Matthew Mace

Swimming and Burnout: How to Avoid It

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Swimmers are prime candidates to experience burnout — here’s everything you need to know to set yourself up for success.

Swimming and burnout go hand in hand — to become a great swimmer, you need to put in countless hours in the water. But the depths of training don’t end once a swimmer steps out of the pool…

There are other strict routines that make up their weekly schedule — an intense diet, a recovery routine, gym sessions, and the pressure to succeed from themselves, their supporters (friends and family), and their coaches.

Swimming is intense, it’s difficult, and it requires a lot of dedication, perhaps more so than any other sport.

There’s a reason why so many elite swimmers encounter burnout or face a myriad of mental health issues. Take Michael Phelps, for example; the most successful and decorated Olympian of all time struggled with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts for years while in the pool, later opening up about his struggles which inevitably helped others. Whether part of the problem was burnout or not, it signifies a serious issue for competitive swimmers and other athletes.

Then there’s Simone Manuel, a professional American swimmer who revealed her burnout diagnosis back in 2021. And let’s not forget the countless other swimmers who are unable to reveal their burnout as they risk losing sponsorship or a spot on the team.

So, this blog post will discuss swimming and burnout in more detail — what burnout is, what causes it, and how to avoid burnout in swimmers.

What is athletic burnout in swimming?

Athletic burnout is seen as a lasting experience of emotional and physical exhaustion. It’s typically met with a mix of symptoms such as a lack of motivation, a reduced sense of accomplishment, and even withdrawal from sport. 

One study takes it a step further, saying: “burnout in swimming is characterised by mental and physical exhaustion, a devaluation of swimming, and successes often become less meaningful.”

But why are swimmers most at risk? According to one study, individual sports presented a higher risk of burnout and other depressive symptoms. Furthermore, competitive swimmers typically dive into the pool and begin training anywhere from the ages of seven to twelve.

From a very young age, swimmers put in two-plus-hour training sessions multiple times a week. Often, it starts off as fun or, for Phelps, a way to burn off extra energy. But for many swimmers, it can be challenging to know why they started in the first place. 

It’s a sport that demands an excessive time and energy commitment, with those wearing the goggles and performing laps left to their own thoughts. You can likely already see why burnout is a risk and is perhaps more common than it should be.

What causes burnout in swimmers?

It’s rare that you’ll hear the term burnout spoken of without the mention of overtraining syndrome.

Overtraining syndrome is when an athlete engages in excessive exercise with inadequate rest and recovery, increasing their risk of burnout, but also physical injury. Stress also plays a key role — stress is essential for adaptation, but too much stress can contribute to overtraining and burnout. The stress can be out of the pool, too. For example, it could be academic pressures, family issues, or other social demands. 

It’s when the stress gets too high (physical and emotional) that an athlete is at risk of both overtraining and burnout, as mentioned by Dr Ralph Richards, former swim coach and sports scientist at the Australian Institute of Sport.

The more we understand the risk factors and what causes burnout in swimmers, the easier it is for coaches and athletes to counter it.

How to avoid athletic burnout in swimming 

There are numerous ways for coaches and swim athletes to avoid burnout in swimming.

Typically, the athlete will display signs of burnout and overtraining in training — this is likely to manifest as a decrease in training performance for 1 week or longer. It’s vital that the coach and athlete react to the symptoms early to prevent injury or a more serious case of burnout.

So, what can they do?

  • Ensure good communication between the coach and athlete
  • Create individualised training programs for swim athletes 
  • Increase training loads in a progressive manner 
  • Maintain variety and keep it fun
  • Include activities that ensure success

Continue reading to find out more about each prevention strategy. 

Ensure good communication 

As Dr Ralph Richards mentions, it’s important to ensure good communication between the coach and athlete. 

The swim athlete should feel comfortable with the coach — able to tell them if they feel a lack of motivation, confidence, or other risk factors associated with burnout.

But the same should be true for the coach-athlete relationship — the coach should be aware of the athlete’s performance and know when there’s an increased risk of burnout.

Good communication allows for early detection of burnout, making treatment easier.

Create individualised training programs for swim athletes

No two athletes are created the same in the pool or in any other sport — some athletes respond better to more intense training than others.

So, when creating a swim training plan, coaches should create these with each athlete in mind. It’s no good prescribing a dozen high-intensity intervals for an athlete who responds better to slightly less volume but equal intensity.

Also, if possible, the athlete should be involved when creating the training plan.

Increase training loads in a progressive manner

It’s the age-old rule for any type of training — progressive training is key to avoiding injury and burnout.

A good training plan should become progressively more difficult as the season goes on. Likewise, it’s important to include periods of low-intensity training and rest to ensure proper physical and mental recovery from the previous season or swim meets.

Maintain variety and keep it fun 

Even if you’re competing for Olympic gold, you should be having fun in training. Granted, not every training session in the pool will be enjoyable — but there should be one or two sessions that you look forward to.

This will pique your interest and keep you motivated for training.

Include activities that ensure success

And finally, the coach should include activities and training sessions in a swim athlete’s training plan that ensures success.

The cognitive appraisal model is all about stress — how an athlete interprets an event or situation and whether they see it as stressful. If an athlete has had success in similar events, then they are likely to see the situation as less stressful, reducing the overall stress load. 

This is important because cognitive appraisal is seen as an important variable in athletes experiencing burnout, as found in a 2017 study. By adding these periods of success, you can build up the confidence in swim athletes, reducing their overall stress levels and risk of burnout.

Use Rewire to combat stress and burnout 

Whether you’re a swimmer, a triathlete, a cyclist, or anything in-between, you’re at risk of burnout. However, if you can reduce stress and better control your immediate environment, then you can likely reduce your risk of burnout.

Begin using the Rewire Fitness app today for free and begin mental training to help combat burnout and reduce stress.

Interested in finding out more about burnout? Read our guide on athlete burnout and how to prevent it. 

Check out our podcast episode with Joe Fuggle as he shares his personal experience with burnout as a former elite GB athlete.

References:

Campbell, T.S., Johnson, J.A. and Zernicke, K.A., 2013. Cognitive appraisal. Encyclopedia of behavioral medicine, pp.442-442.

Gomes, A.R., Faria, S. and Vilela, C., 2017. Anxiety and burnout in young athletes: The mediating role of cognitive appraisal. Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports, 27(12), pp.2116-2126.

Gustafsson, H., 2007. Burnout in competitive and elite athletes (Doctoral dissertation, Örebro universitetsbibliotek). https://memberdesq.sportstg.com/assets/console/customitem/attachments/burnout-rrichards.pdf

Kreher, J.B. and Schwartz, J.B., 2012. Overtraining syndrome: a practical guide. Sports health, 4(2), pp.128-138.

Martin, J., Byrd, B., Hew-Butler, T. and Moore, E.W.G., 2021. A longitudinal study on the psychological and physiological predictors of burnout in NCAA collegiate swimmers. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, pp.1-17.

Nixdorf, I., Beckmann, J. and Nixdorf, R., 2019. Prevention of burnout and depression in junior elite swimmers. In Mental health and well-being interventions in sport (pp. 31-44). Routledge.

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David Lipman

Individualisation and Modification of Training Based on Readiness and Individual Responses to Stimulus With Rewire

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With each passing month there is more and more evidence in support of the use of HRV guided training for athletes. Part of this is driven by the increasing interest in HRV as a measure in health and performance, but part of it is also probably due to the intrinsic ‘sense’ it makes. That is; not everyone adapts to the same stimulus the same way and everyone deals with life stressors differently. In fact, if you speak to most coaches these phenomena are deeply ingrained in their understanding of adaptation, the challenge has been how to quantify this and adapt as a result. 

This was the basis for Rewire’s readiness tracking. It was built on the concept of blending both objective physiological parameters with subjective and emotional factors, which is still quite unique in the industry. As is the appreciation of the two and their impact on eachother, perhaps due to modern culture’s mind-body dissociation. 

To this point, a bulk of the research regarding HRV guided training has used HRV as the sole measure to adjust training (either in an acute time frame with acute changes to HRV or a longer term time frame based on longer term trends) and has mostly cut back or reduced training intensity based on this. In reality many coaches would likely integrate subject measures with these sorts of objective measures such as resting heart rate and HRV as well as modify training in more ways than just reducing load on days of poor readiness. 


A recent study from Nuuttila Olli-Pekka and colleagues has taken a very coach oriented view on readiness when it comes to HRV guided training. 

The basics of the study:

  • Runners were split into two groups, one followed a set program and one adjusted training around their HRV, heart rate-running speed index (a measure of the relationship of running speed to heart rate)  and subjective measures of readiness. 
  • In the group who adjusted training, this was done twice a week and saw either an increase, maintenance or decrease in training based on the measures mentioned. 
    • This is of specific note given usually HRV guided training studies use only low HRV to reduce training load, not the opposite. 
  • They trained for 15 weeks, with pre and post intervention testing
  • Top speed on a treadmill and 10km time trial were the outcome measures

What they found:

  • All runners improved
  • The magnitude of improvement was greater for the group with modified training in the 10km time trial 
  • The proportion of high responders (those who had significantly larger improvements) was more in the modified training group (50% vs 29%)
  • The modified training group had fewer low responders (0% vs 21%)

Some thoughts and takeaways:

  • Generally training improves performance, so the global improvement is expected but the difference in the groups is key
  • Using modified training had greater upside (high responders) and lower downside (low responders), crucially there were no non-responders

So to summarize, modifying training to match readiness showed increased performance and improved all participants’ performance. This is very rare in any intervention, let alone one that only takes a few minutes! 

If this, in combination with the fact that Rewire both tracks these metrics and provides actionable insights around modification of training and preparation for training on different days, doesn’t make you want to use Rewire then the next study will help really cement this. 

Jens Voet and colleagues’ 2021 paper showed the disconnect between the training prescription of the coach and the way this was executed by the athletes (in this case, semi-professional cyclists) with respect to RPE. This difference was significant, and importantly, differed between individuals. It likely reflects, at least in part, the disconnect between prescription of external workloads and training responses they induce (internal workloads). 

To simplify, the intention of the coach when prescribing sessions was rarely the reality, and the magnitude of this difference was individual between athletes. Again, for most coaches this probably makes some sense upon reflection. But the challenge is quantifying this gap and the bigger challenge is adapting things going forward to the athlete. 

Enter Rewire. 

The algorithm used in readiness tracking by Rewire adapts to you in that your individual variation is scaled based on your normal ranges, because everyone’s responses differ. 

This readiness measurement drives mindset recovery and pre-workout priming recommendations to help you get the most out of training or indeed recover better for the day. That’s right, Rewire provides actions to take based on readiness, not just a readiness score for you to try and understand. 

Additionally, the gap between intended session difficulty and actual difficulty is currently tracked when undertaking Neuro-training and is something that is in the roadmap for inclusion at a later date for the coaches dashboard for other training sessions.

So with this in mind, why not start your Elite trial of Rewire today?

Don’t forget, Rewire is about more than just readiness tracking and pre-training preparation! Recovery sessions are prescribed thanks to integrations such as Garmin and Strava because training is about repeated efforts over weeks and months, not just every now and then. This is all without mention of Rewire’s key mental fitness focused Neuro-training, which improves mental endurance. 

References:

Olli-Pekka N, Ari N, Elisa K, Keijo H, Heikki K. Individualized Endurance Training Based on Recovery and Training Status in Recreational Runners. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2022 Aug 13. doi: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000002968. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35975912.

Jens G. Voet, Robert P. Lamberts, Jos J. de Koning, Jelle de Jong, Carl Foster & Teun van Erp (2021) Differences in execution and perception of training sessions as experienced by (semi-) professional cyclists and their coach, European Journal of Sport Science, DOI: 10.1080/17461391.2021.1979102

This indicates that the relationship between RPE and iRPE is unique to each cyclist. Both the different execution and perception of the training programme by the individual cyclists could cause an impaired training adaptation.

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Matthew Mace

What Is Mental Fitness, and Why Is It Important?

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And a few tips to help you improve your mental fitness.

Mental fitness is more than a reaction test or a memory game, and it’s not a state of well-being. Instead, mental fitness is all about achieving emotional balance, increasing awareness, making clear decisions, and setting healthy boundaries. 

And while we can talk about what mental fitness is all day, the definition often means somewhat different things to others. For example, one person may see mental fitness as their ability to push themselves mentally during a race, while another person may define mental fitness as thinking clearly and being in a good place mentally and emotionally.

But regardless of what it means to you or me, exactly why is mental fitness important? What happens if you neglect it, and how do you exercise and maintain it? We’ll address all these questions and more below.

What is mental fitness?

While physical fitness is often represented by defined muscles, personal bests, and an impressively low heart rate, mental fitness is a lot more difficult to define. Besides, you can’t touch or feel mental fitness.

If you can’t deadlift with your brain, then how are you supposed to improve your mental fitness? And is it even possible?  

Yes, it is possible to train your mental fitness, and there are various methods to do it. A good place to start would be by adding mindfulness and meditation into your daily routine. You should also follow a regular exercise schedule and stick to a healthy diet. It’s important to stick to these healthy habits long-term to see real benefits. It’s not a do-it-once approach — you must stick with it.

For more tips on improving mental fitness, check out our mental fitness guide for beginners.

Why is mental fitness important?

Being in a state of positive mental fitness enables us to respond to the many challenges life throws at us. Our state of mind and emotions directly impact the decisions we make, how we respond to certain situations, and how we think and feel daily.

Poor mental fitness may negatively impact your relationships (spouse, friends, or family), your emotional and mental health, and even your self-esteem. As an athlete, you may put less effort into training, perhaps lose interest in your sport, and no longer perform at your best.

By now, you likely understand just how important mental fitness is. And if you neglect your mental fitness, you may begin to experience negative consequences in other areas of your life. So, take control of your mental fitness and better control and manage how you think, feel, and act.

What is the difference between physical and mental fitness?

The difference between physical and mental fitness is an easy one.

Physical fitness is the body’s ability to function as expected, whereas mental fitness is focused on the mind — how we think, feel, and experience certain scenarios. 

Both mental and physical fitness can be trained — you can build bulging quads and other defined muscles, but you can also exercise and stimulate the mind to improve your well-being and how you respond to stressful situations. 

For example, American psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues compared self-control to that of a muscle — it can be strengthened and fatigued. The theory is known as “ego depletion” and surrounds the idea that we all possess a limited mental reserve of energy — once it runs out, we’re more likely to lose self-control. 

This is further supported by the theory that willpower can be trained, helping us deal with a variety of stressful situations we not only encounter daily, but in sports — think long-distance running, challenging training sessions, and gruelling triathlon distances.

Anyways, it’s important to achieve a balance of both physical and mental fitness. However, achieving excellent mental fitness may result in the motivation to improve your physical fitness, whether that means losing weight or overcoming an injury.

How do you exercise your mental fitness?

We’ve previously touched on a few methods to exercise your mental fitness already. But there are numerous methods at your disposal, such as:

  • Practice mindfulness: reduce distractions and practice being present and in the moment.
  • Exercise regularly: aim to exercise for at least 150-minutes a week.
  • Push yourself out of your comfort zone: seek new opportunities and challenge yourself regularly.

Exercising your mental fitness is not as simple as completing one task daily. Instead, your mental fitness is linked to multiple factors. Therefore, it’s recommended to engage in these tasks regularly to provide yourself with the best opportunity to increase and maintain your mental fitness.

The Rewire Fitness app has an entire library full of mindfulness and recovery sessions designed to increase mental fitness, reduce stress, and allow you to re-focus on what’s important to you.

Start training your mental fitness today

The concept of mental fitness is fairly new. And while the increased awareness surrounding mental health is more than welcomed, more people need to know what mental fitness is and how it works.

To get started, we suggest using the Rewire daily readiness assessment. The short 90-second assessment measures how prepared you are to tackle the day. It’s easy to do, and when used with the Rewire app, it provides you with the tools to better manage your mental fitness.

FAQs

Why is mental fitness important? 

Mental fitness is important for many reasons. For example, it allows you to respond to situations better, enables you to think clearer, and may positively influence work or training performance.

What is the difference between mental health and mental fitness?

Mental fitness is about thinking, feeling, and performing your best in all areas of life. Mental health is greater concerned with maintaining and managing a positive and healthy state of mind and well-being.

What is more important, physical or mental fitness? 

Both physical and mental fitness are equally important. If you work on both, you’re likely to see the maximum benefits in all areas of your life.

Why is it important to have a healthy mind?

Having a healthy mind directly impacts how you think, feel, and act. Set yourself up for success by prioritising your mental health and mental fitness.

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Sun Sachs

Exclusive Offer to Become a Founding Investor of Rewire Fitness

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Exclusive Offer to Our Rewire Community

We’re offering our Rewire community an exclusive opportunity to invest in the Rewire business and become a founding investor this month (October 2022).

Market Trends
When it comes to investing they say timing is everything and this is literally the perfect time to consider investing in Rewire. The mindful movement trend has become a $29 Billion dollar market with brands like Nike, Under Armour, Hyperice, Therabody, Othership, Breathwork and others doubling down on the “Mental Fitness” category. Rewire Fitness is the first to market, patented solution that provides holistic readiness, mindset recovery and resilience training for athletes using evidence based solutions from neuroscience, NASA, the military and sports science. According to the research group Mintel, mental and emotional well being is now the #1 reason for exercising and with athlete burnout and overtraining on the rise, the Rewire solution needs to be in the hands of athletes all around the world.

How will Funding be Used?
This funding will go directly into continuing the mission of helping athletes around the world by supporting the ongoing development of new product features, the launch of our new Teams product and Neuro-Training hardware.


“Rewire is a product built by athletes for athletes. Our mission is to help you reach your full potential and avoid burnout by providing tools that improve mindset, readiness and resilience. We have a market-leading product with deep IP that harnesses the best science and technology to help athletes and teams around the world. We hear from many of you every day about how helpful Rewire is to your performance and well-being. This keeps us constantly inspired and motivated to continually improve the product. We also have a fantastic group of investors, advisors, and partners who love what we’re doing and believe in our mission. If you feel the same about what we’re doing please join us in becoming a founding investor of Rewire Fitness.”

Sun Sachs, CEO & Co-Founder, Rewire Fitness

Company Facts

  • Rewire holds a U.S. Patent with international patents pending
  • Prior funding rounds included investments from sports brands and athletes including Under Armour and notable pro athletes such as NBA All-Star, Kyle Korver & 7 other professional athletes from around the World
  • Rewire created an advisory board with notable scientists, human performance experts and athletes in Sept 2021
  • Techstars Sports Accelerator Alumni (Q2 2022)
  • Rewire launched a closed beta program for teams and coaches in Jan 2022 which is set to launch in Nov 2022
  • Rewire’s first-to-market neuro-training system hardware is launching in Dec 2022

Requirements of Investors

  • At this time we can only receive investments from accredited investors
  • Minimum investment amount: $5,000 USD

Investment Terms

Rewire is raising $250,000 on a SAFE note with a $8M Post
No additional terms, discounts or incentives are being offered at this time

Offer Ends on October 31st, 2022
If you feel strongly about what we’re doing and would like to learn more about becoming a founding investor in the Rewire business please reach out to us as soon as possible as this opportunity will no longer be available beyond this month (Ends on October, 31st 2022). [email protected]

Danielle

Setting Goals, Finding Purpose, and The Importance of Mindset in Sports with Marc Klok, Professional Football Player

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Marc Klok is a professional footballer who plays as a midfielder for Liga 1 club Persib Bandung and the Indonesia national team. 

In this episode, Marc Klok shares his journey toward becoming a professional football player. He discusses how he practices resilience, deals with setbacks, approaches goal-setting, and his thoughts on health, mindset, and longevity. In addition, Marc offers his advice to aspiring professional athletes.

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