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SWIM PARENTS

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Teach­ing Tech­nique – What We Know, What We Think We Know, and What We Do.

By John Leonard

One of the more com­mon ques­tions that par­ents have, is when/how the coach teaches the tech­ni­cal aspects of swim­ming to the ath­letes. First of all, we know that swim­ming is a “tech­nique lim­ited” sport. Which means that with­out good tech­ni­cal strokes, starts and turns, effort and hard work will only carry you a very lim­ited way…..the fact that water becomes more resis­tant as you go faster, means that per­fect tech­nique is rewarded and impaired tech­nique is pun­ished with less speed for more effort. This is age old wis­dom that is accepted by all expe­ri­enced coaches and athletes.

We think we know, that we can teach good tech­nique. Coaches spend count­less hours learn­ing not only WHAT a swim­mer should do, but HOW to teach them to do it. It appears, in non-scientific terms, that when coaches spend time teach­ing tech­nique, tech­nique improves. We hope that means there is a direct cor­re­la­tion between our teach­ing and the ath­letes learn­ing. It’s a rea­son­able belief.

Our friend Dr. K. Anders Eric­s­son at Florida State Uni­ver­sity, is the world’s lead­ing author­ity on “becom­ing an expert” in any domain. Part of his research, writ­ten about in pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture, is that it requires 10,000 hours of ded­i­cated prac­tice (which he terms “Pur­pose­ful prac­tice”) in order to acquire “expert” sta­tus in any domain. Inter­est­ingly, if the ordi­nary swim­mer begins prac­tice at age 8 and fol­lows a nor­mal curve of increas­ing prac­tice hours each year to age 17 – 18, they will have put in approx­i­mately 10,000 hours……which is a nice coin­ci­dence with the long held “truth” among coaches that it takes 10 years to “make a swim­mer.” Sci­ence meets expe­ri­ence right in the mid­dle, and both are validated.

Now “pur­pose­ful prac­tice” is time that is focused on specifics and exact­ing detail in per­for­mance. It has con­stant and real­is­tic and expert feed­back from the teacher, and feed­back again from the ath­lete to the teacher. The entire effort is hard work, not much fun, and men­tally focused and exhaust­ing effort.

Is that what we do in swim­ming? Not for most of us. When swim coaches teach tech­nique, it is typ­i­cally “to the team” or a group of the team, almost never in a sus­tained 30 – 60 minute burst of one on one teach­ing. (essen­tially a pri­vate les­son.) My friend Guy Edson, who edits and dis­trib­utes this newslet­ter, describes it as work­ing to “get in the same neigh­bor­hood” as a good stroke, with most of his novice swim­mers. Not nec­es­sar­ily in the right house, much less in the right chair in the liv­ing room….just get­ting in the neigh­bor­hood. Swim Teams, by their very nature, of being “A TEAM”, do not allow much one on one teaching….or what Dr. Eric­s­son would call “delib­er­ate, or pur­pose­ful practice.”

Of course, years of suc­cess­ful age group swim­ming would tell us that we’re being suc­cess­ful “some­how”. Per­haps at cer­tain ages, “get­ting in the neigh­bor­hood” of a great stroke is enough. As the child matures, addi­tional pur­pose­ful prac­tice gets the ath­lete more finely tuned, and even­tu­ally, if they are pur­pose­ful and stu­dious enough to war­rant a lot of one on one atten­tion from a coach, they will have the oppor­tu­nity to per­son­al­ize that per­fect stroke for them….deliberate and pur­pose­ful prac­tice at its best.

To be suc­cess­ful in swim­ming, we need to not only learn, but also to improve our phys­i­cal state…training. Both are needed for top per­for­mance at all ages. So those 10,000 hours of prac­tice we put in may not all be “pur­pose­ful and directed learn­ing”, but many of them qual­ify as con­tribut­ing to our even­tual expertise.

The ques­tion for coaches? How to incor­po­rate more of that delib­er­ate and spe­cific prac­tice to improve strokes? And the ques­tion for par­ents and ath­letes? How to best apply the “train­ing time” to swim the strokes in the pat­terns that have been taught by the coaches…..so they become habit and ingrained skill.

Improv­ing the qual­ity of our prac­tices will improve the speed of our performances.

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