by Olivier Poirier-Leroy. You can join 9,000+ swimmers and coaches who read his motivational newsletter last week by clicking here.
No matter how much you love to swim there will be moments where you are feeling plateaued and frustrated. While routine and habits can keep you consistent, when they aren’t providing you the results you want it may be time to shake things up.
But how can you tell if the staleness is a temporary dip in motivation, or a sign of something more serious? And how can you tell if you need to hang on just a little bit longer, or if the path you are on is actually producing diminishing, possibly even negative returns?
If it is the latter, than your training will probably be suffering from one of the following characteristics:
The Process Is Making You Miserable.
Yes, hard training isn’t exactly what most athletes would call an overwhelming amount of fun. But it should bring you some satisfaction and pride in its completion. Working your muscles and lungs to the point that you are a cramped heap of chlorine-soaked limbs isn’t what most people would prefer to be doing on a Thursday morning when it is still dark out, but alas, those are the demands of the sport and the process.
If you find that you are not enjoying the daily grind, or at least the pride and satisfaction that you should be deriving from the process, then perhaps it is time to adjust the way you are training so that you are getting some of that intrinsic motivation.
How do we do that?
- Revisit your goals. There is a reason that you are putting in all of this hard work. Get in touch with that reason again. Whatever the goal is, sit down with it for a few minutes and think about how good it is going to feel when you achieve it.
- Clarify the purpose behind the work that is being done. If you have lost sight of the objective behind the punishing meters than it is time to sit down with your coach and get some mission clarity. What are you trying to achieve within the specific workouts and sets?
- Set yourself short term objectives. Going through the grind on a daily basis with no sense of accomplishment will drain anybody. Attach some purpose to your daily workouts by setting micro-goals that will help keep you engaged and on point in the midst of those big sets.
You have underestimated the amount of work needed to be done.
We are terrible at forecasting. Need proof? Read the blog of any financial advisor or economist in the years prior to the big financial collapse. Or your local weather broadcast. Or any pre-game sports show breaking down the game ahead and their predictions.
This inability to forecast with any kind of precision isn’t just limited to pundits and so-called experts—we are just as guilty when it comes to predicting our goals. While we like to think of ourselves as clairvoyant when it comes to putting together a plan to achieve something big in the pool, more often than not we end up being off by a country mile.
Whether it is what it will actually take, or how long it will take to see happen, the timeline and work necessary to accomplish our goals are all too frequently way off.
This has the rather unfortunate side-effect of making us believe that we stink at goal setting, and that we aren’t equipped with the skills/talents/time necessary to achieve the things we want to achieve.
Having sky-high expectations is great, but be willing to tack on the extra work necessary when you realize that you will need more time to get there.
I should point out that this doesn’t mean you should completely forgo goal planning altogether—the instinct after reading this may be, “well if my forecasting sucks, why bother at all?”—but that you should be willing to be flexible and adaptable in the event you aren’t seeing results fast enough.
You realize that your current habits and behaviors are getting you nowhere.
While this can be a particularly freeing moment mentally—simply realizing that you need to make some serious change in life can be a powerful and motivating phase—it often comes at the end of a long period of struggle and angst.
For too long you have been doing things the same way, hanging out with the same people, putting in the same misguided effort into your workouts, only to see that your results are falling far short of what you know yourself to be capable of.
These “enough is enough” moments are often the prologue to change, so accept them and move forward.
Conclusion
Change is good. It keeps you stimulated and interested. Doing the same thing over and over again and not seeing results is mentally draining and discouraging and often leads to burnout.
On the other hand, change for the sake of change means you run the risk of shortchanging yourself of any meaningful adaptations and progression.
Be willing to sit down and do an honest assessment of your current training and swimming situation and figure out if you need to make a change, or button down the hatches and plod on just a little longer.
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