Top 3 Ways to Boost Your Swimming Confidence This Year
By Peter Scott and Tyler Zetterstrom
Part 1 of 3 - Simplify Your Goals
Few of us have the luxury of a dedicated swim coach or motivational personal trainer to help us achieve our fitness goals. It can sometimes take a lot of effort to get out the door for each swim practice.
It’s even harder to fit swim practices into an already busy schedule. And triathletes have it even worse with two other sports that compete for their time.
The end result is that we can feel rushed, easily distracted and nervous about achieving our swim training goals. If you have experienced any of these feelings, this article is for you, whether you are just starting out or already swimming confidently.
In this 3-part article, we're going to look at how to make each practice count on the road to achieving your goals and build your confidence, motivation and excitement for swimming.
Okay, let’s get started!
The Problem with Goals
Once you’ve established a goal it is usually hard to relax! That triathlon race or personal swimming goal you have committed to immediately starts breathing down your neck.
Goal setting is great. But ineffective goals can wreak havoc on your swim practice, leading you to rush through important steps, neglect your weak points, and proceed with a vague plan that might actually be nothing more than getting kilometres under your belt.
The problem of the anxiety that comes with goal-setting can be broken down into three common experiences:
1. Do you feel anxious about falling behind and not making the advances required to reach your goal?
Doubting your success is a good sign that your goals, or your plan to achieve them, may need reassessing and may not be effective for you. When we experience this doubt often our tendency is to have a knee-jerk reaction and start ramping up the distance and/or time without much else in mind.
2. Do you find it hard to feel motivated to take the time to perform drills and explore the discovery of new sensations in the water?
In the panic to achieve a goal, our vision often gets narrow and we lose sight of the big picture. It is easy to revert to mindsets of other sports, no matter how much experience we have, and simply expect that the more we swim the better we will get.
Such an approach can be quite demotivating for you. Because the more you swim in this way, the more you notice that you have a plateau. You are not getting faster, you are not feeling more aquatic, and you are spending a lot of time in the pool, and for what? You may even doubt whether you are cut out to be a swimmer. Sure, you may have reached a certain distance or endurance milestone, but what happened to the excitement and progress that you had hoped for?
The stuff that actually improves your efficiency the most is your technique and skill practice. With every advancement of endurance and strength our skill needs to evolve in tandem. The sense of urgency of our goal often distracts us from taking the time to assess where we are at, the tools at our disposal, and what skills require the most attention. Your intent on the goal as a primary focus and anxiety ends up hindering your progress towards it.
Quite clearly, not having the interest or motivation to practice skills in drills and focused swimming will make it much harder for you to achieve your goal.
3. Do you find yourself confused about what must get done to reach your goal?
If your goals are too general, this is almost guaranteed to lead to anxiety since the means of achieving and identifying success are not clear. For example, if you have the goal of “doing well” in a triathlon, that could mean many things. It also could depend on a huge number of variables.
How can you adhere to a plan and identify successes without knowing exactly what the most important skills and approaches are that will help you with the goal of “doing well.”? How can you monitor your progression to your goal without knowing the specifics of each step in the process?
Not knowing the specifics of how you are going to achieve your goal can often lead to a real sense of frustration. This will cast doubt on many of the tools you are currently using, especially new approaches that perhaps you have less experience and comfort with. A clear sign of someone who has not properly considered what it takes to achieve their goal is someone who changes methods, styles, and training approaches constantly, often with a "it just wasn't working for me" as an explanation.
If you want to work towards your goal with confidence and patience, you need to explore alternative strategies, starting with being clear about what your goal is really all about.
Consider Your Potential
If you commit to achieving your goal, you’re also committing to spending lots of time in the water to achieve it.
With your busy life, wouldn’t it be great if that time you spend in the water felt worthwhile and absolutely essential?
Wouldn’t it be great if you felt confident your time was not wasted; each session of swimming experienced as a successful achievement and progression towards your overall swim goal?
Yes, it would be great. In as little as a few hours or a few days of reflection, you could identify exactly what you need to do to achieve your goal and also find out what parts of your goal are the most important to you.
And we'll show you how to get started on this path so you can see the potential you have for amazing success.
Goal Analysis: Create a Simple Roadmap for Success
So what is the better approach that you can use right now?
Here it is: Goal Analysis
Step 1: Simplify your goals by writing down each milestone from the most obvious ("I want to finish the race") to the more personal details that matter to you ("I want to feel excited to do my best on race day").
Step 2: Prioritize the milestones of your overall goal from "must have" to "would like to have." The lowest priority should be icing on the cake. Your most imporant milestones should mean that without them, you would feel that you had wasted your time practicing in the pool.
Step 3: Brainstorm ideas or concrete steps for each milestone. Then, identify the specific tools, approaches and resources that will help you achieve those steps. This will help you see if you need any extra help, advice or guidance for your plan of attack.
This process of analyzing your goals will show what you need to focus on first. Once you achieve that first milestone, then you can move on to the next one, and the next, always taking care of the things that are absolutely vital to your success first. We'll look at an example below to ilustrate this method.
Here are some examples of swimming goals we encounter on a regular basis:
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“I want to do well in my triathlon swim.”
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“I want to swim 1000 metres and not feel out of breath or panicked.”
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“I’ve been stuck at one speed and want to go faster, now.”
These are all nice goals, but all relatively vague. Each one could be broken down further into milestones that will account for the experiences, level of focus and specific steps required in achieving that goal.
Below, we’ve used the “I want to do well in my triathlon swim” goal as an example of how to analyse the goal and identify in priority which milestones are most important and which are least important (but still of interest).
The first numbered milestone is the most important and the last the least important. Below each milestone are examples of ideas for how to approach each one with concrete steps. You could break these steps down even further into specific drills, technique points, dry land drills, discovery exercises, practice sets, and even cross-training. But doing that is beyond the scope of this article.
If you have questions about how to do this for your own situation, whether it is to swim a certain distance with ease or swim Ironman, please send us an email or sign-up below to comment on this article. We’d be happy to help you out.
Goal: “I want to do well in my triathlon swim.”
Milestone 1: I want to feel comfortable in the water and not panic. (most important)
Ideas that support that milestone:
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I should look to create a practice that is comfortable and builds confidence.
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I should focus on drills and swim sets that give me the feeling of getting better at breathing with ease.
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I should focus on my need to reduce my kicking and have better balance so that I save energy and keep my heart rate down.
Milestone 2: I want to finish with lots of energy left over. (important)
Ideas that support it:
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I need to practice streamlining and reducing drag.
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I need to know how to pace myself and avoid starting my swims too fast.
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I need to practice drills and swimming with less effort but maintain my current speed.
Milestone 3: I want to swim faster and more efficiently than last time. (less important)
Ideas that support it:
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I need to practice swimming with more mental focus on being precise in my technique over longer periods of time, even when I’m tired.
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I need to practice eliminating external distractions and swim my own race.
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I need to find the right combination of drill and pace swimming so I don’t get sloppy or inefficient if I try to go faster.
This is just an example of the first step in seeing how your goal can be seen as a collection of smaller goals. Your own goal breakdown process may have completely different milestones and possibly have more than three of them.
Ranking and describing your milestones in detail will help you decide what to spend energy on in your practice. You may find that your goal, once you’ve analyzed it more thoroughly, has a great many elements for you to work on. If that is the case, you can limit your practice to addressing the parts that you absolutely WANT to see happen, and save the others as bonuses should you get that far. Focus on them in order of importance, moving on to the next one only when you feel and have proof that you have achieved what you set out to do.
Going through this exercise will also let you know if you need more information or guidance to help you address of the milestones that are vital to your success.
This process will help you stay focused and patient with your practice. You will be much more likely to be confident and excited as you work with purpose on the things that matter most.
Attention to what you can do in each moment, without constantly looking ahead to your goal, will get you to your goal a lot faster. Knowing your goal inside out is the key to achieving true confidence in yourself as a swimmer.
The Key Points
The more you simplify your goals into steps and milestones, the more confident you will be in your swim practices. You will know what to focus your attention on in each moment and that is a key to building confidence. Confident swimmers usually exceed the goals they set for themselves. You can be that kind of confident swimmer.
What You Can Do Today
Next week, look for the second instalment of this article series, where we talk about the specifics of building your own confidence by keeping track of what YOU bring to your own practices.
In the meantime, why don't you take the first step and do a goal analysis of your own? You can learn so much about what is important to you and how you feel about your potential for achieving your goals with this method. Feel free to post the results of your exploration below in a comment or send us an email.
Let us know your results! Read part 2 of this article here.
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