James Gibson On Managing Energy, Emotion & Risks At Start Of Swimming Season Like No Other

Energy Standard coach James Gibson, left, next to coach Tom Rushton, coach Ian Armiger in the background between them, on ISL tour in 2019

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The start date of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games having been reset to July 23, 2021, this week marks the first for goals and plans reset. At the pointy end of business, no surprise to find a note pinned to coach James Gibson‘s Energy Standard Elite Team planner: ‘new training cycle begins’.

It will be like no other start to a cycle before it, apart from the lack of rush.

Top 3 no-panic priorities in a pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19): safety; duty of care; steady as she goes. The aim is to make it back to full training, come the hour the pools open, injury free and ready to build on whatever condition has been maintained.

“We’ve classified this week as the start of a new training cycle and that’s just going to be ‘foundation-level fitness’. We’re just asking the team to engage in one thing per day whether that be a row, a bike ride, which you can do, or a home workout,” James Gibson tells Swimming World.

The Energy head coach, a former World Champion turned mentor, is among the pioneers of a Pro-revolution in the sport as the man who led his shoal to the inaugural International Swimming League season trophy.

A great season behind him, Gibson is planning for the one ahead, beyond 2020. He’s reading the challenge of the moment, responding as he goes, finding balance in what his squad, athletes and staff need right now, his mind’s eye on where they all visualise themselves to be come 2021. Says Gibson:

“Speaking to my athletes last week, I told them that every athlete will be de-conditioned to some extent. I’m telling them ‘don’t worry about that – it’s okay’. What we want to try and do is slow down that process. So, everyone will de-condition but we’re just going to try and make that process as slow as possible so we’re in the right place when they get back into full training.

“If you haven’t been maintaining as best you can, you run significant injury risks, especially the big sprinters who do a lot of heavy gym. This break will affect the sprinters quite a lot if they can’t get in the gym.”

Managing Risks

The coaching may be remote for a while but the value of expertise, of understanding the nature of the swimming beast and the art of appreciating and helping to develop the human not just the athlete are all the more real in a virtual world of many choices, not all of them wise.

“Injury risks”, words that remind us of the wave of fitness legends in their living rooms strutting their stuff online. In an age of ‘self-improvement’ culture, the media’s drive to fill column inches and airspace with ‘positivity’ and ‘how-to guides on what to do with all that extra time you’ve got on your hands’ (many wading through home schooling and discovering that it wasn’t the teacher’s fault after all, may well beg to differ) and the liberty of social media make it all too easy to find a guru dispensing conditioning advice to the homebound masses.

Athletes seeking ways to stay on top of their game can also find themselves in the ranks of the gullible who live to regret.

Ben Proud and Florent Manaudou get set to fire in League Skins – Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick

Gibson knows it. He counts the likes of Sarah Sjöström, Georgia Davies, Florent Manaudou, Ben Proud, Chad Le Clos, Mikhailo Romanchuk and Kliment Kolesnikov among his Energy charges. Zoom and similar-tech sessions bring coaches and swimmers onto the virtual deck each day, the constant refrain summed up like this by the head coach:

“It’s important to follow the advice of coaches … in this period any athlete can be tempted to try radical new things, some new high-intensity training, things they’re not used to. That can be very dangerous because it’s not controlled. So, what we’re asking our guys to do is to stick to the basics, stick to what you know, follow the instructions; if you do the basics well in this period, when we get back to full-time training, you’re going to be in a strong position to carry on the good work.”

“For the foreseeable future, this is where we are. We encourage all our athletes to follow their home Government advice. That means, if things are closed for others, they’re closed for you too. So, they’re doing some home gym sessions set by the Marco Cosso strength and conditioning coach [providing] the internet group with different daily workouts.”

Managing Emotional Energy

Sarah Sjostrom – Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick

Gibson is conscious that these are no ordinary times. They need careful handling. The 2003 World 50m breaststroke champion, who steered Manaudou to Olympic gold over 50m freestyle at London 2012, says:

“We just have to use home workouts to do the best we can. And that’s all we ask, really. I’m not giving anyone a super-structured program because everyone circumstances are different. I think that if you try to pressurise the guys now, I think they’ll use too much emotional energy. If they try to do everything … they’ll get back to the pool burned out. So now is not the time to impose that sort of emotional stress because this period is stressful enough.

“It’s the same for staff – and let’s be honest, it’s not just in the swimming world. I know people are losing their jobs already. So, we’re just asking everyone to do one little thing a day and keep in regular contact with us. We’re here to help with nutritional advice – and nutritionists are obviously offering some good advice for everyone. It’s funny but I think everyone could be in better shape, bizarrely, because the things they can get our basic fruit and veg and supplies in the supermarket instead of eating out in restaurants or going for fast food.”

The ‘Right Decision’

Like all the rest of us, Gibson was unprepared for a pandemic and its impact on ‘normal life’ in an athletic realm where ‘normal’ is relative to start with. He recalls the run-up to and then the decision to close down the Energy program at its base in Turkey:

“We were set to stick this out in Turkey, regardless, because we have our training base there in great conditions and we were able to access those world-class facilities on a daily basis. But then lockdown measures were being taken in more and more places and some flights got cancelled.

“As that started to unfold, I felt like the athletes were exceptionally stressed; there was a high level of stress and anxiety over things that they couldn’t control, we couldn’t control, like are the national championships going to happen, are the Olympic trials going to happen?

“And you know what, I just got to a point where I was no longer coaching them anymore to become better athletes. As a group they were coming to the pool, swimming, but there was just so much going on in the background and back home that I made the decision, with staff as well, to get everyone back with friends and family, back to their loved ones.”

Energy mates Chad Le Clos and Simonas Bilis – Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick

The decision to “go home” meant that some, such as Simonas Bilis, of Lithuania, and athletes from Ukraine and Estonia, had to spend two weeks in quarantine.

“But it was the right decision,” says Gibson of an approach backed by club and ISL founder and funder Konstantin Grigorishin, who struck the same tone in a statement about the coming League system.

“The guys are now through that two-week period. It presented big challenges for everyone, coaches too, but speaking to lots of colleagues around the world, everyone’s in a similar position,” notes Gibson, adding:

“It was slowly becoming less about swimming and more about the human side of things. Some of the athletes wanted to stay in Turkey but as it turned out even the centre then closed so it was the right thing to do all round.”

The decision was expedited by a world closing down, the reduction and even closure of airline services requiring quick response. Says Gibson at the start of a new training cycle like no other:

“While the opportunity was there to leave, we took it and as things have turned out with Covid-19, it would have been totally the wrong decision to keep everyone there, with no options to travel and nowhere to train. It was a huge decision but I’m glad we took it.”

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Paul Robbins

4 years ago

Excellent article by Craig Lord citing James Gibson. A must read.