SWIMMING GOLD

About SWIMMING GOLD

Straight talk on swimming coaching from Wayne Goldsmith — 30+ years working with Olympic programs and national federations worldwide. Cutting through the noise on technique, training, race skills and building swimmers who love the sport. swimminggold.substack.com (https://swimminggold.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Wayne Goldsmith

Category

sports · sports

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

13 Jun 2025

Latest episode

19 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

50 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   19 Aug 2026

   The Swimming Coach's Eye.

   By Wayne Goldsmith Three Key Learning Points: * Coach’s Eye is a learnable skill, not a talent some coaches were born with. * Look, scan fingers to feet and feet to fingers, then stand back and look again. * Swimming is a technique-driven sport - yet technique is the thing coaches talk about least. Coach’s Eye. And no, not coach’s eye strain from twenty years of squinting at sunlight bouncing off water. (Although that’s real too and it’s a hazard of the job nobody warns you about.) I mean Coach’s Eye.. What you see as a coach when you’re coaching. Here’s the scene. You’re standing on deck next to an experienced coach. They glance at a swimmer and go “yeah, the butterfly’s not quite right”. “It’s a timing thing.” “Their feet are too high.” “Their arms are too low.” Three seconds. Done. Straight to it. And you’re standing there thinking “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at. How did they pick that up so fast?” Whether you’re a new coach, a Learn to Swim teacher, a stroke school teacher or a triathlon coach who’s found themselves on a pool deck - that gap feels enormous. It isn’t magic, my friends. That’s a highly developed Coach’s Eye. It’s a skill. And skills can be taught. Position: stop coaching from the end of the pool: Before we talk about the Coach’s Eye process, here’s one thing to consider. Most coaches coach from the end of the pool. I don’t like it. Bottom line - if your swimmers are swimming three kilometres, you should be walking five. You should be giving more than you’re asking of them. (That’s a video for another day.) But for technique specifically, here’s the problem. From end-on or front-on, with no underwater vision, relying purely on your eye - you see almost nothing. You cannot analyse what you cannot see. Let’s work through the Coach’s Eye process. Coach’s Eye Step One: stand back and just look: Go to the side of the pool. Look. Don’t diagnose yet. Don’t start hunting for the fault. Just see what you see and get a feel for it. You’ll notice a lot of good coaches “mimic” while they watch, i.e.standing on deck mirroring the swimmer’s stroke with their own arms, getting the feel of it in their own body. Try that. Copy the swimmer. Imagine it. Feel their stroke. And then - usually just by observing and mimicking - you'll have a hunch, e.g. “Okay - I think it’s a hip issue.” That’s enough for Coach’s Eye step one. A hunch is exactly what you’re after. Coach’s Eye Step Two: fingers to feet, feet to fingers: Now walk up and down the pool with the swimmer and take a good look at each of their body parts directly involved in swimming: * Fingers to feet: fingers, wrists, forearms, shoulders, head, body, hips, thighs, knees, shins, feet, toes. * Feet to fingers: toes, feet, shin, knee, thigh, hip, body, head, shoulder, forearm, wrist, fingers. Top to bottom. Bottom to top. Every piece in isolation. At first this part of the Coach’s Eye process feels slow. It is slow. That’s the point: you’re building the stroke dynamics library that the experienced coach is drawing on when they do it in three seconds. Coach’s Eye Step Three: stand back and look again: Back to the side of the pool. Look at the whole swimmer again. And now - now - you go “okay, I’ve got a pretty good idea what’s happening here”. Look. Scan. Look again. As you get better, the full body scan becomes less necessary, because you’ll glance and go “that’s a hip issue”. But that takes a while and for most of us mortals it takes a loooong while. We’re all a bit in awe of the high performance coach who calls it instantly. Don’t be. They’ve just done this ten thousand times. You can develop the same skill. Very Useful Technology: the phone in your pocket: You’ve got a phone in your pocket. (Even though of course none of us are ever on our phones on deck, are we!) Pull it out. Video the technical issue you’ve just identified. Then show the swimmer as soon as you possibly can. The reason matters. You want the smallest possible gap between what they felt in the water and what they see on the screen. That gap is where the learning happens - and it closes fast. One serious note. Rules about videoing swimmers are tight in a lot of pools and getting tighter and rightly so. * Follow your local safeguarding policy. * Get proper parental and facility management permission. * If videos need to go to parents rather than to kids, send them to parents. Do the right thing on safeguarding first, always. Then use the tool. Summary: Here’s what bothers me colleagues. So many coaches want to talk training sets. Lots want to talk sports science. Everyone wants to talk technology and AI. Very few coaches want to talk technique. And I don’t think that’s laziness. I think it’s because we never taught them how to develop a Coach’s Eye - so they never got comfortable with technique and as a result they default to what they can talk about confidently. “Let’s do hundreds.” “Let’s do more backstroke.” Sets and workouts and programs, instead of technique. But this is a technique-driven sport. We are moving human bodies through a medium roughly 800 times denser than air. Technique is what it’s all about. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Run the three steps on one swimmer at every session this month. One swimmer. Look, scan both ways, look again. Twenty sessions in you’ll notice the scan getting shorter on its own. * Mimic what you’re watching. Stand there and do the stroke with your own arms while the swimmer does it in the water. It feels ridiculous, it looks silly but it works. * Check your safeguarding policy before you film anything. Know your club’s rules, your pool’s rules and where the video is allowed to go. Sort that out properly and then the phone becomes a genuinely useful coaching tool. If you’ve got a different way - a better way - of developing Coach’s Eye, I’d love to hear it. Share it with our learning community. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with swimming coaches, swimming clubs and Learn to Swim groups all over the world and offers a unique mentoring and coaching program for aquatic professionals. Contact him at wayne@moregold.com.au (mailto:wayne@moregold.com.au) or WhatsApp +61 414 712 074 for more details. Also available - The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now. Seven modules, built for real coaches with real time pressures.https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow (https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow) And for swimming parents - Raising Athletes (includes The Talent Myth book).https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes (https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe (https://swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   14 Aug 2026

   Keep It Simple In Swimming!

   By Wayne Goldsmith Three Key Learning Points: * Propulsion is Newtonian, not aeronautical. Reach out, grab the water, pull straight through. * S-patterns, keyholes and question marks are obsolete - they just haven’t been told yet. * There is no perfect technique. Every swimmer is different - every technique is different. There are a million things written about swimming technique every week. Go to Google. Go to Gemini. Go to Chat. Go to Claude. Go to any of the online swimming or triathlon forums. You will find everything you could possibly want to know about swimming technique online and unfortunately a lot of it is wrong. I want to talk about the big picture stuff - the things I think every coach, every swimming teacher and everyone coaching coaches and teaching teachers needs to sort out in their own head first. And it starts with a phrase everybody knows. Keep it simple, stupid. In our case - keep it simple in swimming. K.I.S.S. Bernoulli: the theory the fluid mechanics experts laugh at: A long, long time ago, in the in the 60s, 70s and 80s, work came out about propulsion in swimming being built on “Bernoulli’s principle”: * Hand pitch angles had to be 45 degrees on entry in fly, back and free. * The human arm as the wing of an albatross. * The human arm as the wing of an aeroplane. * Hands as hydrofoils, moving through water the way birds fly and planes fly. It was complicated. It was very difficult to understand. And a lot of very good people struggled with it - which should have been the first clue. My friends, the reality is that the contribution of the hands and forearms working like hydrofoils and albatross wings is negligible. I know people who are genuine experts in Fluid Mechanics including an old friend who advises the Air Force on design issues. When I raise Bernoulli’s principle being applied to human beings using their hands like aircraft wings, he laughs at me. My son is studying Fluid Mechanics at university right now. He asked his lecturer about it - and got the same response. There may be some lift effect in breaststroke. There may be a small influence of lift on hand entry. But do your homework. Do your own research. And look at what’s actually happening in the water - which is the most important evidence there is. Get hold of some underwater footage of an international swim Meet and watch what the good swimmers are doing. It’s basically Newtonian physics. Reach out. Grab the water. Pull straight through. The stuff in the triathlon magazines, the stuff in the front section of your Learn to Swim journals and coaching books…..a lot of it is simply out of date. Patterns: the shapes we invented and can’t let go of: While we’re here, let’s do the other one: Pull patterns. In freestyle we used to say - touch, then trace an S. In butterfly - make a keyhole. (Although not many people nowadays have ever seen a keyhole!) Exaggerated S patterns. Question marks. Keyholes. Obsolete. All of it. Slow down some front-on underwater footage of world-class swimmers in any of the four strokes and look at what you actually see. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. You do not see complicated hand patterns, exotic pitch angles, keyholes and weird shapes in the vast majority of good swimmers. All of that came out of textbooks written in the 60s, the 70s and the 80s. And for reasons nobody has ever adequately explained to me, it still dominates swimming textbooks, coaching courses and teaching courses around the world today. Don’t teach weird patterns and bizarre shapes. Reach out. Soft hands. Grab the water. Keep pressure on the water. Pull straight through. Perfect: the only kid with perfect technique: The other thing about swimming technique I share with coaches everywhere is this. There is no perfect swimming technique. The only kid whose technique is textbook perfect is the kid whose picture is in the textbook. And that technique is perfect for exactly one person - the one in the photograph. There is no single stroke model that works for all swimmers, all ages, males, females, all strokes. The great and late Gennadi Touretski said the words that should be on the T-shirt of every Learn to Swim teacher on earth: “Every swimmer is different. Every technique is different”. Every swimmer is different. Every technique is different. Remember that. The Five H’s: get these right and you can teach anyone to swim: I once tried to get thousands of Learn to Swim teachers working in a very large aquatics management group to teach stroke development exactly the same way. Didn’t work. Couldn’t be done. Different pools, different teachers, different backgrounds. Too hard. So we stopped chasing uniformity of our teaching methods and went after uniformity of priorities instead: The Five H’s: * Head - in the right position. * Hips - in the right position. * Hands - soft, applying pressure all the way through the stroke. * Heels - relaxed and loose, so the kick can actually happen. * Huff - the breathing is right. Head, hands, hips, heels, huff. Head, hands, hips, heels, huff. Get the Five H’s right and then - then - you can play with hand pitch angle and degree of elbow bend and all the rest of it. And there’s a wonderful line from the wonderful Laurie Lawrence that everyone has quoted since. “If you can’t swim, you can’t swim”. It doesn’t matter what detail you pour into hand pitch and elbow bend. If the head’s in the wrong position they can’t swim. If the hips are in the wrong position they can’t swim. Get the basics wrong and all the technical understanding in the world makes no difference at all. Summary: Here’s the good news, colleagues. What we now know about stroke technique is far simpler than what we used to believe. Bernoulli. Aeroplane wings. Hydrofoils. Keyhole patterns. All that weird stuff we carried on about for four decades - (and unfortunately still carry on about in a lot of places) - most of it is no longer relevant. Keep it simple in swimming. Get the Five H’s right - head, hands, hips, heels, huff - and chances are your swimmer, your triathlete, your Masters swimmer, your learn-to-swim student will be a lot closer to moving efficiently and effectively through the water. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Audit your own language for a week. Count how many times you say S-pull, keyhole, pitch angle or elbow bend to a developing swimmer. Every one of those is a sentence you could have spent on head, hips, hands, heels or breathing. * Film front-on and underwater, then watch it slowly. Front-on is where the mythology falls apart and where you’ll see how simple the technique of the current crop of champion swimmers actually is. * Run every technique intervention through the Five H’s in order. If head and hips aren’t right, nothing below them on the list is worth your session time yet. If you’ve got different ways - better ways - of teaching swimming, coaching swimming or teaching teachers, I’d love to hear them. Keep it simple in swimming. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with swimming coaches, swimming clubs and Learn to Swim groups all over the world and offers a unique mentoring and coaching program for aquatic professionals. Contact him at wayne@moregold.com.au (mailto:wayne@moregold.com.au) or WhatsApp +61 414 712 074 for more details. Also available - The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now. Seven modules, built for real coaches with real time pressures.https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow (https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow) And for swimming parents - Raising Athletes (includes The Talent Myth book).https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes (https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe (https://swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   21 May 2026

   The Car Ride Home!

   Three Key Learning Points * The worst thing you can do is ask them to analyse what went wrong. * The car ride home is not the time to coach - even if you ARE a coach. * What they need most in that moment is unconditional love and acceptance. This post is ostensibly for swimming parents but it’s a good one for coaches too - because part of your job is educating the parents in your program on how to handle the big moments. So here’s the scenario. Your child has gone to a big meet. New goggles. New bag. Everyone’s been excited about the Meet for weeks. But, for whatever reason, their swimming performances didn’t meet their own expectations or yours or the coach’s. Now you’re in the car on the way home. They’re quiet in the back. Maybe headphones on. Maybe gaming. Maybe just staring out the window. There’s that silence that we as parents all know so very very well. And as a parent you’re thinking: “I’ve got to say something. I love them. I can’t bear to see them like this.” This is one of the most critical swimming parent moments you’ll ever experience. Let me walk you through what NOT to say and suggest what you can say and do that might actually help. Don’t ask them to analyse what went wrong: The absolute worst thing you can say is this: “Gee, I thought you’d swim a lot faster darling. What do you think went wrong?” They know they didn’t swim fast. Their coach has already spoken to them about it. They’ve seen their split times. Their teammates have already told them. A competitor or two probably had a go at them. They’ve been beating themselves up since they touched the wall. They do not need YOU - the person they love most - asking them to dwell on it a little more! Don’t try to coach them: “I was watching your backstroke today. You really need to throw your arms more. Push off faster. Kick harder in and out of the turn.” Don’t do it. You’re not their coach. And even if you ARE their coach - in that car, in that moment, you’re not. You’re their parent. That’s the only role that matters in that car in that moment. Don’t compare them to other kids: “Gee, Susie went really well today. Susie was so fast. You normally beat Susie.” Another massive NO! Comparing your child to other kids in that moment just makes them feel smaller and worse. Don’t go there. So what CAN you do? First - say nothing. If they’re in their mid-teens especially they’ll come to you when or if they’re ready. Pushing things only makes them withdraw further. Second - divert. “Hey, on the way home I thought we might grab some takeaway. What do you think?” Give them something small and joyful to think about that’s not related to swimming. Take the spotlight off the meet for a minute. They don’t have to be sitting in the back hitting themselves over the head with a brick the whole drive. Third - share something positive about YOU. “You know what - I really enjoy going to swim meets. I just love watching.” Tell them something that makes it not all about them and their performance. The bigger picture: I’ve been through this hundreds of times with sporting parents - not just with swimming but with football, rugby, tennis, basketball, rowing, gymnastics: every parent at some time will experience the car ride home after a sporting event. The car ride home is far more important than most parents realise. Get it wrong and you create more stress, more frustration, more sadness. You make it harder for the kid to come out of it. But get it right and it’s a chance to demonstrate something extraordinary - unconditional love. Whether they won nine gold medals and broke records, or got disqualified and missed their entry time - love them. Cuddle them. Tell them they’re amazing. Show them they’re valued for who they are not what they swam. If they have you as their “rock” - i.e. the certainty that you love them whether they win or lose - then they have the stable foundation to come back, recover, learn and grow. They always do. Summary: The car ride home is one of the most important moments in your child’s sporting life. Don’t analyse. Don’t coach. Don’t compare. Stay quiet, divert if needed, share something positive about yourself and above everything else - love them unconditionally. That’s the rock they will build the rest of their sporting career - and indeed the rest of their lives upon. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Educate Your Parents: Run a short parent workshop on the topic of the car ride home. Five minutes at a parent meeting could change dozens of swimmer experiences. * Hand Out the “What Not To Say”: Give parents a printable one-pager with the “three things not to say after a tough meet”. Make it easy for them to remember. * Model It Yourself: Coaches - the first conversation after a tough swim matters too. Same rules apply. Don’t pile on. Don’t analyse in the moment. The deep debrief can wait until the next training session. This is Wayne Goldsmith for Swimming Gold. Check out my new SPORTING PARENTS COURSE https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes RAISING ATHLETES - The Sporting Parent’s Guide to Getting It Right. You not only get a unique learning experience with videos and study guides but you get a free copy of my book THE TALENT MYTH - WHY CHARACTER BEATS GENETICS EVERYTIME! And use this CODE PARENTS2026ST at checkout to receive 25% off the price! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe (https://swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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