When a child learns to swim, depending on their physical predispositions, coordination abilities, and motor skills, they will quickly or somewhat slowly adopt all the movement patterns in swimming and then swim correctly and efficiently.
Already in this initial phase, a coach can notice differences in the progress among the children.
At this early stage, as a coach, you must differentiate the swimming exercises you use to train young swimmers.
For a true coach, there is no universal program. Remember that!
If you assign overly difficult exercises to weaker swimmers, their progress will be slowed down, and the same will happen if you give stronger swimmers exercises they have already mastered and need something more challenging and complex to continue progressing.
Only experienced coaches understand how important it is to select the right exercises for the youngest age groups and how crucial it is to tailor the training to the swimmers to achieve maximum efficiency.
It is a huge mistake when you completely tailor the children to a single program, which doesn’t change for years but simply increases the distances and alters the duration of breaks.
When, after several years, the children become fully strengthened and have mastered swimming techniques, and they need even more power in their bodies to improve their performance, strength, and stroke speed, you should not make the catastrophic mistake of systematically increasing the distances they swim!
By doing so, you will only create marathon swimmers (unless they are naturally inclined for this), because instead of strength, their muscles will develop endurance. The speed they have gained so far will only allow them to maintain that pace for a few extra meters, and that’s all you’ll achieve with longer distances in swimming.
This provides too little benefit for too much effort, and it means completely draining the power out of the muscles, leading to a loss of the much-needed muscular explosive force, which is actually far more beneficial to swimmers and brings much faster and better results.
This is particularly harmful for children who are born sprinters and whose muscle composition naturally gives them speed in rotations and movements.
There are many factors involved here, and an experienced coach almost instinctively knows what to add, remove, or change in a given training session.
You must know that if you treat the muscles incorrectly—meaning the wrong intensity, tempo in the exercise, which can be slow or explosively fast, number of repetitions (the distance swum), number of sets, duration of breaks between sets, exercise sequence compatibility, and similar factors—not only will you not get good results in the next training session, but you will actually set them back.
The main point of all this is that with every next training session, the results should improve, becoming better and better. An optimal performance training plan is the right answer.
You need to know what type of effort you’ve imposed on the swimmer in training and what type of effort should follow, ideally complementing their muscles and the sport they’re involved in. If you don’t understand this, you will often cancel out the benefits of the previous training, and the athlete will stagnate, with progress becoming much slower.
There is no artificial intelligence that can generalize and encapsulate this knowledge. It’s a feeling that the coach experiences in the moment while athletes are training; it’s experience gained through years of training and deep knowledge of anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, and the field of training itself.
This is the real magic that allows you to create top champions, achieve champion results, and win medals and trophies.
I know there are many things that need to be aligned.
There is also politics...
Many coaches will use inadequate nutrition, lack of seriousness, or physical weakness as regular excuses for a swimmer’s lack of progress, but this mostly depends on the coach and much less on the swimmers themselves.
When you motivate the athlete in the right way and give them the right advice as a coach, and medals begin to multiply, the problems that most coaches use as excuses are solved quickly.
The real problem, in my current environment, is that there are almost no truly professional coaches.
Everyone knows the difference between professional and amateur sports, and here everything is mixed up and institutionally appropriated.
A professional coach must be fully dedicated to their job. They must understand the mental makeup, psychophysical strengths, and weaknesses of each swimmer. They patiently correct every mistake and systematically, progressively increase the efficiency, strength, explosiveness, and speed of their swimmers.
Designing the most purposeful training plan for their swimmers is their primary focus, and they meticulously plan each next training session, as well as create an overall training periodization plan for each swimmer.
The reason there are so few such coaches here is that in this field, as in every other, "green light" is given only to the suitable ones, not the qualified ones.
In this highly profitable job, only the suitable, but not the qualified, professional and talented people, are currently making good money.
Coaches here are mostly people with the right political pedigree or a background in education related to physical education, and they treat coaching as a secondary activity, often without enthusiasm, and many times they don’t even manage to attend the training.
Their understanding of coaching is mostly superficial; they are strictly bound to rigid programs and templates, and they neither know nor care about many important aspects of training.
I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I can’t help but ask those who have a decisive influence on this field:
Are they aware of how many young talented swimmers are deprived of achieving top results because of this?
How much is the national sport as a whole losing because of this?
How many talented young souls and their parents are deprived of joy, happiness, and a brighter future, swimming in mediocrity due to a system set up like this?
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