Published in Volume 2007 Issue 10 American Swimming Coaches Association Newsletter.
A Hard Workout v. Working Hard
by Charlie Dragon
For a swimmer the difference between being assigned a difficult workout and being pushed to make the workout hard is important both from a physical and psychological standpoint. Coaches should create workouts that allow swimmers to self-motivate and work hard rather than create hard workouts.
First let me differentiate between a “hard workout” and “working hard.” A hard workout is one in which simply completing the workout as written on paper is the challenge. The workout could have fast intervals, or be high-yardage, or more generally be so demanding that the swimmers will have no choice but to push themselves to the limit simply to finish. There is no standard which determines whether a workout is hard because difficulty is relative to the training background of the group. But as coaches we all know when we have written a killer, and that is what I mean by a “hard workout.”
Contrast that with “working hard” which has to do with a voluntary effort by the swimmer to make a pace, to race a teammate, to push oneself beyond a previous limit, to improve technique, to create a breakthrough physically or mentally. The workout in these cases is not easy, but simply completing the workout is not an achievement either. The goal -- the challenge -- is to swim the workout well. In this situation the coach is still pushing the swimmer to work hard, and will not tolerate a lack of effort, but ultimately the ‘work’ is on the swimmer not on the paper. During this type of workout, the swimmer has a much higher degree of responsibility for his/her improvement.
The coach’s role during a hard workout is to get the swimmer to do it, or not stop. The motivation for the swimmer is therefore external i.e. “If I slow down I won’t make the set.” Some typical thoughts of the swimmer in a hard workout might be (at least these were mine as a swimmer), “The coach told me to do this, so I will do it. The other kids are all doing it so I must too.” “If I finish this workout, I will be a faster swimmer” “If I can take this, I can take anything.”
I think this type of training is based in an attitude of “toughness.” The coach views practice as the time during which the swimmers get “tougher” because the swimmers who lose races are not as “tough” as the swimmers who win. (As a side note, I think true toughness is very important, but toughness is almost entirely mental. See “The New Toughness Training For Sports” by James Loehr). I believe this style of training originates in a military boot-camp model which while effective in that setting, is inappropriate in sports. A solider is being trained in a high-stress environment because the solider must survive in a high-stress, highly unpredictable environment. The confidence a solider gains from surviving boot-camp directly aids in surviving combat situations. The belief, “If I can survive boot-camp, I can survive anything” does help a solider perform. How is this at all analogous to sports? Are we training athletes to survive their practices, or survive swim meets?
This military style training seems to be even more popular in sports like football, and more popular in the past. I was recently flabbergasted at hearing stories of high school football practices in the 1950s, where two-a-day workouts were held in August without water. Did coaches believe drinking water made athletes perform worse? Hardly as water was always provided at games. They probably believed that players who were “tough” enough to go without water during practice would play better during games. As absurd as that may sound to us today given our knowledge of exercise science, don’t we know coaches who give swimmers sets that seem to have little relation to the events they compete in? What event does 8 1000 IMs prepare you for? Or how about 100 100s on 1:30? I’m sure each of you can supply your own examples of heard about over-the-top sets.
In contrast, the coach’s role, and the swimmer’s internal thought process, during a workout in which the swimmer must work hard are very different from that during a hard workout. The coach must first teach the swimmer what the goal of the set is because simply completing the workout will not be enough of a challenge. The coach must encourage the swimmer to focus on a technique point, or make a race pace, or race a teammate. The coach is there to assist the swimmer in achieving a goal for the set. In this type of workout, the swimmer is in the driver’s seat and the workout’s function is to give the swimmer an opportunity for peak performance. A swimmer with this sense of ownership of the workout and agency in his/her improvement is a swimmer who will succeed long-term.
My idea for writing this article came from downloading a talk given by Dave Salo at an ASCA clinic in the late 1980s. He described having a swimmer do a set of 60x25s on 1 minute. On paper, that has to be one of the easiest workouts a coach could write, do 1 lap a minute for an hour. This is the ultimate example of the workout not being hard on paper, but hard through the self-generated effort put forth by the swimmer. Each 25 must be truly 100%, which makes for a very challenging set indeed.
I tried this set out with my group (we only did 20x25s) and it was the best set we did all season. I have never seen my swimmers breathing that hard during practice. I had them dive from the block end, and during the rest time several of them had to lie down on the deck from exhaustion. I was matching them up by ability, in heats, and encouraging them to win their heat, trying to simulate racing situations in practice. Seeing how hard they worked, and how favorably they talked about the set afterward, led me to wonder why this set was better than many of the others I give. I believe it is because in this set they are choosing (with my encouragement) to give full effort on each lap, and that psychological state is highly beneficial to training.
Drills serve a similar function on the technique side. When young swimmers do drills it is often the drill itself which forces proper technique. But as swimmers age, simply doing the drill as instructed is no longer sufficient for improvement. They must understand the drill’s function, experiment with it, and feel changes to their stroke. We as coaches cannot swim the stroke for the swimmers, and at a certain point it is up to the swimmers to make their own technique changes. Drills are not physically taxing, but they are difficult to do well.
For too many swimmers the hard workout is a weight put on them by the coach. Certainly the highest level swimmers can perform well under this weight, but the middle and lower level swimmers are busy trying not to get lapped, or not miss an interval, and that creates swimmers who swim scared, who swim not to fail. The hard workout is coach-centered, while working hard is swimmer-centered.
I don’t believe in all-or-nothing approaches to training, and in my workouts there is a place for tough-intervals, or workouts that when read cause the swimmers to groan a bit, but they are used selectively with the primary benefit being confidence building i.e. after the workout is over the swimmers think “I never thought I could do that set, wow, I’m proud of myself.” One of my fondest memories as a summer league coach was when a tiny seven-year-old girl (who cried if she was asked to swim more than two laps straight) decided that, on the day we did a mile-swim with the whole team, to not do the 20 or so laps 8-and-unders were going for, or even the half-mile the 10-and-unders were going for, but to swim the entire mile. We stopped her at times to make sure she was okay, and tell her that she had already done a great job, but she chose to keep going. The value of completing the mile-swim for her was much greater than if she were forced or coerced. While swimming that mile had no direct relation to her meet events, the confidence and pride she felt after choosing to push herself that far when she didn’t have to no doubt improved her meet performance (as well as her self-image).
Writing hard workouts for every practice is like using a sledge hammer to pound in a nail – the nail will go in, but it’s overkill and risks serious damage. Our job isn’t to heavy-handedly force improvement on the swimmers, to exert our will power over them and have them get faster by default. Our job is to educate, motivate, and support so they can take risks and choose to perform optimally.
