2009 Year in Review-Triathlon Swimming Coaching

I have thought a lot about publishing a review of how the last year went as head coach of dobkanize.com.  Lots happened in 2009.  But the last thing I wanted to do was bore you to death about my own story.  I spend a lot of effort separating my story from the swimming story in these articles.  You are the judge, but I know I try my best.  The one great thing that 2009 did for me was further understanding of the perspective of my clients.  I have gone through many phases over the past 3 years.  I have briefly summarized these below and provided an example of lessons learned from 2009.

Phase 1:  (pre-2006):   I knew a ton about swimming, and enough about triathlon to incorporate my swimming knowledge.  But I had no idea how swimming felt to others, and just assumed that everybody perceived swimming as I do.  I got frustrated when I told a person to “just keep the elbow high” and they didn’t seem to do it.  I assumed it was because they didn’t want to learn.

Phase 2:  (2007):  I had a eureka moment (drum roll please…) that almost no one in triathlon perceives swimming as I do.  People didn’t drop their elbows because they were bad listeners.  They dropped their elbows because my teaching was not effective.  This caused me to focus on simulation techniques to teach swimming movement, and I made good gains on clients with a few basic tools.

Phase 3:  (2008):  As my simulations became more complex, I realized how little I knew about all of the parts that make up great swimming.  Why was my kicking fast and my clients kicking so slow (even when their legs appear to move the same way as mine)?  I made a critical assumption that my way of swimming is the baseline I would use to direct my clients.  I adopted a strategy of reverse engineering as a result.  I picked apart every single piece of the way I swam, creating a detailed sequence of events for each motion, which allowed me to effectively teach and simulate for others.

Phase 4:  (2009):  I exposed a lot more athletes to dobkanize in 2009.  I was successful in improving most people.  My average improvement rate, tracked on the website, stayed pretty constant in the mid 5% range.  But I was shocked at the number of surprises:  people whose swim did not respond to the learning techniques I developed in 2006-2008.  I expected less surprises, but I got more.  An example follows.

Kicking is always very hard to teach to beginners.  You cannot tell what the person is doing just by looking at them.  The differences in good kicking versus bad kicking are so subtle.  Your feet and knees can be moving an inch or less relative to each other to make a good kick completely ineffective.  Since I couldn’t tell the difference visually, I have been using alternative methods of evaluation.  Which muscles the athlete claims to engage while kicking is one of those indicators.  It hints at where the leg needs to be aligned in order to engage those muscles, which allows me to interpret what the athlete is doing right or wrong.

So my teaching of flutter kick worked well for awhile.  Then I had one client go slower after I taught them.  When they were kicking in a way I thought was wrong, they went faster.  It was very confusing.  After much head-scratching, we found the cause was that the client’s knees were pointed outwards.  Once the client started kicking knobby-kneed, they performed better, as expected.  Kicking with knees pointed inwards does many good things.  It creates less of a profile in the water (less resistance), and twists the broad side of your foot into the kicking motion (allowing you to grab more water as the legs move up and down).

As crazy as it sounds, I had always taken for granted that a person would point their knees inward while flutter kicking.  I never questioned it.  But with one client I suddenly realized it wasn’t a good assumption.  Running and gymnastics, in particular, often emphasize a knee position that points outward.  Swimmers may naturally point their knees in, but most triathletes will not.  From this example, I began teaching other clients about the importance of keeping the knees pointed inwards while flutter kicking.  I stopped taking it for granted. 

So that problem was fixed, but the need to continuously improve my coaching methods was still there.  To serve every single client as best as I can, I need to continuously find ways to be more open to new ideas, and to find techniques to simulate those ideas so my clients know what it feels like to swim well.  Maybe one day will come that I stop getting surprised.  But I don’t expect that day to come anymore.  There is always a person out there that needs swimming help in a way that cannot be expected or predicted.  And there always seem to be assumptions I make that don’t lead me on the right path to instruct some people.

I am very grateful for everything my clients throw at me.  They force me to really think and understand swimming in a way that I never had to do as a competitor.  What the assumptions are, the sequence of events, what triathletes seem to do wrong and why.  When I swam in college, I thought that coaching instruction was as simple as “kick more”, or “make that finish longer”!  My experience in coaching and teaching adult non-swimmers to swim fast has come a long way since then.  And I am excited to keep moving forward.

The plan for 2010 is to keep evaluating trends.  The trends of 2006-2009 worked for around 75% of my clients so far, and I expect them to work in the future.  But my experiences in 2009 tell me to keep the door open for new ideas and assumptions to help that remaining 25%.  I’m sure there will be more clients who swim in a way that just doesn’t fit the way I would expect.  And I am doing my best to be ready for all of them.  It is the best I can do, and the best way I know of to keep my improvement rates in the mid 5% range.  I look forward to seeing you all in 2010!