I’ve often said that coaches are destined to be tortured by the challenges they could not overcome as athletes. And so it was that I found myself at the first championship meet I ever coached, watching my team unravel in front of me.
From the age of about sixteen on, I really struggled at “big” meets. Like most swimmers, I’d had the ignorant confidence of youth snapped. I tried to put it back together, but that’s the thing about ignorance- when it’s gone, it’s gone. We should celebrate this transition, but often we don’t. We hope to be ignorant again someday.
The rest of my career has been an obsessive journey to understand this phenomenon and inoculate athletes against this bug. Just now, walking through my neighborhood on a (finally) beautiful summer day, I had a breakthrough.
Replicability
What attracted me to Positive Psychology is that it aligns perfectly with coaching. Coaching is not a reactive pursuit. If it becomes reactive, then you’re on the path to burn out. You can only move in crisis for so long, although manage to have more resistance than others.
Coaching, to me, is proactive. You plan for events far in the future, and you provide training and guidance. A path, if you will, to whatever goal lies ahead. I don’t believe that people that are “good on their feet” just get there randomly. No, they are practiced, perhaps millions of repetitions until they appear spontaneously capable.
But why does repetition help us? I think on a basic level we think that repetition makes performance automatic. That’s certainly true, but not the full picture. Everything works as part of a system.
The type of training that we do in the sport of swimming is well known for it’s repetitiveness. Swimmers are far ahead of most in terms of “reps” in relation to what an actual swim race looks like. On the high end swimmers may do 8-10,000 yards in a workout, where the majority of races they compete in are 200 yards or less. That’s 40-50x the race distance.
“Low” volume athletes may do as little as 3000 per workout, which is still 15x a 200 distance. It’s probably not accurate to call that low volume. In swimming we have high volume and we have higher volume.
The thought with higher volume training is, greatly simplified, that you can’t do very many repetitions at full tilt. So training at maximum intensity will result in very few repetitions. The thought with low volume training is that there is value in training as close to maximum intensity and compromising therefore on the number of repetitions.
Now what does any of this have to do with people struggling competitively? I’ll share with you a phenomenon that I resisted for a long time. I didn’t want it to be right, but finally i found it staring me right in the face. Once ignorance is gone, it’s gone. To understand it, though, you’re going to have to understand what kind of performance possibilities a high volume vs very high volume training creates.
Wide vs Narrow Band
I’m not a good artist, but perhaps I can’t paint a picture with words. When you train a very high volume, what you end up with is a very narrow performance band. That is, the difference between the worst possible performance you could have versus the best possible performance you could have is very small.
Put in very specific, swimming terms, a swimmer with a narrow band trains and will compete in the 200 free. Picture the band as a scale of 1-100, where 1 is the 1/100 worst performance and 100 is the 1/100 best performance. His “1” performance is 1:46.9. His 100 performance is 1:45.0. This is what I mean when I say that very high volume creates a very narrow performance band.
Now, for most of my career I only trained people high volume. I did not push for the most reps I could, instead I focused on the quality of the reps. What I observed is that this created a wider band of possible performance. So, in the example of the swimmer above, the “1” performance might be 1:47.9, but the 100 performance is now 1:44.0. I’ve kept the math simple, there is variability in any athlete.
Here’s where the biggest misunderstanding came into play, the one that I was woefully ignorant to. You might guess that in both scenarios, each of the 100 possibilities are equally possible. I certainly did! I was tempted by the possibility of faster swimming, the probability that something exceptional could happen. For a long time I considered higher volume training to be a waste of time that “dulled the knife edge” of athletes.
Only, that’s not exactly how it played out. I think that in higher volume, narrow band athletes, every possibility on the spectrum from 1-100 is equally possible. But the wider the band of performance goes, the less probability that the high end of performance will occur. The reason has something to do with the mind and the body.
The Body Remembers
One of the challenges in getting people to “think” positively is that positive thinking can easily be overpowered by negative thinking. The fear of something going wrong can easily override all the positivity most people can muster.
The wider that performance band grows, the more that any potential athlete will fear the low end of the band. Inexorably, they will gravitate towards it because the fear overpowers the hope of achieving something amazing. And coaches will fume with frustration at watching someone with so much promise constantly underperform. So to return to the 200 free example, you’re more likely to see a lot of 1:47s even though you know 1:44 is possible.
One of the biggest psychological fallacies is that mind and body are distinct. What we think of as our “mind” is really just a tiny part of our nervous system that we are aware of and can rudimentarily direct. What we think of memories are the translation of an entire nervous system into something that narrow part can understand.
Let me put this in another way. Most people’s earliest “memory” that they hang onto is from when they are around 3-4 years old. Many people in psychology believe, however, that memory goes far beyond what we can functionally recall. Essentially, the entire nervous system remembers, and it’s memory goes far deeper and wider than what we can process.
I believe that athletes’ nervous systems remember their training when they step behind the block. So even if cognitively they believe that the high end of performance is possible, their body remembers that the low end is possible too. And it remembers how you feel after that low end happens. Those two things combined can make trigger fear, and fear is disproportionately more powerful than positive thinking.
Lots of youth athletes can manage to do enough repetitions that their band will be very narrow. Will this ensure that they never underperform? Certainly not. Nothing is a magic bullet. What it does do is make it far less likely. It makes the disappointing performances far less disappointing and disastrous. On the flip side, the curve is exponential, as the likelihood of a truly “bad” performance falls of a cliff, the likelihood of a good one goes up steeply.
Implications for training
One of the goals of training should be enough repetition that the entire nervous system of an athlete finds that even the “worst” outcome can’t be too bad. Boredom is not a bad thing, especially in 2024 it can potentially be a slower path to growth, but as I’ve argued here before, slow is better than fast. However you achieve that is a matter of coaching- convincing people to do what is best for them is always easier said than done.
There’s a reason why old school swim coaches are known for pushing volume and repetition. There’s a reason why Brett Hawke will be an unmitigated failure as a club swimming coach. Repetition is how we gain confidence. It’s how we learn to be our best selves in adverse situations. It’s through thousands of small failures, just big enough to motivate us to change but not big enough to send us reeling, that we build confidence.