How I involve swimmers in the planning process? What’s the benefit of this?

Get them to complete a goal sheet or assessment sheet and from this consider personalising the plan, either adapting what they would do as part of a squad or think about a individual set and scheme of work. They buy into something if they feel responsible for it – this kind of intrinsic motivation is more powerful than extrinsic motivation.

When I change my mind.

I hadn’t appreciated that most of my swimmers would be taking part in a massive internal gala the following weekend and they naturally wished to practice starts and turns rather than drilling on specific strokes. I was more than happy to accommodate so after a warm up we worked on starts, turns, streamlining and transitions for all strokes from the deep end and shallow end.

Expecting a group of seven swimmers to turn up for a session that was earmarked for BK I found I had only one swimmer. Looking at his notes I knew this would be a great chance to work on his dive and BR so that is what we did.

Working with a group of young adolescent swimmers who were having problems with the rigid sessions being delivered by the former coach and knowing that fins would engage them we did a programme geared around dolphin kick and drills into FLY.

The aim is not always to get the planned result from the session, but to get a result or the best result from the session you end up taking. This might change because of the mix of swimmers or additional info: such as a event coming up or once in a while the need to shut close the pool for emergency repairs resulting in a need to do something else.

Content to push the training group hard whenever I took them to cover for someone else I was surprised to learn that half of them had just come from an hour long land based training session so were not only warmed up … but actually pretty tired out too! The session I had for them that included an 800m warm up then 1600m VO.

Swimmers have goal sheets that invited them to assess their strengths, weaknesses and goals.

They discuss this with me and this will then be reflected in the kind of sessions they do. They are asked to remind their coach of their individual ambitions/plans which may simply mean a swimmer ding more arms only work, or working on a combination of strokes or specific drills with a set that all can follow.