Setting the Course: Defining My Path to Swim Improvement
In Summary (TL;DR)
A quick review of your survey responses: how they will help us serve you better 🙏
Join us on a new 8-week journey, as we seek to help you map out your improvement with some bite-size practical interventions - this week: don't be left behind, get ready for Wk 1 & set your intentions 📝
Be one of just 8 people to be selected to be personally coached by me - for FREE - over this 8-week period as we track the ups/downs of your progress and share them with our global swimming ‘family’ each week - together, we're better ✅
I hope you've been enjoying the World Swimming Championships in Fukuoka, Japan 🎌. There's been some amazing racing! I love nothing more than watching these events and then going for a swim and literally visualising I am one of my heroes, complete with commentary and everything! I find it super effective for my swimming mojo!
Anyway, big thanks if you completed last week's survey.
✅ The Top-5 reasons why you swim are:
✅ You said this was missing in your current swimming routine:
It WORKS. It's FUN. It's for EVERYONE!
Before we crack on with what we can do with all of this information to help serve you better with a brand new initiative, here are some other highlights for your interest:
88.9% of you are over 45 years of age (I'll be joining you in 6 weeks time! 🥳)
58% are male and 42% female (a much better statistic than what YouTube was telling me, though your insight on the videos and their length specifically will help me shape that better going forwards)
73.6% of you are what I would term “very competent improvers" or “above”, meaning you'd likely be perfectly at home in one of my squads here in Perth, and you'd always be welcome!
In addition to your positive feedback on the effectiveness of our logical, evidence-based coaching methodology, you mentioned how enjoyable it is and how much you value our personalized approach through our innovative Swim Types system:
Join us for an 8-week improvement plan!
✅ You asked me - quite convincingly - to cover these 3 areas in future blogs:
In fact, the word “improve” (and it's derivatives) was such a strong feature in last week's survey that I started to look a lot closer at what we could do together as a global swimming initiative to really elevate your swimming to a higher level, however you define that.
So, how could we do something that would be fun, help everyone, and most importantly, would help you improve after setting some improvement parameters together?
I came up with a bit of a plan that would:
re-enthuse your swimming mojo with a practical program you can follow along with for FREE over the next 8 weeks
maintain a focus on ensuring you're ticking off the basics to improvement
keep the advice to bite-size chunks (but allow you to dig deeper if you wish)
acknowledge that whilst the social media 'influencers' give you many snippets, there's no systematic process to connect them and help you truly feel the changes in your swimming (which is what you've all told us we do best - thank you 🙏)
👉 How do I get involved?
There are three ways you can get involved:
just passively follow the email series over the next 8 weeks, arriving in your inbox each Friday
actively define your improvement intentions to keep you accountable to your goal
be one of the lucky 8 to receive direct, personal coaching from myself over the period of the program
Each week we'll break down the advice into something simple to help guide you towards improvement, dig a little deeper to enhance your understanding, define a simple session or task to try to aid your swim routine, and for 8 lucky swimmers we'll provide you with the ultimate Swim Smooth coaching experience by directly coaching you through the process and feeding back your ups/downs to the wider global swim community so that everyone benefits from your real-world journey.
🧐 Is improvement possible as you age?
88.9% of our readership is over 45 years of age. At 44, I can already feel myself reaching a bit of a plateau with respect to how much faster or how much further I can swim. Does this mean that striving for improvement is a futile exercise as we age? Absolutely not! Merely the process of setting some realistic goals can help keep you on track and engaged.
Barrie (pictured above) turned 87 last week. I asked him about his secret to longevity and he simply responded, “never stop!” Sage words. So whilst you might not be getting any faster as you age, a worthy improvement intention is to simply work to stave off the ageing process and “minimise your losses” as Barrie puts it 👍.
🤷♀️ Do I need to always be improving?
No, you don't. Whilst many of you told us that from time to time you find yourself on a bit of a plateau with your swimming, this is entirely normal. Sometimes it's OK to just accept that, especially when you say that your top two reasons for swimming are: 1) because you love how it makes you feel; and 2) because it aids your mental health and wellbeing.
Just making it down to the pool for a dip sometimes can be all you need, and that's OK.
That said, I am hoping this collective 8-week improver plan will stir a bit of inspiration and mojo to ensure that you can be riding high on enthusiasm for your swimming.
🙏 Let's thank Nicola, Tracy & Michael…
From the several thousand responses we had to last week's survey, I thought you might like to know who's voices represented the ‘masses’ most effectively - you can thank them over a coffee one day ☕️ 👍
