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Jun 09, 2023

Every Swimmer Needs This Tool in Their Mental Swim Bag

As we swim our way through best times, finally get that cut we’ve been aiming for, get moved up to the next group on our team, or are invited to swim on our dream team, we collect and develop many

As we swim our way through best times, finally get that cut we’ve been aiming for, get moved up to the next group on our team, or are invited to swim on our dream team, we collect and develop many mental tools along the way. Each of them has its own strengths and purpose. One, however, stands out as a go-to tool for almost any situation you might swim your way into. The tool is known as cognitive reframing.

Reframing is simply looking at situations, experiences, events, ideas and emotions from a different angle. Reframing plays an essential role in our psychology and quality of life as an athlete. You probably already use reframing without even knowing it. Its purpose is to shift our ideas, beliefs and feelings about something in a way that helps us grow, take action, and create value out of them.

To improve the way we reframe and to understand how to do so effectively, we need to understand how our perception and perspective shape our reality.

Our beliefs and attitudes about things are born out of our understanding of them. For example, as young age group swimmers, we might watch our swimming idol crushing it at the Olympics. While watching them swim we notice how fast their stroke is. We might begin to develop the belief that our stroke needs to look the same in order to swim fast because we associate fast swimming (our idol) with this stroke.

We might begin to integrate this stroke in practice without realizing that it’s actually hurting our performance because we do not have the self-awareness, strength and flexibility necessary to carry out this stroke safely and effectively. In time this could lead to a strong habit that hinders our performance, our potential, or even leads to injury. And we amphibious folk all know how difficult it is to break stroke habits we’ve developed over the years.

These beliefs and our attitudes about them influence our experiences in and out of the water. This is a powerful reminder because, with awareness of what and why we believe certain things, we can expand our attitudes and beliefs about them further, ultimately expanding our idea and reality of what is possible for us. With confined belief, we confine our performance. With expanded beliefs, we expand our performance.

The act of reframing, actually shifting our perspective, is often the easiest part of the reframing process. The most difficult part is actually having the self-awareness that we are in a moment of opportunity to reframe. This is often the most challenging step to reframing because we are usually prone to become caught up in our emotions about something – perhaps a race that didn’t go as planned – or a practice set that is kicking our butt.

When we are fixated or hyper-focused on something such as a slow race or a really challenging set, it can be extremely difficult to step outside our emotion around it and have the level-headedness to look at the situation in a more reasonable and collected manner and reframe it.

With practice, the transition from being in our head and our feelings to taking psychological action and reframing our situation comes more easily. Great tools for developing cognitive and emotional self-awareness for us swimmers are plentiful. Yoga, meditation and swim journaling are just a few.

Once we shift our attitude and center ourselves around a situation, an event, person or result, we have much more cognitive space to create value from it and complete the process of reframing. This is when we actually move our inner camera a few degrees to the right and look at the same result or event from a different angle. Once we do this, we have successfully reframed and can now see this event or result in a new light, one that is more helpful for our cause and our goals as athletes and coaches.

Here are a few examples of situations reframing can come in handy

Take Swimmy for example. Swimmy has been training all summer long for her championship meet that commences in three weeks. After spraining her wrist badly on a run, the doctor confirms she will need to stay away from swimming with her arm for a week–no strokes, no pulling, no dives, no turns. She’s completely torn having put so much work and passion into her summer training and now feels it was all for nothing. Luckily, her Coach is familiar with the power of reframing.

Swimmy talks to Coach Fin who helps her reframe the situation as an opportunity to build up her race kick and underwaters, explaining that this is actually a blessing in disguise because she’s been complaining all summer about shoulder issues and soreness, so taking a step back from her upper body and re-focusing on her legs, she will help her upper body recover and heal while building up her weakness of kick.

Swimmy walks away confident in their plan and with her eyes focused on her new goals of developing her race pace kick and building up her underwaters.

We all know that feeling when we walk onto the pool deck after several days or even weeks of beast training only to find that the posted practice is the complete opposite of our expectations for a recovery day. In that moment of thinking we should have slept in we have a tremendous opportunity to build up our resilience and mental fortitude by using reframing to create value and purpose for being there at practice.

Rather than displaying and infecting others with our poor outlook when Coach’s set doesn’t meet our expectations for how things should be, we can practice using a growth mindset to open an entire world of possibility for ourselves and grow our skills and our abilities, physical and mental.

Carol Dweck, perhaps the world’s leading psychologist on motivation and growth mindset wrapped up this idea nicely when she said, “In a growth mindset, challenges are exciting and not threatening…”. And this is so true.

In every challenge and scary set, there is an opportunity for us to get better. Find the parts of the practice where you can develop yourself, whether that be technically or psychologically. Talk to your coach about it, observe how your teammates do it, and practice it yourself. Chunk owns the big set into little bits and identifies what you want to get better at. Then attack.

We’ve all heard the adage that swimming is ninety-percent (or more) mental and only ten-percent physical. Just as you show up to the pool each day to develop your swimming skills and physical fitness, you too must show up mentally. Reframing is also practice. It must be used often. In your journey of building psychological resilience as a swimmer, remember that the seeds you plant in spring determine what you reap in the fall. Don’t just read and forget…read and practice!

By seeking support from your teammates and coaches as your primary resources for your practice of reframing and with consistent and intentional effort, you’ll find that the process of reframing becomes second nature quickly. Such skill has a dramatic effect on expanding how you see yourself as an athlete and how you understand the world, both of which can (and will) dramatically impact your performance.