ROUTINES & RITUALS: Performing Under Pressure

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle    

    
Pre-competitive routines have been studied by sport psychologists for a long time, and there is good evidence that routines increase consistency of an athlete’s thinking, feelings, and pre-sport behavior. Because of these effects, routines also produce more consistent performances. This in turn produces better results. Routines therefore, can make a better swimmer. There are a number of reasons why routines work, but many athletes still resist them:

“It slows me down”
“I don’t want to get locked into anything”
“I like being flexible in case things change”
“I used to do it, and it was helpful, but I just stopped. I’m not sure why.”

Many athletes don’t develop effective routines simply because nobody ever taught them how important and helpful they are. Take Tiger Woods, for example:

"My preshot routine, taught to me years ago by my father, didn't come naturally or easily. Like most kids I was of the grip-it-and-rip-it mentality. I had to learn patience and how to find my natural rhythm. Pop finally convinced me a preshot routine was necessary for consistency, and I've used the same one ever since." - Tiger Woods

If even Tiger Woods resisted routines at the beginning, why would we expect our swimmers to suddenly embrace them? We need to develop a sales pitch that gets past initial resistance and makes a compelling argument for change. One tactic is simply to list all the things that routines do for you, by both ensuring good things happen and preventing bad things from happening.

Routines- Helping an athlete do the right things

1) A routine increases the sense of familiar in a new environment. Routines are portable, transferable, and adaptable. A routine can make even the strangest pool environment seem normal, familiar, and most importantly, comfortable. This is a powerful effect when the environment of the competition is full of distractions.

2) A routine helps an athlete stay active and focused on useful behaviors. One of the worst things an athlete can do in a high pressure environment is to stop and think about it. At a meet, when I see an swimmer starting to freeze up, glaze over, and think too much (usually about the dreaded “what ifs”), I will try to get them talking, moving, and laughing. Much better than this emergency interaction, however, is a routine that keeps an athlete moving, on a schedule, and focused on the things that help.

3) A routine enhances feelings of control and confidence. Going through the same routine in practice and competition is a useful reminder that you have done this a thousand times. The old expression of “practice like it is a competition, compete like it is a practice” describes an athlete with an effective, consistent routine.Simple routines enhance a sense of control and confidence. A routine helps an athlete feel in control, no matter what the stakes.

4) Routines help make useful behavior automatic. Some psychologists believe that over 90% of our behaviors are automatic habits or unconscious, learned behavior patterns. This is why parents and first coaches in a sport play such a critical role in introducing positive behaviors. If you learn how to do something the right way at the beginning, you don’t have to fix mistakes later, because you always do it the correct way, without any conscious thought. These routines will become automatic and help a swimmer avoid all kinds of challenges that many athletes struggle with.

5) Routines increase the opportunity for the brain to focus on the proper things. Routines that take care of all the little things an athlete has to do to get ready, free up brain space to focus on the things that really matter. If you want to have an excellent warm-up, you must be fully focused on the warm-up, and not wondering about something left undone.

Routines- Helping an athlete avoid doing the wrong things

6) Routines help reduce thinking and decision making. When an athlete is stressed, anxious, and concerned about outcomes (a typical state for many athletes at competitions), thinking often transforms to worry. In addition, decisions about simple things become overemphasized, and athletes will often freeze up, wasting valuable time as they agonize over which pair of goggles to put in their swimbag. Athletes weighted down with worry or unable to make a decision are wasting energy. At meets, energy is a precious commodity. An effective routine eliminates decisions (because, if you always do it the same way, you don’t have to decide), and keeps an swimmer too busy to think too much.

7) Routines help prevent silly mistakes. Under pressure, swimmers begin to leak energy, and become more vulnerable to a variety of distractions and challenges. When an athlete is preparing for a key performance, the last thing they should be doing is making critical decisions. An effective routine keeps an swimmer busy, productive, and reduces the probability that they will make a mistake that they cannot recover from.

The Coaches Role In Building Routines

"We first make our habits, and then our habits make us." - John Dryden

All coaches can benefit from understanding the value of creating good regimens. By starting with the most basic aspects of a sport, and ensuring that athletes develop great routines, a coach begins to develop the foundation of great performances.

While it can take a tremendous investment of effort by a coach to develop new routines, the cost of not making this investment can be high. An argument can be made that a coach will end up using a great deal more energy if they don’t help athletes develop great routines. As the John Dryden quote suggests, an initial investment of energy in developing good habits will create a great return down the road. If a coach develops great routines, and the athletes develop great habits, then the habits make them great swimmers.

Adapted from and article by Sean McCann, PhD, Performance Services Sport Psychologist.

YES YOU CAN!
The Importance of "Self Confidence" in Achieving Your Swimming Goals.

Have you said (or thought) any of the following in the past few months??? "I can’t do it," "They are much faster than me. I’ll come last," "I’m hopeless," "I’ve never been able to do that, so I know I can’t do it now," "It’s just too hard. It’s impossible."

You are not alone. Many swimmers have these thoughts and say these words from time to time. Most swimmers (and people generally) have times when they get a little negative and lack faith in their abilities.

When swimmers say "I can’t" or "it’s too hard," what are they really saying?

Swimmer says: "I can’t do it." Swimmer means: "I am not prepared to try because if people might think less of me."

Swimmer says: "They are faster than me. I’ll come last." Swimmer means: "If I can’t win there’s no point trying."

Swimmer says: "I’m hopeless." Swimmer means: "I have no faith in myself or my ability to succeed. I have no confidence."

Swimmer says: "I’ve never been able to do that, so I know I can’t do it now ." Swimmer means: "I’ve never really prepared for this or learned how to do it correctly so the chances of me doing it now are not very good" or "I tried once and failed, so I am not going to try again."

Swimmer says: "It’s just too hard. It’s impossible." Swimmer means: "I’m not prepared to try ."

Confidence is believing in yourself to do what has to be done. To do what needs to be done, with faith in your ability to achieve it. To meet new challenges with an expectation that anything is possible. To accept failure as an opportunity to learn from the experience and try again. And try again. And try again if necessary .

Confidence is trying to achieve and if you fail knowing that it was the nature of the task or the circumstances or just plain bad luck, not your lack of character that is to blame. Confidence is learning from that failure and trying again with more energy, more commitment and greater determination than before.

What do some of swimming’s most successful people say about CONFIDENCE??

"Confidence comes from accepting a challenge and achieving it using the best of your ability. Confidence builds through training to meet your challenge".

"Confidence is about believing in yourself and your ability to do something -- not necessarily believing in your ability to do it perfectly or better than other people, but believing that you have as good a chance as anyone to achieve something. Confidence is having the courage to get up and try and face whatever the outcome is -- good, bad or something in between."

"In my experience, confidence is best achieved through controlled independence. If a young athlete is constantly challenged to be independent (within reasonable bounds), they will learn to rely on themselves and know how to thrive without the assistance of others in moments of greatest need. The ability to follow good decision making processes is a crucial part of this. For young athletes, teach them to take personal responsibility ( control the controllable and develop a chameleon-like ability to deal with the rest). Confidence is the ability to believe you can do something and the courage to do it - if others have made the hard decisions for you and you have never had to live with the results of your own actions, you can never be expected to know full confidence and the power of the self".

"Attitudes such as belief, optimism, high aspirations, and anticipation of the best possible result—all these positive states of mind add up to confidence, the keystone for success. But of course it pays for all of these to be built on the firm rock of a sound preparation".

Confidence it seems, is a skill -- a skill that can be learned. You learned to swim. You learned to flip turn. You learned how to do butterfly. You can learn to be confident.

Leading Sports Psychologist, Dr Mark Andersen agrees: "Many people believe that confidence is something that comes from the inside, but we probably develop confidence from the models we have around us, that confidence really comes from the outside. If we have coaches, parents, teachers and instructors that model confidence in our abilities and let us know that they think we can do good things, slowly their confidence in us becomes internalised".

A few tips to develop confidence:
Accept who you are and learn to like and respect yourself.

Nothing helps build confidence like learning the 3 P’s:

• Practice to the best of your ability.
• Develop a Positive Attitude to trying new tasks.
• Persevere, Persevere, Persevere.

Ladder of Achievement:

This is called the Ladder of Achievement. It shows how your attitude towards a goal or task can impact your ability to achieve it.

The ladder of achievment suggests that an attitude of "I can’t" has almost no chance of success whilst "I won’t" is no chance at all.

Change "I can’t" and "I won’t" to
I CAN - I WILL - I DID !

Understand what motivates you to do well then you can harness your energy in the right directions.

Failure is a race or a meet or a task -it is not a person. Failure is not the person: it’s not you- it’s the performance. Learn to separate who you are from what you do.

Learn to talk to yourself positively. When the negative thoughts come, learn to replace them with positive ones. I can’t = I can, I won’t = I will, I will try = I did. Remember the old saying, "If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right".

"The greatest achievement is not in never failing but in getting up every time you fall". Keep trying and it will happen.

What you believe, you can, with effort and persistence, achieve. Dream a dream, believe in that dream, work towards achieving it and live the dream.

Anything worth having is worth working to achieve. Talent is important, but there are many talented swimmers who don’t make it to the top. TOUGH, TENACIOUS TRAINING makes up for most talent limitations.

Successful people are not afraid to fail. They have the ability to accept their failures and continue on, knowing that failure is a natural consequence of trying. The law of failure is one of the most powerful of all the success laws because you only really fail when you quit trying.

Copyright © 1998-2008 American Swimming Coaches Association.

Mental imagery is a skill athletes can tap into to help reach their goals. Look at the quotes listed at the side - they illustrate how mental imagery can be used to achieve goals through mental preparation for success.

Imagery can also be used to help adjust pre-competitive and competitive mood and energy levels (for example, if you are too nervous, you can help yourself relax by mentally taking yourself to a quiet, calm environment).

Finally, imagery can be effective when learning a skill through mental practice – an athlete can work on turns without getting in the water! Read on to learn more about what a powerful tool imagery can be.

Mental Imagery
Most athletes already use mental imagery naturally, though often not in a systematic or purposeful manner. Similar to physical skills, mental skills such as imagery need to be practiced and used in a variety of settings so that one can call on them when the pressure is on.

How Can Imagery Improve Performance?
In addition to the ways athletes in the quotes described their uses for imagery, there are a number of other uses for this versatile skill.

• To see success: Athletes can see and feel themselves achieving goals. This helps build confidence that these goals can be achieved. This supports the adage “Seeing is Believing”.
• To motivate: Sometimes in the middle of a long period of training, it can become difficult to maintain the proper intensity level needed to get the most out of practice. Base training in the pool can be mentally challenging, to say the least. Thoughts and images of past and future competitions can be helpful in maintaining persistence and intensity level while training.
• To manage energy level: Imagery can be used to change energy level, using calming images to relax, or energizing images to “psych” up.
• To learn/perfect skills: Imagery can be used as an additional form of practice to help master a particular skill. Or, imagery can be used to correct errors in swim technique--either by reducing complex movements to simple skills or slowing the movements down to better analyze them for technique errors.
• To refocus: During practice and competition, many distractions can arise that prevent an athlete from maintaining an optimal focus. Imagining what to focus on can often help get an athlete back on track, by helping remind her about what is important.
• To prepare for competition: Just as a swimmer needs to prepare physically for competition by stretching and warming up, he needs to get mentally ready. He can imagine himself in the physical competition environment and mentally rehearse key elements of his performance. He can also prepare for the unexpected by imagining himself in difficult situations and then see himself successfully dealing with them. Finally, he can also see himself succeeding, touching the wall with a best time.
• To evaluate performance: After a swim, imagery can be used to evaluate performance. An athlete can replay her swim in her head, to reinforce what she did well and evaluate those aspects that need to be improved.
• Mental Imagery: To help recover form an injury. Injuries are no fun. However, there are mental skills athletes can use to help in the recovery process- imagery being one such skill. A swimmer can use imagery to visualize herself healing from her specific injury; and to visualize performing specific skills in their sport to stay “fresh”.

Tips to Best Learn and Use Imagery:

• Be calm and relaxed: Imagery is most often effective when the mind is calm and the body is relaxed. If your body feels tense, take a few minutes to relax and get yourself focused.
• Use all the senses: Often, athletes only use their visual sense when imaging- seeing themselves perform. But equally important is feel, sound, thoughts, body position, and even smell and taste, as these are all part of the athletic experience.
• Control the Mental Images: In addition to vividness, being able to control images - making sure you see and feel yourself perform as you want to perform - is another vital piece of successful imagery.
• At first, keep imagery practice simple: It is generally best to first learn and practice imagery in a quiet environment with few distractions. Start by imaging basic objects or places such as your bedroom or a lemon. Try to manipulate the image - move the furniture in your room or peel the lemon. The key is to first learn how to create and recreate mental images. Later, this skill can be applied to swimming.
• Use movement: Make images more vivid by including some movement with the imagery - this can help create a body experience to match what is being imagined - which can strengthen the image itself. Given the physical nature of swimming including movements can be very helpful in increasing imagery effectiveness and self-awareness.
• Mental Imagery: Practice, practice, practice! Remember that, just like physical skills, mental imagery can only be improved through practice. Spend time every week working on imagery skills.

Download the Mental Imagary Handout for L1-2
Download the Mental Imagary Handout for L5-5

DRYLAND TRAINING:
What is it and Why we do it

Swimming is a rigorous exercise that incorporates complex biomechanical movements. In order to swim efficiently a swimmer must possess technical skill, coordination & flexibility, muscular balance, and athletic ability. Swimming is unlike any other exercise because you have to use all of your large muscle groups simultaneously to propel you through the water. It takes years to learn how to do it well and a lifetime to master.

In case your athlete forgot to remind you, they work HARD in the water, chalking up some 15000 yards a week for our L5s. By the time they stand on the blocks for their first race at the march challenge, the L3 swimmers will have swum over 80,000 yards in preparation for the meet.

As coaches, we always look to ways to increase performance and still maximise the time in the water - so for swimmers aged 10 and over, we have a dryland program. Despite the technical name, 'dryland training' is simply additional conditioning that a swimmer does out of the pool as a form of cross training. 

The goal of our dryland program is to stretch and strengthen muscles that are used in swimming. It works in tandem with the activities in the pool, enhancing performance, creating fluidity, momentum and functional strength while maintaining cardiovascular fitness and flexibility.

As with all our training, the dryland program is broken down into key components. Typically, we start with a general conditioning exercises that emphasis cardio fitness, then move on to flexibility/strength, and finally a power phase where the focus is on generating explosiveness.

But how do these components translate to improvement in the water?

Conditioning: Builds an endurance base and increases cardiovascular fitness so that swimmers are 'fit' to swim. In the pool we are currently working on a distance cycle, so overall fitness is crucial to a swimmers ability to swim far and fast.

Flexibility: Good flexibility is crucial for our swimmers, and a focal point for our dryland program. Where there is joint stiffness, muscles have to work harder and the body uses up valuable energy, which could otherwise be used to swim faster. A lack of flexibility restricts the extent to which a swimmer can extend in the water for efficient stroke technique and so not only do speed and endurance suffer, but there is also the potential for injury. 

By working on increasing the range of movement in the shoulder, spine and ankle joints, a swimmers technique should improve and they will be able to swim more efficiently for longer distances. These stretching exercises also prevent injuries like torn muscles and aching shoulder joints, which can be common amongst swimmers with poor flexibility.

Strength: Circuit training is a very effective to increase muscle endurance and strength. We practice strength-building exercises that incorporate the entire body because swimming is a whole body exercise. 

As movement in swimming is continuous, our strength training focuses on dynamic, continuous movements using the swimmers body weight instead of weight-lifting' in the traditional sense. 

Power: Swimming requires almost as much explosive power as it does endurance. The goal of the power phase is to develop that explosiveness so swimmers can focus it on every start and turn, and to be able to turn on the gas when it counts.

For our younger athletes, we do basic core conditioning exersises on the pool deck before practice. This is an important part of swim training as it introduces our L1 & 2 swimmers to the concept of core fitness, and helps them focus on the workout ahead.

Drills practiced on-deck during dryland translate into technical skills in the pool, enabling the swimmers to maintain their balance and body position in the water, and swim and turn more efficiently.

Coaches are looking forward to seeing how effective our dryland training has been at the March Meet, and welcome any questions and feedback on your swimmer's experience.

All the L3-5 swimmers have been training hard, ahead of the March Challenge Meet, when they will swim a 500 Free. It is the next step in an overall Season Plan that will encompass all areas of swimming, from General Conditioning, through the IM Tough Cycle, and later this year, a Sprint Cycle and a Long Course/Open Water Cycle. The intention behind the Season Plan is to give the Seals a taste of all the different opportunities available to them out there, as well as giving them a balanced swim education across all strokes.

"Not all swimmers are sprinters" says Coach Lisa MacLeod, "We want to give our athletes the chance to experience distance events, as well as shorter races. Otherwise, how will they know what their strengths are?"

These upper level swimmers are averaging 3000+ yards per practice, as they work on technique and stamina, as well as strategy for the longer events. The Cycle Plan steadily escalates the yardage over a period of 8 weeks then allows a final preparation week to refocus on the essential elements of swimming each event legally.

Along the way, swimmers are challenged with specific 'test' sets, so that coaches can evaluate their progress. The T-15 is a continuous 15 minute swim where the distance is recorded and compared to earlier attempts at the challenge. "We also do the X-test - where the swimmers have to swim 100 Free repeats on the lowest possible rest." commented MacLeod, "It gives the coaches a real-time assessment of how the swimmers are adapting to the training cycle, and allows us to make changes as necessary."

For the coaches, the challenge with a distance cycle is keeping up the swimmers motivation as the workouts get harder. "They have to stare at the bottom of the pool for a long time - counting tile, racking up the yards. Our job is to write workouts that effectively push the swimmers in the right direction, but also allow them to have fun. We usually plan for Fridays to be the 'Goof-Off' day - and the swimmers get to choose the games." Fun - yes, though they are still working hard without realizing it.

Coaches are looking forward to seeing the results from the March Challenge - and having a water-polo day to celebrate the end of the cycle and the hard work all the Seals put in.