Pocket Intensity

Posted by Glenn Mills on Dec 29, 2010 06:00AM (0 views)

This article is meant for competitive swimmers who have expressed their desire to be great at this sport. This does not apply to everyone and I don't mean it to. I do NOT carry this level of intensity with me anymore in my swimming, and only wish it on those who do choose it.

I've toyed with writing this article for a few years. I've always been a bit in amazement by people who feel attitude at a specific time will get them through a situation against someone who has been preparing for years.

Like the short video above, which is obviously a friendly competition to highlight the great talent by the smaller, and seemingly younger wrestler, no talk in the world, or intimidation could possibly get the larger athlete through this competition. In a skill sport, no matter how "intense" he decided to get, talent and preparation will always overcome someone who talks a good game.

Swimming, unfortunately for people who choose when to be intense, is a skill sport. It's a sport in which the technique you use is as, if not much more important than the fitness level you achieve. Simply put, could you imagine a competition in which average people show up at a pool, and get to race even former Olympic swimmers? You can usually tell someone who's achieved a certain amount of mastery in swimming by watching them for just a couple strokes. You can also usually tell someone who is still in the developmental stages of swimming. The thing that stands between them... years of preparation.

If you've decided that swimming is your sport, then you're going to have to also decide on your level of intensity. Trash talking doesn't exist in our sport, and usually when it does, it has a history of playing against the trash talker. No matter the level of respect that comes after the fact, trash talking hasn't been very successful in the sport of swimming. The Americans telling the Australians how he was going to beat them in the 2000 Olympics only fueled the fire of the opponents and helped them win. Just as the French team telling the American's in 2008 how they were going to smash them, helped create one of the most exciting and memorable races in the history of the sport. How foolish do people feel when they talk a good game, then fail.

I'm also not saying there's really anything wrong with an Olympic Silver medal. Are you kidding me? I'd take one, and those athlete's who have earned them have prepared incredibly, and if for only an instant, a mistake, or an strategical error, the would also be Olympic Champions. Those are just two very striking examples of trash talking in swimming.

What bothers me the most if the trash talking that takes place at the beginning and at the end of the season. Everybody seems to be intense when it matters most. The beginning of the season, especially in the goal setting meetings, there is talk of heroic feats to come at the end of the season. The visions of holding the hands high in victory at State Championships, Junior Nationals, and even higher... everybody is a champion at the BEGINNING of the season. The same happens during taper. Those that are of this persuasion seem to think that a few sprints, or NOW focusing on starts and turns will turn everything around... and their personal TOUGHNESS will prevail. It's only on the last length of a hard fought race, when there's simply nothing left and the competition is leaving them in the dust, does reality set in. No amount of tough talk, or "pocket intensity" is going to will something great to happen.

Greatness comes with constant intensity. The intensity that isn't glamorous. The intensity that reaches over to the alarm clock at 4:55 am to shut it off and climb out of bed. The intensity to work an IM set when you're a sprint freestyler. The intensity to push off in streamline and do 3 or 4 dolphin kicks off each wall in practice.

This type of intensity isn't what people like to talk about. This type of intensity carries with it more of a feeling of drudgery than the screaming american gladiator. This type of intensity is usually lonely, hard, and extremely waring on the psyche of the individual who practices it. It doesn't come with woots and hollars and fist pumping in the middle of practice. It normally comes with gasping for air in the :03 seconds of rest between intervals, or the soreness of muscles day in and day out.

I heard a great quote the other day that works well here. "You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do." - Henry Ford

My advice as a former athlete. Stop talking a good game, and get IN the game. Preparation and intensity isn't just about yardage and fast swimming. Intensity means showing up on time, completing a practice with integrity, not cheating, and trying to get something out of every length you swim.

If you don't carry that level of intensity with you on a daily basis, good luck pulling intensity out of your pocket at the end of the season.

Hope that works out for ya. ;)

Cheat Success or Honest Failure?

Posted by Glenn Mills on Dec 28, 2010 04:51AM (0 views)

This starts with a question:
Is it better to appear successful when you had to cheat to do so, or fail while following the rules and trying your hardest?

While this post could easily be extrapolated to pro sports, or the Olympics with steroids or blood doping, this is simply about practice.

Coaches across the world spend countless hours developing season plans, crafting practices that hopefully intrigue and excite swimmers into giving effort in areas the coach knows the swimmer needs work in. If the swimmers accomplish the practices as written by the coach throughout the entire season, chances are very good for success. However, if the practices are performed in sections... specifically only the sections swimmers enjoy or feel like working, and the rest of the practice is cruised, or worse, cheated on to get through, then in reality, the design of the practice is no longer valid.

A good practice will either overload a specific muscle group (like upper or lower body), or focus on a specific swimming task (like speed or distance), or be an overall general distribution of many muscle groups or techniques so a more general understanding of the water can take place. Very few practices, when done as written, are bad practices. Failure to do practices as written, again, make the overall practice have less long term impact to your goals.

Picking and choosing when to work is understandable. Picking and choosing when to be legal is NEVER understandable.

There are several simple rules to practices that, when followed, make it much easier to accomplish a practice 'as written'.

Here are a few:

1. Start from the wall, not the flags.
2. The lane lines are to DIVIDE the lanes, not to serve as an additional form of propulsion for you.
3. Turn at the wall, not the flags. Don't forget, the flags are to tell you that the wall is coming soon... they're not a temporary signal for you to turn right there.
4. Leave the prescribed time behind the person in front of you. Quick hint; if there are 6 people in a 50 meter lane, you don't have to go :05 seconds apart... or :04... :10 seconds apart will give you your own space and allow you to focus on your stroke, pace, and even give you more work because there's less chance you'll get caught in the draft of the swimmer in front.
5. Kick sets are for kicking. Pulling on the lane line, or using your kick board as a paddle, or simply flat out swimming doesn't mean you're working your legs... YOU'RE CHEATING!
6. Unless your coach has told you to switch strokes at the 12-1/2 or 25 (long course), chances are they've designed a set that was meant for the same stroke to be swum at the END of the length that you started with at the BEGINNING of the length. So swim the entire length the same stroke.

Come on coaches... how long could this list be, but if your swimmers all followed just a few very simple rules, all the time, how much better would your team be?

Swimmers, if you have a kick set that you're having a hard time making by following the rules above, and you decide to cheat to make it... it may APPEAR that you've succeeded, but you know you've failed. While there may be another swimmer in the pool who has NOT made the set, but done everything according to the simple rules above, at least that swimmer has a guideline as to how close they came to making the set, and hopefully the next time, will get closer.

Here's more specific information. If there are two swimmers who have a set of 10 x 100's on 1:10 (pick your pool... it's theoretical). Swimmer A does everything legally and makes the first 6... then starts to fall off the pace. Struggles home and is missing the interval by :05 - :08 seconds by the last one. While they may get yelled at by the coach, or heck, praised by the coach for their effort, they know that the next time that set comes around, they know that if they make 7 or 8 of the 100's on 1:10, that they're improving. Swimmer B on the other hand... also gets to #6 successfully, but notices on #7 that by the 50 turn, they're simply not going to make the interval... at the 75 turn, rather than swimming all the way in to the wall, they turn at the flags and come back just in time to leave on the 1:10... the same practice is applied for the next 3 and unless the coach saw this, appears to have accomplished the task at hand.

If Swimmer A and Swimmer B were of exactly the same ability level... who got a better practice?

The most fitness comes in athletics when you continue to push through a certain point and just keep going. Even if you don't make the intervals, if you're doing everything correctly, at least you know where you stand.

Here's my feeling on young competitive swimmers. I don't mind slow swimmers. They have so much upside, so much to learn, and so much hope. What I can't stand are cheaters. Even extremely talented swimmers who cheat. To me, it's just a waste of time.

Swimmers. Look in your heart at your next practice. When you cheat, you're not just giving yourself a break, you're also disrupting the design of the practice. This disruption means you're not getting the work you were supposed to get. Because of this, if you cheat regularly in practice, you can NOT blame your coach at the end of the season for your failure. You are the only one to blame.

Moving into a new year is the time for resolutions. Athletes need to question themselves and understand that they hold their own destiny in their hands. Failure to grab that destiny in a positive, and honest way, will ultimately lead to dissatisfaction.

When that happens, take ownership of your failure and use it as a lesson. Don't look to see who you're going to blame, blame yourself.

At the same time, if you take the opportunity to swim practices with integrity and honesty, although you may appear to be going slower (because you're actually doing the set), you'll ultimately understand what it really means to be an athlete and will more than likely be very happy with your career. I can't even promise that it will pay off THIS season. It's almost January... it's almost too late for THIS season.
However, the summer season will be here soon... how happy do you want to be?

ABCs OF MENTAL TRAINING: P is for Perfectionism

By Dr. Aimee Kimball, Mental Training Consultant

Wouldn’t we all like to be perfect and live a Ferris Bueller type of life? Of course we would, but reality makes perfection pretty hard to achieve. I know far too many swimmers who, when they don’t have the perfect race, are extremely hard on themselves. This article will focus on the concept of perfectionism and how to encourage individuals to be OK with being slightly less than perfect.

Striving for Perfection
Are you one of those swimmers who expects every race to go exactly as planned? If so, that’s great! I love the optimism! Not to rain on your parade, but the likelihood of you dropping time in every event in every race you ever swim is kind of slim. Believing you can do it is fantastic because that demonstrates you have confidence in yourself, which is extremely important when it comes to sport. However, perfectionist thinking can create problems before, during and after races.

“Perfectionists” often have pre-race anxiety because they look around the pool, see whom they are racing, and assess how they will do in comparison. Totally normal, until people with this personality take it to the next level and have abnormal amounts of stress over the “what ifs” (what if I lose, what if I don’t perform well, etc…). So while they have high expectations for themselves (which is good), they worry obsessively about perfection, which interferes with their performance.

I have worked with athletes who expect so much of themselves that if someone passes them during a race they give up almost on the spot. They unconsciously provide themselves with a reason why they didn’t win. Basically, at the end of the race they can save their ego and tell themselves “I didn’t try my hardest. That’s why I lost.” If you fall into this category, ask yourself, “Would I rather lose knowing I could have given more or swam my best and it not have been good enough?” Typically, the disappointment of not having been as good as you thought you were fades while the frustration of having given up lasts much longer.

After races, perfectionists often focus on what they could have done better. They may have won by a body length or dropped half a second, but they focus not on how well they did but on what else they could have done. As such, they are rarely happy with their performance and eventually their overall enjoyment of their sport will decline.

My advice? Strive for perfection but allow room for error every now and then. It’s the pursuit of perfection that makes you great, not perfection itself.

But I’ve Been There Before
You may have had that one “perfect” race where you were confident, had a great start, flawless technique, sharp turns and a superb finish. It felt so good you just wanted to bottle it up and do that every time. It is good to believe you can have that type of race consistently. The problem is not in believing this can reoccur, it’s in trying to force it and then being disappointed when it doesn’t occur. When you force perfection, it doesn’t happen. When you trust yourself to be as close to perfect as the circumstances allow, then you’re giving yourself the best chance to at least be in the vicinity of where you want to be.

Perfection Continuum
Perfection doesn’t have to be an absolute, it can be a matter of degrees. Evaluate your race on a continuum:

1) Awful— 2) Could Do Better —3) Good—4) Pretty Good—5) What I Trained For

If at the end of the race you can say to yourself, “That’s the type of race I trained to have,” you should be happy with your performance. You may decide your race was “pretty good.” Maybe it wasn’t exactly like you planned, but it had more of what you wanted than what you didn’t. That’s ok, too. Sometimes “pretty good” is good enough. I’m not suggesting you set out for “pretty good” before races, but sometimes you have to be OK with the way you swam. You don’t have to be elated, but you can be content. However, as I said before, you want to strive for perfection (i.e., work to have the race you trained for) not just to be content. If you fall in the “awful” through “good” categories, it is actually a good sign when you’re slightly unhappy because that means you’re competitive. If you have one of those not-so-perfect races, realistically evaluate what you did well and what you could have done better and use this evaluation to create goals for the upcoming practices and meets.

Keep at It
Wanting to be perfect is a great quality. Too many people waste their talent because “good enough” is always good enough and they are satisfied with just getting by. I’d take someone who is disappointed with anything less than perfection over someone who doesn’t even care. However, if you find that your perfectionist tendencies get in the way of your performance and enjoyment then maybe you need to give yourself some slack. You may just find that you’re actually much better when you expect perfection but allow yourself a bit of breathing room. Regardless, if you are less than perfect, keep working at getting there since hard work will at least get you closer to perfection.

Make it great!

Dr. Aimee

ABOUT AIMEE C. KIMBALL, PhD

Dr. Aimee C. Kimball is the Director of Mental Training at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Sports Medicine. She received a PhD from the University of Tennessee where she specialized in sport psychology.

She is an Association for the Advancement 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.

As a Mental Training Consultant, Dr. Kimball has worked with professional, collegiate, high school, recreational, and youth athletes in a variety of sports, and assists the Pittsburgh Steelers in analyzing potential draft picks.

She has been a featured speaker at conferences across the nation and has appeared in Men’s Health Magazine, Runner’s World, Athletic Management Magazine, various local and national newspapers, and has appeared on ESPN, NPR, and news broadcasts across the country.

She is a Clinical Faculty member in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Orthopaedics and an adjunct faulty member in the Sports Marketing Department at Duquesne University. Currently, Dr. Kimball works with athletes and other performers to assist them in achieving success in sport and life. For more information contact: 412-432-3777; kimballac@upmc.edu