Swim Life

By Graham Bodner (Archvie) As a coach, I always get asked the age-old swimming question: "How do I best prepare for a swim meet?" Meet preparation comes in many forms, and many different time tables. The best swimmers don’t wait until the day before the big swim meet. They spend the months and weeks...

12 Questions You Should Ask During College Recruiting Process By Ashley Illenye (Archive) Each year, high school seniors must make one of the biggest decisions of their young adult lives: Where they will spend the next four years of their lives and educations. Recruiting trips primarily decide where...

7 Memorable and Meaningful Coaches' Gift Ideas With Thanksgiving behind us, shopping for the upcoming holidays will pick up. So, here are some considerations while out and about, or surfing online. Our swim coaches give us so much during our swimming careers: inspiration, guidance, counseling, educa...

5 Ways Swimming Can Help Your Everyday Life One of the most common desires a person can have is to live a healthy lifestyle, which opens up many opportunities in both the present and future. Swimming can accomplish just this, as it is a perfect exercise for the entire body that can be done by people...

8 Ways to Thank Your Teammates Teammates are special people. We spend hours of our weeks throughout the year with them, during long meet weekends and long practices. They are there to pick us up after hard races and hard days at school and work. Teammates are some of the most important people within...

15 Truths About Swimming Swimming is a sport like no other. You learn a lot about yourself throughout your years as a swimmer and the sport inherently instills valuable life lessons in you. Even when your time as a competitive swimmer is done, you still continue to learn more about the sport and hav...

As swimmers, we can look for quick fixes. We know that we can adjust a flip turn here, tweak a breath there, and throw in a few extra dolphin kicks off of our start—and that could shave time off of even the shortest of races. However, we are not always eager to reach for the more long-term aids to o...

3 Ways To Maintain Mental Toughness Through Demanding Sets Whether you're a club swimmer trying to qualify for Olympic Trials or a high school swimmer trying to capture your first state cut, every swimmer has endured their share of hard practices. Tough sets make swimmers some of the strongest a...

Meal-Prepping for Race Day: Three Foods That Will Fuel the Body The big day has finally arrived. Over the last few months, you have spent hours in the pool perfecting your strokes, turns and dives for this moment. And now it’s time to compete. While training is crucial for high-pe...

Swimming Can Be a Brutal Sport: Remember These Tips The act of being vulnerable is different for everyone. As aquatic athletes, we put a lot of ourselves out for the world to see, and it takes a lot to do what we do every day. Swimming is a fairly individualized sport, so however we swim in a given ...

Forget Me Nots: Essential Items Needed For Every Swim Meet Too often, swimmers need to remember their swim meet essentials. Coaches always have swimmers who may have forgotten the items they needed to race and found out too late. Swim meets can be hectic, and it's normal to forget specific equipment...

The Former Swimmer: 5 Things They Miss From the Daily Grind (From the Swimming World Archive) By Lauren Williams, Swimming World Intern I never thought the day would come when I would miss getting in the water. Like many of my former teammates, I waited for the last day of our conference championshi...

Every swimmer has one or more habits, superstitions or rituals that they cannot live without. Some are simple while others are complex and drawn out. Certain ones may only apply to meets, while others could be a daily occurrence. After spending some time reflecting with teammates and friends from ar...

By: Kate Smarjesse, Swimming World College Intern There are a few sentences Coach can say that really kill the mood at practice. Our expressions sink when our coaches say certain things, and we are always convincing ourselves that our suffering somehow brings our beloved coaches great joy. Here are ...

5 Ways to Find Your Passion for Swimming Again While swimming can get monotonous sometimes, it is easier to get through it all when you're feeling passionate about the sport. Losing your passion for swimming makes the everyday struggles much harder to get through. I often find myself struggling to r...

Making Swimming a More Spectator-Friendly Sport Historically, swimming is a sport that only gains national attention every four years during the Olympic Games. Apart from these eight days of excitement, swimming is widely unknown by the average person. If you’ve ever swum at a high school meet, or a...

5 Strength Training Exercises to Improve Swimming Performance By Kayla Riemensperger Weight training is often a highly debated topic in the world of swimming. While there is no clear-cut right or wrong answer to whether or not weights are beneficial for developing swimmers, many year-round programs ...

6 Tips For Getting Over the Midseason Slump The end of the year is quickly approaching, which means that the school semester is winding down and winter break is coming soon. With that also comes the middle part of the winter swim season, and often the midseason slump. It is often the hardest section...

5 Impossible Things to Explain to the Non-Swimmer By Erin Himes, Swimming World College Intern Swimming is a different sport, which is why explaining things to non-swimmers can get tricky sometimes. While swimmers pretty much speak another language, here are a few of the hardest things to explain to...

6 Ways to Survive Through Swim Practice Surviving a swim practice can get a bit rough. Sometimes, it’s the workout. Sometimes, it’s just not your day. Every swimmer has their own strategies for making it through. Here are six of the most common ways swimmers endure their swim practices... 1. The Clo...