Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer based out of Victoria, BC. In feeding his passion for swimming, he has developed YourSwimBook, a powerful log book and goal setting guide made specifically for swimmers. Sign up for the YourSwimBook newsletter (free) and get weekly motivational tips by clicking here.
They are inevitable. And they fully suck.
You know, those workouts.
Where your equipment falls apart. Your swim paddle straps snap. Your lane mates have seemingly forgotten all forms of lane etiquette. School and friends and your coach and stress and a million other things are pulling you in a million different directions.
No matter how hard you try to focus, how much you try to forget the outside distractions, your practice disintegrates into a series of missed intervals, frustratingly sloppy technique, and failed sets.
It makes you feel like you have regressed. Like your goals have leaped further out into the horizon. Like your swimming abilities have completely and utterly collapsed.
Here are 5 things to tell yourself after you have that inevitable bad workout so that you can bounce back quickly:
1. I am in charge of my swimming.
Who is the boss of you and your swimming? You are! There will always be a line of thought in your melon that will want to look externally for reasons why your practice wasn’t as good as it could have been. Blaming outside influences robs you of the opportunity to take full responsibility for your swimming.
SEE ALSO: 5 Motivational Swimming Posters to Get You Motivated
2. I can choose to make tomorrow’s workout better.
Elite swimmers have a short memory when it comes to awful performances. Whether it comes to a bad practice or a poor swim successful swimmers refuse to dwell and let those swims fade into the rear view so that they can bounce back hard and fast the next day.
3. I can choose to be positive.
This can be a hard one to wrap your head around. Some days it will be easy to positive, when things are going your way and your swimming is effortless and awesome, and then other days being optimistic feels like a nearly insurmountable task. Believing that optimism and positivity is a choice is a conscious one. It’s a choice. The next time you have that asinine workout walk out determined to make the best of the situation.
4. Bad workouts are part of the process.
We love to believe that things should always go perfectly. That as long as we prepare, have our goals planned out, and motivation roaring and in tact, that every practice will go exactly as we want. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case. There will be days where things don’t click, your stroke is off, that your muscles have simply had enough.
Understanding that this is part of the process, that the occasional bad practice is normal, can lessen the self-inflicted negativity that typically arises when you swim below expectations.
5. Why did it go down the way it did?
Lastly, use that bad workout as an opportunity to identify the issue and fix it moving forward. Take a few moments to look over your bad practice, not to dwell on it or to use it to beat on yourself mentally, but to figure out why it went down the way it did. (You should be doing the same with your excellent practices as well – extrapolating why you were successful is important in order to apply those same winning circumstances to future workouts.)
When you get back behind the curtain, and can see why the practice went the way you did, that knowledge can be invaluable to knowing to avoid those same mistakes in the future.
About YourSwimBook
YourSwimBook is a log book and goal setting guide designed specifically for competitive swimmers. It includes a ten month log book, comprehensive goal setting section, monthly evaluations to be filled out with your coach, and more. Learn 8 more reasons why this tool kicks butt.
NEW: We now have motivational swimming posters. Five of ’em, actually.
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