Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer based out of Victoria, BC. In feeding his passion for swimming, he has developed YourSwimBook, a powerful log book and goal setting guide made specifically for swimmers. Sign up for the YourSwimBook newsletter (free) and get weekly motivational tips by clicking here.
If you sat down for a few minutes and objectively looked at your swimming, and asked yourself what you wanted to change, what you wanted to improve on in the months moving forward, I don’t doubt you’d be able to think of at least of a couple of key things.
And the more you sat there thinking about it, the more things would come to mind.
No breathing in or out of every wall. A tighter streamline. More dolphin kicks. Better technique when you are tired. Never missing a morning workout. Nailing every one of your push-offs. Packing post-workout nutrition to every workout.
And so on.
From that initial goal or two sprouts about 18 more, and the only reason you stop at 18 is because you’ve become flustered and overwhelmed thinking about how much work and change all of those goals will be. This feeling of being washed over with the amount of hard work, dedication and commitment results in a stupefying and frustrating paralysis.
With too many directions to go into you end up not going in any of them.
Here is how to step back and take control of your goals:
Change one thing at a time.
Although we like to think otherwise—and I am just as guilty of this as anyone—when we let our ambitions get the better of us and try to improve a dozen things at once we end up arresting any sort of forward progress. Having too many things to do is overwhelming, frustrating us as we are left with no idea where to start.
As a result, we don’t accomplish much of anything.
The key to making change of any sort is to do it one at a time. Yes, you will want to do more, and you might even feel like you aren’t doing enough, but doing one thing well will always be better than doing 35 things not at all.
Progression is key.
Scaling is something we do in every area of our lives, so why aren’t we applying it to our goals in the pool?
If you decided today that you were going to become a better cook you wouldn’t pick the hardest recipe in the book. If you set the goal of adding 100 pounds to your front squat you wouldn’t go to the gym, load the bar and try to blast out a rep you’d never come close to approaching (and fold like an accordion).
Likewise with making sizable and noticeable changes in your swimming you know that it’s unrealistic to expect to go from novice to dynamo overnight.
Yes, it will take every fiber within you to not charge headlong into making massive changes, to resist the urge to change everything right now, but the likelihood of the new and improved swimming you sticking around is vastly improved when you scale your efforts in a sustainable manner.
Keep it simple.
Somewhere along the line we bought into the idea that things need to be complicated to be better. That they need to be difficult, hard to understand.
If a swimmer is fast it is because he has mastered some weird, ultra-unorthodox technique, and not because he shows up every day and works his butt off. If a girl destroys the competition at state it’s because she has some fancy diet and recovery program that would require a PhD to understand, and not because she makes the decision to get a full 8 hours of sleep every night no matter what.
The simpler your goals are in the pool, the less conditions and terms attached to them, the easier it will be to stay focused on banging them out each and every day. While we seem to crave complexity, what your goals really want is simplicity.
What is today’s step?
If you have heeded the above advice, and still find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the largeness of what lays ahead, simply focus on today, on what you can do right this moment to start heading in the right direction.
Action, no matter how small and trivial it may seem in the grand scheme of things, leads to more action. Little by little, step by step, this is how lasting and effective change is brought about.
About YourSwimBook
YourSwimBook is a log book and goal setting guide designed specifically for competitive swimmers. It includes a ten month log book, comprehensive goal setting section, monthly evaluations to be filled out with your coach, and more. Learn 8 more reasons why this tool kicks butt.
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