SWIMMING GOLD

Three Key Learning Points: * In a 100 metre short course race, 50 metres of it is affected by walls. * Dive starts, turns and finishes are not skill work sitting beside your training. They are half the race. * Every dive is a race dive. Every turn is a race turn. Build it into what you’re already doing. Short course racing. Some people love it. Some people not so much. But when I talk to coaches about their short course plans, their programs and their workouts, they nearly always go one of two ways. The first group says - it’s short course, it’s a 25 metre pool, so we’ll do a lot more sprints. I get that. There’s something in it for a lot of coaches. The second group says the opposite - short course isn’t as demanding as long course, so we need to do more work. More laps. More volume heading into the short course season. You can argue either case. But I want you to consider a third option, and it comes from doing some very simple arithmetic. The Arithmetic: adding up a 100 metre race: Take a 100 metre event in a short course pool. The first 15 metres is affected by the wall - your dive or your backstroke start. Into the first turn, we know the 5 metres in and the 5 metres out are affected by the wall. Second turn - 5 in, 5 out. How you approach, how you push off, underwater, streamline etc. Third turn - 5 in, 5 out. And the final 5 metres to the wall, where there’s an enormous impact from thinking about how you’ll finish. Which arm you’ll finish on. Getting both hands on the wall in fly and breast. Now add it up. 15 metres. Plus 5 in and 5 out - that’s 25. Another 5 and 5 - that’s 35. Another 5 and 5 - that’s 45. Plus the last 5 to the finish. Fifty metres. Half of your 100 metre race distance is affected by walls. Your dive, your start, your turns and your finish are 50% of the race you are preparing for. The Third Option: match the focus to the arithmetic: So group one is adding sprints. Group two is adding volume. Neither of them is addressing the half of the race that walls decide. The third method is simply this. Increase your focus in training on dive starts, turns and finishes so it matches what’s actually happening in the water. Fifty per cent of every 100 metres you race short course is walls. Your training should look something like that. Race Quality: how to build it in without rewriting your program: Before you go away and rebuild your program around doing an extra 10 or 20 per cent of turns practice - there’s a much easier way to integrate this. Every dive is a race dive. Every start is a race start. Every turn is a race turn. Every finish is a race finish. Here’s what that looks like in practice. You’ve got an easy 400 free on the workout. The athletes are moving slowly, 60 to 75 per cent heart rate, whatever zone you want. Between the flags they cruise. Relaxed, easy, flowing. Aerobic pace. They could even be doing drill work between the flags - one arm fly, whatever your favourite is. But inside the flags, it’s race quality. Every single time. Race dive. Race turn. Race finish. You’re not adding sets. You’re changing the standard of the walls in the sets you already have. Summary: Do this properly and it doesn’t just improve short course racing. Your athletes arrive at the long course season with their skills at a completely different level, because they’ve spent months treating every wall as a race wall. So for short course this year, don’t just reach for more sprints or more laps. Do the arithmetic first. Half of every 100 metres you race is dive start, turn and finish. Set your focus accordingly - so that your swimmers’ success comes from their skills as much as their fitness, their power and their speed. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Run the arithmetic in front of your squad. Fifteen, five and five, five and five, five and five, plus five. Let them add it up themselves. A swimmer who has worked out that half their race is walls will never treat a turn as a rest again. * Set one rule for the whole season - inside the flags is race quality. Every session, every set, warm-up included. It costs no extra pool time and it changes thousands of repetitions. * Film turns from the side at race pace, not at drill pace. Most turn feedback is given on turns nobody was racing into. You cannot fix what you have never actually seen at speed. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with swimming coaches, swimming clubs and Learn to Swim groups all over the world and offers a unique mentoring and coaching program for aquatic professionals. Contact him at [email protected] or WhatsApp +61 414 712 074 for more details. Further reading: The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow. For swimming parents: Raising Athletes - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe

By Wayne Goldsmith Three Key Learning Points: * Coach’s Eye is a learnable skill, not a talent some coaches were born with. * Look, scan fingers to feet and feet to fingers, then stand back and look again. * Swimming is a technique-driven sport - yet technique is the thing coaches talk about least. Coach’s Eye. And no, not coach’s eye strain from twenty years of squinting at sunlight bouncing off water. (Although that’s real too and it’s a hazard of the job nobody warns you about.) I mean Coach’s Eye.. What you see as a coach when you’re coaching. Here’s the scene. You’re standing on deck next to an experienced coach. They glance at a swimmer and go “yeah, the butterfly’s not quite right”. “It’s a timing thing.” “Their feet are too high.” “Their arms are too low.” Three seconds. Done. Straight to it. And you’re standing there thinking “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at. How did they pick that up so fast?” Whether you’re a new coach, a Learn to Swim teacher, a stroke school teacher or a triathlon coach who’s found themselves on a pool deck - that gap feels enormous. It isn’t magic, my friends. That’s a highly developed Coach’s Eye. It’s a skill. And skills can be taught. Position: stop coaching from the end of the pool: Before we talk about the Coach’s Eye process, here’s one thing to consider. Most coaches coach from the end of the pool. I don’t like it. Bottom line - if your swimmers are swimming three kilometres, you should be walking five. You should be giving more than you’re asking of them. (That’s a video for another day.) But for technique specifically, here’s the problem. From end-on or front-on, with no underwater vision, relying purely on your eye - you see almost nothing. You cannot analyse what you cannot see. Let’s work through the Coach’s Eye process. Coach’s Eye Step One: stand back and just look: Go to the side of the pool. Look. Don’t diagnose yet. Don’t start hunting for the fault. Just see what you see and get a feel for it. You’ll notice a lot of good coaches “mimic” while they watch, i.e.standing on deck mirroring the swimmer’s stroke with their own arms, getting the feel of it in their own body. Try that. Copy the swimmer. Imagine it. Feel their stroke. And then - usually just by observing and mimicking - you'll have a hunch, e.g. “Okay - I think it’s a hip issue.” That’s enough for Coach’s Eye step one. A hunch is exactly what you’re after. Coach’s Eye Step Two: fingers to feet, feet to fingers: Now walk up and down the pool with the swimmer and take a good look at each of their body parts directly involved in swimming: * Fingers to feet: fingers, wrists, forearms, shoulders, head, body, hips, thighs, knees, shins, feet, toes. * Feet to fingers: toes, feet, shin, knee, thigh, hip, body, head, shoulder, forearm, wrist, fingers. Top to bottom. Bottom to top. Every piece in isolation. At first this part of the Coach’s Eye process feels slow. It is slow. That’s the point: you’re building the stroke dynamics library that the experienced coach is drawing on when they do it in three seconds. Coach’s Eye Step Three: stand back and look again: Back to the side of the pool. Look at the whole swimmer again. And now - now - you go “okay, I’ve got a pretty good idea what’s happening here”. Look. Scan. Look again. As you get better, the full body scan becomes less necessary, because you’ll glance and go “that’s a hip issue”. But that takes a while and for most of us mortals it takes a loooong while. We’re all a bit in awe of the high performance coach who calls it instantly. Don’t be. They’ve just done this ten thousand times. You can develop the same skill. Very Useful Technology: the phone in your pocket: You’ve got a phone in your pocket. (Even though of course none of us are ever on our phones on deck, are we!) Pull it out. Video the technical issue you’ve just identified. Then show the swimmer as soon as you possibly can. The reason matters. You want the smallest possible gap between what they felt in the water and what they see on the screen. That gap is where the learning happens - and it closes fast. One serious note. Rules about videoing swimmers are tight in a lot of pools and getting tighter and rightly so. * Follow your local safeguarding policy. * Get proper parental and facility management permission. * If videos need to go to parents rather than to kids, send them to parents. Do the right thing on safeguarding first, always. Then use the tool. Summary: Here’s what bothers me colleagues. So many coaches want to talk training sets. Lots want to talk sports science. Everyone wants to talk technology and AI. Very few coaches want to talk technique. And I don’t think that’s laziness. I think it’s because we never taught them how to develop a Coach’s Eye - so they never got comfortable with technique and as a result they default to what they can talk about confidently. “Let’s do hundreds.” “Let’s do more backstroke.” Sets and workouts and programs, instead of technique. But this is a technique-driven sport. We are moving human bodies through a medium roughly 800 times denser than air. Technique is what it’s all about. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Run the three steps on one swimmer at every session this month. One swimmer. Look, scan both ways, look again. Twenty sessions in you’ll notice the scan getting shorter on its own. * Mimic what you’re watching. Stand there and do the stroke with your own arms while the swimmer does it in the water. It feels ridiculous, it looks silly but it works. * Check your safeguarding policy before you film anything. Know your club’s rules, your pool’s rules and where the video is allowed to go. Sort that out properly and then the phone becomes a genuinely useful coaching tool. If you’ve got a different way - a better way - of developing Coach’s Eye, I’d love to hear it. Share it with our learning community. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with swimming coaches, swimming clubs and Learn to Swim groups all over the world and offers a unique mentoring and coaching program for aquatic professionals. Contact him at [email protected] or WhatsApp +61 414 712 074 for more details. Also available - The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now. Seven modules, built for real coaches with real time pressures.https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow And for swimming parents - Raising Athletes (includes The Talent Myth book).https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe

By Wayne Goldsmith Three Key Learning Points: * Propulsion is Newtonian, not aeronautical. Reach out, grab the water, pull straight through. * S-patterns, keyholes and question marks are obsolete - they just haven’t been told yet. * There is no perfect technique. Every swimmer is different - every technique is different. There are a million things written about swimming technique every week. Go to Google. Go to Gemini. Go to Chat. Go to Claude. Go to any of the online swimming or triathlon forums. You will find everything you could possibly want to know about swimming technique online and unfortunately a lot of it is wrong. I want to talk about the big picture stuff - the things I think every coach, every swimming teacher and everyone coaching coaches and teaching teachers needs to sort out in their own head first. And it starts with a phrase everybody knows. Keep it simple, stupid. In our case - keep it simple in swimming. K.I.S.S. Bernoulli: the theory the fluid mechanics experts laugh at: A long, long time ago, in the in the 60s, 70s and 80s, work came out about propulsion in swimming being built on “Bernoulli’s principle”: * Hand pitch angles had to be 45 degrees on entry in fly, back and free. * The human arm as the wing of an albatross. * The human arm as the wing of an aeroplane. * Hands as hydrofoils, moving through water the way birds fly and planes fly. It was complicated. It was very difficult to understand. And a lot of very good people struggled with it - which should have been the first clue. My friends, the reality is that the contribution of the hands and forearms working like hydrofoils and albatross wings is negligible. I know people who are genuine experts in Fluid Mechanics including an old friend who advises the Air Force on design issues. When I raise Bernoulli’s principle being applied to human beings using their hands like aircraft wings, he laughs at me. My son is studying Fluid Mechanics at university right now. He asked his lecturer about it - and got the same response. There may be some lift effect in breaststroke. There may be a small influence of lift on hand entry. But do your homework. Do your own research. And look at what’s actually happening in the water - which is the most important evidence there is. Get hold of some underwater footage of an international swim Meet and watch what the good swimmers are doing. It’s basically Newtonian physics. Reach out. Grab the water. Pull straight through. The stuff in the triathlon magazines, the stuff in the front section of your Learn to Swim journals and coaching books…..a lot of it is simply out of date. Patterns: the shapes we invented and can’t let go of: While we’re here, let’s do the other one: Pull patterns. In freestyle we used to say - touch, then trace an S. In butterfly - make a keyhole. (Although not many people nowadays have ever seen a keyhole!) Exaggerated S patterns. Question marks. Keyholes. Obsolete. All of it. Slow down some front-on underwater footage of world-class swimmers in any of the four strokes and look at what you actually see. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. You do not see complicated hand patterns, exotic pitch angles, keyholes and weird shapes in the vast majority of good swimmers. All of that came out of textbooks written in the 60s, the 70s and the 80s. And for reasons nobody has ever adequately explained to me, it still dominates swimming textbooks, coaching courses and teaching courses around the world today. Don’t teach weird patterns and bizarre shapes. Reach out. Soft hands. Grab the water. Keep pressure on the water. Pull straight through. Perfect: the only kid with perfect technique: The other thing about swimming technique I share with coaches everywhere is this. There is no perfect swimming technique. The only kid whose technique is textbook perfect is the kid whose picture is in the textbook. And that technique is perfect for exactly one person - the one in the photograph. There is no single stroke model that works for all swimmers, all ages, males, females, all strokes. The great and late Gennadi Touretski said the words that should be on the T-shirt of every Learn to Swim teacher on earth: “Every swimmer is different. Every technique is different”. Every swimmer is different. Every technique is different. Remember that. The Five H’s: get these right and you can teach anyone to swim: I once tried to get thousands of Learn to Swim teachers working in a very large aquatics management group to teach stroke development exactly the same way. Didn’t work. Couldn’t be done. Different pools, different teachers, different backgrounds. Too hard. So we stopped chasing uniformity of our teaching methods and went after uniformity of priorities instead: The Five H’s: * Head - in the right position. * Hips - in the right position. * Hands - soft, applying pressure all the way through the stroke. * Heels - relaxed and loose, so the kick can actually happen. * Huff - the breathing is right. Head, hands, hips, heels, huff. Head, hands, hips, heels, huff. Get the Five H’s right and then - then - you can play with hand pitch angle and degree of elbow bend and all the rest of it. And there’s a wonderful line from the wonderful Laurie Lawrence that everyone has quoted since. “If you can’t swim, you can’t swim”. It doesn’t matter what detail you pour into hand pitch and elbow bend. If the head’s in the wrong position they can’t swim. If the hips are in the wrong position they can’t swim. Get the basics wrong and all the technical understanding in the world makes no difference at all. Summary: Here’s the good news, colleagues. What we now know about stroke technique is far simpler than what we used to believe. Bernoulli. Aeroplane wings. Hydrofoils. Keyhole patterns. All that weird stuff we carried on about for four decades - (and unfortunately still carry on about in a lot of places) - most of it is no longer relevant. Keep it simple in swimming. Get the Five H’s right - head, hands, hips, heels, huff - and chances are your swimmer, your triathlete, your Masters swimmer, your learn-to-swim student will be a lot closer to moving efficiently and effectively through the water. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Audit your own language for a week. Count how many times you say S-pull, keyhole, pitch angle or elbow bend to a developing swimmer. Every one of those is a sentence you could have spent on head, hips, hands, heels or breathing. * Film front-on and underwater, then watch it slowly. Front-on is where the mythology falls apart and where you’ll see how simple the technique of the current crop of champion swimmers actually is. * Run every technique intervention through the Five H’s in order. If head and hips aren’t right, nothing below them on the list is worth your session time yet. If you’ve got different ways - better ways - of teaching swimming, coaching swimming or teaching teachers, I’d love to hear them. Keep it simple in swimming. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with swimming coaches, swimming clubs and Learn to Swim groups all over the world and offers a unique mentoring and coaching program for aquatic professionals. Contact him at [email protected] or WhatsApp +61 414 712 074 for more details. Also available - The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now. Seven modules, built for real coaches with real time pressures.https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow And for swimming parents - Raising Athletes (includes The Talent Myth book).https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe

Three Key Learning Points * The worst thing you can do is ask them to analyse what went wrong. * The car ride home is not the time to coach - even if you ARE a coach. * What they need most in that moment is unconditional love and acceptance. This post is ostensibly for swimming parents but it’s a good one for coaches too - because part of your job is educating the parents in your program on how to handle the big moments. So here’s the scenario. Your child has gone to a big meet. New goggles. New bag. Everyone’s been excited about the Meet for weeks. But, for whatever reason, their swimming performances didn’t meet their own expectations or yours or the coach’s. Now you’re in the car on the way home. They’re quiet in the back. Maybe headphones on. Maybe gaming. Maybe just staring out the window. There’s that silence that we as parents all know so very very well. And as a parent you’re thinking: “I’ve got to say something. I love them. I can’t bear to see them like this.” This is one of the most critical swimming parent moments you’ll ever experience. Let me walk you through what NOT to say and suggest what you can say and do that might actually help. Don’t ask them to analyse what went wrong: The absolute worst thing you can say is this: “Gee, I thought you’d swim a lot faster darling. What do you think went wrong?” They know they didn’t swim fast. Their coach has already spoken to them about it. They’ve seen their split times. Their teammates have already told them. A competitor or two probably had a go at them. They’ve been beating themselves up since they touched the wall. They do not need YOU - the person they love most - asking them to dwell on it a little more! Don’t try to coach them: “I was watching your backstroke today. You really need to throw your arms more. Push off faster. Kick harder in and out of the turn.” Don’t do it. You’re not their coach. And even if you ARE their coach - in that car, in that moment, you’re not. You’re their parent. That’s the only role that matters in that car in that moment. Don’t compare them to other kids: “Gee, Susie went really well today. Susie was so fast. You normally beat Susie.” Another massive NO! Comparing your child to other kids in that moment just makes them feel smaller and worse. Don’t go there. So what CAN you do? First - say nothing. If they’re in their mid-teens especially they’ll come to you when or if they’re ready. Pushing things only makes them withdraw further. Second - divert. “Hey, on the way home I thought we might grab some takeaway. What do you think?” Give them something small and joyful to think about that’s not related to swimming. Take the spotlight off the meet for a minute. They don’t have to be sitting in the back hitting themselves over the head with a brick the whole drive. Third - share something positive about YOU. “You know what - I really enjoy going to swim meets. I just love watching.” Tell them something that makes it not all about them and their performance. The bigger picture: I’ve been through this hundreds of times with sporting parents - not just with swimming but with football, rugby, tennis, basketball, rowing, gymnastics: every parent at some time will experience the car ride home after a sporting event. The car ride home is far more important than most parents realise. Get it wrong and you create more stress, more frustration, more sadness. You make it harder for the kid to come out of it. But get it right and it’s a chance to demonstrate something extraordinary - unconditional love. Whether they won nine gold medals and broke records, or got disqualified and missed their entry time - love them. Cuddle them. Tell them they’re amazing. Show them they’re valued for who they are not what they swam. If they have you as their “rock” - i.e. the certainty that you love them whether they win or lose - then they have the stable foundation to come back, recover, learn and grow. They always do. Summary: The car ride home is one of the most important moments in your child’s sporting life. Don’t analyse. Don’t coach. Don’t compare. Stay quiet, divert if needed, share something positive about yourself and above everything else - love them unconditionally. That’s the rock they will build the rest of their sporting career - and indeed the rest of their lives upon. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Educate Your Parents: Run a short parent workshop on the topic of the car ride home. Five minutes at a parent meeting could change dozens of swimmer experiences. * Hand Out the “What Not To Say”: Give parents a printable one-pager with the “three things not to say after a tough meet”. Make it easy for them to remember. * Model It Yourself: Coaches - the first conversation after a tough swim matters too. Same rules apply. Don’t pile on. Don’t analyse in the moment. The deep debrief can wait until the next training session. This is Wayne Goldsmith for Swimming Gold. Check out my new SPORTING PARENTS COURSE https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes RAISING ATHLETES - The Sporting Parent’s Guide to Getting It Right. You not only get a unique learning experience with videos and study guides but you get a free copy of my book THE TALENT MYTH - WHY CHARACTER BEATS GENETICS EVERYTIME! And use this CODE PARENTS2026ST at checkout to receive 25% off the price! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe

Three Key Learning Points: * The “sage on a stage” coaching model is failing teenage athletes and contributing to the dropout crisis. * If a swimmer solves the problem they own the solution - and ownership leads to self-responsibility which changes everything. * Coaching through questioning isn’t “soft or weak” - it’s exactly how the best teachers and university lecturers operate. When you ask most adults about the coaches they had when they were growing up they will often describe very similar experiences: The coach spoke. A lot. The coach gave instructions. The coach set the program. The coach told them how to do drills. The coach was always telling or yelling. It’s what we call “The sage on a stage” i.e. “I’m the custodian of all knowledge and information. I’ll tell you what to do and you do it.” That model of coaching is broken and the dropout data is screaming at us. We have a dropout crisis: Teenage dropout rates in swimming are extraordinarily high around the world and they’re only getting worse. It’s not just swimming either. Rugby, rugby league, AFL, hockey - most of the sports I work with are seeing the same thing. The response from most sports has been to tinker with the rules or to pour more money into marketing campaigns to try and increase participation. I think there’s a much better solution and it sits very squarely with coaches and coaching. Why teenagers walk away: When kids hit 14, 15, 16 they start to rationalise their relationships. School? “Yes, I need that relationship”. Part-time job? “Yes, I need money for a car, to buy stuff and to go out”. Boyfriend or girlfriend? “Yes, I’m growing and developing psychosocially. I want that relationship”. Then they look at swimming and they ponder: “Hang on. The coach has been standing at the end of the pool yelling numbers at me since I was 10. The relationship hasn’t changed. I don’t get much feedback. I have no input into my own program. I have no voice.” They quietly conclude that the swimming relationship isn’t serving them. So they come less. Then they stop coming. Solve the problem - own the solution: Here’s the shift. Instead of telling them, ask them. “Don’t breathe inside the flags” - said, told, yelled, screamed a hundred times - lands flat. But what if it sounded more like this? Coach: “Where did you take your last breath?” Swimmer: “On the wall coach.” Coach: “Is that going to make you faster or slower?” Swimmer: “Slower.” Coach: “Is there another way you could do it?” Swimmer: “Yeah - I could take my last breath four strokes from the wall and build my kick to the wall.” Coach: “That’s a good idea. I like that. Give it a go!” The swimmer solved the problem, they own the solution and the learning and they can take responsibility for putting it into action. When the swimmer pushes off the next time they’re not thinking “I have to do what coach told me to do.” They’re thinking “I’ll do this because I chose to. I saw the problem. I solved it. This is mine.” If you solve a problem you own the solution. Ownership of the learning changes everything. This isn’t being soft: A lot of old-school coaches hear this and think “You’re going soft. You’re relinquishing your coaching power.” Not at all! This is exactly how teachers run classrooms in modern high schools. This is exactly how university lecturers run lectures and tutorials. The whole education world has moved past the sage-on-a-stage model to a shared learning, collaborative learning approach. Swimming has been a bit slow to catch up - but we learn fast! Summary: If we want to keep teenagers in the sport we have to change the way we deliver the experience of swimming. Move from telling and yelling to asking and listening. Pose learning experiences as questions. Let them solve the problem. Let them own the solution. And remember, it’s their journey not yours. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * The 10-1 Rule: For every 5 instructions you’d normally give in a session try replacing one of them with a question. Build from there. * End-of-Set Debrief: After a key set ask the swimmers: “What worked? What didn’t? What would you try differently?” Listen before you respond. Let them feel heard, respected and listened to. * Standing Question: Pick one question to ask every swimmer every session. “What’s one thing you want to get better at today?” Then hold them accountable for their own answer. This is Wayne Goldsmith for Swimming Gold. If you liked this post check out my Sports Thoughts Substack with new weekly content on coaching, sports parenting, athlete development and youth sport: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe