Difficulties during stroke changes

Making stroke changes is difficult, especially for younger swimmers. Alexander Popov’s coach, Coach Gennadi Touretski, once said that it took Alexander about 100,000 m of focused swimming to take a minor change in his freestyle. Coaches may sometimes feel that they don’t have the necessary knowledge, or that his/her swimmers don’t have the ability, but this is not the problem. Coaches real challenge in helping his/her swimmers to improve their stroke is to keep them focused until the good skills become habitual and then continue to reinforce and polish those good habits. They have to realize that many barriers stand in the way of positive change.

Some of them are:

• Difficulty. It is hard to form a new habit, especially when the old one is natural and automatic. Change requires thinking about the change all the time and practicing it over and over until it is just as natural and automatic as the previous habit. Swimmers must think about skills they had done unthinkingly, and most swimmers can’t focus for the necessary amount of time. This is especially true for young swimmers who love splashing each other and for chatty swimmers who simply must discuss the day’s events.
• Discomfort. Changes are also hard to make because they often hurt. Different ways of swimming a stroke use different muscles and muscle patterns, and often swimmers will complain after trying a new stroke that they hurt in strange places. This is to be expected; the new muscle-use patterns are not very strong.
• Lack of trust. True coachability is rare. It is the rare swimmer who trusts that a new stroke that feels unnatural and makes him/her slower (at least initially) is for the best. The more success a swimmer has had with a bad stroke, the less likely s/he is to want to change. This attitude is common with young swimmers who are bigger and stronger than their peers and who win because of their size and strength.
• Ignorance. Most swimmers have no clue what they are actually doing when they swim. One of the fundamentals roles of a coach is to teach swimmers to feel what they are doing and to learn to read the signals their bodies are sending about what is working and what is not.
• Complexity. Change is hard because the one little stroke point you want to change is part of a larger, multipart whole; each part of which has accommodated its functioning to all the other parts as they currently are, even if they are inefficient. A change in one part affects all the others.
• Lack of confidence. Most swimmers don’t like to do things they are not good at. Even if the coach make a well intended lecture that will aim at convincing them that their weak are precisely those where they can make the greatest improvements they will not listen.

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