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 a...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 mos...

Three Key Learning Points: * First movement matters - what part of the swimmer’s body moves first usually determines the success of their first 15 metres. * The “little hole” - hands together, feet together, body in streamline before entry. * The “ three kicks” - kick fast underwater, kick fast to the surface, kick INTO the stroke. There’s a lot of talk on the internet about swimming speed - what...

Forget Bernoulli. Forget precise hand pitch angles. Forget complex angular analysis. Let’s make swimming biomechanics practical for every coach. The Problem With Traditional Biomechanics Education Coaching courses love to throw physics at new coaches. Bernoulli’s principle. Lift versus drag propulsion. Optimal elbow angles of 127 degrees. Angular velocity calculations. Meanwhile, in the REAL world...

We’ve overcomplicated training zones for beginner coaches and it’s time to fix it. The Problem With Current Models Most coaching education programs throw 6 or 7 different training zones at first year coaches. Threshold, VO2 max, lactate tolerance, aerobic endurance, race pace, recovery, anaerobic power; the list goes on and on. Here’s the reality: you’ve got 25 kids in the pool, three lanes, two h...

By Wayne Goldsmith Introduction: Every swimming coach does drills and skills work at the same time in their practices. We can do it differently and better! Three Critical Learning Points: * The typical structure — drills and skills first, main set second — means technique is generally practised when swimmers are fresh. * Skills that only work when rested aren’t race-ready skills. * The fix: integr...

Introduction: The non-stop main set is a relic of 1980s thinking — and it’s producing mediocre swimming disguised as hard work. Three Critical Learning Points: * Pushing straight through a 20 x 100 set often means technique collapses, bad habits are reinforced and swimmers just swim to survive. * Splitting the main set into two parts — with a purposeful break in the middle — restores quality skill...

By Wayne Goldsmith Every swimming coach does some form of skills practice in their training sessions every day. For the most part, coaches focus on learning and practicing skills — but rarely test whether those skills are actually race-ready. The challenge is that there’s a big gap between doing a skill well in training and executing it under race conditions. Here are four steps to bridge that gap...

By Wayne Goldsmith One of the hottest topics in swimming is always Dryland Training. When I speak at conferences, it’s inevitably a question from the audience. Swimming coaches have more opinions about dryland than just about anything else. Here are the three most commonly asked questions: * What are the best dryland exercises and programs? * When should we do dryland — before or after pool workou...

By Wayne Goldsmith Let’s get this right from the start: There are NO 7 year old backstrokers. There are NO 9 year old freestylers. There are NO 10 year old IMers. There are just kids who swim — who, at that point in their development, swim one specific stroke a little better than the other strokes. Now I know coaches and parents everywhere are reading this and thinking “ He’s wrong. Johnny the 8 y...

By popular demand — let’s talk about speed. There’s a lot written about it. A lot talked about it. And a lot of confusion about how to actually develop it. Here are my five fundamentals of going fast, fast, fast: 1. Forget “throw your arms” I’m not a fan of that old drill where kids get on their back and just throw their arms as fast as possible. Some call it overspeed training. I don’t buy it — p...

By Wayne Goldsmith A lot of coaches, when they start out, focus on one thing: physiology. The body. The physical elements of swimming. They spend years looking for drills, workouts, training programs, session plans. They go to conferences. An elite coach stands up and talks about their sets and reps, their periodisation. Everyone writes it down or takes a photo of the PowerPoint. Everyone’s lookin...

By Wayne Goldsmith Coaches and parents often ask me: “How do I help my swimmer develop confidence?” Here’s the equation I use: Confidence = Belief × Evidence Think of confidence as a can — the Confidence Can. Our job as coaches — and as swimmers — is to fill that can with experiences. Evidence that proves “I CAN do this.” Every quality training session. Every race where they held their technique u...

By Wayne Goldsmith I often get asked to do pool deck sessions with swim teams when I travel. Most of the time it’s drills and skills practices or “motivation” talks, attitude talks etc. But there’s one session I love to do because it’s so important: Straight Line Swimming. Swimming is a straight line sport. We start in a straight line: it’s called Streamlining. We swim in a straight line and avoid...

By Wayne Goldsmith No matter what stroke. No matter the age of the squad swimmer. From “Minis to Masters” - there’s 7 Technique Tips that I guarantee will improve the swimming technique of every swimmer you coach. * Soft hands; * Loose feet; * Head and hips relationship; * Breathing; * Slow to fast; * Relax Relax Relax; * Feel - Connect - Pull. I promise you - these Magnificent 7 work every time!...

Write a training session for yourself, coach! We all write workouts for our athletes. We know the repeats, the drills, the distances, the times. We prepare everything in advance for our swimmers. But what about YOUR plan? Add a column to your workout that says: “How I Will Coach.” So when the swimmers’ workout says “10 x ABC Drill” — yours says “Be energetic. Give individual feedback. Change the s...

What would you do if you had ONE session with a team you don’t know, in a place you’ve never been, sometimes in a language you don’t speak, in a culture you don’t understand? I have the best job in the world. I get to travel around the globe spending time with swimming coaches, swimmers and swimming families everywhere. When I travel, coaches will often ask me to come and visit their pool and spen...

By Wayne Goldsmith This is without doubt my favorite story to tell when I do Club visits, swimming parents workshops and coaching clinics: The 5 a.m. In A Swimming Household story. Please share this with every swimming parent you know. It is a funny story - but in my experience - having done hundreds of swimming club visits all over the world - it’s also very very true. The bottom line - the key m...

By Wayne Goldsmith I’ve been to over 1000 swimming pools. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Fiji Islands, USA, South Korea, Zimbabwe, South Africa, England, The Isle of Man, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, The Netherlands, The Philippines, Greece and Italy - and a few more places I’ve probably forgotten. And the “default” version of coaching...

Coaching is moments that matter. I was coaching a 14 year old. He looked sad and flat and tired and I asked him how he was going. He said, “I’m ok. I just wish I was more talented like Steve. He doesn’t train much and yet he keeps kicking my butt in races. It’s not fair.”. I replied, “From where I’m standing, when I see you I see a tough young man, who never gives up, who always tries his best, wh...

I was in Zimbabwe doing a swimming clinic in 1996 for WORLD AQUATICS - FINA as it was. The hosts took me to a local swimming program. Run down pool, no lane ropes, no backstroke flags, no starting blocks. Cold water. The sides of the pool had green scum on them. One of the kids told me they were toad eggs and they had to be careful not to swallow them. Coach - a very good guy - was a butcher - ver...

By Wayne Goldsmith ir Alex Ferguson would stop training to talk one-on-one with players. In that moment, they were the only person who mattered. Laurie Lawrence told me: “Don’t put heart rate before heart.” If you see a moment to inspire an athlete — grab it. They can always do more reps later. Phil King , Olympic gold medal coach, put it this way: think about the impact of missing coaching opport...