How does your swimming team influence you?

The atmosphere whilst you train can have a massive influence on you and your performance. Being a part of a team can massively raise spirits and swimming abilities or totally destroy them! A positive group attitude is really important but is something that takes time to develop. Making sure everyone feels a part of the team and as important as everyone is hard work! By having just 1 person that doesn’t pull their weight, train as hard as everyone else or brings a negative attitude to training can drag everyone right down. That individual or handful of people is probably completely unaware that they have this effect on other team members! If this is happening in your club, then give them more encouragement than usual to be a part of the ‘positive team.’ There are always going to be team members that are jealous of other swim club members, especially if you have a pretty young team. This does not bring out any good performances. If you’re a coach and you know a swimmer like this, then reinforce their strengths to them and make them aware of how good they are too. So as a swimmer what do you do if you are positive but others aren’t? My advice to you would be to focus on you, not the negative people. If you let their negative behaviour bother you then you are going to become one of these negative people! Keep motivated, stay positive and remember you are the one who is going to see the results not the slackers. Not all people quite get this sense of team and team spirit. Inspiration and motivation between team members will improve all swimmers, not just individuals. Once you get this positive team of coaches, parents and swimmers then you are sure to see a huge increase in enjoyment levels and massive improvements to times. The main point of this read is to note that team power is so much stronger than any individual on their own. There is that old saying that went… ‘a champion team will always beat a team of champions’ True right? With thanks to Zitona for images.