SwimPsych | Swimming Psychology
Sport Psychology for Swimmers, Swim Coaches and Swimming Parents
I was recently approached by a male senior swimmer ‘G’ who wanted help preparing for competition, because he was experiencing issues with anxiety and confidence, and losing time from starting the race feeling tense. The senior Nationals were around 6 weeks away and he wanted some help preparing for the event and races beyond. Presenting [...]
All of us experience pressure from time to time, and often it’s no bad thing. Pressure can help focus the mind and, at healthy levels, can help us to perform. Many people, however, experience unpleasant levels of pressure and find that their performance suffers as a result. So, how can you go about ensuring that [...]
We see it in sports like golf and tennis, where an elite athlete’s skills fail them, often dramatically, under pressure. There are many different explanations for choking in sport, but can it happen in swimming? What is Choking? Simply put, choking occurs when an athlete’s performance suffers under pressure. Most often we associate it with [...]
Being the parent of a swimmer is a thankless combination of roles, from financier to taxi driver and many things in between. At the same time as making huge sacrifices yourself, there’s every chance that your teenage child will probably reward you by finding you intolerably embarrassing and tell you on a frequent basis that [...]
It’s long been believed that there’s an ideal level of physiological arousal for performance (the ‘Inverted U’ Hypothesis), and more recently that each individual has their own level (e.g. IZOF). However, even the view that each person has their own ideal level of arousal is simplistic. Whatever your level of physiological arousal, this can be [...]
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