Swimming Without Limits

Feature by Tonya Nascimento, Swimming World intern

TALLAHASSEE, Florida, October 29. HAVE you ever noticed when your body hurts it is your mind that tells you to slow down? Very few well-conditioned athletes physically need to back off when working hard, but a lot of them do because the mind is telling the body to do so. How fast would you be if your body gave out before your mind? How fast would you be if you didn't have the belief that you could not go on, which in turn convinces you body it can't? For most of us, our performance short-comings can be directly related to our limiting beliefs.

There is an inspirational scene in the football movie, "Facing the Giants" where the coach has a player bear crawl with another player on his back for at least 50 yards of the football field. The trick is that the coach blindfolds him and then yells encouragement meant to override the players own thoughts about quitting until he ends up physically collapsing – in the end zone. With the player's ability to see his progress taken away and his self-defeating thoughts switched to a drive to keep going, he ends up performing much better than he believed he could. (To see just this clip, search for the movie title and "inspiration" on YouTube.)

What are your limiting beliefs? Everyone has them! A swimmer I am working with exclaimed to me after a recent meet, "I broke a minute in my 100 free! Me! I never thought I'd be able to do that!" She had apparently discounted her ability to swim that time. She had set a limit on her speed.

Other possible limiting beliefs include:
The ability to swim faster earlier in a set
The ability to beat a competitor deemed faster, bigger, or older than you
The ability to hold your butterfly stroke for an entire practice with no one-arm

We tend to confirm our own beliefs.
We form beliefs about ourselves and then actively seek out opinions and facts that support our own beliefs or hypotheses. We have a bias to remember only that information that confirms our beliefs (i.e. selective recall and confirmation bias) and forget or discard any evidence to the contrary. As an example, if you believe your teammate is always going to beat you in the 100 backstroke, then you will seek out information that confirms the likelihood of getting beat, such as the teammates' current faster personal best time and all the attributes that make this person a better swimmer.

If you happen to beat your teammate, you will either disregard it as luck or a fluke or give your teammate reasons for having swum slow in that race – he or she was sick, tired, or not motivated. Then you will forget the event and remind yourself of all the times you have gotten beat. This is a mostly unconscious process that occurs due to our original belief and our mind's natural desire to make external information fit our internal view of reality.

We also tend to behave in ways that confirm our beliefs; our internalized beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We tell the future and then act to make it come true. This only further confirms our beliefs. To continue the example, that means if you believe a certain person will beat you, then you might even unconsciously slow down in a race if you seem too close to that person or like you might actually beat that person. In fact, without awareness of your doing so, you might actually make sure that person beats you! This might seem ridiculous, but as a coach, I saw it on many occasions, especially among the 11-12 and 13-14 age group swimmers.

Furthermore, as we store in our memory those events that confirm our beliefs, it becomes difficult to override the emotionally salient memories with logical reasoning that the future can be different. As we are consistently beat by a certain swimmer, consistently fall short of a specific goal time, consistently fail to reach what we desire but do not believe we can actually do, we form mental logs of each failure. Trying to use logic to dispute our negative thoughts that it will only happen again likely makes no difference because the memories have more emotional power than the arguments.

Believe with no limits.
It's time to let go of limiting beliefs and open up your opportunities for improvement and success. The good news is that the process works with both success/limitless beliefs and failure/limiting beliefs. The trick is to recognize a limiting belief and consciously work to change it.

In order to change the belief, you'll need to identify the failure thinking and change it to something realistic and success oriented. Then you'll need to consciously start gathering information and evidence that supports your new belief. Any examples that support the original limited thinking need to be actively discarded as "part of the process" toward improvement.

Using the possible examples of limited thinking used earlier, here are some way can change the belief in order to remove limits:

Limiting belief: I need to save up or else I'll never be able to complete the set. Limitless belief: I can take any set my coach designs and give it everything I have all the way through.

Limiting belief: I can't beat [fill in with a name of someone who is actually in range of your ability]
Limitless belief: I can race anyone wall to wall and swim faster than I can imagine.

Limiting belief: I can't swim legal butterfly the whole way
Limitless belief: Length per length, I can hold my stroke together; or Each length is only 10 strokes, and I can easily do 10 strokes at a time.

Keeping a journal will facilitate the process. Because you are trying to reverse previously unconscious beliefs, writing the changes can help quite a bit in helping to make the beliefs conscious and to organize your evidence. Write the new belief and write evidence as you gather it. Record every instance of when you perform in a way that confirms your success belief. Replay these instances in your mind so that you have the memories readily available to draw upon.

Be your own cheerleader.
Research into the running performance on a treadmill revealed that those who have the researcher encouraging them end up running much closer to their max than those who run with no researcher encouragement. The football player represented in the movie clip mentioned earlier went much farther with his coach yelling encouragement when it got hard. Presumably, the external encouragement helps overcome the thoughts that lead to quitting. You might have had the experience of swimming faster on a relay than individually. This usually occurs because swimmers will let themselves down quicker than they will let their team down. The added desire to swim for the team helps overcome the limits of their beliefs about how fast they can swim or how much they can take.

You can help your teammates by cheering and yelling encouragement. But you also need to learn to be your own cheerleader. You will be able to perform without limits if you learn to up the ante on your positive self-talk when the going gets tough. Do not let yourself quit. Push yourself past what you believe you can. Nearly all of us can take more pain, swim faster, and bounce back from disappointment better than we think we can.

Swim beyond belief.
Our mind does not like conflicts and will strive to have our actions match our beliefs. This is the truth behind the phrase, "What your mind can believe, your body can achieve." It is important that your beliefs result in actions that will help you improve and succeed. Start today to identify the beliefs that limit your potential and let them go. Remove the speed limits. Swim beyond belief.

Tonya Nascimento is a doctorate student in the sport psychology program at Florida State University. She was a competitive swimmer for 20 years, during which she swam for FSU. She also coached Maverick Aquatics for eight years and the Niceville High School swim team for four years.

Name*

Email*

Welcome to our community. We invite you to join our discussion. Our community guidelines are simple: be respectful and constructive, keep on topic, and support your fellow commenters. Commenting signifies that you agree to our Terms of Use