By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
Swimming is heavily results-focused.
Times. Splits. Medal podiums. Qualifying standards. Meet scores. PBs.
And there’s nothing wrong with wanting all of those things. Competitive swimming is… competitive, after all.
But when swimmers get overly wrapped up on outcomes, training can turn into a daily true-or-false on whether they are getting closer to their goals.
Fast practice? Heck yeah—things are better than ever. Slow practice? Ruh roh.Encouraging swimmers to be more process-oriented doesn’t mean they care less about the big and greasy goals. It just means they stay engaged with the things that matter for the outcome.
And coaches can do a lot to encourage this mindset.
Here are some ideas for helping your swimmers be all about that process.
Give swimmers process targets during main sets
The pace clock is one of the most useful coaching tools on the pool deck. It mostly doesn’t lie (except for those pushing off early, we see you) and gives feedback on what’s happening in the water.
But it can also become the only thing swimmers fixate on when churning up and down the black line.
Instead of giving swimmers only outcome-based targets during main sets—Hold 1:05s!—give them an execution target or two.
Things like:
Five dolphin kicks off every wall Descend the final 25s/50s Breakout with max speed every time Count your strokes during every lapNow swimmers have an additional way to evaluate the quality of a rep.
Yes, the time matters, but how they produced it is where being more process-oriented pays off.
Because suddenly they are focused on the behaviors and actions that lead to faster times, and not obsessing about where that second hand sits when they arrive at the wall.
Use daily process accountability
One of my favorite tools for keeping swimmers soaked in the process is a quick post-practice grade.
Simply asking swimmers to grade how well they executed each day can be an awesome reinforcement for this mindset. And it doesn’t need to be complicated—a grade out of 10, or a letter grade.
The grade is very subjective, and that is partly the point. A swimmer can still earn a strong grade even when their times aren’t spectacular.
Maybe they:
Stayed focused on a specific technique adjustment during a brutal aerobic set Attacked every turn Encouraged a teammate who was having a tough go Finished a set properly instead of mailing it in Responded well after a bad repeatOver time, swimmers learn that a successful practice doesn’t solely rest on swimming an in-practice PB. But doing all of the little things that go into a great practice.
This also raises the general productivity of their training sessions as swimmers go from obsessing with “how fast was I today?” to reflecting on “how well did I do on the things I can control?”
Break the big goals into controllable pieces
Big goals are awesome. All the greats will be honest about how aggressive and ambitious they were with their goals.
Caeleb Dressel with his 17.6 in the 50 yard freestyle. Katie Ledecky cleaning house in the freestyle events at the Rio Olympics. Michael Phelps’ epic goal of eight gold medals in a single Olympic Games.
But once the excitement from writing that big goal comes down, the shadow of the goal quickly grows long.
I’ve found that often it’s the swimmers with the most ambitious goals who obsess hardest over the results—which can provide a big jolt of initial motivation before subsiding as the scope of the goal becomes apparent.
The solution isn’t to “care less” about the big goal, but to take that energy and apply it towards your process by breaking the big goal apart.
Sit down with your swimmers and have them turn that ambition into a process.
Start with the performance goals—quicker start, target splits, cleaning up the turns, faster breakouts—and then build out the process goals that will make this happen:
Show up to 95% of practices this season Give a 9/10 effort during every main set Go to bed by 10pm each night Do three mental race rehearsals each weekend Swim one lap at a time when the set is really hardWhen swimmers can take that big goal and turn into a collection of trainable skills, and then match them with process-based behaviors and habits, the awe of the goal shifts to daily execution.
They can connect the big season-end goal with something useful today.
Evaluate performance by execution
How coaches talk about races teaches swimmers how to think about races.
After a disappointing swim, it’s tempting to circle and highlight the result. The time on the scoreboard. The placing. The contrast between previous results.
But the swimmer already knows the result.
What is more helpful is getting under the hood for diagnosis.
What worked? What broke down? What was under your control? What do we adjust next time?This doesn’t mean pretending the result doesn’t matter. Of course a bad swim hurts. A lot of hard work went into that swim, so it’s natural to be bummed out. But there’s information there.
Maybe the race strategy worked, but front end speed wasn’t there. Maybe stroke length fell apart earlier than expected. Maybe the swimmer got distracted by the faster swimmer in the next lane.
These give coaches and swimmers something to work with. Process-focused feedback teaches swimmers to get curious and learn from their performances instead of ruthlessly judge them.
Reinforce the controllables vs uncontrollables
Swimmers are comparison machines. It’s baked into the sport and as typical as the smell of chlorine at the pool.
They check where they are seeded in the heat sheet. Who they are swimming next to. Compare splits and results to previous swims. How their main competitors are looking during warm-up, other events, and in previous/future heats.
And some comparisons can be motivating.
But too much of it can leave swimmers spending enormous amounts of energy on things they can’t do anything about.
Set the distinction early in the season between controllables and uncontrollables.
Remind swimmers what happens when they get lost in the stuff they don’t control. Show them what happens when they stay mentally in their own lane, locked in on their process, and how that leads to the results that other swimmers will compare themselves to.
Controllable Uncontrollable Effort How other swimmers perform Preparation Meet seeding Technique Warm-up conditions Race execution What people are saying about you Sleep and nutrition habits How much someone else improves How they respond to adversity The swimmer in the next lanePost the list on the white board. In the locker room. Bring them up during goal planning sessions. Post-meet debriefs. Revisit them especially in the days and weeks leading up to the Big Meet as tension and anxiety increases in anticipation of racing.
The distractions aren’t going anywhere. Neither are the medals, qualification standards, results, heat sheets, or the competitors.
By repeatedly directing swimmers to the things they can control—their process—they give themselves a better chance of exceling compared to getting buried by the things they can’t.
The Bottom Line
One of the reasons that swimmers push back on being more process-oriented is that they imagine being successful purely requires sharp, competitive instincts. Just “wanting it” really, really badly.
But the elite swimmer is the one who can harness that hunger and those instincts and channel them through their process.
“Wanting it” means showing up, doing the daily work, not getting flustered or discouraged by the externals, and knowing that what they do today in the pool is more important than staring wistfully at a goal sheet late into the night.
As a coach, making this shift means making the process visible and consistent.
Give swimmers execution targets in practice and competition. Have them grade their effort to build accountability to their daily process. Break goals into trainable pieces and habits. Be a diagnostic when it comes to races. And relentlessly direct their attention to the things they control.
By crushing the process, your swimmers will crush the results on race day.
And if you want to give your swimmers a more structured way to build these skills, Conquer the Pool: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide to a High-Performance Mindset gives you the blueprint. Learn more below.
ABOUT OLIVIER POIRIER-LEROY
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national-level swimmer, 2x Olympic Trials qualifier, and author of Conquer the Pool: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide to a High-Performance Mindset.
Conquer the Pool gives competitive swimmers a practical blueprint for building confidence, setting better goals, staying focused on the process, bouncing back from setbacks, and performing under pressure.
The book combines sport psychology research, guided worksheets, and lessons from Olympic champions to help coaches make mental training a more consistent part of what their swimmers do every day.
Want to use Conquer the Pool with your team this season?
Click here to learn about team orders and get pricing for your swim club.
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