Being on the Team vs. Being a Teammate

Compiled by John Leonard from InSideOut Coaching by Joe Ehrmann

Goals & Ambitions

• Being on the team benefits your personal goals and ambitions.
• Being a teammate benefits the goals and ambitions of your team and your teammates.

Bystander or Teammate

• Being on the team can make you a bystander.
• Teammates intervene in the lives and actions of their teammates.

Efforts

• Being on the team involves personal effort.
• Being a teammate involves the efforts of every player.

Amount you give

• Being on the team means doing what is asked of you.
• Being a teammate is doing whatever is needed for the team to succeed.

Blame vs. Accountability

• Being on the team can involve blaming others and making excuses.
• Being a teammate involves accepting responsibility, accountability, and ownership of the team's problems.

Me vs. We

• Being on the team makes you "me-optic," asking what's in it for me?
• Being a teammate makes you "we-optic," asking what's in it for us?

Interest vs. Mission

• Sometimes players on the team are drawn together by common interests;
• Teammates are drawn together by a common mission.

Like vs. Respect

• Sometimes players on a team like one another;
• Teammates respect one another.

Bonding

• Sometimes players on a team bond together because of a shared background or compatible personalities;
• Teammates bond together because they recognize every player is needed to accomplish the goal of the team.

Energy

• Sometimes players on a team are energized by emotions;
• Teammates energize one another out of commitment.

ABCS OF MENTAL TRAINING: W IS FOR WINNING

BY AIMEE C. KIMBALL, PHD, CC-AASP

People often belong to two camps—1) Winning is the source of all things good or 2) Winning is the source of all things evil. Frankly, when it comes to sport, either can be true but the reality is winning is as important as you make it—which is neither good nor bad. This article discusses the concept of winning, from the good, to the bad, to the ugly.

Love to Win
Personally, I love to win, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. One problem I see with the current generation of athletes is they are often too reserved. They won’t admit how much they want to win and how confident they are in their ability to win. I love confident swimmers who come into my office with some well-deserved swagger and talk about winning like it’s a given rather than something in question. Coaches sometimes get criticized for telling swimmers to go out and win it or for pushing them to out-swim everyone else. Somewhere along the lines people decided focusing on winning was a bad thing. I disagree. Focusing on winning is perfectly fine. The problem really occurs when the ONLY focus is on winning. Overall, the athlete who enjoys winning and sets it as one of his/her goals is doing something all athletes should—competing to be the best, which gives them a much better chance of achieving their best.

It’s Not All About Winning
Success isn’t defined by how often you win. Winning is simply one way to assess your abilities. To me, athletes are successful if they do everything they can (physically, mentally, nutritionally, etc…) in pursuit of being their best.

No matter how much you want to win, train to win, and deserve to win, it doesn’t always happen. There will be times when someone is better. There will be times when you’re not at your best. That doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It just means you didn’t win that race. No biggie, you will live to swim another day. Ultimately, you don’t control whether you win or lose. All you control is doing everything you can to put yourself in the best position to swim well.

Remember, winning is a by-product of your hard work. Winning is a reward rather than necessity.

Winning Can Get Ugly
If you, your coaches, or you parents make swimming all about winning, you are in for a lot of headaches. When sport becomes all about winning, enjoyment tends to go out the window. You spend too much time in the pool not to enjoy it. Athletes whose sole focus is on winning: a) are often dissatisfied (because they don’t always win), b) have trouble transitioning to higher levels of competition (especially if they won most of the time at lower levels), c) burnout, d) let one bad race impact their next event, and e) have significantly higher anxiety before races.

Coaches who focus only on winning place a lot of stress on their swimmers. They often make the mistake of pitting teammates against each other, which increases anxiety and decreases confidence, enjoyment and camaraderie. Parents who focus too much on winning make their children feel less important if they lose. These swimmers can feel like their parents’ love is conditional on the outcome of their meet. Swimmers who have parents who emphasize winning above all tend to be more anxious because they focus on not disappointing their parents or what their parents will say if they lose. When you have a combination of athletes-coaches-parents who all emphasize winning, unhealthy behaviors can result (i.e., eating disorders, overtraining, psychological and emotional issues).

Strive to Win
Most people have heard of the concept of “Fear of Failure” but what few people realize is that some athletes do have a “Fear of Success.” While less common, in theory it does exist since some swimmers think about the pressure that results if they constantly win. They think about the expectations others will have for them and wonder how they will be able to live up to those expectations. They recognize how much harder they will have to work to continue to be successful and to drop even more time. My question always is, “why fear success and what comes with it?” Instead of worrying about what comes next, enjoy the fruits of your labor. You’ve won because you’ve earned it. No one handed a victory to you. You logged the miles and put in the time and energy. You developed your talent.

All sport, regardless of whether it’s in a pool, on a track, field, or court is about seeing what your potential is. There will be a day when your competitive opportunities end. Until that time, strive to win. Better yet, strive to be your best—in and out of the pool—and if that results in winning, then congratulations. If it results in improved times, then congratulations. If striving to be your best results in fitness, enjoyment and participation in what can be a lifelong sport, then that is the best reward of all and certainly makes you an all-around winner.

Make it Great!
Dr. Aimee

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, the USA Swimming Sports Medicine Network, and the NCAA Speakers Bureau. 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

Reposted from USASwimming.org

Problem-Solving Swimming

Posted by Glenn Mills on Sep 13, 2011 09:53AM
The new season is upon everyone.  How you approach how you're going to reach your goals will be an important aspect of starting your season.

Swimmers will typically start each season either excited for the training, dreading the training, or with goals so lofty that they' maybe a little bit tentative with what's upon them.  Starting the season with a plan is probably the most important thing you can do, or setting training goals that are realistic when thinking of your season goals.  However, don't focus only on "how much" you're going to train, but start the season thinking of "how" you're going to train.

When you think of swimming, are you constantly analyzing how you approach the water?  Do you think about how your hands initiate the catch, how the fingers slide against the water and the exact point in which you make that connection and start to move forward?  Or do you approach the sport with the notion that by just training harder, you'll accomplish what you set out to do.

When you think of swimming as a series of equations, or problems that have to be looked into, or solved, there are a never-ending number of problems, and solutions to help you continue to swim faster.
Identifying wasted motion is actually pretty easy.  Case in point, I went for a jog yesterday.  While not a runner, I understand there is technique in everything we do, so I started to think about why I am so slow.  Taking physiology, age, and being a breaststroker out of the equation, I started to think about littlle details in what I was doing.  How was my posture (leaning back)?   How high was I lifting my feet off the ground (barely, more like shuffling)?   How did my feet connect with the ground... heel-toe, or toe-heel (side first then rolling to flat)?  What were my hands doing (actually relaxed)?  What was the cadence of my breathing (started inhale for 3 strides, exhale for 3 strides... turned into inhale for 1 stride, exhale for 1 stride)?  What I learned from a simple 3-mile jog (other than the fact that I could listen to the entire Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon album), is that there is SO much to think about when I'm trying to do something that we're naturally supposed to do... how much is there really to think about during swimming?

It's easy to get so caught up in making intervals, or hammering sets, that we forget this is a technical sport, and it's the times that we're hammering that give us the best opportunities to solve problems.

My favorite quote over the past year has been one by Albert Einstein -

"Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results, is the definition of insanity."

If you swim the same way every day, without a doubt, going from out of shape, to IN shape... you're going to get faster, but are you really teaching yourself the skills necessary to reach the next level?  I've written on the site many times about being the hardest worker, and it's great if you are (you strive to be).  However, the people we'll be watching in London next year, are the ones who don't just work hard.  We'll be watching the swimmers who solve problems... problems that come with being human in the water.  Awkward bodies not meant to move through the water quickly, creating tremendous resistance, and lying horizontal in a substance that keeps us from getting what we need to survive... oxygen.
In looking at a very quick list, if you're in the middle of a very difficult set, having a hard time keeping up, or in the zone where you simply can't hurt enough (I remember those days... LONG ago!), then here are some ideas of ways to solve the problem of not going as fast as you want:

• Switch responsibility of the pull from your arms to your lats - all strokes.
• When are you going to air?  Early, or late in the stroke cycle? - freestyle.
• Rotate your shoulders completely out of the water on each recovery - backstroke.
• Use your hips more to help you clear the surface for your breath - butterfly.
• Where are looking? - all strokes.
• Are you pointing your toes off the push off? - all strokes.
• Where are you finishing the stroke? - all strokes.
• How fast are you recovering your hands? - breaststroke.

Rather than me just sitting and thinking of endless possibilities of things to think about, list yours below.  These are not things to think about during drill sets, but rather, when you're in the thick of training, when it's very difficult.

Most athletes, when in pain, focus on the pain.  Great athletes, when in pain, focus on how to keep shifting responsibilities of the body to keep going as fast as they have been.

Don't fall in to the trap of being a regular athlete.  Use the mental capacity you've been given, and use your brain to solve the problems that come with pain, and being tired.

On that note... I'm going for a jog.  Hopefully be back before dinner.
brain training, swim technique, swim training

Posted from GoSwim.com