The Things You Don’t Say

Between what a swimmer needs and what a coach wants to say.

There’s a misunderstanding that many swimmers carry into training.

That the way to get better at distance is simply to do more distance.

More continuous swimming equals a more competent and more prepared swimmer. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s absolutely not the most effective way to improve.

Yesterday, during a 1–1 session, that misunderstanding surfaced in a simple conversation that lasted barely two minutes. But it captured something I see again and again in swimmers – and in coaching itself.

The conversation with this swimmer didn’t last long.

Two minutes, at most.

We were standing at the end of the lane, water still moving around us, the session waiting to continue – yet I had so much more I wanted to say.

I wanted to explain why I wouldn’t coach him this way. There were better ways to improve swim fitness. Better ways to think about swimming. Better ways to hold technique. Better ways to become a swimmer. 

I wanted to give him my years of experience, mistakes, observations, and lessons.

But coaching is often about moments – and moments rarely give you the luxury of time.

So instead, I tried to distill my reasoning into something simple. More like a handful of bullet points, offered quickly before he pushed off again.

• Break the distance up.
• Protect your technique.
• Swim faster in shorter reps.
• Make quality repeatable.
• Don’t increase distance of the reps, increase distance of the sets.
• Don’t turn every session into a slog (that you dread).

Then he nodded, took a breath, and disappeared back down the lane.

And I was left hoping that something had hit home.

There’s a strange feeling in coaching, which this little story captures.

You often see far more than you can say. You identify issues, potential solutions or ideas that would take hours to explain. But the swimmer in front of you doesn’t need a lecture.

They need something they can remember while they’re tired, breathing hard, halfway through a set. So you try to compress complexity into simplicity. And choose clarity over completeness.

Not because you have nothing more to say, but because too much, delivered at the wrong moment, just becomes noise.

I suppose, out in the field (or on the poolside), the best coaching isn’t actually the perfect explanation, including the reasons why. It’s just about the right sentence, offered at the right time.

I often think about this after sessions. How much has been left unsaid. The things you don’t say, the ideas you hold back and the conversations that happen only in your head on the drive back from the pool.

A swimmer leaves the session with five bullet points. You leave with fifty thoughts!

And yet, if even one of those bullet points changes how he swims next week, if one idea shifts his approach to training, then the conversation has done its job.

Over the years I’ve learned that often, the most important thing a coach can do is not to say everything they know, but to say just enough – and trust that the rest will grow in the swimmer’s mind, stroke by stroke, length by length, session by session.