed in the X-Games with training wheels. Though training wheels may give you balance and security, they strip you of the opportunity to experience the full potential of riding a bike.

Here is what I’ve found. Consistently giving your very best, every single day, is a much higher standard than arbitrary goals.

Some coaches have said, “BUT some of my players need an outcome goal to chase after!” If that is how you feel, I would encourage you to revisit your mission in coaching. Most coaches tell me their mission is something along the lines of “training and equipping their athletes for life.” If that is the case, then it is our job—I would go as far as to say it’s our responsibility—to do what we believe is best long-term for our athletes.

Kids want to have dessert before dinner. It is a parents’ responsibility, however, to make sure that doesn’t happen. Because I think we all can agree that if we equipped our kids with this type of dietary strategy, there would be some detrimental long-term effects.

So, what is a more beneficial strategy? We develop a compelling vision for our life of who we want to become as a person and a player that is 100% controllable and not results based. We then create a commitment list of what we are willing to sacrifice and do with our 86,400 seconds per day to close the gap between where we are at, and where we want to be.

This isn’t semantics.

When we were young, we didn’t know the difference between lust and love. The older we get, we start to realize these two words are worlds apart.

When we were young, we didn’t know the difference between happiness and fulfillment. The older we get, the more we start to realize the two words are leap years apart.

The difference between being goal driven and mission/vision driven is MASSIVE! I think goal driven coaches are much more likely to be transactional and mission/vision driven coaches are much more likely to be transformational.

I encourage you.

Take off the training wheels.

Put your blanky in storage.

You can’t control the results anyway.

Fall in love with the process.

Focus on your commitments.

Focus on giving your very best, treating people really well, having a great attitude, and unconditional gratitude, REGARDLESS of your circumstances. It’s a much higher standard, and much like bicycles with no training wheels, it’s not for the faint of heart.

We can enjoy the security and predictability goals provide, but I would argue you can never achieve your fullest potential with them.

Well, what do you think? Please leave your thoughts, comments and questions below.

This thought provoking  blog post was written by our friend Joshua Medcalf, Founder of Train to be Clutch. Joshua is the Mental Training Coach for renowned programs such as UCLA Women’s Basketball and University of Oregon Women’s Golf, as well as numerous elite high school, collegiate and professional athletes. He is the creator of the first mental training apps in the world for basketball, soccer and golf. You can follow his work on Twitter at @joshuamedcalf, and check out some of his free mental training videos and mp3s at www.traintobeclutch.com .

8 THINGS TO HELP YOU GET PSYCHED UP

Natalie Coughlin gets psyched up to swim like few other in history, as is evidenced by her Olympic success. What can you do to experience the same?

We all get those days when the last thing we want to do is strap on the suit and crank out 10 x 200 butterfly for time. (Except for Mel, maybe…)

Motivation doesn’t have to be one of those “you-have-it-or-you-don’t” qualities. Knowing how to harness it when it’s peaking — and how to massage it out of hiding when it evaporates – plays a major role in how we perform in the pool. A swimmer that is stoked to show up on deck is going to work harder and ultimately perform faster more than the unmotivated athlete.

The next time you feel the fire in your belly starting to flicker, deploy any and all of the following  eight ways to stoke the flames—

Pick Out Some Goals.

I’m no space scientist, but I know this much: Goals are super! They provide direction and a benchmark for our efforts. They challenge, invigorate and push us to our perceived limits and every so often – a little further. They demonstrate what we can achieve when we set ourselves to something, and they also spur us on to greater heights with the confidence earned with each goal accomplished.

Not bad, right?

So set some shiny, specific (important!) goals for your swimming that are important to you (also important – be selfish here). An exact time you want to swim. A cut you want to make. Dream big, and then write it down and make yourself accountable to it.

Call in for Back-up.

Excellence is difficult; achieving it completely on our own is impossible. Having a positive, supportive circle of friends and family is critical to your success.

Your friends and family knowing of your goals, and facilitating your success is only half the battle.

The other half?

Surrounding yourself with successful swimmers.

You’ve probably heard the following—“You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most of your time with.” Successful swimmers hang out with successful swimmers. Step it up and jump into the faster lane next practice. Watch what the fast kids in your group, team and state/province/planet are doing.

Do One Thing Really, Really Well.

The big, greasy goal at the end of the season is what inspires you. It’s what you fantasize about when you should be listening to your teacher. It’s the time that you paste in big, bright numbers to your ceiling so it’s the last thing you see at night. It’s the yellow Omega pad at the end of the pool.

On one hand it inspires and motivates us, and then on days when we aren’t feeling so hot, when we cannot seem to find our stroke, when our mood only continues to dampen and the last thing we want to do is train — the mere thought of that goal can become daunting and heavy. Soon enough, the “I’m-so-far-away-so-what’s-the-point” thoughts begin circulating through your mind.

Avoid psyching yourself out by looking at the enormity your goals, and instead focus on the smallest step you can take today.

When I felt off, like my hands were slipping through the water, or I was stressed from school and/or up to my eyeballs in drama with the ex-girlfriend, I would pick a couple different areas of my swimming and focus intensely on them for the duration of the workout. My entry. Getting an extra couple dolphin kicks off each wall. Breathing every 18 strokes.

I would pick something small, and before long the confidence and motivation gleaned from doing one thing particularly well would spread itself to the rest of my swimming.

Be Prepared for That Next Lull

Motivation, like a lot of things in life, is in a constant state of ebb-and-flow, kind of like the tide. In, out. Up, down.

Today you are on top of the world, jacked out of your mind, ready to accept any and all challenges. Tomorrow you’d rather draw the shades and call a mulligan on the whole day. The key to lessening the impact of the lows and their frequency is to get your Sherlock Holmes on and figure out why they happen in the first place.

Write down what you were feeling, the activities you were engaged in, if you were stressed out, how you were eating, and find the commonalities. Trust me, they are there. Ya just gotta look. And once you do figure out what they are (for me, lack of sleep is a huge, rippling red flag to an approaching bout of low-motivation) – tactfully head them off one at a time as they arise.

Baby Steps Aren’t Just for Stumbling Toddlers

Going back to feeling daunted again, there are those moments where we have to start something – could be a difficult set, a homework assignment, or an article (ahem) – but the sheer amount of work facing us seems impossible to surmount.

So what do we do? Start? Of course not. (Aren’t we just gloriously and peculiarly weird in our self-sabotage?)

Start somewhere. Start something. Start anywhere.  Doesn’t have to be the hardest part, the easiest part; just something.

Here is a little trick I play on myself (which I may or may not have used for this article right hurrr) – commit to five minutes.

Just five minutes.

Don’t think beyond that, just promise yourself the first five minutes. You’ll find that once you get into it the “now that I’m doing this set it’s not so awful” groove will kick that sense of feeling daunted right out the window.

Don’t Plan for Somedays

Don’t wait to get pumped up about your goals later. Or tomorrow. Or worse, the day that doesn’t appear on the calendar because it simply doesn’t exist — “someday.”

The best time to start chasing your goals, to be the champion swimmer you want to be, is right now.

Not when you “feel like it.”

Not “sometime,” “eventually” or “later.”

Today.

Now.

Embrace the Horror

Overnight success stories are great for television and media. They make for great vignettes and athlete profiles, but let’s get serious here; they are a bold-faced, unchlorinated pile of lies.

Success isn’t stumbled upon or conceived overnight. It’s the messy, final result of a culmination of small wins. Eating well when you coulda motorboated the contents of the vending machine. Showing up early that week and doing extra ab work. Not taking 18 right-handed strokes with your keyboard into each wall during kick sets.

Success in the pool is the gritty, day-to-day of showing up, doing a little extra,and doing it well.

So embrace the grind!

Act.

Doing is invigorating. Sitting, thinking, endlessly planning and ruminating leads us to needlessly overthinking things. Action brings us confidence, builds our self-esteem, and the best of all – brings us results!

Boom.

Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer based out of Victoria, BC. In feeding his passion for swimming, he has developed YourSwimBook, a powerful log book and goal setting guide made specifically for swimmers. Sign up for the YourSwimBook newsletter (free) and get weekly motivational tips by clicking here.

Reposted from swimswam.com

5 Goal Setting Hacks For Swimmers

Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer based out of Victoria, BC. In feeding his passion for swimming, he has developed YourSwimBook, a powerful log book and goal setting guide made specifically for swimmers. Sign up for the YourSwimBook newsletter (free) and get weekly motivational tips by clicking here.

Michael Phelps was renown for setting and adjusting his goals. Here are 5 goal setting tips to help you make 2013/2014 one to remember.

 

It’s a new season, and you know what that means — new goals! Whatever it is that you want to achieve this year, you gotsta put a plan together in order to achieve it. Accomplishing grandiose stuff doesn’t generally happen by accident, so as the 2013/2014 season begins to roll out, take a few minutes to properly outline your goals for the year with these 5 goal setting hacks for swimmers–

 

1. Define What Success Means for You as a Swimmer.

What does success in the pool look like to you? Is it qualifying for a particular meet? Dropping XYZ seconds off a best time? Being the first swimmer to swim butterfly and freestyle at the same time? (Dare to dream, right?)

This is the extraordinarily fun part of the goal setting process; where your inner dreamer lets loose and imagines all of the things you’d love to do with your swimming. Don’t censor yourself quite yet, and don’t constrain yourself with what others might think; write out what success looks like for you.

 

2. Slap a Specific Date and Number on Your Goal.

Next we are going to take that lofty goal and bring it down from the clouds and into reality. To do so we are going to slap a very specific number on that goal. This is done to avoid any ambiguity, or reliance on the performance of others to achieve your goals.

Here are some examples:

Nope: I want to swim fast this year.

Meh: I want to qualify for the World Juniors team next summer.

Whammy: I want to swim a 22.43 at XYZ swim meet for the 50m freestyle, July 2015.

If your goal is to make a specific team, do your best to figure out the time you will have to go. Saying that you want to place top 3 isn’t good enough, as achieving this goal is reliant on how your competition does (i.e. things which you have no control over).

Focusing on you and your performance alone sheds you of the burden of feeling discouraged when you see a competitor swimming particularly well; you can only control how you swim so dial in on that.

 

3. Break it Down

Here is where you need to get into the guts of your goals while also trying to be as objective as you can regarding your own strengths and weaknesses. (Collaborating with your coach on this point in particular is almost a given.)

What parts of your race are you going to need to focus on? What technical, mental, and physical improvements will you have to see? Does your start need work? Does your underwater butterfly kicking need to improve?

Break down the major opportunities for improvement, and write out how you are going to tackle each one of them. So let’s say you want to improve your fly kicks. What are you going to do each day at practice to make them better? Write out the steps until you have a concrete plan of action to move forward with.

 

4. Set the Roadposts

You’ve got your final end time. The things you will need to do to put you in the condition necessary to achieve it. Now to set smaller goals or road-posts along your journey so that you have an idea of how close you are to being on track.

These smaller bench marks serve two main purposes:

1. They provide an opportunity to assess how far you have come along.
2. They provide real world proof how sensible and realistic your goal setting is. Setting goals is a skill, something you need to hone.

List the major meets between now and the end of the season. Starting from your final goal, move backwards from meet to meet, charting the times you’ll have to swim, until you have returned to where you are standing right now.

 

5. Start Living Your Goals

Positive thinking is nice and dandy, but much better and far more effective is positive action. Fake it till you make it isn’t just a rhyming catchphrase, it’s an actual, like, real thing. In research done as far back as 1970 at Clark University showed that the moods exhibited by participants quickly mirrored the expressions they were asked to make. When told to smile they felt happier, when asked to clench their teeth their anger quickly rose.

If you have seen the movie Boiler Room you have already heard of “acting as if.” This same technique can be applied to your swimming.

Act as if you are a champion swimmer. Act as if you love the hard sets. Act as if you love the grind.

Acting as if doesn’t mean sitting around, thinking and dreaming about your goal and expecting it to happen. Acting as if implies exactly what it says – acting. That part is unavoidably critical – you must act, or take action in accordance with your goal.

Boom.

Also see “20 Habits of Elite Swimmers” here.

Also see “The 5 Things You Will Takeaway from Swimming” here.

Reposted from www.swimswam.com

Coaches Perspective: What Kind of Athlete are YOU?

I was really excited when my brother Tyler and I talked about me writing some coaches blogs for his website.  My name is Elliott, and I am currently the Head Men’s and Women’s Swimming Coach at Eastern Illinois University.  I was never nearly as fast as my brother, but as I found my swimming career dwindling down I realized that maybe my talent wasn’t in the water, but rather on the deck…as a coach.

The idea of having me join my brother in writing this blog is to provide a coach’s perspective on swimming.  Sometimes I am going to provide practice ideas or technique tips, and other times I am going try to provide you with some mental or life advice.  What we hope to do is to help athletes and parents learn a little bit more about how your coaches might think about things.  Hopefully this will help you grow as a person and an athlete.

So, to start!  I am going to ask you to follow my directions in this next paragraph as we go through a short exercise:

I would like you to start by pinching your cheeks with both hands.  For five seconds begin to make sounds like a cow and wiggle your cheeks at the same time!  Ok, so now I want you take right arm, stretch it across your chest, lift your arm so your bicep is right by your mouth…and for five seconds I want you to make a fart noise with your mouth!  Fun right??

Now some of you did those things, and some of you just read it, right?  Either way, did you find yourself asking, “What was the point of me doing that?”  There was no point.  Neither of those things serve any purpose what so ever!  But some of you did it anyway, without ever having met me, without knowing what was going to happen afterwards, or even without knowing if I am a good coach or not!  You just did it!  But let me ask you athletes this; is that how you are with your coach?  Or do you hesitate, question things, or just go through the motions until you are more confident it will work?

If you are willing to make a fart noise, that serves ZERO purpose to anything in this world, then why is it that sometimes it is so hard as an athlete to do something you know will make you better?  I’ll tell you why, because it is HARD!  So next time you get to that point in practice, or while studying for a test, or while doing anything that does serve a purpose of making you or someone else better, remind yourself of one thing…You made a fart noise, for no reason, so why not do this for a reason?

Then to wrap up, what about those of you who just read that paragraph instead of doing what I asked?  Ask yourself, are you that way at school or at practice?  Do you wait until you think you know what is going to happen to “buy in” or trust?  Do you wait to see if someone else does it first, before you join in?

Imagine if you let yourself go a little bit, and maybe trusted a little more without questioning.  Not everything you do in life is going to serve a purpose, and sometimes you’ll do something that should serve a purpose and it will fall flat.  But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try something different or not trust that what we are doing will benefit us someday!

So when you’re having a hard day, or not able to focus at practice, or not having a good set… make a fart noise or doing something silly!  It will remind you to get back on track, push through, and do something that will help you!  And if it doesn’t do that, it will at least make you smile and laugh and sometimes in life that is all we need.

If you every have questions about college swimming, training, mental approaches, or just want advice email me at mcgillelliott@gmail.com .

Reposted from Tyler McGill’s website.

Staying Loose and Calm Pre-Race

10/1/2013

By Dr. Alan Goldberg//Competitivedge.com

Why are races won and lost before the start?
As I've said many times throughout this series, the BIGGEST secret to swimming your best when it counts the most is having the ability to stay loose and calm behind the blocks, right before your race. Far too many swimmers waste precious energy the minutes leading up to their event by thinking about and focusing on all of the wrong things. Because of this, they unknowingly undermine their confidence, get themselves overly nervous and set themselves up for failure.

The Devastating Effects Of Out Of Control Pre-Race Jitters
Ever wonder how you can run out of gas at the 150 mark of your 200, the very first race of your big meet? You've worked hard all season, you've got a solid training base, yet your arms and legs feel like lead and you're totally exhausted! What gives? You go 7 – 8,000 yards easily in practice and after a mere 150 you're wasted?! This is a direct result of a swimmer being far too nervous pre-race! If you're “over-amped” behind the blocks and thinking about the time you need, who you have to beat or, “what if you don't?,” then your breathing will get faster and shallower, your muscles will tighten up and the end result of these physical changes will be this feeling of premature exhaustion.

Controlling Your Eyes & Ears To Stay Calm Under Pressure
If you want to consistently swim to your potential under big meet pressure and avoid the devastating physical effects of excessive nerves, then you have to learn how to keep yourself physically and mentally composed at race time! One important way that you do this is by controlling your eyes and ears behind the blocks. This means that what you LOOK AT and LISTEN TO behind the blocks has to be only things that help keep you calm, loose and confident. For example, if focusing on another swimmer and how big or fast they look gets you nervous, you control your eyes by looking at spot behind the blocks or by defocusing your eyes as you look out across the pool. If listening to a conversation between one or more swimmers is getting you anxious, you control your ears by turning up the volume on your iPod or finding someone else to talk to about non-swimming related issues. Controlling your eyes and ears means that you need to establish set things that you look at and listen to right before your races.

How do you control your pre-race focus?
Every great athlete has a repeatable, familiar pre-performance ritual that they use leading up to the start of the action which helps them systematically control their eyes and ears. Your pre-race routine and what you do behind the blocks can help you stay in control of your focus and keep you calm during those critical minutes just before the start of your event. Your pre-race routine will give you very specific things for you to look at, listen to and do that will help distract you from the normal, anxiety-producing distractions that every swimmer has to face right before the start.

What You Need To Know To Develop An Effective Pre-Race Routine
There are several key points that you need to keep in mind whenever developing and using a pre-race ritual.

• Keep your ritual SIMPLE. The less complicated, the better!
• Make your ritual CONTROLLABLE. You should only have things in your ritual that you know you will always be able to control. For example, if your pre-race ritual depends upon looking at certain other people (coach/parent), they might not always be there for you and therefore are out of your control. However, stretching and adjusting your cap and/or goggles a certain way will always be in your control.
• KEEP your ritual the SAME. You never want to change the steps of your ritual right before the race. Keeping things the same and familiar will help calm you down and keep you loose.
• Build in VISUAL, AUDITORY and/or KINESTHETIC FOCAL POINTS to your ritual. Be sure that your routine has specific things that you look at (the back of the blocks, your goggles, your feet), listen to, (certain music, sound of your breathing or specific pre-race self-talk) and feel/do, (stretching a certain way, feeling your inhalation and exhalation, adjusting your cap and goggles).
• Do what you're doing MENTALLY while you do it PHYSICALLY. Rituals are most effective when you keep your mental focus on the steps of the ritual while you go through them. In other words, while you're stretching behind the blocks, your concentration needs to be on the feel of the stretch. Rituals will not help you calm down if, while you go through them, your mind is elsewhere!
• Understand the SOLE PURPOSE of any good ritual is to give you specific things to look at and listen to, which will distract you from the distractions. You don't do your pre-race ritual just for good luck. This is NOT about superstition. You go through this pre-race routine to calm yourself down, and most important, to help you control your eyes and ears. This means that if, for whatever reason, you have to leave a step out of the ritual, and you can't do what you always do, you understand that you can still perform your best in this upcoming race. The key is that you use whatever steps you do go through to keep yourself focused, loose and calm!

As a sports psychology consultant, Dr. Alan Goldberg works with swimmers at every level. A presenter at the Olympic Training Center, swim coaches clinics and clubs around the country, Dr. G specializes in helping swimmers struggling with performance problems, get unstuck and swim fast when it counts the most. He works over Skype, providing one-on-one consultation with swimmers and other athletes around the world. Dr. G has written over 35 mental toughness training programs and books. In addition, he is a regular contributor to Splash Magazine.
For more FREE mental toughness tips and swim articles, go to Dr. Goldberg's website, www.competitivedge.com and click on “choose your sport” and then “swimming.” You can also visit him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and sign up for his free, monthly mental toughness newsletter.

Want to get a head start on your mental toughness training? Dr. Goldberg's BRAND NEW 7 CD Swim Program with track-by-track Training Guide now available! All products in his store at a 10% discount for USASwimming.org. readers. Coupon Code at check-out: USASwimming. FREE SHIPPING NOW AVAILABLE.
Questions? I hope you'll feel free to contact Dr. Goldberg at Goldberg@competitivedge.com or call directly (413) 549-1085.

The Three-Word Study Tip

By Daniel Coyle

It’s official: summer has ended. Farewell, beach chair. Hello, beeping alarm clock.

It’s also Study Tip Season — that time of year when kids and parents start thinking about how to improve their lives by studying more effectively and efficiently.

With that in mind, I thought I’d try to distill the best advice into a few simple words. Three, to be precise.

The first word is reach. The most effective studying happens when you’re slightly out of your comfort zone, when you go the edge of your ability and make an intense, targeted effort beyond it. This is how our brains make new connections — not by leaning back and letting information wash over them, but by leaning forward, making mistakes, and fixing those mistakes.

(Parent tip: when your kid is struggling on the edge of their ability, resist the urge to heroically swoop in and rescue them. Instead, let them know that those are the moments when progress happens.)

So if you have to learn material in a textbook, don’t just read it over and over. Instead, read it once, close the book, and then summarize the main points on a separate sheet of paper.

If you’re a fan of highlighting (which research has shown is not that effective), you might want to follow it up by organizing all your highlighted material into an outline.

The best way to reach? Make a habit of testing yourself. Testing yourself works best of all, because it’s a double-reach: first you have to figure out the important questions to ask (one reach), then you have to answer (another).

The second word is loop. Embrace the idea of learning stuff by repeating it in short sessions over a number of days. In other words, don’t study in a straight line, but in a series of short loops, returning to the material over and over. This technique, called spaced repetition, works because each repetition embeds the information more strongly in our brains.

So instead of studying just today’s work, go over work from the previous few days as well. Instead of trying to learn all the Spanish vocabulary words the night before the quiz, learn a dozen each night, and keep going over them. And, of course, avoid cramming, which feels really satisfying, but doesn’t work that well.

The third word is mix. Our natural instinct is to attack homework like a dutiful worker on an assembly line, focusing on a single area for large chunks of time. But what works better is to mix it up — to interleave different types of problems and allow our brains to navigate the conceptual landscape, to make connections that might have otherwise been missed.

Instead of focusing on one type of algebra problem, switch it up by doing several different types of problems, so your brain has to sort through the different possibilities. Instead of studying one narrow aspect of science (say, cell division), try to link it with other, related areas. Study like a great athlete works on their game — working on a bit of A, a bit of B, a bit of C, and combining them.

So that’s it: reach, loop, and mix. Your brain will thank you. For more study tips, here’s  a useful compilation from one of my favorite writers, Annie Murphy Paul : as well as another  from The Washington Post.

Though now I have a confession to make.

There’s one more word, which might contain the most effective study tip of all.

Clue: It has five letters, and begins with S. Any guesses?

Posted from Daniel Coyle’s blog The Talent Code

The Swimming Sisyphus

Dean Ottati | September 08th, 2013 | Categories: Featured, Lifestyle, News

Picture: Sysiphus pushed a boulder up a hill. Forever. (Painting done by the artist Titian, compleded in 1549)

My friend Jason and I are standing on deck in Pleasant Hill, California, working the Summer’s End meet.  Both of our sons are a thousand miles away, in Federal Way Washington, swimming in another meet.  Jason looks up from his smartphone, just as I do mine.  Now we both know. “Swimming is a mean sport,” is all he says.  Then silence…

I know exactly what he means.  These kids, our kids, work so hard for so little.  A saving of a few ticks of the clock here and there and hardly anything else.  There is no money in it. Their classmates certainly don’t understand it.  Worse, the kids only get a few chances each year to perform at their very best.  Hundreds of training hours distilled into races that last maybe minutes.

Meet Mobile has just reported the time of the last 400 free  that Jason’s son, Jake, will swim this summer.  The news is bittersweet.  It’s close to the best time he swam a week earlier, and he placed well, but it’s still just short of a Junior National cut.  I received the same news about my son, Zach, in the 200 back about 20 minutes earlier. 

For Zach, the splits indicate a courageous effort.  Holding pace through 150 meters, and then a painful die-off.  It’s a near best time, a bonus time, but it’s not a Junior National cut time.  And now, both Jake and Zach are out of chances.  Having lived though nearly the same scenario at their targeted taper meet in Clovis just a week earlier, I already know how deep the emotions run.  Only this time there isn’t another meet “next week” to forestall some of the disappointment.  This time there’s a break for a few weeks and then the Fall short course season, climbing the mountain again, getting back into shape…And while life shouldn’t be this way, it will be hard for Jake and Zach to watch some of their teammates, the guys they train next to and push every day, preparing to leave for Juniors when they won’t be getting on that airplane…

Just to clear up any possible misconception, I’m proud of Zach.  I’m proud of how hard he works, the effort and caring he puts into his swimming.  And, I’m pleased with his improvement.  I think he’s had a great season.  I also know Jason feels the same way about Jake.  But still, I’m sad…but not about Zach’s swimming.  I’m sad simply because I’m a dad who knows his boy is sad, and there’s not a lot I can say or do.  And worse, he’s far away, and I can’t even give him a hug…

I look up just as a high school age swimmer passes by.  His shirt reads “Attitude, Action, Achievement.”  I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something about this shirt that ties into this precise moment.   I just don’t know what it is, and it nags at me for the rest of the afternoon…

A couple months ago in Swim Swam, I described a game I invented while spending time at swim meets.  I call it the T-Shirt game.  It’s a game that combines both my love of swimming and my love of philosophy, and which forces me to slow down and reflect. The aim is simple: it’s to pick out a T-Shirt that someone in the mass of humanity is wearing, read it, and contemplate its deeper meaning.  My current working theory is that taking a little time out of our busy and hectic lives to ponder the nature of wisdom nudges us toward the thing itself.  (READ THIS PIECE HERE).

I could use a little wisdom right now.

When I get home, I’m still wondering about the connection between missed Jr. cuts and the T-Shirt: “Attitude, Action, Achievement.”  I remember reading about this saying in the Michael Phelps book: No Limits.  It was a favorite slogan of Michael’s coach, Bob Bowman.  I decided to look up the passage again.  Michael writes:

“’Attitude, Action, Achievement.’  That was the order in which you could expect things to happen.  You could see every day’s practice as an ordeal.  Or you could see it as an adventure.

To that end, Bob would always tell me when I was younger:  We become what we think about the most.

Bob also used to give a talk that went something like this: Are you going to wait until after you win your gold medal to have a good attitude?  No.  You’re going to do it beforehand.  You have to have the right attitude, and go from there.  You’re going to be an Olympic champion in attitude long before there’s a gold medal around your neck.”

Swimming achievement, Bob Bowman tells his swimmers, begins with attitude.  Sportsmanship, accountability, responsibility are all important, but the prime mover in all of it is attitude.  Attitude is where the process toward excellence begins.  Attitude is the energy that allows a swimmer to meet the challenge of the daily grind of thousands of yards staring at a black line, by taking pride in perfecting ones stroke, hitting split times, pushing one more repeat, and seeing ultimately how all these little daily actions add up to ultimate achievement…

Bowman, of course, is probably right.  But what happens when someone does have a good attitude which feeds into right action, and still the desired achievement falls short?  What then?  Does not realizing ones goals circle back and erode ones attitude? 

And then I remember.  There’s a story all about attitude that I want to tell my son.  It’s an essay by the French philosopher Albert Camus called the Myth of Sisyphus.

Sisyphus, as many of us probably recall, is the man condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain in hell for all eternity.  His is the most ridiculous of fates.  But Camus sees Sisyphus as one of the first rebels, what he called ‘the absurd hero,’ a man who learned to overcome his fate.  Camus writes that Sisyphus was paying the price for a life of passion, and he had learned to accept his ordeal, he had learned to love the struggle.

The great myths are a metaphor for the dramas of our inward life, and the story of Sisyphus is a metaphor for struggle itself. On the outside, it’s a tale of betrayal and retribution, but on the inside, it tells us something about our attitude toward struggle that we can’t seem to learn any other way.

In briefest summary, Sisyphus was the ruler of Corinth and he needed a source of fresh water for his city.  One afternoon, he chanced upon Zeus en flagrante delicto with the lovely maiden Aegina, the daughter of the river God Asopus.  Later Asopus, inconsolable over the disappearance of his daughter, approached Sisyphus for help.   Sisyphus was torn between his loyalty to the Gods and the truth he witnessed, but the cisterns of Corinth were dry.  So Sisyphus risked everything by trading his divine secret for a perennial spring, chancing retribution for an act of compassion for his own citizens.   

Naturally Asopus is enraged.  Zeus’s wife Hera finds out and is on the warpath.  And Zeus is furious with Sisyphus for betraying his pawky little secret, so he sent his brother Hades to personally escort Sisyphus to the underworld and administer punishment. 

A lot more happens.  Sisyphus outsmarts the Gods many times (in Greek Sisyphus translates as  “the crafty one”), he even escapes from Hell, and the embarrassment for Zeus escalates.  It’s all very exciting and scandalous, but in the end Sisyphus is condemned to suffer the seemingly most futile and hopeless of labors.  In a shadow world of skyless space and depthless time, in a place echoing with the cries of the damned, the greasy smell of brimstone wafting through the air, Sisyphus was given the sentence of shouldering a stone for all eternity, up a forlorn mountain slope in Tartarus.

In the Odyssey, the blind poet Homer describes the scene:

“With both arms embracing the monstrous stone, struggling with hands and feet alike, he would try to push the stone upward to the crest of the hill, but when it was on the point of going over the top, the force of gravity turned it backward, and the pitiless stone rolled back down to the level.  He then tried once more to push it up, straining hard, and sweat ran all down his body, and over his head a cloud of dust rose.”

Imagine, condemned for all of eternity to shoulder the boulder up the mountain of hell, and all the while Hades would be watching for the look of despair that would mark the defeat of another mere mortal.  But Sisyphus resolved never to allow the gods to see him defeated by despair.  He silently vowed that because his fate was in his hands he could be superior  to it.

On the surface, the tale of Sisyphus is the usual dish of deceit and retribution, but I’m convinced that it is far more, a fable about the acceptance of one’s burden, as fresh today as it was three hundred centuries ago.  Camus writes about the moment that Sisyphus watches the boulder roll to the bottom of the hill and turns to slowly walk back down:

“That hour is like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness.  At each of these moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate.  He is stronger than his rock.”

Camus then observes that “the price exacted from him for the betrayal of the gods was fair.”  Which, if Zach is anything like me, he will find hard to accept.  But, if indeed Zach is like me, he might also be able to accept what Camus is implying  –That there is always a price to pay for our passionate convictions, whether we are pursuing love, art, political change, or athletic excellence.  In the end, what matters is our attitude toward our burden. 

Camus concludes his essay with the famous and astonishing conclusion: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

In the immediate throes of his current personal disappointment, I imagine Zach’s protests now.  “Happy,” he’ll say.  “Ha! How in the world could Sisyphus possibly be happy?  He can’t even look to death for relief.”  And then at this point, I further imagine that skeptical look Zach shoots at me sometimes.  Then he’d probably add something like “Dad, swimming is really hard, it hurts and it’s a lot of work.  If you can’t reach your goals, what’s the point of all the effort and pain?  Why shouldn’t I just go spend more time with my other friends instead? Doesn’t the story of Sisyphus just ennobling suffering?”

“The story of Sisyphus,” I’ll tell him, “doesn’t ennoble suffering.  It ennobles struggle.  There’s a crucial difference.  Sisyphus got into this predicament because he was willing to risk everything for his people so they could have fresh water.  The same is true for a swimmer who dives in even when he doesn’t feel like it.  A swimmer does this because he wants to live a life of passion, of commitment, of excellence, and of meaning.  Struggle is inevitable in life, and those who learn to perceive it as an obstacle rather than a burden make life a lot easier for themselves.   The secret of a life of creativity, passion, and excellence consists in taking the next step, doing the next thing you have to do, but doing it with all your heart and soul and finding some joy in doing it…”

The great stories work on multiple levels, and we see new things in them every time we revisit them at different stages of our lives.    Reading Sisyphus again for the first time as a parent, I can see the story is a great antidote to the reigning myth in our culture that there is only one ascent up the mountain – to marriage, money, or success.  That’s the kind of fairy-tale thinking that makes it difficult to accept the inevitable descents back down the mountain.  Isn’t learning to overcome setbacks one of the life lessons of sport I hoped Zach would learn when we first signed him up for swimming?  Don’t we all want to raise kids with the grit, and the determination, and the character to pick themselves up and start the climb again?  And truth be told, I’ve already seen mine do this many times.  Once he gets past the initial disappointment, he’s going to be okay.

During the offseason, instead of having him read Camus, I think I’ll encourage Zach to write down all the reasons he can think of as to why he loves his sport.  Then he can refer to it in the middle of next season when he’s got a morning practice he’d rather skip.  Maybe it will help him to embrace that boulder a little more fondly…Attitude, Action, Achievement.

POST SCRIPT:  AS I WAS EDITING THIS PIECE, NEWS CAME ACROSS THE WIRES THAT ON HER 5^TH ATTEMPT, 64-YEAR-OLD DIANNA NYAD COMPLETED THE 110 MILE SWIM FROM CUBA TO FLORIDA.  TALK ABOUT SHOULDERING THE BOULDER.  WHEN SHE EMERGED FROM THE WATER, NYAD WAS QUOTED AS SAYING: “I HAVE THREE MESSAGES: ONE IS WE SHOULD NEVER GIVE UP; TWO IS YOU ARE NEVER TO OLD TO CHASE YOUR DREAMS; AND THREE IS IT LOOKS LIKE A SOLITARY SPORT BUT IT TAKES A TEAM.”  GOOD ON YOU DIANNA.  SISYPHUS WOULD BE PROUD.  YOU ROCK! AND YES, PUN INTENDED.

9 GOALS FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR

9/4/2013

BY MIKE GUSTAFSON//CORRESPONDENT

Beginning a new school year can sometimes feel like a huge case of the Mondays. Yesterday, thousands of kids went back to school, and as such, I think I heard 100,000 kids simultaneously release a heavy, despondent sigh trudging to class. Morning practices, exams, math…

But going back to school doesn’t have to be that bad. It’s a new year and a new beginning, which means new goals.

The start of the school year is like New Years Day: It’s an opportunity to hit the reset button and create the good habits for the rest of the year. Here are 9 goals you can work on this school year -- outside-of-the-pool types of things that don’t necessarily have to do with specific times or places.

1. Compliment Yourself.
No Olympic gold medalist in history ever thought, “You’re not good enough” seconds before diving into the final race. Neither should you. Get into the habit of complimenting yourself, even if it seems silly at first.

2. Be The First Person In The Water.
I have a theory that the first person in the water usually has the best practice, and the last person in the water (sometimes) has the worst. Staring at the cold pool does nothing for you except make you agonize about how cold the pool is. Don’t agonize: be the first in the water! It’s such a simple thing that, somehow, always makes me enjoy practice more.

3. Swim An Off-Event.
Cesar Cielo said during the World Championships that he had never swum the1500m freestyle. Don’t be like Cesar. If you never swim every event, how will you know what you are good at? I used to hate the 400 IM, until I swam it in a meet. Four years later, I was a 400 IMer. Don’t be scared of the 500 or the 1650. Swim everything once. Who knows? You might even love it.

4. Give Up One “Time Waster”.
You’ll never finish high school or college and say, “I wish I had spent more time playing Words With Friends.”

5. Cheer Your Teammates.
Cheering is like karma: When you cheer for teammates, they’ll cheer for you. Don’t be the person or team that sits on chairs and sluggishly whispers, “Go Brian…” Cheer loud, cheer proud, and cheer for everyone.

6. Understand Your Practices.
Don’t be the swimmer who floats through practice mindlessly and never pays attention to the sets. Ask your coach questions. “Why are we doing this distance free set?” Don’t ask sarcastically, but ask sincerely. You’ll understand your workouts more. And when you understand the reasoning behind 10x400 IMs, you’ll be more inclined to practice better.

7. Improve One Thing A Day.
You can’t win an Olympic medal with one practice. Success requires a multitude of practices, and a million tiny, little baby steps. Pick one thing to improve with every practice – a turn, a technique improvement – and focus on that. This works especially well when you’re having a sluggish practice or when you’re having a case of the Mondays.

8. Make A Calendar Of Goals.
Print off a calendar and write goals on it. They don’t necessarily have to be times. Write on Friday that you’ll nail that back-to-breast turn, or that you’ll do 15 minutes extra of dryland. Then, as you accomplish the goals, mark a big red “X” across the day. You’ll get lots of satisfaction looking back at your month and seeing a streak of red Xs.

9. Say Something Nice About Someone Else Every Day.
Happiness is a virus: It spreads. Many people get into the habit of talking bad about other people. This is mostly laziness. Take the time to find the goodness in people, and compliment someone. Be sincere. When you get in this habit, you’ll feel better about yourself, and other people will be happier around you, too.

Reposted from USASwimming.org

Having Fun With Planning Your Swimming Goals

By Olivier Poirier-Leroy

Oh, hello...

If you are like me, you are amazing at planning. In fact, if unchecked, I can easily lose half of my day planning stuff I want to do tomorrow, next week, or next year. Planning allows us to dream freely, to look ahead at what life will be like when things are "just perfect."

And truthfully, planning is fun.

Action, on the other hand...

A little bit of planning is good, and quite necessary. But when you resort to planning (like I caught myself doing this afternoon - again) instead of action, you begin to sacrifice results.

The Symptoms of Planning Too Much

Tell me if this sounds feel familiar...

There is something you want to do, nay, have to do to achieve your swimming goals, but the whole process of starting has got you so overwhelmed, so intimidated, that you continually put off truly committing to it until either:

1. It's too late and you don't do it all or
2. You rush to get it done at the last minute, doing a half-ass job

If you've been a student at any point in your life you know this experience well. I can still feel that knot in my stomach, sitting at my laptop in the library staring at a blank monitor, the cursor blinking judgingly at me in the empty word processing document, putting up a continuous train of excuses...

So why do we do this to ourselves?

The illusion of perfect action is one of the biggest obstacles to your success in the pool.

That what you have to do has to be done flawlessly.

That you are not allowed to fail on the first go.

That it has to be done right... Or not at all.

We want to start doing something, but we feel like our initial efforts won't be good enough, so we look around for more information, take a break, or generally postpone what we wanna do for as long as humanely possible.

"Oh, I'll start really training when I feel better."

"I'll start doing extra stretching after practice tomorrow."

"I'll start breathing bi-laterally once I get that super rad new bathing suit."

And so on.

Of course you know nothing is really perfect, so how can we continually chase "perfect" conditions? 

The only perfect condition you need is this moment right now.

Not next month.

Not when you "feel like it."

And definitely not tomorrow.

It's now.

Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer based out of Victoria, BC. In feeding his passion for swimming, he has developed YourSwimBook, a powerful log book and goal setting guide made specifically for swimmers. Sign up for the YourSwimBook newsletter (free) and get weekly motivational tips by clicking here.

Off-Season Swimming Training

By G. John Mullen of SwimmingScience.net and CenterofOptimalRestoration.com, Creator of Swimmer's Shoulder System, Swimming World correspondent

SANTA CLARA, California, August 14. OFF-SEASON swimming training is often not discussed in the swimming community. Unfortunately, this is a valuable period where various improvements are possible. Moreover, some people need something to fill the extra 2 - 6 hour void left by not swimming.

Too often overworked swimmers will lounge around, play World of War Craft and eat McGriddles until the break is over, feeling like a blob the next time they hit the pool. I remember during my off-season days, I'd run around the house with the soccer ball as instructed by my parents and older sibling. This chaotic routine distracted me from torturing my dog and family.

Whether you've chowing on McGriddles, playing video games, or injuring family members, the off-season is an opportunity for improvement; luckily there are many avenues for improvement. For a successful off-season, consider theses areas for improvement and you'll find the transition to the pool much easier:

1. Fix your Body: Grueling swim seasons leave many swimmers physically, emotionally, and psychologically scarred. The off-season is the perfect opportunity to improve any of these realms.

Solution: If you have a bum shoulder, find help some help (Swimmer's Shoulder System), don't sit around hoping the problem will solve itself. Ignoring an injury does not fix your body, get some help and prepare your body for the next season!

2. Get your Mind Right: If you are psychologically exhausted, take a break from the sport, people, and community involved in swimming. The mind plays a large role in swimming success, so be mentally prepared for the upcoming season is a prerequisite for a successful season.

Solution: If you are getting scared at the blocks, consider some Mental Toughness Training or seeing a sports psychologist.

3. Maintain Feel: I know what you're thinking, getting back to the pool is the last thing you want to think about. In swimming, the principle of specificity applies making all other forms of training inferior to swimming. This is due to the high neural involvement in the sport as proper training develops motor program during the season. Unfortunately, all this hard work vanishes quickly without a little maintenance work in the pool. This is why everyone feels drastically different in the water after a few days from this chlorination station. Therefore, if you're not busy getting mentally or physically healthy, do some maintenance work in the pool or ocean. Performing maintenance work is important, even if it doesn't feel like you're doing much. Always remember, the best type of training for swimming success is swimming! Don't lose all the hard work you put in during summer.

Solution: Swim for fifteen minutes three times a week for the ideal off-season swimming training.

4. Improve Weak Links: Every swimmer has weak links. Too often swimmers do not have the prerequisite tools of out of the water to properly manipulate their stroke in the water. This makes it essential to find these weak links and set a plan for improvement. Too often swimmers and coaches leave swimming biomechanical errors to incompetence or lack of feel, but often times the swimmer doesn't have the length, strength, or timing of the muscle to do the desired task.

Solution: Find a rehabilitative specialist to improve these weak links. Make sure not to neglect the weak link, as this is likely your breaking point during races!

5. Improve Body Composition: Drag is the biggest inhibitor of swimming speed. The larger the person, the more drag potential you'll have in the water. For this reason elite swimmers are typically lean creatures. The off-season is a great time to start any new food habits to improve your body composition for swimming success. Get your food habits on track during the off-season, the easiest time to make these adjustments, not weeks into treacherous training. This does not suggest under eating as many college programs have reported under nutrition in female swimmers, instead having a balanced diet to fuel your body for swimming is essential for success.

Solution: Find an expert in nutrition and adjust dietary habits to set up a healthy plan for body composition improvements and a successful off-season swimming training period.

6. Improve Athleticism: Biomechanics are tough in swimming. This is why many coaches make a nice side business providing excessive swim lessons. However, barking orders on the pool deck at swimmers who don't know how to coordinate their body is like shoving the block through the circle peg! Therefore, improving athleticism, motor control, and coordination is essential on land to help the swimmer learn how to move their body in the water. If a swimmer knows how to control their body on land, it is likely they can manipulate their strokes in the water, correcting any stroke deviations in the pool and increasing swimming success.

Solution: Don't waste your money on lessons when you don't have the tools for improvement in the water, learn how to use your body out of the water by improving athleticism and make quicker stroke corrections in the water. Find a strength and conditioning specialist to formulate a well-balanced dry-land program, focusing on learning a variety of movements and control through these various motions.

7. Increase Relative Strength: Contrary to other sports, the strongest athlete (absolute strength) doesn't win. However, the strongest athlete for their body size (relative strength) is helpful for success. Being strong on land has not been correlated with swimming success, but being able to maximize force production while minimizing drag is essential for swimming success. For example, throw a World's Strongest Men athlete in the pool and it is likely their sink like a rock. Therefore, improving one's relative strength is important for swimming success.

Solution: Find a strength and conditioning specialist who understands the difference between absolute and relative strength and work on improving strength per size.

Summary
Once again, being fresh for the upcoming season is the primary goal of any off-season. However, if you're mentally and physically ready for the next season, try tips 2-7 for a successful off-season.

G. John Mullen is the owner of of the Center of Optimal Restoration and creator of Swimming Science. He received his doctorate in Physical Therapy at the University of Southern California. G. John has been featured in Swimming World Magazine, Swimmer Magazine, and the International Society of Swim Coaches Journal.

That's One

by Glenn Mills

Always at the end of a season, you'll have athletes who are completely satisfied with what they've done, and others who wish things had gone a little differently.

That's the great thing about this sport. There's not as much to it as you'd think.  After 10 years of posting drills, and doing our part to create material that can be used to help swimmers visualize what they can, and sometimes should, be doing, the sport itself remains pretty easy.  I had a great opportunity to hang out with Gregg Troy last week while at the Indy Grand Prix swim meet.  As we talked about philosophy of training, technique, and communications with athletes, we both agreed... sometimes it's an over-thought process.

Work, and you win.  Don't work, don't worry... you won't win.  Work, and you'll succeed.  Don't work, don't worry... you won't succeed.  While coaches can make changes to technique, it's much more difficult to make changes to cultures.  If people are used to, and allowed to, show up late or pull on lane lines or do one-handed turns... then it's never a surprise when little things go wrong during competition.

There's one athlete in particular that I'm thinking about right now.  The swimmer is talented, hard working, and wants to be faster... but there are chinks in the armor.  There is a habit of being late, not doing the entire warm-up, slacking off a bit in kick sets, and focusing only on sets that excite the swimmer... but not enough on the things that don't.

While this particular swimmer had a few life-time best times at the meet, the swimmer left the meet fully unsatisfied with the experience.  Coaches and mentors can use these situations as either a time to yell... or an opportunity to teach.  If the swimmer really wants to be better, then it's a great time to teach.  I was fortunate that while at the meet, I saw the swimmer's unhappiness, and happened to have a good friend walking by.  I asked this friend if he'd take a minute to talk to the swimmer.  Through the course of the conversation, the question was asked... what would you change?  The first response was, "I'd show up on time."  My friend was amazed.  "You don't show up on time?"  I won't go into detail about the talk, it's between these two, but my friend was Nelson Diebel... Olympic Champion in the 100 Breaststroke.

Whatever the course of the conversation, when I went to the pool this morning (typically, my wife and I walk in alone and wait for the swimmers), this particular swimmer was on deck, stretching, getting ready.  Neither of us said anything.

The swimmer did a great job during practice and, I felt, continued to seek approval... looking to see if we noticed. 

After practice we were talking, and I was asked... "did I do good?"  I said that it was all I could do to stop myself from coming over and high-fiving this swimmer when I got there... but that I had to maintain composure.  You see, it's not a question of whether the swimmer can be reformed on a single day.  The ultimate question is whether the swimmer can do this for the next 100 practices.  My response was, "That's one." 

There's an old story about John Naber's preparation/quest to set a world record in the 100 Backstroke. To fuel his training, John gave himself credit for 1/100th of a second toward that WR time every time he did something great at practice.    Over the course of the final year leading up to the Olympics, John had accumulated just enough 100ths of a second to break the World Record... which he did in Montreal.

Greatness, or reaching your goal, never comes from one practice.  It comes from the result of hundreds of practices.  Sometimes thousands.

With that said, every journey starts with one small step, and you have to take it to get there.  So even though it was "just one"... it was the most important one.  Don't be afraid to take it... just take it.

I encouraged the swimmer to start a visual calendar, or journal, where they could mark each day that they did something great... in which NOTHING is allowed be great unless the first step is taken... showing up on time.

I'll end this with my standard saying, "You know how to eat an elephant don't you?  One bite at a time."

Taken from GoSwim

HANDLING LAST-MINUTE NEGATIVE THINKING AND SELF-DOUBTS

7/9/2013

BY ALAN GOLDBERG, PHD//COMPETITIVEDGE.COM

The problem...
You're behind the blocks feeling pretty good about your BIG meet. Your best race starts in just a few minutes and everything has gone OK for you leading up to this meet. Your practices have been good and your taper felt right. But when you get behind the blocks, the “noise upstairs” starts. “Oh my gosh! What if I false start?” “This is my last chance to qualify, and if I don't, my entire season has been a waste!” “What if I die on the last 75 again?” “I don't think I got enough sleep last night!” “Maybe I ate too much… or not enough…” As you listen to this stream of negativity, it seems to build in intensity. Soon, your confidence and all those good feelings rapidly do a disappearing act! You try to “be positive,” but it's as if that negative part of you isn't listening...

Did you know that you can still swim your best under pressure even if you are flooded with last minute negative thoughts and self-doubts?
That's right! You can still have the race of your life even if all of those old familiar negatives are loudly playing in the back of your mind. The trick here is learning how to effectively manage them, and the very first step in doing this is to understand some of the myths that swimmers believe about these last minute negatives and doubts.

Key myths about last-minute negative thinking and your racing:

• You have to “be positive” in order to swim fast
• Negative thinking always lead to poor swims
• You can control your negative thinking so that you stay positive
• When last minute negatives pop up, you must immediately push them away
• Negative thinking and doubts are very bad and mean you're not ready

What's really true here?
First off, you need to understand that all of this last-minute negative stuff is absolutely and totally NORMAL! Even the very best swimmers in the world entertain last-minute negative thoughts because it's simply part of being human. Just because you may be flooded with last minutes doubts, doesn't mean that you're not ready or you'll swim poorly. These unexpected negatives are simply a reflection of your nervous system amping up and getting you ready for the upcoming race.

The problem here is not the negative thinking or doubts by themselves. The REAL problem is how YOU respond to them!

That which you resist, persists!
When you get freaked out behind the blocks because your mind has suddenly turned negative, and then you try to push the negatives away with things like, “I have to stay positive!” and “Don't think that,” what ends up happening is that your negative thoughts and doubts get even stronger and louder. Why is this? Because you can't really control your thinking! Don't worry! NO ONE CAN! And the good news here is that you don't need to! What you need to do is train yourself to have a calmer, more accepting stance whenever the negatives start clamoring for your attention.

How do you calmly handle the negatives?

• Avoid fighting with your negatives and trying to turn them into positives
• Remind yourself that last minute negative thoughts and doubts ARE NORMAL
• Reassure yourself that you can still swim YOUR VERY BEST with them
• Understand that your response to the negatives is what's important here
• Immediately refocus your concentration on your pre-race ritual behind the blocks

Focus on DOING and FEEL, not on THINKING
Swimming fast when it counts the most is all about keeping your concentration on what you're DOING both before and during the race. This means that both your pre-race and during-race focus should be on FEEL! So rather than engaging the negative thoughts with more thinking by trying to “be positive” or pushing them away when you're behind the blocks, switch your focus to the feel of your stretching, taking slow, relaxed breaths or whatever else you typically do in your pre-race ritual. If the negatives pop up while you're racing, let them be and immediately refocus your concentration on staying long and smooth, on how much water you're pulling, your breathing pattern or what you need to be doing in order to swim fast.

Keep in mind that I have worked with Olympic medalists who have taught me this very important lesson. Last minutes doubts and negativity DO NOT predict the kind of race you're about to have unless you engage them by fighting with or trying to change them. When your thoughts turn negative, relax, let them be and refocus your concentration on the task at hand.

As a sports psychology consultant, Dr. Alan Goldberg works with swimmers at every level. A presenter at the Olympic Training Center, swim coaches clinics and clubs around the country, Dr. G specializes in helping swimmers struggling with performance problems, get unstuck and swim fast when it counts the most. He works over Skype, providing one-on-one consultation with swimmers and other athletes around the world. Dr. G has written over 35 mental toughness training programs and books. In addition, he is a regular contributor to Splash Magazine.
For more FREE mental toughness tips and swim articles, go to Dr. Goldberg's website, www.competitivedge.com and click on “choose your sport” and then “swimming.” You can also visit him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and sign up for his free, monthly mental toughness newsletter.
Want to get a head start on your mental toughness training? Dr. Goldberg's BRAND NEW 7 CD Swim Program with track-by-track Training Guide now available! All products in his store at a 10% discount for USASwimming.org. readers. Coupon Code at check-out: USASwimming. FREE SHIPPING NOW AVAILABLE.
Questions? I hope you'll feel free to contact Dr. Goldberg at Goldberg@competitivedge.com or call directly (413) 549-1085.

Taken from usaswimming.org

ABCS OF MENTAL TRAINING: X IS FOR “X-GAMES MENTALITY”

6/26/2013

BY AIMEE C. KIMBALL, PHD, CC-AASP

I was brainstorming with colleague Lenny Wiersma about what my “X’ article was going to be. I was leaning towards “x-pectations” but being a Californian he suggested “X-games” and noted that swimmers could learn a lot from the free-wheeling, chillaxing mentality of X-gamers. I agreed, so this article will address how swimmers can benefit from a no fear, enjoy the ride, kick-butt-and-take-names mentality.

No Fear
Many X-games events are about speed, height, and testing gravity. What you need to succeed in these events are guts; fear will certainly be your downfall (literally and figuratively). The athletes who participate in these games love the adrenaline rush and love to challenge themselves to go bigger and be bolder than everyone else. It’s mentally impressive. So what can athletes who swim in straight lines learn from this? A lot, but what I’d like you to gain is perspective in that the only consistently “scary” fear swimmers often have is losing/not swimming well. X-gamers have those same thoughts of losing but to them it’s simply a concern. They’d laugh if you said “I’m afraid to lose” and tell you that the physics of swimming is a lot more forgiving than the physics of a half-pipe. Next time you catch yourself being afraid to fail ask yourself “is this a fear or is this a concern?”

Accept the Challenge
My outside impression of most X-gamers is that they get genuinely pumped for someone who performs a new trick that they’ve never seen before. Watch a skateboarder throw something “sick” and you’ll see his competitors jump out of their seats in excitement, knowing they just witnessed something cool. I love this about the X-games. Competitors enjoy seeing the bar raised. They see this as a new challenge and then they work hard to top it. They are constantly trying to up their game and go beyond what others thought was possible. In swimming terms, instead of being hard on yourself because someone beat you or broke your record, see this as a new challenge. Embrace this as an opportunity to assess your habits and see what you can do better. Get excited to see a competitor’s hard work pay off, but in your head throw down the gauntlet and say “I’ll beat you next time” or “I’ll break your record soon.”

Have Fun and Get Lost in the Moment
X-gamers compete because they love it. In the 2006 Olympics Lindsey Jacobellis, a snowboardcross rider, had a big lead on her opponent and was about to win her race but decided to do a trick over a jump rather than just hitting the jump cleanly. She fell and it cost her the gold medal. When asked why she did the trick she responded, “I was caught up in the moment…I was having fun and that's what snowboarding is. I was ahead. I wanted to share with the crowd my enthusiasm.” Sure, she had a little too much fun and in hindsight she admits she messed up. However, she knows she was the fastest that day, the outcome just doesn’t show it. What this example demonstrates is that the number one priority of a lot of X-gamers is to enjoy what they are doing. Winning helps make the sport more enjoyable, but ultimately, they just want to compete their best and have fun doing it. This translates to all sports—the more you love it, the harder you’ll work. The harder you work, the better you’ll do. Ultimately, have fun and everything else follows. Even if you don’t win, you’ll likely swim faster if you enjoy the process.

Roll Like I Roll
In the last Winter Olympics they interviewed a snowboarder who was admittedly nervous before he competed. They asked him how he calmed himself down. He said something to the effect of, “I reminded myself I knew what I was doing. I told myself to go put on a show and just roll like I roll.” I loved this phrase because I think it’s something important for all athletes to remember-that you just have to go out and do your thing. Whatever the sport, it’s what you do every day. You know what you’re doing; you know how to swim fast. Simply put, go swim how you swim.
Make it Great!

Dr. Aimee

About Aimee C. Kimball, PhD, CC-AASP
Dr. Kimball is the Director of Mental Training for the UPMC Center for Sports Medicine. She is an Association of Applied Sport Psychology Certified Consultant, and is a member of the American Psychological Association, the United States Olympic Committee’s Sport Psychology Registry, and the USA Swimming Sports Medicine Network. She works with athletes, coaches, and parents to help them achieve success in sport and life.
For more information contact: kimballac@upmc.edu, 412-432-3777,http://tinyurl.com/UPMCmentaltraining

Taken from usaswimming.org

Sharpen Your Axe

Once upon a time there were two men who lived in the same forest and decided to have a contest chopping wood.  The first man was in good physical shape and very muscular.  The second man was in good shape but smaller in stature and wiry.  They would chop wood all day and at the end of the day compare to see who had chopped the most wood.  The first man laughed to himself, there was no way this wiry little man would beat him and so they began the contest.  Every 45 minutes the second smaller man would take a break and seems to just wonder off somewhere.  The first man laughed again to himself and said "Yep there's no way this wiry little man is going to beat me."  This happens several times during the day.  At the end of the day the two men compare their piles of chopped wood and unbelievably enough the wiry little man has chopped twice as much wood as the bigger man.  He says "I don't understand.  First I'm twice your size and twice your strength!  On top of that every 45 minutes you rolled off and took a break or a nap or something.  You must have cheated!"  The smaller man says "I don't cheat.  It was easy to beat you because every 45 minutes when you thought I was taking a break, I was out back sharpening my ax."

There is a famous saying, “time will teach you about the life”, and probably every one of us has heard the above sentence. I think time won’t teach you until we realize, accept, or meet an incident. There is another saying "If you’re not getting better you’re getting worse".  To continue to be successful you need to remember to sharpen our ax by reading books, that are related to your passions, go to seminars or surf the web for blogs/videos and content related to your passion, consult experts, etc...  One of the greatest obstacles to sharpening our axe is our own knowledge and our own ego. “I already know what I know and you can’t tell me anything else!” Make sure to keep an open mind even on things that you think you know well. You should be constantly striving to learn and improve because if you’re not getting better you are getting worse.

Most leaders are too busy doing and trying to achieve, that they never take time to learn and grow. Most of us don’t have the time or patience to update skills, knowledge, and beliefs about what we do, or to take time to think and reflect. Many assume that learning ends at school and so sharpening our axe is not a priority.

So, what exactly is sharpening the axe? Dr. Steven Covey, who popularized the term, believes that it means “increasing your personal production capacity by daily self-care and self-maintenance”.

Most people fail to understand what it means and mistake it for taking a break or vacation. If you’re overworking yourself and your productivity drops, take a break. However, that isn’t sharpening the axe – that’s putting the axe down.

When you put down a dull blade and rest, the blade will still be dull when you pick it up. The woodcutter does need downtime to rest, but it is not “sharpening the axe”. The woodcutter only becomes more productive by sharpening his blade, analyzing new woodcutting techniques, exercising to become stronger, and learning from other woodcutters.

A human’s natural inclination is to be mindless. Mindlessness is our human tendency to operate on auto pilot, whether by stereotyping, performing mechanically or simply not paying attention. We are all victims of being mindless at times. By sharpening our axe, we move from a mindless state to a mindful state, from “blindly going with the flow” to thinking and “breaking boundaries”.

Why then do so many people fail to sharpen their axe? Well, axe sharpening isn’t as fun as whacking away at the trees. And it is painful and tedious work.       

David McKay adds that, “the greatest battles of life are fought out daily in the silent chambers of the soul”. Sharpening the axe is a daily inner internal battle. Research reveals that self-educated presidents like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln sharpened their axe daily by cultivating the discipline of reading.

Of course, too much axe or aimless sharpening can become another form of procrastination. Many like to attend trainings and classes but never end up using the axe. After sharpening the axe, use it or all is in vain.

How are your various blades doing? Your skills, knowledge, mind, physical body, relationships, motivation, commitment to succeed, capacity for growth, emotions – are all of them still sharp? If not, which ones are dull, and what can you do to sharpen them?

Lincoln once said “give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening my axe”. What are you doing to sharpen your axe? Take a step back and start sharpening your axe.

Sharpen your axe: Daily personal growth critical for leadership success

Sharpen your Axe

Sharpen Your Ax