Ali K
- Mar 16, 2021
- 2 min read

THAT PEAK PERFORMANCE

Updated: Mar 24, 2021

Every athlete, every coach, every parent, everyone involved wants peak performances to occur at a given time. In swimming as a coach, planning your sets, balancing training, creating a fun environment, recording swimmer performances, nutrition and many other factors that are not mentioned here play a significant role in achieving THAT PEAK PERFORMANCE.

A little background story before I share some sets that has made a positive impact on my athletes.

LOCO PARENTIS

Duty of care, Loco Parentis role, and genuine care make it so much easier to help your athletes reach their potential and enjoy the sport in a safe and caring environment.

In a season, I must stress that my swimmers and I do many technique work, goal setting sessions, dryland sessions that involve teamwork (all coaches being involved with this), lots and lots of casual talking, and professional talking.

Achieving the best is about the journey and being part of our athlete's journey.

BE PART OF THEIR JOURNEY AND THIS WILL HELP THEM REACH... 'THAT PEAK PERFORMANCE'

The journey starts with technique work, and this is the easiest and the most difficult task...

This method helps my team, and I be part of each athletes journey. Sometimes, we stop during a set and talk about technique work (brainstorm)... Everyone loves it, can you imagine? I guess missing part of the 10 x 200 Threshold would make everyone enjoy the conversation, naturally, right? :) We all have a rule during our brainstorm technique development session NO JUDGEMENT - NO RIGHT OR WRONG - BE AS UNIQUE AS POSSIBLE

We all take the time to brainstorm. All ideas, suggestions and suggestions go on the whiteboard, everyone contributes, and I MEAN EVERYONE. I take this as an opportunity! I always remember each athletes' technique ability and improvement plans and plan my feedback accordingly to provide quality feedback about the skill (usually short).

We have a separate plan and goals as a team on how we want to see our swimmers perform a certain skill at each age group/stage at a given time in the season. This makes everything tangible, organised and transparent.

It gives all of the athletes the chance to contribute and feel part of the team. Something different and beats the monotonous system. Just training hard to reach that peak performance will NEVER work or be a SUCCESS.

This doesn't mean we don't do the hard work... far from it!  

We get to work even harder!

I am sharing a mid-season cycle. In these sets, you will not see a lot of technique work for the reasons given above.

This is an example set of what we do in an International School Swimming Team, Age group athletes who are 18&Unders, by sharing this, by no means am I suggesting this is the correct way, and this is how it has to be done... Circumstances change. You know your swimmers better than anyone else.