Performance profiling - 08-07-2009Taken from Claire's blog at www.clairehitchings.com In my pervious life I was a sport psychologist (working with England Netball for 10 years). Performance Profiling was the big new thing a few years ago. With performance profiling you list the qualities of an elite triathlete (or whatever sport you do) and then rate yourself from 0-10 on each qualities and then set some goals based on where you score lowest. After qualifying for the Worlds back in May I decided to do a more formal review of where I was at. This was really prompted by absolutely hating my first ever mass start lake swim. Prior to that I’d always rationalised that with a 400m pool swim even Rebecca Adlington would only get 3 minutes on me and I was confident that I would get that back on the bike. But with the age group distances (750m swim, 20k bike and 5k run) with such a short bike and nearly double the length swim I needed to re-think my approach. Another prompt was I was moaning about my swim performance to my husband Anthony and he pointed out that I hardly ever go swim training, so what did I expect!! Sometimes Anthony can be quite annoying! :-) It was time for some performance profiling. I was quite excited at doing some “sport psychology” on myself. I looked at the times of the top girls and compared my times to them. On the swim I was losing beteen 2 and 3 minutes to them. Too much. I rated my swimming 3 out of 10. I set a goal of improving my swim time by 2 minutes before the World Champs. How was this to be done? • Prioritise Monday night lake swim – there is absolutely no substitute for specificity of training None of the above is particularly rocket science but I got a lot from it. It certainly prompted me to make a few changes to what I do. I think it’s quite easy to just trundle along doing the same old things and never questioning what you do. Two months down the line I’m certainly enjoying my swimming more and I feel it’s moving in the right direction. Watch out Rebecca!! more news articles... | Upcoming events11-09-2010 |
