As the long course season begins, it is a great time to take a look at the big picture: what do you want to accomplish in the next year and what steps can you take to get there? Before we home in on how to set goals for the summer, let’s discuss 4 steps to better goal setting in general that will make your dreams more tangible.
1. Communicate with your Coach
Speak with the person who is going to be designing your workouts, watching you train, and giving you feedback after your races. Schedule a meeting with your coach where you can discuss how to move forward with the next year of training. Make a rough outline for the year in terms of training cycles, dryland, meets, and end of season goals. The better communication you have with your coach, the easier it will be to trust in his or her training methods and the better relationship you both will have. Give feedback on the things you thought went well last season and areas where you think you can improve. Vocalize your long-term goals and discuss any new elements you may incorporate in your training.
2. Write Down your Goals
Once you have vocalized your goals, write them down. When they are in written form, goals cease to be an intangible idea in your mind and they take on a more realistic shape. Whether you like to have them written down where you see them every day, or simply put them on paper is up to you. This process helps you organize your thoughts and identify with what exactly you want to accomplish.
3. Be accountable- share with a teammate
The next step in effective goal setting is finding an accountability buddy. Share your goals with a teammate—maybe someone in your training group or someone you connect with—and listen to their goals in return. This will help you keep each other accountable when training gets hard in addition to understanding one another better. Your teammates push you to be better in workouts; respect their goals and remember that they will be an integral part of your success.
4. Make Big Plans
Swimmers are some of the toughest athletes out there—Dream big and set the bar high.
About BridgeAthletic
BridgeAthletic works with elite professional, collegiate, and club swimming programs to provide a turnkey solution for dryland training. Led by Nick Folker, the top swimming strength and conditioning coach in the world, our team builds stroke-specific, custom-optimized dryland programs for each of our clients. The individualized workouts are delivered directly to athletes via our state of the art technology platform and mobile applications. Check Nick and BridgeAthletic out as recently featured in SwimSwam.
Nick Folker is the Co-Founder and Director of Elite Performance at BridgeAthletic. Nick’s roster of athletes includes 35 Olympians winning 22 Olympic Medals, 7 team NCAA Championships and over 170 individual and relay NCAA championships. Megan Fischer-Colbrie works as the Sports Science Editor at BridgeAthletic. Megan was a four-year varsity swimmer at Stanford, where she recently graduated with a degree in Human Biology.
The Championship Series by BridgeAthletic is designed to empower athletes with tips from the pros that will help them reach peak performance come race day. We will be covering competition-focused topics such as nutrition, recovery, stretching, and mental preparation.
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