How Small Ideas Make Big Changes

“Love the stroke. Fourteen strokes per 25m. You’re really patient in the water – not rushing the pull”

“I got that from your emails! I used to rush everything before… and go nowhere.”

It took me a second to register what he’d said. Because this wasn’t one of our Squad swimmers. Not someone I coach every week. Not someone who’s had a single technical cue from me in person until this 1-1 session.

He just read the emails each week. And something we’ve written sparked something.

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We throw these messages out in our weekly emails – about patience at the front of the stroke, about a relaxed exhale, about finding rhythm in the water instead of fighting it – and you never really know if they will resonate or make an impact. Most of the time, swim coaching feels like it should be hands-on. You see the stroke. You make the correction or give the guidance. You watch it click.

But sometimes the transformation moment happens elsewhere. In a busy public lane swim. Or a lunch-break 30 minute dip. Or a moment of clarity where someone remembers a sentence you wrote and thinks, “Alright… slow the pull down.”

No video analysis. No Squad. No in-person coaching.

And yet: a completely different stroke.

It’s a reminder – maybe for all of us – that improvement doesn’t always come from the big interventions or the specific technique sessions. Sometimes it’s the small ideas, heard at the right moment, practised a few times, then a few hundred more.

Quiet consistency. Tiny technical tweaks. A swimmer willing to listen and try something different.

That’s how change happens.

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Most adult swimmers rush. They look for speed too early. They apply the force long before the stroke is ready. It feels like the right thing to do, but it isn’t fast or efficient – it’s just impatience.

And fixing that rarely starts with drills. It starts with belief. With the willingness to believe that slowing down can make you faster.

Yes, really. 

This swimmer understood that from a few paragraphs in an email. And then he practised it – alone, in his own time – until it wasn’t just an idea anymore. It was a habit.

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It’s easy to see this as a nice story. A feel-good moment. A success story for our weekly emails. But it shows us something more important, more universal:

Most change doesn’t happen in the technique session, the 1-1, the coached squad sessions. It happens in the un-coached hundreds.

The lengths you swim when nobody is watching or asking you to think about something else. The intervals you do when no one has eyes on your technique or reminding you to breathe out. The small technical details you decide to focus on because something in them feels right.

That’s the real work – and most of it is invisible.

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If you’re someone who trains mostly alone, or swims in busy and random public sessions, or reads these posts and quietly tries things out in your own lane: don’t underestimate the impact of one good habit.

Let willingness to try something new be your anchor this year.

Even small changes – one idea, one tweak, one conscious choice – practiced quietly and consistently, can transform the way you move in the water.

Who knows… maybe you’ll be the next person who tells me:

“I got that from the emails.”