By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
Confidence.
It’s as important as a good taper and a sleek racing suit when the bright lights go up.
But unlike a tech suit that you size, feel, and try on, confidence isn’t so easy to grasp.
(Almost as hard to get into, if we are being fully honest.)
Race day confidence drops are common. And wildly frustrating.
One moment you are feeling unstoppable in the days leading up to the meet, and the next you’re behind the blocks, attention wandering and confidence sinking, wondering how that swagger rolled into the gutter so quickly.
If you’re tired of uneven confidence, or worse, confidence that straight-up hides in the locker room when it’s time to race, here’s the fix:
Train to build high-concordance confidence.
High concordance means that you are confident in specific actions, and not just feeling generally good about yourself.
As a matter of chlorinated fact, according to a 2023 meta-analysis by Lochbaum et al, when an athlete’s confidence is tied to specific tasks (high concordance), the connection between confidence and performance is much higher compared to general, vague, confidence.
If you’re wondering what in the pull buoys I am talking about, here’s a breakdown of what high concordance confidence looks like and how it compares to the more general kind of confidence:
High concordance: “I’m confident I’ll pace my race properly, hit 5 dolphin kicks off each wall, hold my target stroke rate, and drop the hammer on the final lap.”
It’s like driving with a high-resolution GPS—clear, focused, and reliable. No extra data charges, either.
Low concordance: “I’m confident I’m a good swimmer.”
Sorta like driving by feel — you might get to your destination but will probably take some wrong turns when under pressure.
The more specific your confidence is, the stronger and more reliable it becomes.
General confidence works great on “easy” days and competitions where little is on the line.
The specific, task-based confidence is what wins the day when your heart is racing, your palms are sweating, and all sorts of uncertainty and self-doubt are flowing downhill straight at you.
How to Build High Concordance Confidence
This week in practice, start training for this type of confidence. Start by breaking down your goal swim into pieces and train the everlasting anti-fog spray out of them.
Some examples:
Stack reps on reps at race pace. Whether you have to distance-down to make the pace or not, get the race pace yardage under your belt. Confidence crashes happen often when we expect to go a goal speed in competition that we’ve never even flirted with in training.
Hit your target stroke rate over and over again. I like stroke rate for this example as it is something we can automate with enough repetition. It’s a mechanical component of fast swimming in that it ignores feel and even confidence. Turn your overthinking brain off and focus on tempo.
Push-off with the same underwaters that you are going to do in competition. This is a biggie—you get hundreds, if not thousands of walls each week in practice. By increasing focus and execution in your practice underwaters, you can feel confident in knowing that they are largely automatic by the time you get to the Big Meet.
Close every repetition strongly and attack the finish. Building the habit of finishing fast in training gives you the confidence to know that when your legs are cement, your lungs are aching, and lactate is making your teeth float, you will close. Attack the finishes, touch on a full stroke, head down, and you’ll be confident in your finish.
Practice is for Building the Confidence to Compete
Here’s a quick example of how rehearsing something as simple as closing speed plays out at the elite level.
One of my favorite Katie Ledecky stories is how she trained a fast finish to win the 200m freestyle at the Rio Olympics in 2016.
In the lead-up to the Games, for months on end in training, she finished reps in the same way she planned to close the final 15m of the 200 freestyle. Head down, big kick, all go, no quit.
Over and over, she charged at the wall. Race finishes. Let’s go.
In Rio, at 175-185m of the final of the 200m freestyle, Sarah Sjostrom looks like she is going to reel in Ledecky.
“When Sarah pulled even, I thought, I’ve seen Katie finish that race more than a thousand times,” said Bruce Gemmell, Ledecky’s coach at NCAP. “She’s going to get her hand to the wall first.”
Ledecky touches first, winning gold on her way to completing her sweep of the 200, 400, and 800m freestyles.
“No wonder she can do that in the pressure cooker at Rio,” said Gemmell. “She knew exactly what she was doing in practice, over and over again.”
Every time you rehearse those little, seemingly inconsequential details, you are building a performance and building legitimate confidence.
The Bottom Line
Confidence comes from evidence and not just positive thinking or bravado.
When you can look back at your training, and know that you’ve mastered your race pace, can hit target stroke rate in your sleep, and that your kick will be a white-water rooster tail coming down the home stretch, there is no choice but to be confident.
You won’t have to hope for confidence.
You won’t have to wonder.
You’ll know you can.
And that is the real, unbeatable confidence that shows up when the lights are brightest.
Happy swimming!
ABOUT OLIVIER POIRIER-LEROY
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national-level swimmer, author, swim coach, and certified personal trainer. He’s the author of YourSwimBook, a ten-month logbook for competitive swimmers.
He’s also the author of the best-selling mental training workbook for competitive swimmers, Conquer the Pool: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide to a High-Performance Mindset.
It combines sport psychology research, worksheets, anecdotes, and examples of Olympians past and present to give swimmers everything they need to conquer the mental side of the sport.
Ready to take your mindset to the next level in the pool?
Click here to learn more about Conquer the Pool.
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