Repetition Is Our Nemesis: Inconvenient Considerations For A Healthier Sport

Courtesy: Doug Cornish, the founder of Swimpler. Follow Swimpler on Substack here.

INTRO

What percentage of coaches can recite the yardage in every practice they write but don’t track the number of strokes the swimmers take during the practice?

If I was a betting man, I’d take the over at 95%.

That’s about to change.

In swimming, it’s not the yardage that shapes athletes – it’s the strokes. Repetition is the true building block of development. When repetition goes unchecked, it becomes the silent architect of injury, burnout, attrition, and lost potential.

REPETITION CHART

Click HERE to see a chart of total repetitions broken down by practice, week, month, year, and decade.

AGONIST & ANTAGONIST MUSCLES

For movement to come alive, muscles must work in pairs. When your bicep contracts, your tricep lengthens. When your quads flex, your hamstrings lengthen. One pulls, the other releases – and vice versa – a balanced system that enables movement.

The muscle that flexes is called the agonist.

The muscle that stretches is called the antagonist.

Check out this link for better understanding.

In every practice, agonist muscles contract while antagonist muscles stretch thousands of times. Meanwhile, due to their relative neglect, the antagonist grow progressively weaker and overstretched. This has a sculpting effect on the body.

Think of every stroke as a repetition at the gym. Now imagine doing 4,000 biceps curls without a single triceps extension to match. That’s exactly what happens in the pool – in our sport – on a daily basis across the world.

Over time, the results are unmistakable: shoulders hunch forward, necks crane outward, and backs round with strain. Stability erodes as the antagonists lengthen and weaken. There comes a point from which every additional stroke increases the swimmer’s risk of injury – not just in training, but in everyday life.

Michael Phelps.  (Photo: Mike Lewis)

Maintaining the balance between these muscle pairs is essential for long-term musculoskeletal health.

Let’s break down an example:

A high school swimmer averaging 14 strokes per lap and 6,500 yards per practice will log over ten million strokes in a decade.

Now zoom out further: an 8-year-old starting club swimming today faces fourteen years of training before they graduate from college.

Ask yourself:

• Can a few dryland sessions per week truly offset the impact of ten million unbalanced reps?
• Can we honestly believe this path leads anywhere but toward breakdown?

The hard truth – under the current developmental model, swimming breeds more imbalance, injury, and burnout than it does champions.

It’s a long game of Russian roulette. A few athletes reach the summit, but far too many are forced back to base camp – broken, sidelined, or lost to the sport entirely.

For every one swimmer on the podium, how many more have been discarded?

For those on the podium, what does life look like post-swimming?

PERCEIVED COMPETENCE

The danger that repetitions pose isn’t just physical. It’s psychological, and it plays a significant role in both development and retention.

Dan Gould is a world leader in sport attrition research. His extensive work repeatedly demonstrates that attrition rates are negatively correlated to perceived competence: the higher the levels of perceived competence, the lower the levels of attrition.

In his 1982 study, Reasons for Attrition in Competitive Youth Swimming, Gould and colleagues found that a lack of skill development was a major factor in decreased feelings of perceived competence, and therefore, a major reason kids were leaving the sport.

If you have read The Imperative – Improved Technique Development Volume 2, your spider senses should be tingling.

Recall the number of repetitions that a mildly-committed swimmer experiences between the ages of 8 and 10 is 1,000,000. Their skills are autonomous.

Replacing learned skills with new skills is brutally hard. Once a skill reaches the autonomous stage – when you can perform the skill without conscious attention – it’s deeply wired into the nervous system. At that point, retraining is like trying to download the current version of windows while using the old version of windows.

Once the repetitions transform a skill from unlearned to autonomous, swimmers are trapped in an experience that trends toward frustration.

If skill acquisition → perceived competence → enjoyment/retention

Then lack of skill acquisition → perceived incompetence → frustration/attrition

Here’s the perpetuating cycle common in our sport:

1. Young swimmer starts eager and motivated.
2. They increase their training volume, and improve their times.
3. Subpar technique gets locked in.
4. Time improvement plateaus when swimmer stops growing.
5. Focus shifts to improving technique.
6. Frustration rises.
7. Enjoyment fades.
8. Other activities – even the act of doing nothing – look more appealing.

USA Swimming often references the desire to improve retention rates, but as a community, we have never been so bold as to actually address the real problem – both our developmental model and our narrative need an overhaul.

TECHNIQUE – REPETITION INTERACTION

By improving technique, we can make athletes faster and reduce drastically the amount of repetitions athletes accumulate throughout their career in two ways.

First – delaying the onset of volume. Rather than moving to volume-based practices to keep up with the Jones’s, teams and coaches have the option to delay the addition of volume in favor or teaching, layering, and reinforcing skills. They can build technique integrity checkpoints into their system for adding volume.

Second – improved technique means we travel further per stroke, reducing the strokes per lap and strokes per career. Let’s consider two swimmers who average 6 practices per week and 6,000 yards per practice.

• Swimmer A takes 20 strokes per lap
  • 4,800 strokes per practice
  • 13,824,000 strokes per decade
• Swimmer B takes 12 strokes per lap
  • 2,880 strokes per practice
  • 8,294,000 strokes per decade

Swimmer B is more skilled, less likely to be injured, and performing at a much higher level than Swimmer A.

Don’t get confused – this isn’t about yardage – it’s about repetitions.

I had a parent who disagreed with my approach. She demanded that the swimmers do more yardage, pointing out that Michael Phelps did 10,000 yards per practice.

My counterpoint was simple:

• Her daughter took 21 strokes per lap.
  • At 6,000 yards, 21 strokes per lap yields 5,040 strokes
• Michael Phelps takes an estimated 10 strokes per lap.
  • At 10,000 yards 10 strokes per lap yields 4,000 strokes

Imagine the damage I may have inflicted if I listened to her.

• 10,000 yards at 21 strokes per lap yields 8,400 strokes per practice.

I invite everyone to begin viewing your prescribed yardage amounts through the context of repetitions. Once you realize that many of your young developing swimmers are already swimming significantly more than elite athletes, it becomes clear that the quality of the repetition matters far more than the quantity of the laps.

HIPPOCRATIC OATH

For over 2,000 years, the medical field has been guided by the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath:

If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

It’s time for us to more carefully weigh the dangers of repetition, incorporating it into both our oaths and our developmental models for the sake of performance, long-term health, enjoyment, and athlete retention.

If every team:

• Created a technique model for coaches and swimmers to follow
• Established a system for teaching, layering, and reinforcing technique
• Systematically added volume with stroke integrity checkpoints
• Incorporated daily strength programs that restore muscle balance
• Focused on both body and mind

Our sport and our athletes would be healthier, faster, and set up better for the long haul.

TAKEAWAY

Swimming has always been a sport of numbers – yards, intervals, splits, time standards, rankings, tempos, attrition rate.

But the most important number we keep overlooking is the one that shapes every swimmer’s future.

If we want to build athletes who are not just fast, but resilient, healthy, and passionate for the long haul, we must rethink how we prescribe repetition.

The next generation of swimmers deserves more than just mileage. They deserve a path that actually has the ability to lead them to full potential.