Archive for the ‘Swimmer Scoop’ Category

News For

SWIM PARENTS

Pub­lished by The Amer­i­can Swim­ming Coaches Association

5101 NW 21 Ave., Suite 200

Fort Laud­erdale FL 33309

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One Day in The Life of an Age Group Parent

Guy Edson

(From a 2003 Newsletter)

My wife was off to a con­tin­u­ing ed class. My 12 year old daugh­ter was at swim prac­tice. I had the much needed chance to spend a cou­ple extra hours catch­ing up with some work at the office. That is, until my cell phone buzzed at 5:30. “Dad, can you come pick me up?” “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I got kicked out of swim prac­tice,” she said. I was stunned! My daugh­ter is a fairly stan­dard 12 year old, as fully capa­ble of get­ting into trou­ble as any other 12 year old – except at swim prac­tice where she is unusu­ally com­pli­ant and very coach­able. I decided we would talk about it later and said, “Well, just come home with Coach Rob like you always do and we will talk about it when you get home.” “Rob said you have to come pick me up now,” she said.

The pool is 18 miles from my office by way of the most con­gested inter­state in the whole met­ro­pol­i­tan area. The last thing I wanted to do is drive 45 min­utes out there and another 45 min­utes back. My build­ing anger focused on Coach Rob. I thought to myself, “OK, my daugh­ter screwed up but just let her swim. It’s no big deal. Besides, why do I have to pay the price? If it really is that bad he should just make her sit out and then bring her home like usual. After all, that is what I would do.”

Impor­tant note: I am also a swim­ming coach and have been for nearly 30 years. Nev­er­the­less, the par­ent side of me had taken over my thought process and I wanted to blame the coach for the incon­ve­nience I was fac­ing. “…the incon­ve­nience I was facing.”

Look­ing for a way out I asked, “What did you do?” She told me she was three min­utes late to prac­tice and he wouldn’t let her in the water. “Three min­utes? THREE min­utes?” I asked. In my mind I was curs­ing at the coach. “How could you be three min­utes late to prac­tice? You get there 45 min­utes before prac­tice time!” I said. She told me was doing home­work in the locker room and lost track of the time. “And he kicked Jackie out too,” she said. I asked, “Jackie was doing home­work also?” “No, she was chang­ing her swim suit and we came out together.”

At that point dis­tant mem­o­ries started com­ing back and with them ratio­nal think­ing crept back into my brain. In my 30 years of coach­ing, how many times did mul­ti­ples of 11 – 12 year old girls emerge from the locker rooms 3 min­utes late and how many ridicu­lous excuses had I heard? Plenty. And how many times was it the same group of kids? All the time.

“If I were to ask Coach Rob if this was the first time you were late, what would he say?” I asked. I heard a faint “what?” I repeated, “If I were to ask Coach Rob if this was the first time you were late, what would he say? Have you been late before?” “Sometimes.”

And what did I do years ago with those who became chron­i­cally late by 3 min­utes? I sent them back to the locker room, and told them to call their par­ents. This scene is all too famil­iar to me.

“OK,” I said, “I’ll be there in 40 to 45 min­utes. I’ll be think­ing of the con­se­quences along the way.” As a last ditch effort for clemency and a play on my fatherly love, I heard my daugh­ter faintly say, “I’m sorry.”

When I picked her up I was all smiles. And she lighted up right away. She might have been think­ing I was going to be cool about this. I asked her what home­work she was work­ing on in the locker room and she told me it was math. “You’re pretty good at math, aren’t you?” I asked. “Get out a piece of paper and pen­cil and solve this prob­lem: a man dri­ves a car that gets 15 miles to the gal­lon. He has to drive his car 36 miles. If gas costs $1.79 a gal­lon, how much did the trip cost him?” She loves these kinds of prob­lems and started divid­ing then mul­ti­ply­ing and proudly came up with, “Four dol­lars and twenty nine cents!” “That sounds cor­rect,” I said. That’s what it cost me to come pick you up and it’s com­ing out of your next allowance.” The rest of the trip home was on the quiet side.

The next day, Coach Rob reported to me that she was on the deck 15 min­utes early and ready to go.

News For

SWIM PARENTS

Pub­lished by The Amer­i­can Swim­ming Coaches Association

5101 NW 21 Ave., Suite 200

Fort Laud­erdale FL 33309

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Learn­ing To Pre­pare For The Best

John Leonard

As I write this in early Jan­u­ary in Fort Laud­erdale, the air tem­per­a­ture is a “balmy” 42 degrees….well, balmy if you’re from Green Bay, Wis­con­sin, maybe. Here in South Florida, that’s a cold wave. We swim out­side, and the water tem­per­a­ture is 75 degrees…..the heaters can’t keep up when the air is this cold. The wind chill fac­tor, accord­ing to Chan­nel 7, is…well, we don’t want to know the wind chill with a nice brisk 20 mile an hour wind com­ing off the Everglades.

My phone rings at 5 AM and a small voice on the other end asks plain­tively, “Do we really have swim prac­tice, Coach John?” Yes, we really do.

WHY? Is the next ques­tion, which I wres­tle with myself on the 15 minute drive to the pool….why put teenagers in the water on this cold and nasty morn­ing when both they and I would pre­fer to stay snug­gled in at home for another hour or hour and a half.

Now, I KNOW why, but can I express it to my swim­mers? Yes, I’ll try. Every­one, on the day after the high school state meet, vows that “next year” they will A) make a final, B) Make the meet C) win an event or D) write in your own goal here.

It’s easy to vow to do some­thing the day after, when you are excited, full of the promise of life and get up and go. It’s a lot harder to REMEMBER what you wanted to do in early Jan­u­ary when it’s 5 AM and cold out­side. Then it’s a lot harder and a lot eas­ier to ratio­nal­ize, “it’s just one workout”.

The prob­lem is, when teenagers begin to learn to ratio­nal­ize, they get really good at it really fast, and pretty soon, the ACTION required to ful­fill the com­mit­ments to those goals/dreams, falls prey to the ratio­nal­iza­tion. And after you ratio­nal­ize the deci­sion you want to make the first time, it’s so much eas­ier to do it the next time, and the time after that, and pretty soon, the goal is just a dream, because you’re ratio­nal­iz­ing your­self into think­ing, “I’d like to do that if every­thing could be per­fect for me, and it would never be cold in the morn­ing, or no social events would ever con­flict with prac­tice, and time with my friends always went the way I want it to.“

But things never go per­fectly. The ONLY thing you can suc­cess­fully pre­dict is that obsta­cles to your goal WILL come up, and lit­tle or noth­ing will go smoothly. And that con­sis­tency in prepa­ra­tion is the only way to raise the per­cent­ages of the chance you will reach your goal.

Read that again….”raise the per­cent­ages of the chance…” Not a guar­an­tee. If it’s a good goal, there are no guar­an­tees, EXCEPT that if you don’t pre­pare cor­rectly, accord­ing to the plan, you won’t raise your chance of suc­cess, you’ll lower it.

So why go to prac­tice at 5 AM in the cold? Because it’s part of the plan, and it raises your chance of suc­cess. But most of all, because you have told your­self that you will com­mit to doing it. And if you let your­self down, who won’t you let down? Pre­pare for a chance for suc­cess. And feel really good about doing that.

Because not very many peo­ple do.

Goal set­ting: One step at a time — how to raise your game through effec­tive goal-setting

Any­one inter­ested in ath­let­ics will be aware of the achieve­ments of the US 200m and 400m sprinter Michael John­son. In the course of a spec­tac­u­lar career, John­son rewrote the record books when he became the only man ever to win both 200m and 400m Olympic gold medals, at the 1996 Olympics. At times he was, quite lit­er­ally, ‘in a class of his own’.

How­ever, accord­ing to the man him­self, his achieve­ments were based not purely on tal­ent but on hard phys­i­cal con­di­tion­ing, men­tal strength, a clear vision of where he wanted to go, and a plan of how to get there. Michael Johnson’s book Slay­ing the Dragon is not just a record of his achieve­ments but an insight into how one man mobilised his extra­or­di­nary tal­ent through effec­tive goal-setting. Not every­one has the tal­ent to be a Michael John­son, but any­one can achieve sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments in per­for­mance by means of effec­tive goal-setting.

Many peo­ple asso­ciate goal-setting with new year res­o­lu­tions, and are quick to dis­miss goal-setting as inef­fec­tive, since most well-intentioned, if vague, res­o­lu­tions have failed before the end of Jan­u­ary. Let’s get one thing clear straight away: most such res­o­lu­tions are per­fect exam­ples of how not to set goals!

Research on goal-setting in the worlds of busi­ness and in sport and exer­cise has con­sis­tently shown that it can lead to enhanced per­for­mance. In fact, a recent meta-analysis (sta­tis­ti­cal tech­nique used to eval­u­ate the data from a whole series of exper­i­ments) showed that goal-setting led to per­for­mance enhance­ment in 78% of sport and exer­cise research stud­ies, with mod­er­ate to strong effects⁽¹⁾.

Goal-setting is a pow­er­ful tech­nique that appears to work by pro­vid­ing a direc­tion for our efforts, focus­ing our atten­tion, pro­mot­ing per­sis­tence and increas­ing our con­fi­dence (pro­vid­ing we achieve the goals we set ourselves).

But, while goal-setting is an easy con­cept to under­stand, its appli­ca­tion needs more thought and plan­ning than most peo­ple realise. One of the main prob­lems is that not all coaches are aware of the prin­ci­ples of goal-setting and how to apply them effec­tively⁽²⁾. So a key pur­pose of this arti­cle is to give coaches and ath­letes a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how to use goal-setting to enhance per­for­mance and avoid disappointments.

It’s always good to have a vision of what you want to achieve – whether this is related to fit­ness, weight loss, win­ning an Olympic medal or achiev­ing a set stan­dard of per­for­mance; but you also need a plan for how you are going to attain this goal. Dream goals inspire us and give us a tar­get to aim for, but in order to deliver the goods they must be spe­cific and real­is­tic. Most new year res­o­lu­tions are dream goals that will never be realised because peo­ple fail to plan real­is­ti­cally the day-to-day process required to make such dreams into reality.

If you only focus on your dream goal, you can eas­ily become over­whelmed when you think about what it’s going to take to achieve it. Research sug­gests that focus­ing only on long-term dream goals does not lead to enhanced per­for­mances⁽³⁾.

Short-term goals – the key to success

Top ath­letes like Michael John­son and Steve Back­ley have under­stood that, although dream goals such as Olympic gold medals are impor­tant in help­ing to direct our efforts, it is the day– to-day ‘short-term’ goals that pro­vide the key to suc­cess. I like to clas­sify goals into three types:

• Dream goals are the ones that seem a long way off and dif­fi­cult to achieve. In time terms, they may be any­thing from six months to sev­eral years away;
• Inter­me­di­ate goals are mark­ers of where you want to be at a spe­cific time. For exam­ple, if your dream goal was to lower your 400m PB by one sec­ond over 10 months, an inter­me­di­ate goal could be a half sec­ond improve­ment after five months;
• Short-term or daily goals are the most impor­tant because they pro­vide a focus for our train­ing in each and every ses­sion. Past research on Olympic ath­letes found that set­ting daily train­ing goals was one fac­tor that dis­tin­guished suc­cess­ful per­form­ers from their less suc­cess­ful coun­ter­parts ⁽⁴⁾.

For every week and each train­ing ses­sion you should decide what you need to do in order to take another small step towards the next inter­me­di­ate goal, and ulti­mately towards your dream goal. Don’t just set goals for com­pe­ti­tion: we all spend more time prac­tis­ing and train­ing, so set tar­gets for these peri­ods too.

Break­ing down the ‘impos­si­ble’ task

To demon­strate how goal-setting and goal-achievement can aid per­for­mance, let me describe my expe­ri­ences of learn­ing to ski. Hav­ing spent some time on the nurs­ery slopes learn­ing the ‘snow-plough’ turn and other basic moves, I and the rest of my group were both excited and appre­hen­sive when the instruc­tor announced it was time to make our way up to the higher slopes and ski all the way down. To a novice skier, this moment presents a real chal­lenge to con­fi­dence. En masse, my group decided that we couldn’t do it: we were not ready to ski all the way down; after all it was a long and dif­fi­cult slope for novices to ski!

Our instruc­tor then did a very clever thing by dis­tract­ing our focus from the appar­ently ‘impos­si­ble’ task of ski­ing all the way down and break­ing the task down into a series of smaller stages. We didn’t feel con­fi­dent enough to ski to the bot­tom, but could we ski to that tree 50m away to the left? Yes, we agreed – and off we went, fol­low­ing the instruc­tor. On reach­ing the tree, the instruc­tor picked a new tar­get, and these small stages even­tu­ally led us all the way to the bot­tom. The next attempt involved fewer tar­gets with increased dis­tance between each tar­get. In this way, our main objec­tive of ski­ing con­tin­u­ously all the way down, which at first seemed impos­si­ble, became eas­ily attain­able. Focus­ing on one small step at a time – and achiev­ing that goal – devel­oped con­fi­dence, and con­fi­dence allowed us to move on to more chal­leng­ing tar­gets. This sim­ple story encap­su­lates the need for short-term goals to direct our imme­di­ate focus.

Accord­ing to sport psy­chol­o­gist Terry Orlick, there are four pre­req­ui­sites for suc­cess­ful goal-setting ⁽⁵⁾. First, you need to decide what you want – develop a vision; sec­ondly, you must be com­mit­ted, so your goals must be worth striv­ing for; thirdly, you have to believe that the goals you set are achiev­able. Goals that are too easy to achieve pro­vide lit­tle moti­va­tion; but, on the other hand, unre­al­is­ti­cally dif­fi­cult goals can lead to loss of con­fi­dence and even­tual rejec­tion of the goal. To avoid these kinds of prob­lems, coaches and ath­letes should work together to reach an agree­ment on goals and should not be afraid of adjust­ing goals to opti­mise their poten­tial effect. The fourth pre-requisite for suc­cess­ful goal-setting spec­i­fied by Orlick is to focus on one step at a time.

In begin­ning the process of set­ting goals, it’s impor­tant to be spe­cific and real­is­tic about what you are striv­ing to achieve. Ditch such vague goals as, ‘to get fit’ or ‘to do my best’ for more objec­tive alter­na­tives. Objec­tive goals allow the sports per­former and his/her coach to mea­sure progress and re-evaluate the goal if tar­gets prove either too dif­fi­cult or too easy. The types of goals set in sport and exer­cise typ­i­cally reflect what psy­chol­o­gists have iden­ti­fied as out­come, per­for­mance and process goals. All three are valu­able in guid­ing ath­letes towards higher stan­dards of per­for­mance, although you need an aware­ness of some of the poten­tial pit­falls with these goals.

I will use the exam­ple of a 100m sprinter to demon­strate the dif­fer­ences between these three types of goal. If the coach and ath­lete agree a goal of win­ning a medal at the Euro­pean Indoor Cham­pi­onships, this is an ‘out­come goal’. Out­come goals tend to focus on an objec­tive com­pet­i­tive result, such as win­ning a medal or beat­ing an oppo­nent, but they can never be com­pletely under your con­trol since the abil­ity and form of your oppo­nents on the day can influ­ence the result. You might even run a PB but still fail to achieve your spe­cific goal and so dam­age your con­fi­dence. Out­come goals can pro­vide moti­va­tion, but focus­ing purely on the result can lead to increased anxiety.

Per­for­mance goals are more flexible

Alter­na­tively you could set a ‘per­for­mance goal’, such as run­ning under 10.5 sec­onds for the 100m, whose achieve­ment is inde­pen­dent of other ath­letes. As such goals are set in the con­text of com­par­isons with your own pre­vi­ous per­for­mances, they tend to be more flex­i­ble and within your con­trol. In the event of injury, per­for­mance goals can be eas­ily read­justed to pro­vide mean­ing­ful and real­is­tic targets.

‘Process goals’ are to do with the actions or tech­niques that are required to achieve suc­cess. A sprinter who has a ten­dency to become overly con­cerned with the posi­tion of his/her com­peti­tors dur­ing the final 20m of races might set a process goal of focus­ing on a point beyond the fin­ish line to ensure focus is retained until the line has been crossed.

Coaches have a pref­er­ence for per­for­mance and process goals, since these can be more eas­ily and pre­cisely adjusted than out­come goals, although all three types of goal should be used as appro­pri­ate to the ath­lete and sit­u­a­tion. One recent study found bet­ter results when using a com­bi­na­tion of goal strate­gies (out­come, per­for­mance and process goals) than either one alone ⁽⁶⁾.

In the plan­ning stages of a goal-setting pro­gramme, you should think care­fully about fac­tors that may hin­der your progress. For exam­ple, most peo­ple set goals that are too dif­fi­cult rather than too easy, which com­monly leads to the rejec­tion of those goals. Once rejected, the goals no longer direct our efforts or our focus. It is also impor­tant to avoid set­ting too many goals. Instead, focus on one dream goal, per­haps two or three inter­me­di­ate tar­gets and two short-term goals for today’s ses­sion. That’s enough to start with, but be sure to give your short-term goals the high­est pri­or­ity. Through achiev­ing these you will nat­u­rally progress towards the inter­me­di­ate targets.

I recently set myself a goal of reduc­ing my rest­ing heart-rate from 75 to 65 bpm. In order to achieve this, I decided to chose an exer­cise mode that I enjoy (jog­ging) and to exer­cise three times per week over the next six months. As my fit­ness increases and my rest­ing heart rate becomes lower, I will adjust the fre­quency, inten­sity and dura­tion of train­ing to suit my needs. How­ever, I ini­tially iden­ti­fied one major bar­rier to the achieve­ment of my goal – time. My work sched­ule means that I have lit­tle time to spare dur­ing the day, while in the evening I often feel tired and want to relax. Because I value my fit­ness goal, the way around this prob­lem has been to get up early on two days a week and to run before my work­ing day starts. At the week­end I am more flex­i­ble and can make time for exer­cise dur­ing the day. The point is clear: you must con­sider poten­tial bar­ri­ers to your goals and plan around them if pos­si­ble. If you can see no way around your bar­ri­ers, your tar­gets may be unre­al­is­tic. You should always eval­u­ate your goals, and chart­ing your progress can be an effec­tive way to do this and to boost your con­fi­dence and moti­va­tion as you see progress being made.

Goal-setting is a smart move for ath­letes who want to develop their self-confidence, increase their lev­els of moti­va­tion and achieve higher stan­dards of per­for­mance. Remem­ber that time spent in prepa­ra­tion is worth it and can pre­vent dis­ap­point­ments. Take the advice of ath­letes like Michael John­son and use goal-setting to change small steps into great feats. To help remem­ber the key prin­ci­ples of goal-setting you need to think SMARTER. That is, your goals should be:

Specific

Indi­cate pre­cisely what is to be done. Avoid vague alternatives;

Measur­able

You should be able to quan­tify your goal;

Accepted

Goals must be accepted as worth­while, real­is­tic and attainable;

Recorded

Write your goals down. This is the basis of a con­tract with yourself;

Time-constrained

Set spe­cific time-limits;

Eval­u­ated

Mon­i­tor your progress regularly;

Rever­si­ble

In the event of injury, or fail­ure to achieve over-difficult goals, reset your goals accordingly.

Lee Crust

Ref­er­ences

1. Singer, R, Hausen­blas, H, & Janelle, C (Eds), Hand­book of Sport Psy­chol­ogy, Wiley, New York, 2001
2. The Sport Psy­chol­o­gist, vol 15, pp20-47, 2001
3. Jour­nal of Sport & Exer­cise Psy­chol­ogy, vol 17, pp117-137, 1995
4. The Sport Psy­chol­o­gist, vol 2, pp105-130, 1988
5. Orlick, T, In Pur­suit of Excel­lence, 4^th edi­tion, Human Kinet­ics, USA, 2000
6. Jour­nal of Applied Sport Psy­chol­ogy, vol 11, pp230-246, 1999

Source: http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/goal-setting.html