How Do You Know Your Programme Is Any Good?

In this miniseries, we will discuss the different aspects of the athlete support staff, what to look for in your coaches and swimming programme and how to recognise red flags from the people that are guiding you through your athletic career and development.

One of the key consideration’s athletes should think about is, is the programme you are in any good? If you are putting in all your effort, paying the fees and wanting to be the best athlete you can be then you need to be in a good programme to ensure the most optimal athletic development.

Look at the programme you are in. Are there any seniors? Are you and your teammates getting faster? Do you look forward to coming to the pool?

The coaches have a responsibility to make the training environment fun, safe and effective. To make the training environment effective coaches must have a deep understanding of the training processes and the physiological adaptations that the training will elicit. The coaches should be able to give a solid rationale to why your training is the way it is.

What seems to be the norm however is that a large number of swimming programmes use outdated methods involving thousands and thousands of meters every week. High meters might be appropriate for certain athletes, but we have seen up to 80,000 meters a week for 13, 14 and 15 which is just daft! Most swimming training is done because the coaches are former swimmers and that is the methods their coaches used. This is a poor rationale at best.

Previously we asked you to ask yourself if there are any seniors in your programme. This is a great way to see the future of your career in your current programme. If your programme has no seniors then this is a cause for concern. This could be due to several causes such as burnout, injuries or athletes leaving for other programmes. In our programme, we have seniors up to the age of 24, and they are still getting faster and faster. This is a great environment for our younger swimmers as well, it gives them people to look up to and shows that we have the capacity to continue developing athletes into the senior stage of their swimming careers.

If you want to swim for your country, you need a high-performance environment. This environment must foster growth, learning and safety from coach to athlete. Next time we will discuss these qualities and how they can be the difference between reaching the elite level or burning out before you reach the senior level.

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Stay safe.