In the USA, we have a lot of coaches and teams training
athletes in a lot of different ways.
Although our methods are quite different, great results come from
everywhere. This not-to-be-debated fact
is generally explained simply: as a
Coach, it’s not WHAT your training style is, it’s HOW you do deliver that training style to your
athletes.
I agree with this
concept – to a point. The Coach’s
enthusiasm and ability to get the athlete to either buckle down or swim
technically well is a huge factor when considering the success of an
athlete. Additionally, the Coach’s
ability to help the athlete equip him/herself with the tool of self-sufficiency
is also a major key to higher level performance. But if the Coach’s enthusiasm/expertise and
skill as a teacher/mentor was all there was to it, I believe the path to
outstanding performance would be easily attained (easier than it currently is,
at least).
I believe proper practice construction to be of great
importance when developing athletes, and it’s my belief that all of the above
traits can be perfectly in place and aligned with the athletes – but without
proper practice construction we will miss the boat at some point in an athlete’s
development.
To me, proper practice construction takes into consideration
at least four major ideas in athletic development:
1)
The Physiological needs of an athlete, as it
pertains to his/her top swimming events.
2)
The Physiological needs of an athlete, as it
pertains to his/her stage of development (considering factors like age, gender,
phase of season, phase of career).
3)
The Psychological needs of an athlete, as it
pertains to his/her top swimming events.
4)
The Psychological needs of an athlete, as it
pertains to his/her stage of development (considering factors like age, gender,
phase of season, phase of career).
To be clear, my belief is that a practice must be built
around an athlete. As a coach, we should
always form a hypothesis regarding an athlete’s practice performance – and as
well, regarding an athlete’s ability to recover from a practice
performance. We miss the point of a
practice if we just throw a workout at a group of athletes, and see how they
do. These athletes are people we see
every day! We can train them better than that. Here are a few mistakes I think we make, and
my suggestions for correction:
A)
The practice is too hard or too easy. I find the boys/men need the real hard stuff…
the big threshold practices, more than the girls/women. The women need the strength, and the applied
strength of properly managed workouts. Distance-Oriented
women and Sprint-Oriented men tend to need training that is shaded a bit in the
other direction. Psychologically-speaking,
each of these different types of people are affected by all of the physical things
we ask them to do as coaches – so we have to understand that dynamic. We have to know our athletes, figure out
where their “line” is – and coach them just over that line.
B)
The practice is geared toward overall “crowd management”
instead of geared toward higher end performance. We have to consider the top athletes in the
training group, give them what they need on a daily, weekly, yearly basis. Workouts are about athletes and their
specific physical needs/limitations as well as their specific psychological
needs. Great workouts are
not only about percentages of certain types of work, or phases in a season, or
energy systems (although certainly these things are important). We have to do things that allow for
high-level practice performance on a daily basis.
C)
The practice is conceptually too confusing for
the athletes to understand without having to go over it multiple times. If an athlete is spending energy trying to
figure out what is going on, their energy is not being directed into training
and performance. Sets should have a
basic pattern to them, and should be easily memorized based on its
easy-to-follow pattern. How do you know
if your set has a pattern? Write down
two-thirds of your set and see if another coach or athlete can figure out the
last third. For instance, yesterday I
had a group of athletes swim a fly set.
Here is the first two thirds:
3x:
75 Free (120) + 75 Free-Free-Fly (120)* + 75 Free (120) + 75 Fly (120)*
3x: 75 Free (130) + 75 Free-Fly-Free (130)* +
75 Free (130) + 75 Fly (130)**
…..so,
can you tell what is next?
3x: 75
Free (140) + 75 Fly-Free-Free (140)* + 75 Free (140) + 75 Fly (140)***
My belief is that too often we try
to give the athletes a set that “mixes things up”. We consider the mixing to be a good
thing. Why is it good to be mixed
up?!?
Athletes do better with sets that
have a mathematically-based pattern. Give
them this set, and not only will their mind be confused, but so too will their physical body:
5x: {2x50 Free (45) + 3x75
Free-Fly-Free (130) + 3x25 easy (30) + 1x75 Fly (130)* + 100 easy (2)}
They will spend the first 3 rounds
just trying to figure out what is going on! The body and mind perform better when working within a certain rhythm.
……….
To conclude: I remember looking over a practice log of a
great coach, and reading at the top of a page from weeks earlier in the season:
“Poor Set Design”. This coach had
written this note at the top of the page to himself….for future
consideration. This coach knew, based
off seeing the practice actually happen, that it wasn’t the athlete’s fault
that they performed poorly – it was his fault as the coach. Kudos to that coach for tuning in to this
fact (certainly poor set design was a rare occurrence in the program); the next
time around when looking for this type of work the coach had learned what had
NOT worked – and was able to use the information from the previous weeks to
design a set that had some impact in allowing the athletes to work well within
the framework of the set. Oftentimes, we
ask for too many hard repeats with too little of a ratio of active or passive
recovery – or we simply ask for too many repeats, period, in the name of “getting
in some yards” or “being tough”. There
is something to be said for tolerating some discomfort – and I do believe there
is a place for that – but to me, a program can’t be built around this type of
activity. It’s easy to fry an athlete in
a physical or a mental way, and once they’re fried they lose their confidence –
and it takes a ton of energy and focus just to get them back to square one.
Please feel free to comment your
thoughts below this blog. Thanks for
reading this far! These are just my thoughts
– not anything more than that, and I know what I’m saying may not fit into
certain program’s belief system. I feel
that by thinking like this I can continue to keep my program moving in the
right direction.