You Already Train Everything. Except This.

Why knowing mindset matters isn’t the same as being able to train it

Every swim coach I know already believes mindset matters. If you are a coach, you have undoubtedly watched a swimmer who kills it all season in training come undone behind the blocks at a championship meet. You’ve seen a swimmer back off in the last fifteen yards when the pain hits or spiral in between trials and finals when the stakes are high. As a coach, you know the mental side is real, and that it can make a real difference between dropping time and a season filled with frustration.

This isn’t going to be a piece trying to convince you that mindset is important. I want to talk about something else — the gap between knowing it matters and actually being able to train it.

We train everything else like it matters

As a coach, think about how much of your week goes into the things you can train directly – starts, turns, stroke technique, pacing, aerobic base, race strategy. As a sport, we are obsessive about the details. We film, we analyze, we adjust. We’ll spend an entire season chasing a tenth of a second off a wall. Nothing about how we train the physical and technical side of swimming is left to chance.

And then there’s mindset — which everyone agrees decides races — and look at how we actually handle it:

• A pep talk before the big meet

• A motivational quote saved on a phone

• A sports psych who comes in once or twice a year

• An influencer the swimmers follow on Instagram

Some of that is genuinely good. But none of it is training. It’s not daily, it’s not integrated, it’s not built. It’s the thing we reach for in the last two weeks and hope it’s enough.

Here’s the comparison I keep coming back to: we’d never let an athlete skip strength training all season and then start bench pressing the week before championships. Of course not — we’d know it was far too late to matter. But that’s almost exactly how the sport treats mindset. We ignore it for months, then expect a pep talk or a saved quote to hold up under the most pressure a swimmer faces all year.

It doesn’t work that way. Mindset cannot be ignored and then summoned in a crisis. It is a skill, and skills are trained — repeated, integrated, built over a season.

So why doesn’t mindset get trained?

Mindset doesn’t get trained as a skill — but not because coaches don’t care, are unwilling, or don’t think it matters. I believe it comes down to two factors:

1. Bandwidth

2. Expertise

Coaches are busy so bandwidth is a real factor. Day to day, coaches are already writing workouts, running practices, managing meets, talking to parents and holding the culture of the whole team together. Even a coach who fully believes in training mindset doesn’t have a free block in the week to design a season-long mindset curriculum from scratch, build all the materials and then deliver them in a way their swimmers will actually use.

The second factor is expertise. To be clear, I am not saying coaches aren’t smart enough – that’s certainly not the case. I am referring to the specific expertise of taking something big, abstract and intangible — mindset — and breaking it into parts a swimmer can recognize, name, practice, and reach for in the exact moment they need it. That’s a particular skill. It isn’t the same skill as coaching swimming, any more than coaching swimming is the same skill as being a fast swimmer.

How I apply my specific expertise to mindset

I have a background that is pretty unique in the swimming world. I’m not a coach in the traditional sense but I have spent fifty years in this sport — as a swimmer, a swim parent and a masters swimmer. I’ve seen swimming from multiple angles over many decades. I also spent twenty-four years at IBM where I specialized in taking complex concepts - like quantum computing, cybersecurity risk and mainframe hosting - and making them simple enough so that our clients could understand and ultimately buy our solutions. That was the job - translate complexity into something usable.

For a long time my swimming life and my work life felt like two separate things – then it clicked that the one part of swimming nobody had built a real system for — mindset — was a complexity-translation problem. It was exactly the thing I’d spent my career doing, just pointed at a different subject.

It became clear to me that the reason most mindset content stays a pile of disconnected tips is that turning it into a system that hangs together is hard, specialized work. It has taken me over a year of obsessive focus to build something that actually holds together across a whole season and makes sense to swimmers in the moment.

Here is a concrete example. I recently saw a social media post from someone who talks about swimming mindset. Her point was that swimmers tighten up at big meets because they feel this matters, so I have to give 110%. She’s not wrong — but on its own, that’s a disconnected tip a swimmer will nod at and forget before the next meet.

Here’s the same idea inside a system. In my framework, what she described is one of four specific challenges showing up: pressure. Swimmers learn that pressure pulls their attention toward the outcome — this matters — and that’s what makes them tighten. Then they learn specific tools for that specific challenge, and they practice them. Same insight. But now it has a name, a cause, and a tool attached — so it sticks, and it actually changes what a swimmer does on the blocks. That’s the difference between a swimmer nodding along and a swimmer actually doing something different when the pressure hits.

If you are a coach who believes in the power of mindset but struggles with how to integrate it into your program I’d love to hear your thoughts.