One of the most important skills you can develop is the ability to look after yourself. It is easy when you are a young swimmer, mum and dad do everything. But as you get older and more serious about training and racing, you need to take responsibility for looking after yourself and making sure you are fit and well and ready for anything.

How does a driver know that his or her car is going OK?

The driver looks at the dials and gauges on the dash board and gets information about the various parts of the car. A quick look at the car’s instrument panel can tell the driver a lot about how the car is operating: oil pressure, speed, engine temperature, battery charge levels, revs, water pressure and so on are all available and at the ready to give the driver details on how the car is performing.
This allows the driver to make clear decisions about how to drive and what needs to be done to keep the car working at its best.

It would be nice if you had a set of dials and gauges on your arm or chest or legs that you could look at every day and check to see how your body is going. Imagine being able to look at a dial that told you how tired you were, how much food you needed to eat, how hard you needed to train and how much sleep you needed.

Short of radical surgery to turn yourself into a half human, half robot swimming machine, there are some simple things you can do everyday to manage and monitor how your body is adapting the stress and strains of training and racing.

It starts with writing down some of the following things in a training diary or training logbook. Your logbook is your set of dials and gauges that tells you how the “swimming machine” is going.

Here are some ideas of what to put in your training diary:

Smiley Faces

In your training diary or on a training chart draw a smiley face that best describes how you feel on that day.

• Draw this face if you feel great.

• Draw this face if you feel OK – just average.

• Draw this face if you feel really low, slow, tired and fatigued.

Sometimes it is hard to put into words how you feel but these faces can sometimes say a lot more than a page of notes. Don’t restrict yourself to these three faces – be as imaginative as you like. Try to draw how you feel.

Take your own heart rate

Your heart is an excellent indicator of how hard your body is working. It is also a good indicator of how well your body is recovering from hard training and a tough competition schedule.

Take your heart rate every morning just after you wake up. Please two fingers lightly on the outside of your wrist near the base of your thumb. You will feel a little pulse rhythmically beating away. This is called your RHR – Resting Heart Rate.
Count the number of beats you feel for 30 seconds then double that number to get BPM – Beats per minute.

As you get fitter and stronger from training, your RHR should get lower and slower. This basically means your heart is getting more efficient at doing what it has to do. Fit swimmers will have a consistent RHR every morning that will not vary more than a beat or two.

However, if you are training too hard and not getting enough rest, your resting heart rate will actually increase. It is not uncommon for a swimmer training too hard to experience increases in their resting heart rate of 5-15 beats per minute.

Mood

Being “moody” is also a good indicator of how your body and mind are adapting to training and competition.
Use the mood scale – a rating scale of 1-5 where “one” is feeling really low and in a bad mood and “five” is feeling great and fully charged – ready to take on the world.

Athletes who are in a bad mood, feeling flat, negative and angry are often just showing the signs of over training and over straining in the pursuit of excellence.

Sleep

Tired athletes for some reason often sleep poorly. The short answer might be that the bodies of tired athletes are still working even when they are resting; their bodies are using rest time to repair, rebuild and regenerate and constantly stay in an active state.

Rate the quality of your sleep out of 5. “One” is a terrible sleep – one of those terrible nights where you tossed and turned and struggled to get any sleep. A “five” sleep means you fell asleep quickly and slept soundly most of the night.
Rating the quality of your sleep rather than the quantity makes sense as it is virtually impossible to remember exactly when you fell asleep.

Seems a bit crazy, but it is often the case that really tired athletes have difficulty sleeping. This means they go to bed tired, wake up tired and stay tired most of the time. Good sleep and good swimming go hand in hand.

Weight

Get in the habit of weighing yourself usually in the morning after going to the toilet but before eating or drinking anything. The main reason for doing this is to make sure you are not losing weight. Fit, healthy, growing swimmers generally keep a fairly even, constant weight. However, sudden weight loss over a 24 hour period can mean one of three things:

• You are dehydrated
• You are fatigued and your body is struggling to maintain normal functions
• Both of the above.

Get in the habit of aiming to weigh the same just before going to bed as you did just after waking that same morning. Weight loss over the time you are awake is generally just water loss, water loss that needs to be replaced.

Muscle Soreness

When muscles work hard, sometimes they feel tight and sore. Sometimes this soreness will not become obvious until a day or two after a tough training session or following hard racing. This soreness is called D.O.M.S. (Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness) and can literally be a pain in the neck (or butt or arms or legs or somewhere else).
In your diary, record muscle soreness. A rating of “1” means your muscles are feeling strong, loose and relaxed and a “5” means your muscles feel like you have gone ten rounds with the world heavy weight boxing champion (and lost).

Self Monitoring Recording Sheet (example)

You can record your information on a simple sheet like this. In this example, notice how as the week progresses, that the swimmer shows several signs of tiredness and fatigue. On Friday, the swimmer drew a sad face and reported being in a bad mood (ie 2 out of 5), having poor quality sleep (1 out of 5) and rated their muscle soreness as high (4 out of 5).

Also between Wednesday and Friday the swimmer lost two kilograms of body weight. Whilst this by itself is not a big problem, added to the other factors (sleep, mood and muscle soreness) it may be a sign all is not well.

In addition, the swimmer’s heart rate was steady early in the week, then like everything else, things seemed to get worse by Thursday and Friday.

This is one swimmer who was looking forward to the weekend!

It is important to note that one of these signs may not mean anything at all. For example, your morning heart rate can be higher than usual if you have drunk a little too much caffeine the night before, gone to bed dehydrated or had a scary dream. However, two or three of the warning signs happening at the same time may mean you have a problem on the way.

A picture tells a thousand words so sometimes it is a good idea to put the information into a chart or graph. This Self Monitoring Chart clearly shows the profile of a tired swimmer.

Summary

Look after yourself. The best coach, the best pool, the best program are of little use if you are always too tired and too fatigued to take advantage of these opportunities.

Keep a training log or training diary and record the day to day workings of your body. Over time you will learn what works best for you. Your ability to monitor and manage yourself will be an important key to being successful.

Training means you try your best
Then you need to rest, rest, rest.
When you race you’ll beat every other,
If you learn to rest and recover.
Wayne Goldsmith

‘Tis the Season to Recover, Fa La La La La, La, La, La La.

So, the swimming season has ended…or so you thought. Here are a few suggestions on how to use the break between swimming seasons to rest, recover, regenerate, re-energise, restore, replenish, refill and re-invigorate!

1. Take up another healthy sport like jogging, mountain bike riding, hiking, snow skiing, field hockey or soccer – the choices are endless (as are the mental and physical benefits).
2. Read a book about healthy nutrition for high performance athletes.
3. Take a cooking course on how to cook healthy, nutritious foods for optimal athlete performance.
4. Sleep in a few times each week –but not for too long – about an extra hour a day extra sleep is enough to get the benefits of some extra rest but not long enough to disturb your biorhythms.
5. Take a course in yoga and improve your flexibility, strength, balance, co-ordination and posture.
6. Talk to an athletic sprint coach about how to improve your starts – no one understands fast starts like these guys!
7. Spend some quality time with your family.
8. Spend some quality time with your friends.
9. Spend quality time with yourself.
10. Talk to your teacher about any assignments or projects that are due in the next swim season and get a head start. Takes the pressure off when swimming starts!
11. Study some swimming history. For example buy or borrow a book about the Olympic Games and track the progress of your event since 1896, who won the events, what times they swam, what country they came from and other cool stuff.
12. Buy an IPOD or MP3 player, load it full of your favourite tunes and spend some time just listening to great music.
13. Create something. Build it. Paint it. Craft it. But create something.
14. Help someone who really needs it – good Karma!
15. Help your swim club clean and store swim equipment that will not be used during the winter break so that it is in tip top condition for next season.
16. Get a blood test and check out your iron levels, ferritin, immune system functioning and body fats.
17. See a physical therapist and get a complete musculo-skeletal screen, i.e. a total body screen which assesses your muscle strengths and weaknesses, flexibility and identifies potential problems before they occur.
18. Get a massage.
19. Get a massage – they feel so good I put it in twice!
20. Write a letter of thanks to three people who have helped you in the past season.
21. Take a public speaking course. Helps you develop self confidence and to deal with those occasions when you have to get up and speak in public.
22. Read and review your training diary from the past season. Try to identify the things that worked, the things that didn’t and look for some ways to improve next season.
23. Buy a new training diary for the coming season.
24. Check out all your swim gear and replace anything old, broken or worn that needs replacing.
25. Clean out your (stinky) swim bag – you know the one you haven’t cleaned out for six months.
26. Put your name on all new swim gear you buy.
27. Look up “motivational quotes” on the internet and write the best five in the front of your new training diary.
28. Write the best “motivational quote” on your kick board so you see it every time you practice.
29. Do something really really nice for your Mom (or Dad). All season……she (or he) drove you to the pool…. made you breakfast….. emptied out your swim bag…and about 100000 other things for you.
30. Ask your coach what he / she believes you can do to improve next season in four areas: Physically, Mentally, Technically and Tactically. Write these down in the front of your new training diary.
31. Talk to a retired former great swimmer about the lessons they learnt during their career.
32. Watch a motivational and inspirational movie.
33. Write down all your goals for the coming season including dates they will be achieved: a goal is a dream with a deadline.
34. Some days do nothing at all. Just hang out in your sweat suit all day and be a couch potato.
35. Go and watch a practice session in another sport and see what you can learn from the behaviours and actions of other athletes.
36. Give up takeout food for two weeks.
37. Eat more fresh fruit – at least two pieces each day.
38. Eat more fresh vegetables – at least five different varieties each day.
39. Eat more lean, fresh meat and fish.
40. Drink more clean, fresh water.
41. Start believing in you.
42. Dare to dream about what’s possible.
43. Have a heart to heart talk with a good friend about your dreams – sharing dreams often helps turn them into reality.
44. Join a gym and get strong.
45. Join a martial arts club and improve your balance, co-ordination, timing, strength, power, flexibility and self confidence.
46. Join a gymnastics team for the same reasons.
47. Do a research project on a successful athlete like Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong and discover how they think, how they train, what they believe, how they became great.
48. Experiment with the latest sports drinks, sports bars, supplements and gels and see what works best for you.
49. Learn how to use hydrotherapies (i.e. water therapies) effectively in your recovery program including spas, saunas, ice, showers and baths.
50. Practice visualisation – i.e. lie down in a quiet, dark, warm room and relax. Imagine yourself swimming fast. Imagine how the water feels rushing past your body. Imagine how your body will move, how your arms will pull with power and strength, how your legs will kick with power and force. Imagine yourself feeling stronger and stronger as the race progresses. Recent research suggests visualising yourself performing a skill you know well helps you to retain the skill even though you are not physically doing it.

You may not be in the pool training but there are plenty of options to help you recover from one season and prepare you for the next one. Just be careful you don’t do so much in your off season that you need a rest from your recovery program!

Wayne Goldsmith