Nobody can think about holding an elbow at 98 degrees instead of 97 while their heart rate sits at 180. Andrew Sheaff told me that, and he has spent more than fifteen years coaching swimmers on deck.
Andrew coached at Virginia, Northwestern, Bucknell and Maryland. He wrote A Constraints-Led Approach to Swim Coaching (Routledge, 2024). He came to swimming late and hit a wall in college when getting stronger stopped paying. That wall sent him to Keith Davids and the constraints-led approach.
His point on cues is direct: “willpower is not enough.” So Andrew builds the correction into the activity. A pull buoy between the legs takes the kick away, so the arms have to solve the problem. An upside-down paddle makes the forearm face backward. A cap on stroke count forces a swimmer to slow down.
Destruction and creation in the pool
I heard John Boyd’s Destruction and Creation in this. I told Andrew he was using task constraints to destabilize old patterns so swimmers can find newer ones. He agreed. He destabilizes the old pattern at low intensity, rebuilds it there, and then brings the speed and fatigue back.
We also covered implicit guidance and control. In a pool, that means teaching a swimmer to feel the difference between the old way and the new way, because the coach will not be there in the race. Andrew also says racing is the test, and practice is where the improvement happens.
The switch
Andrew is clear that theory is rarely the bottleneck. Most coaches already own the drills. They have not organized them around the skills that make a swimmer fast. He describes the change as a move from what a coach can say to a swimmer to what environment the coach can create for them to learn in. His words: “That’s the switch and thought process.”
What could you take away from a swimmer so they have to find a better way?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.