DON'T RUIN Your Kid's Swimming Career!!!

I see so many parents ruin their kids' swimming careers. Parents, make sure you are not. So a question here from the fans, how does swimming differ if you're 13 versus 33 versus 63? And I can speak on behalf of two of those. Yeah, please. But in terms of training, I mean, when you're younger, like what's the difference? Like why does it matter to be more specific if you're 13 versus 63? You may have the same goal. You want to swim fast in a 50 freestyle. You may actually be the exact same time. You may be 63 years old and you're 30 seconds, you want to break 30, and you're 13 years old and you want to break 30. Same goal, same everything. The difference is that when you're 13, you can probably recover faster. I mean, not probably, but you will recover faster because you're young, you're growing, you're developing, you're getting stronger naturally. So as long as you get eight to nine hours of sleep per day, you eat well, and you show up to practice, you will get faster. Now the question is, how much faster can you get and how quickly can you improve? Because a 13 year old has a lot more room to go. Whether you're a guy or girl, you can get taller, get stronger. There's a lot more development that can be done there. But when it comes to training, the older you get, you need more recovery time between the sessions and you have to be even more specific with the kind of training that you do because you can't afford to not recover. Because if you don't give yourself enough recovery time and you end up swimming more than you need to, you're not going to be able to hit the next workout with the right level of focus and intensity. Whereas when you're 13, you can actually have a really bad workout and the next day you'll feel amazing and you can hit it really hard. When you're 33, I already feel that now, you're not going to be as fresh until maybe 24, 48 hours. And when you're 63, God willing we get there, you're gonna end up needing even more time to recover. Your sleep is gonna be even more important. So when it comes to actually how you train, the older you get, you need to get more and more specific the older you get and you have to put even more focus on taking a holistic approach and that includes your recovery, your sleep, your nutrition, getting a massage, whatever it may be. So same goal, same speed, but the style of training and the approach to all of those holistic things becomes much more important the older that you get. Totally. I love what you said, but I think the way I like to put it is you can only work as hard as you can recover. I think this is very important. And I love what you said with, of course, it's taking longer to recover as you get older, but would you say you can still overtrain when you're 13? Oh, you can absolutely overtrain when you're 13. I mean, it's actually easier to overtrain when you're 13 or 12 or 15 because you feel invincible and maybe you have nothing else to do. Like you go to school, you can literally, you have like six hours a day that you can theoretically train. But if swimming becomes your life, it really shouldn't at age 12, 13, 14. You should be interested in other things. It's okay to play some video games. It's okay to read a book. Read a book, go read a book, kids. And so by having more of like a well-rounded nature, it's actually gonna prevent you from burning yourself out because at that age, it's actually more mental too. Because if you're only thinking about swimming and you're only obsessing over it, I guess at any age, that's actually gonna hurt you as well. So you don't wanna overtrain. You don't wanna overthink it necessarily because you just need to do what's necessary to reach your desired goal. And if you're 13 or 63 and you're trying to get faster in the 50 freestyle, there are really only a few things you need to worry about and you don't need to spend five hours a day training. Totally. And I think this is a great lesson for parents as well. I mean, there are, I come across it all the time. I coach many kids and as a parent, I mean, I haven't got kids, but I can imagine it's very, very easy to get carried away wanting your journey to be the best at swimming, which I completely understand. But as you just mentioned, and as I just said, your body can only work as hard as it can recover. So if you are pushing your child through those eight, nine, 10, 11 sessions a week when they're 10, 11, 12, they don't need that, right? I mean, as long as a child enjoys it, especially when you're 13 or under, you just have to make sure you're going to training, you are meeting your friends, you are having fun. Of course, you have to make sure you're doing things right. But if you don't enjoy what you are doing, and there's no point in it, the only person you are doing this for is yourself. So if your parent or your mom or your dad is the person who's pushing you to go to training, the chances are you're doing something wrong, okay? So you should be going to training for the sake of you getting better, not anybody else. So parents, make sure you are not pushing your kids to an extent. And actually, let's riff on this a little bit. I see so many parents ruin their kids' swimming careers. And I've seen it over the years now. I mean, like almost two decades now since I've been either a coach or a teenage athlete. And I have seen so many swimmers end their career because their parents shoved swimming down their throat. The swimmer, the kid loved swimming, but they grew to hate it because of the overbearing nature of their parents. If you're a parent, it's your job to love and hug your child and encourage them, but the swimming has to be done for themselves. And if you feel they need to try harder, or if you feel they're lazy, it's actually a reflection on how you've raised them. And that's the most painful thing to hear as a parent because you want the best for them. But in some ways, you almost have to undo the guidance that you've given them because you've pushed them in a direction of trying to please you instead of them finding the joy and love for self-improvement in the sport, which is swimming in this case. But yeah, Tolstoy, I think it's very easy as well as a parent to get carried away in trying to win trophies and medals. And like you just said, it's not all about that, right? If you are going to a meet and you're 11 or 12 or 13, and you get a half a second PB, this is the most important thing in the world. You have just broken your own world record. This is the fastest time you have ever gone in your life, right? If you come dead last, it doesn't matter. You've just improved. It's like I say, if you go to the Olympics and everybody pulls out last day, right? Nobody goes. Leon Marchand decided he wants to sleep in today. Nobody goes to the Olympics. You are the only person in 200 IM Olympic final. You go and win gold and you go three minutes, right? You go PB plus 10. Is that going to be satisfying? The chances are it's probably not, right? There was no competition. You've just gone. You've just won an Olympic medal. Because you had more in yourself. Right, exactly. But if you went to the Olympic, for you made an Olympic final, you come dead last and you take five seconds of your 200 IM PB. Now this is a win. I think that's so much more important than trying to chase these materialistic things of medals, trophies and whatnot. So Coach Lea, we've had a great conversation here, but the last question is maybe the most important. If someone is serious about getting better at swimming and they really want to improve, maybe they want to compete, what do they do? How do they go about it? How do they think about it? Well, I think the most important thing is enjoying it. I think having fun in what you do is probably one of the most important things in sports and swimming in general. If you're going to training and you don't want to be there, you don't want to listen to your coach, you probably shouldn't be going. So I think fun and joy and, like I say, fun in what you are doing is very, very important. Being surrounded by like-minded people is very, very important. It could be just within your sessions. If you are, again, we had this conversation earlier, you become the average of the five people you hang around with. If you're hanging around people who are not serious about getting faster, chances are you're probably not going to get faster either. So just making sure you're in the right environment, the right atmosphere, around the right people will ultimately and most likely help you get faster too.