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SWIM PARENTS

Pub­lished by The Amer­i­can Swim­ming Coaches Association

5101 NW 21 Ave., Suite 200

Fort Laud­erdale FL 33309

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TRAINING VERSUS LEARNING

By john Leonard

Last week I was speak­ing to a young coach who had just taken a new job.

His spe­cific prob­lem was that the coach that was there before he was, had every­one “train­ing hard” and had done a great job of sell­ing that con­cept. Every­one from 8 and unders to seniors was pound­ing the yardage daily.

The new coach wanted to spend 6 weeks or so con­cen­trat­ing on skills devel­op­ment, because in the first few days on the job, he noticed that many of the swim­mers were defi­cient in the types of stroke, turn and start skills that would sup­port them as they aged into older swim­mers in the program.

He’d laid out that plan to his par­ent group, includ­ing cut­ting back prac­tices from 2 and one half hours per day to just 90 min­utes for the older swim­mers and 60 min­utes for the mid­dle groups and 45 min­utes for the youngest swim­mers. This, con­sis­tent with today’s best advice to ded­i­cate one­self to “pur­pose­ful prac­tice” of new skills if you hoped for opti­mum learning….shorter peri­ods of intense con­cen­tra­tion, with lit­tle to inter­fere with the con­cen­tra­tion process.

He imme­di­ately faced rebellion.

Moms and a few Dads, called him to com­plain that impor­tant swim meets were com­ing up and their lit­tle dar­ling needed to “train” in order to be suc­cess­ful. Inter­est­ingly, more than 70% of the calls came from the par­ents of younger chil­dren. The coach asked my advice on how to edu­cate the par­ents on this issue.

Here’s my answer.

“Long prac­tices, with high train­ing vol­umes will make all swim­mers VERY good at what they are doing. Rep­e­ti­tion builds habit. Habit stands up beau­ti­fully under the pres­sure of competition…when in fact, noth­ing else does….as the pain of com­pe­ti­tion effort removes all traces of thought from the brain…..it becomes habit that the swim­mer relies upon to get him home to the finish.

“Unfor­tu­nately, if they are prac­tic­ing poor tech­nique, that will be learned and habit­u­ated, just as well as good tech­nique. And poor tech­nique makes you bio­me­chan­i­cally inef­fi­cient at the time of great­est stress. Hence you strug­gle more, go slower and your stroke col­lapses at the end of races.

“This makes swim­ming a tech­nique lim­ited sport. Your child will be severely lim­ited by the degree with which they can per­form the strokes with good habits, instead of poor habits.

“Lots of train­ing with poor habits will make a very poor swim­mer. A lit­tle train­ing with good habits, will result in a good swim­mer and one that is “unlim­ited” in their future.

“Which one do you want for your child?

HINT: Get the strokes right FIRST instead of pur­pose­fully prac­tic­ing mistakes.

All the Best for Great Swim­ming Experiences!

John Leonard

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