I’ve seen hundreds of ads on social media saying the same types of things:
Mindset matters
Train your mind like you train your body
Don’t wait until championship season to train your mindset
I agree with all of those things. What I don’t agree with is what those ads are actually offering.
Behind many of those ads is one of these:
A book
An online course
A request to “DM me” to talk about 1:1 mindset training
Here is the problem: none of those things are training. I believe if we’re going to say “train your mind like your body,” you have to actually mean it.
We are swimmers. We know exactly what training is. With training, we learn a skill and we practice it. Over and over again. We’re never done with it because there is always something to learn and refine.
Want proof? Listen to Kate Douglass’s interview after she broke the 50 free world record for the first time this summer . She talks about how hard she was working on her start. She didn’t say, “Well, I’m a world-class sprinter, so I don’t have to work on that anymore.” She kept working on it because even at that level, there is always something to learn and refine.
So why do we treat mindset completely differently?
A book can teach you something. But reading a book isn’t the same thing as training. To turn it into training, you would need to take detailed notes, revisit the material again and again, take what you learned into the pool, practice it, and keep refining it. I know very few busy swimmers who have time for that.
Traditional online courses are no different. You can watch a series of videos and learn some useful ideas, but you can’t expect watching those videos to create some radical transformation in your swimming. The transformation comes from learning, applying, practicing, and adjusting over time, not passively watching a video.
There are certainly some good people offering 1:1 coaching. But weekly talks are difficult to translate into concrete action in the pool and I know from personal experience how quickly 1:1 coaching can become more expensive than a mortgage payment.
So what happens to the swimmer who actually wants to train their mindset?
They scroll social media. They find inspirational posts and save them. Maybe a coach or speaker comes in to deliver a motivational speech.
That’s not training.
Those things might make a swimmer feel better temporarily, but they aren’t going to be there when you’re feeling pressure in the ready room, your competitor surges during the last 50, or you feel off from the moment you get in the water.
I’m passionate about doing mindset training differently. Training that is actually training.
What does that look like? Simple—it looks like every other type of training we do in swimming. We learn something, we apply it, we practice it over and over again, and we keep refining it. We never stop because there is always something more to learn.
This is what I built inside the Swim Mindset Collective.
First, swimmers learn the fundamentals—the key, swimming-specific frameworks I spent a year building and refining. The goal is to take a complex and sometimes squishy topic like mindset and make it relatable, understandable, and actionable.
Then swimmers get ongoing training. Every week, we go deeper into a specific topic. On Sunday, I share the plan for the week, and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I deliver new lessons through The Mindset Set, a private podcast for Collective members. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays are for repetition and reflection, giving swimmers a chance to revisit what they learned and document what they are discovering.
Over time, swimmers figure out what works for them and develop their own personal mindset formula - I call it the “Formula 4 One” - and just like everything else in swimming, it continues to evolve.
Before you think this sounds like a huge time commitment—it isn’t. The five foundational lessons are about 15 minutes each, and the ongoing lessons are 3–5 minutes on average. Swimmers can listen on the way to practice, on the way to school, or whenever it fits into their day.
The important part is what happens after that: they take what they learned into the pool and experiment with it. For example, maybe one week we’re focused on handling discomfort. A swimmer gets a hard set in practice and tries different tools and strategies they’ve learned. They pay attention to what works, what doesn’t, and what they want to keep practicing.
That’s mindset training. Not reading about it. Not saving an inspirational quote. Not hoping a motivational speech happens to land at exactly the right moment. It’s doing the work in practice, figuring out what works for you, and building the ability to rely on those tools when you need them most.
If you aren’t doing those things, you aren’t training.