Friday, September 17, 2021
Training Without Seeing Results: Pushing Past Outside Factors and Controlling Your Own Swim
One of the most frustrating and maddening issues I frequently hear from swimmers is having teammates who regularly goof off in practice, leave early and/or back down when the going gets rough, but then, at meets, they consistently outperform their more-dedicated, harder-working teammates.
It seems so unfair that you put in the work, go to all the practices while other athletes who just don't appear to take their training anywhere near as seriously as you do, out-swim you when it counts. What is wrong with this picture?!
First off, let me explain why this happens — it's very simple actually: Some swimmers have been blessed with amazing physical gifts. Call it the luck of the genetic draw and being graced with athletic parents, but some of your teammates have body types that enable them to swim faster than you with much less work. They may be taller and/or stronger than you, they may even pick things up faster than you. Fair or unfair, this is just one aspect of life and one that is totally out of your control. There is absolutely nothing that you can do about your teammates' genetic gifts or the quality of their training, good or bad! And like any “uncontrollable,” the more you focus on that, the less confidence you'll feel and the more stressed out you'll make yourself!
What you have to learn to do is to follow one of the cardinal rules in swimming: Stay in your own lane! You need to develop the mental muscle of keeping your focus on what YOU are doing and away from what OTHERS around you are doing. When any swimmer is in the bad habit of over-focusing on others, they will do an incredible job of undermining his or her self-confidence while simultaneously distracting themselves from focusing on what's important whenever they train and race.
Here's the hard reality that you must keep in the back of your mind: The only thing that you will always have direct control over in relation to your swimming is what YOU do! A teammate or opponent's training habits is actually not your problem, so my best advice to you if you find yourself in this deeply frustrating situation and preoccupied with some of your less-motivated teammates is to mentally disconnect with what they may or may not be doing, and instead, completely focus on your own training. When the frustration starts to build, along with your anger that things could be so cruel and unfair, and you find yourself obsessing about these swimmers who don't seem to care, quickly “reset” and bring your concentration back to you and what you're doing in that moment!
Those swimmers who seem to not take their training as seriously as you do are inadvertently laying the ground work for potential mishaps! They may consistently beat you now, even though you're easily out-training them. However, sooner or later their poor practice habits will catch up to them. At higher levels within the sport, their genetic advantages will become less and less important. When this happens, their lack of good technique and/or a solid training base can come back to haunt them.
You need to stay exquisitely aware of whenever your thoughts and focuses drift to the frustration and anger you feel because someone with poor training habits is still beating you. Then you need to use that awareness to immediately bring your focus right back to what's important, which is what you're doing in the water at that moment.
It seems so unfair that you put in the work, go to all the practices while other athletes who just don't appear to take their training anywhere near as seriously as you do, out-swim you when it counts. What is wrong with this picture?!
First off, let me explain why this happens — it's very simple actually: Some swimmers have been blessed with amazing physical gifts. Call it the luck of the genetic draw and being graced with athletic parents, but some of your teammates have body types that enable them to swim faster than you with much less work. They may be taller and/or stronger than you, they may even pick things up faster than you. Fair or unfair, this is just one aspect of life and one that is totally out of your control. There is absolutely nothing that you can do about your teammates' genetic gifts or the quality of their training, good or bad! And like any “uncontrollable,” the more you focus on that, the less confidence you'll feel and the more stressed out you'll make yourself!
What you have to learn to do is to follow one of the cardinal rules in swimming: Stay in your own lane! You need to develop the mental muscle of keeping your focus on what YOU are doing and away from what OTHERS around you are doing. When any swimmer is in the bad habit of over-focusing on others, they will do an incredible job of undermining his or her self-confidence while simultaneously distracting themselves from focusing on what's important whenever they train and race.
Here's the hard reality that you must keep in the back of your mind: The only thing that you will always have direct control over in relation to your swimming is what YOU do! A teammate or opponent's training habits is actually not your problem, so my best advice to you if you find yourself in this deeply frustrating situation and preoccupied with some of your less-motivated teammates is to mentally disconnect with what they may or may not be doing, and instead, completely focus on your own training. When the frustration starts to build, along with your anger that things could be so cruel and unfair, and you find yourself obsessing about these swimmers who don't seem to care, quickly “reset” and bring your concentration back to you and what you're doing in that moment!
Those swimmers who seem to not take their training as seriously as you do are inadvertently laying the ground work for potential mishaps! They may consistently beat you now, even though you're easily out-training them. However, sooner or later their poor practice habits will catch up to them. At higher levels within the sport, their genetic advantages will become less and less important. When this happens, their lack of good technique and/or a solid training base can come back to haunt them.
You need to stay exquisitely aware of whenever your thoughts and focuses drift to the frustration and anger you feel because someone with poor training habits is still beating you. Then you need to use that awareness to immediately bring your focus right back to what's important, which is what you're doing in the water at that moment.