So yesterday I was at the 3rd day of the SA Short Course swimming championships in Germiston, South Africa. It had been a pretty good 3 days of racing but last night I was fortunate to witness Roland Schoeman set a new world record in the 50m Freestyle! Wow want an opportunity it is to witness something like that. What makes this even more remarkable is that he has just come off, what many will describe as a pretty unsucessful Olympic Games (of course forgetting the fact that in the same event there he improved the SA & Africa record by almost a full 0.3 of a second). So sitting there last night I could not help but asking myself why? Why now the world record? Why now, 3 weeks after a "dissapointing" Olympics? So lets unpack some possibilities.
- Firstly, the world of high performance sport is one that oftens rests on a knifes edge. An athlete can move between zero and hero within a few days, weeks or even seconds
- Secondly, small changes can often cause big changes. By this I mean that by making a small change to a specific aspect of your strength & conditioning program or plan, it could lead to very slow times or very fast times i.e. big improvements or deterioration. This could include changing of specific training sets, composition of the sets, rest periods between loading and incorporating different variables into the session.
- Thirdly, there are often variables outside of the athletes control. This could be technical gear failure (like suites tearing) for example.
- Forthly, optimising the supercompensation curve. This includes ensuring good quality training execution and more so encorporating sufficient and appropriate recovery into the training repitoure. Optimising recovery between training sets or days and from week to week is key in performance. As Angela Calder (sport recovery specialist at the AIS) says WORK HARD + REST WELL = BEST PERFORMANCE.
- Fifthly, modification or optimsing of technique. Over the last number of years in swimming, we have witnessed the advent of the straight arm freestyle. It works for some and not for others. This stroke developed particularly due to the strong emergance of short course swimming and the swimmers being allowed to push the 15m mark with the underwaters. By pushing this distance underwater, it only allows for around 9-10m of swimming stroke per 25m length. So the straight arm power stroke freestlye which is quite tiring has been used with good success by swimmers. This was also more evident in Rolands performance as he was trying out this version of the stroke and had moved away from his typical stroke.
- Sixthly, your time is your time. I strongly believe that we have a time put out for us and we dont alwyas quite understand why we dont achieve when we think we should, and do achieve when we dont expect it. However, what is important to remember is that you as an athlete and coach always need to push the boundaries and attempt to do your best at all points in time.
- Seventhly, doing the basics right is key. Always making sure you have done the basic fundamentals correctly, sets you up for good perfomance.
- Finally, there will always be an element of luck involved. That perfect day will comprise of everything going just right and it is important to use the luck you get.
So hopefully i have been able to unpack maybe just some of the elements that could contribute to success of an elite athlete. Hopefully that has given us food for thought and maybe will make us look at performace slightly differently.
SB
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