One day at an outdoor summer practice, Heartland Aquatics head coach Erik Wiken showed his swimmers a new part of their dryland routine: Hoisting and flipping a huge, 250-pound tire.

Erica Rose knows preparation. World champion in the 5k by age 15, Rose has been one of the most dominant open water marathon swimmers in the past fifteen years.

Knowing how much carbohydrate, protein and fat to get in a day is good. But knowing when you should be getting those nutrients is even better. In general, follow these guidelines for incorporating carbohydrate, protein and fat into your day.

Teaching the skills of swimming involves implementation of a common teaching language and employment of demonstration, explanation, repetition and feedback. Coaches need a big “toolbox” of ideas for teaching and each coach must find his/her own methods to best teach, organize and communicate with the swimmers.

Rest and recovery are an important part of a swimmer’s training regime, and maintaining good sleep habits (sleep hygiene) is a sure way to get the rest and recovery time needed. This cannot be truer than when an athlete travels across time zones. Athletes competing at national and international competitions sometimes face long-distance travel.

Chuck Wielgus, Executive Director of USA Swimming offers some advice for young coaches.

The more you are responsible for, the more authority you have. With more authority increases in stability and compensation usually follow. But since you cannot do it all, how do you take on more responsibilities? The answer is learning how to delegate. Here are some tips on effective delegation.

The concept of excellence and success can be thought of in both relative and absolute terms. The beauty of our sport is that every athlete can enjoy success in relative terms by working hard and improving. The improvement can be by time, accomplishing stroke corrections, event placing or succeeding at race strategy. Absolute excellence generally is reserved for the pinnacle in our sport: Olympics, gold medals, records and titles.

Not only are coaches role models for the athletes with whom they work, coaches must also many times teach their athletes to be role models. This is especially important for the senior coaches. The older and more elite athletes are always going to be admired by the younger athletes.

The concept of excellence and success can be thought of in both relative and absolute terms. The beauty of our sport is that every athlete can enjoy success in relative terms by working hard and improving. The improvement can be by time, accomplishing stroke corrections, event placing or succeeding at race strategy. Absolute excellence generally is reserved for the pinnacle in our sport: Olympics, gold medals, records and titles.

Looking for a quick primer on how to help your swimmers set effective goals? Read the tips below to help your swimmers get on a great goal setting path.

Effective goal setting entails setting long-term and short-term goals; these goals will identify where the athlete is going and how they are going to get there. When planning a vacation, you often think about dream destinations. Where would you go if you had unlimited funds and abilities… Egypt, the Caribbean, Europe? As with traveling and many other aspects of life it is fun to dream. In sport, it is also fun and important to dream. Dream goals allow you to project years into the future without any limits. For example, for many athletes making the Olympic Team is a dream goal.

Learn more about some of the stages of psychological readiness for younger athletes. Coaches need to monitor how the young athlete copes with various situations in practice to determine if he/she has the coping skills to deal with the increased demands and challenges of competition.

Imagery involves creating or recreating an event or a scene in one’s mind. For example, an athlete can use imagery to create a perfect swim performance, or he or she can call to mind a past successful performance. Imagery involves all the senses. When athletes are using imagery they should try to not only see but also to hear, feel and smell all that is going on in the imagined situation. For maximal benefits, the image needs to be as close to reality as possible. Research shows that imagery, if used purposefully, is a skill that enhances performance. But if the imagery becomes negative it can be a detriment to performance.

Concentration can be understood as the ability to focus attention on relevant cues and to disregard irrelevant cues. Certainly, this is not an easy task prior to competition as the athlete is typically bombarded with potentially distracting stimuli, both internally and externally. Many skills are involved in effective concentration, but the primary skills involve knowing the following:

As we approach World Championship Trials next month, it seems like a good time to take a look at what the rest of the world has been up to in 2013.

With the summer championship meets just around the corner, a lot of athletes and coaches are working to finalize the details of their race-day plans. While there is something to be said about the calm and confidence that can be gained through following a routine, the ability to be flexible and adapt to situations is something that gives elite athletes an edge.

The usefulness of VO2 Max training has been a topic for a few years in the endurance sports world. At the elite athlete level, it is nearly impossible to train an improvement in VO2 Max, and it takes about 10 minutes of training for an athlete to achieve VO2 Max. VO2 Max is also extremely difficult to test in the swimming population.

It’s not uncommon to see teams of young swimmers filing into the local Italian restaurant to load up on pasta the night before a big meet. The common conception is that loading up on a high carbohydrate meal will prepare the muscles with a ready source of glycogen the following day, usually a race day. So the thinking goes.

Here at the National Team one of the methods we are starting to use to evaluate past performances and compare them with our current developmental athletes is to look at times as a percentage of the world record. Check out our charts to see how our Olympic medalists have compared to the current world records in their medal events at each age during their progression.

Learn more about how to deal with difficult parent situations. Find out strategies to help deal with common problems.

Start the new year off right by getting parents on your team. USA Swimming Program & Services Director Sue Anderson presents a webinar on plannng for parent education.

Believe it or not, 99% of all parents out there are sane and workable. If you want to be a successful coach you have to deliberately make an effort to train them. The following is a list of strategies and ideas that will help you in this endeavor.

Let’s take a look at the coach-parent relationship from the coach's perspective. It can't be denied that a small per­centage of those who go into coach­ing do so from a desire to feed an oversized ego, for the opportunity to give orders. . . and see them fol­lowed, and that such people can be high-handed, authoritarian and dif­ficult to deal with. Other coaches start out as reasonable people, but harsh experience in parent relation­ships hardens them into an attitude that "It's my way or the highway." Most coaches, though, are reason­able and responsible souls who enter the profession because coaching can offer a rewarding lifestyle.