3 Things to Focus on for Better Swim Practices

Heyo!

There are things you have no control over in the water. 

Things like your genetics, natural talent, luck, the competition.

But what you do have control over is practice.

That chunk of time each day where you step out onto a cold pool deck, read the workout on the whiteboard, hop in the water and churn around the black line for a couple of hours. 

While you can’t control what the swimmer in the next lane is doing, you do control your mindset. The effort you give. The focus and concentration you use. And the way you bounce back when failure strikes like a Mike Tyson uppercut from the deep end. 

When the referee’s whistle chirps and you step onto the starting block, there’s one reality that should comfort you: 

We all have the same number of hours of training available to us. 

The season is the same length for everyone. The number of yards or meters are generally the same. 

Races, sets, and practices are less the same for all of us.

The fast swimmer, the one whose ankles are dancing by your face at the finish, has the same number of workouts and meters at his or her disposal as you. 

It’s what you do with each of those training opportunities that determines how two swimmers can put in the same number of meters, go to the same number of workouts, and emerge as two totally different swimmers at the end of the season.

Call it deliberate practice if you like. 

Call it high-performance smashy-smash.

Whatever you want to call it, here are some ideas for how to maximize your swim practices this season.

How focused are you at practice? 

Daydreaming is a common tactic for surviving the mental boredom of a two-hour swim practice. 

• Warming up? I wonder if that cute lifeguard saw how awesome my running dive was. 
• Kick set? Look around at the people milling about the pool, up in the mezzanine, in the stands. 
• Main set? Ugh, how many more rounds are left?

You might think you are being focused at the pool, but what you are really doing is thinking. These two mental approaches may look the same, but under the hood, they are the difference between improvement and going through the motions.

When you are focused, you are concentrating on how best to accomplish stuff in the water. You use concentration strategies that maximize the type of improvement and effort you want. 

When you are thinking, you are placing too much stock in how you feel in the water. 

You get distracted by what other swimmers are doing, base your effort on how they perform, and ride the ups and downs that come with choosing effort based on where you rank in the lane. 

A focused swimmer is present, engaged, and using the best tools for the job, whether it’s a slow, drill-focused set, or a lung-busting, gut-swirling threshold set. 

How much effort are you giving in practice? 

•  “I would have worked hard, but I didn’t feel like it.”
• “I wasn’t feeling it today.”
• “I’ll try a more challenging interval when I feel like it.”

When you feel good, working hard isn’t a challenge. Hard sets induce less shoulder sagging. We dive in, slice through the water, and ride the “feeling good” train to a good workout. 

But when we don’t feel good, things get murky. 

You are sore, stressed, tired, or doing a set that is outside of your comfort zone/not your main stroke. 

On account of not feeling great, effort rolls into the pool gutter.

How you feel on any given day isn’t predictable or guaranteed. And how you feel certainly isn’t a foolproof indication of how you are going to swim. 

I’ve had a night of great sleep, gone to the pool, and still had a bad workout. I’ve also had days where the last thing I wanted to do was go to the pool, and yet, with a little bit of effort and patience, my stroke came around and I banged out a stellar main set. 

Learning to perform—giving a great effort—consistently is a skill that high-performing swimmers have mastered. You can’t always control how you are going to feel, but you can always predict your effort.

Effort doesn’t need to contingent on how you feel.

How you feel is over-rated. You can be sore from legs day and still work on your technique. You can have just broken up with your boyfriend and still show up and work through the tears. 

Feeling great isn’t a prerequisite for the pursuit of improvement. 

Often we confuse not feeling like it for a legitimate impediment to improvement. 

It’s not. 

I encourage the swimmers I work with to grade their effort each day after practice. 

Grading your effort capitalizes on the natural instinct we have to rank and measure ourselves. 

We do this all the time with other swimmers, going cross-eyed staring at psych sheets and meet results. 

But instead of competing against other swimmers, by grading your effort you are competing with yourself. A more functional and productive means of comparison-making. 

How constructively do you fail?

Ever asked yourself how good you are at failing?

I don’t mean how often do you fail, or how deeply you sink when you fail. 

But how do you respond to your failures? 

Do you wallow and mope, sinking back into unproductive behaviors and patterns, or do you learn from your mistakes, going forth smarter and with a tank of motivation?

Forget failing and staying stuck or going backwards. Let’s get serious about failing forward.

Failing forward means you use failures and mistakes as tools for improvement. 

Often, when swimmers suffer a big setback, whether it’s an injury, choking, or getting pneumonia two weeks before Worlds, they wallow, dwell and set things back even further.

Learn from your mistakes. Remove your ego from the equation. Find a way to learn and improve when you step into a steaming pile of failure. 

Fail like a champion.

An attitude that I have used over the years (initially with a break-up, but soon extended to other moments of adversity), is asking: “How can I make this the best thing to ever happen to me?” 

This attitude redirects your focus and actions in a positive manner. Instead of wallowing in defeatism and self-pity, you are on the hunt for ways to get better and win. Failures become rocket fuel for your journey.

Here are some examples of how this plays out:

You hurt your shoulder.

Injuries stink, they happen, and none more than swimmer’s shoulder. 

You could mope, withdraw, and set yourself back even further. 

Or you could get serious about your rehab, nail every step along the way, work around your injury, and do what you could outside the pool to come back healthy. 

You chlorinate the bed at the biggest meet of the season. 

Struggling when it matters most puts you in pretty good company. Just about every elite swimmer has under-performed when it mattered most. 

Instead of telling yourself that you aren’t cut out to swim fast under pressure, you could get serious about fixing the issue. 

You begin incorporating visualization into your preparation, you sit down with your coach about developing a killer mindset, you seek harder opportunities in training, and you challenge yourself ruthlessly in practice so that the threat of competition doesn’t the scare the tech suit off you.

You have a lousy workout. 

Bad workouts and failed main sets happen. 

To you, to me, to everyone who pushes it to the limit in the water. 

A bad workout only really becomes a problem when a) one bad workout turns into a streak of bad practices and b) bad practices become more common than good ones. 

You could wallow, feel dejected and tell yourself that you are off-track to achieve your goals. Or, you could take a breath, realize that bad workouts happen, and give yourself a couple simple things to work on tomorrow to get back on the right path. 

The reality of failure is this: You aren’t immune to them. 

They happen to us all. 

There is no “unsubscribe” link to adversity and hardship. And despite your best intentions and effort, adversity will continue to happen. 

All you need to do is look at the history of the top swimmers on the planet. Injuries, illness, choking, personal tragedy—no matter how accomplished a swimmer is, they will continue to face varying types of hardship and failure. 

You don’t graduate from them when you get to a certain level. 

There are a lot of swim practices over the course of the season. 

The occasional bad workout is impossible to avoid. 

But you can decide how you will respond when it happens.

Better practices make for a much more enjoyable journey.

Something else happens when you are focused, pay attention to your effort, and manage failure in a constructive way.

Practice becomes a lot more fun. 

Not “fun” in the same way that face-planting a large pizza while putting in an 8-hour shift on your favorite Netflix show is “fun.” 

But fun in the sense that the time you spend in the water gives you a sense of pride. The effort you put in produces tangible results. And you get a deeper sense of control and autonomy when it comes to the results. 

Your journey in the water becomes exponentially more meaningful.

And at the end of the day, when you’ve hung up your suit and towel, the goal of practice is to produce a process and a result that means something to you. 

See you in the water,

Olivier

PS: If you want more help crafting a killer mindset in practice and in competition, check out my mental training workbooks Conquer the Pool: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide for a High-Performance Mindset. 

Learn more here.