Learning to Dive: Trusting Yourself in Swimming

I like your ideas. It’s very useful to look at what you fear in light of what you used to fear and now do with ease. t’s useful to look at failure from the perspective of a baby learning to walk. They fail, the cry, they get up and fail and cry. They then get one step right. and then fail. And get up again. And fail. And wait a while or crawl a while. They watch those who walk proficiently. and then they get up and walk five steps, often the cheers of a parent. Then they get it. And often no one ever tries that hard against so many failure experience again in their lives! Great parents and great coaches are a lot more rare in developing the right environment than we might suppose. Steve Job’s parents were very very rare in both nurturing a unique environment and leaving him alone to fail of succeed on his own terms. Studies show that training wheels on bicycles delay of ten by noths a child’s ability to ride on two wheels. Coaches giving 10×100’s@1:30 often delay the swimmer’s ability to set his own goals for each lap they swim and teach mediocrity by default as your example of kids belly flopping. A simple hoop allows me to teach starts in a few minutes to two-year-olds! I even made an extension to re-teach our college swimmers. The great coach and parent manipulates the environment without manipulating the person. At the toughest level I look at the lack of feedback in areas of swim teaching and training and cringe. This is why I make self video devices and hand them to the kids — EyeSwims I call them. It’s why I sell pace lights. It’s why we just picked up and are helping XMetrics that puts the stroke count and tempo and pace in the ear of swimmers as they swim. It why I co-authored Cool Coach twenty years ago with my former swimmer to give tools to coaches to track the effectiveness of their teaching and coaching. And, most important, it’s why I collaborate with swimmers and encourge coaches to empower versus controlling their athletes. You can’t teach someone to walk. They have to teach themselves. We forget that as we blame teachers and even ourselves for test scores or meet times. Our job is to build environments and manifest excellence or bring in those who do the same. Kids rarely learn stroke from elite performers — they rarely have the flexibility and strength right off the bat to keep the elbow high or the knees stright on the kick recovery or the core stable to mimmick the best stroke. But being with elite swimmers might teach the lifestyle and training characteristics of excellence. Great coaches build the environment. Great parents do the same and recognize great envionments. In reality great coaches are maybe five percent of USA Swimming. Great parents might even be more rare, which is why we are 24th in the world in math, science, and even language arts education in the world. I can immediately tell the great ones from the others when they call me for ideas or tools. You see the eyes light up. Eddie Reese bought my first set of Rangs. He bought them. Gregg Troy took on elook at my Fankle and bought them. Their eyes lit up. I could feel it. Therre are prents and even swimmers who do the same when they are at my gym with four types of electronic swim ergometers and over 400 exercises to choose from all specific to swimming. But, for the most part, people don’t get this at all. Fina doesn’t. They get the money from the suits and expensive backstroke starting blocks. But they don’t get the procuess and philosphy, and the spirit and envirnoment that reinforces excellence. Thank you very much Erin Himes! You get it 🙂 Steve Friederang, Competitiveswimmer.com.

William Burke