my biggest lesson working with swimming (so far)
When I got the call from Ash Delaney asking me to move to St Andrews, the statement that got me over the line was, “you need to be in a club program to learn what works and doesn’t work.” I realised this was going to keep swimnastics practical, relevant and relatable. Keep me in the real world with my feet on pool deck would also keep me creative and swimnastics evolving. So it has been a year and there have been some challenges, which I thrive on. The greatest challenge was putting swimnastics on maintenance as I learnt 80+ swimmers and 5 coaches. I kept reminding myself that these were the experiences I needed to be having in order for swimnastics to keep meeting the needs of swimmers and their coaches. The 2021-2022 season was a ride and here is a snapshot of the ups and downs.
2 greatest lessons
Why we need to build athletic swimmers.
This one hurt the most and took me a long time to find the ah ha moment. Rohan Taylor called back in 2015 to ask for gymnastics to build more athletic swimmers. I always knew athletic swimmers are robust, handle load, are adaptable, recover quicker. I had never seen the ramifications of not being built to be an athletic swimmer. For emerging open swimmers this means higher injury rates, constant load management and competing demands of building strength whilst still trying to get the work done in the pool. A headache! I tore through all my coaching values and methodologies only to come back to them stronger than ever before. Get your swimmers doing dryland as young as you can! This will avoid the competing demands later on in their career. Unfortunately you can’t chase back time. We have found a solution for the season ahead and the whole squad is excited for the months to come.
2. Teach posture!
We all know that the way we are living life is not creating ideal posture. A swimmer with poor posture is also more likely to have less than ideal body position in the water. There was limited to no dryland being done when I arrived at St Andrews. Everyone was excited and wanted to get moving so we did. I however, forgot the one vital thing we always start with in gymnastics - TEACHING posture! Not repeatedly asking for good posture but actually getting the mobility and strength that is required for it. In gymnastics we do it on beam and it’s reinforced when they go to ballet. So what did we do when state squad started getting niggly shoulders, taught and strengthened posture. Then we moved into through to learning how the shoulder moves, strengthening the shoulder and developing mobility in the thoracic spine. A couple of weeks later that niggles settled down.
2 greatest accomplishments
Worked out how best to meet with each coach
As the strength coach you need to work with every single coach on the team. Have good communication to ensure you are on the same page, sailing in the same direction. Work out what’s working, what’s not working, avoid competing demands on the same day, understand where individual athletes are at, the list doesn’t end. So how do you best work with 5 different personalities? With Ash it’s a national park walk and when we really need to walk things through it can get up to 20km, with Brad we clock up cafe time, it is always over a coffee, when it’s time with Bec it actually looks like a meeting with things getting done there and then, with Elijah & Eduardo its out in the surf sitting on our boards between sets. I am thankful for the team I get to be part of they have been a massive support. In the support role it is crucial that these relationships are working.
2. The gym culture and standards are set.
And they are working really well. There is awareness of how the body moves and it is prioritised over how much weight is lifted or how difficult the exercise. We have progressed on from learning how be an athlete in the gym! This took some time but it was worth every second. Now that the basics of how to work are set, progress is happening quicker! This is across all squads too, there is a gym culture where we have fun, work hard, get challenged, learn and focus. It is exciting to work with and the swimmers love gym!
2 changes for the season ahead
(there are a few on the list but we have started here)
Gym attendance
As a coach you put together a yearly plan, then a plan for each cycle, for each month, for each week, for each day. It is quite the task. Then you have athletes miss weeks at a time or sessions. It becomes difficult to see whether the planned worked or what changes need to be made for the following season. Hence, attendance. If we can objectively look at our plan and see an attendance score we have more idea of what factors need to be altered. If attendance was too low, the plan wasn’t actually completed. So then we look at the athletes with high attendance and see how the plan worked for them. I now take attendance on the screen in the gym and it shows percentage attendance for each individual. This allows for load altering if a week has been missed. At the end of the season I also have numbers for the coach, I also worked out last year how much swimming coaches love numbers, objective data. I came from a sport that was subjective so if that set looked better we were happy. Time to get into numbers and data!
2. Exercises on a time cycle
We now have a big clock on the whiteboard and it is the most used tool in the gym! Swimmers know how to work to a clock. Rest between exercises is now being completed. We had a bit of rushing going on between exercises initially. Putting them on a time cycle works even better than allocating the rest time between sets.
Thank you season 2021-2022 you taught me more than I could ever imagine, I have taken them and run (got to love being a quick learner!) So here we go into the next season. May we keep learning lessons and at least make sure they are different every season!