Ryan Lochte Uses Visualization Techniques for Success (VIDEO)

The Michael Phelps Legacy: Changing the Sport of Swimming

“I wanted to change the sport and take it to another level.  

"It's kind of weird looking at this and seeing 'Greatest Olympian of All Time.' I finished my career the way I wanted to. It think that pretty cool."

--Michael Phelps, after collecting his 22nd Olympic medal and 18th gold as member of the USA men's 4x100 meter medley relay team. at the 2012 Olympics in London.

Missy Franklin, 17, who competed in seven swimming events in London, the most ever by a female Olympic swimmer, attributes her drive and ambition to Phelps, who made such a championship training regimen seem not only feasible but fun.

“He has done a world of difference for swimming,” Franklin said. “He has really brought swimming onto the scene and gotten so many more people involved. Just what he’s done is incredible, and he’s kind of made people rethink the impossible — rethink what they can do and how they can push themselves.”

She added: “I don’t think his shoes will ever be filled. I think his footsteps are huge. Hopefully, I can make little paths next to his.”
Le Clos, 20, said he watched Phelps win six golds and two bronzes at the Athens Olympics and was inspired to become a champion swimmer. It was not a coincidence that Le Clos swam six events in London, including the same four individual ones as Phelps. After watching Phelps win a record eight golds in Beijing, Le Clos added more events to his program to be like Mike. On Tuesday, he pulled off a monumental upset when he handed Phelps his first major international defeat in 10 years in the 200-meter butterfly.

“That’s why I was so emotional afterwards,” Le Clos said. “He was the reason I swam the butterfly. It’s not a joke. If you think about it, it’s kind of crazy.” He added: “That’s why I swim the 200 freestyle, both the I.M.’s. I don’t swim it for any other reason than just because Michael does.”

Phelps got choked up when he heard that he was Le Clos’s hero and role model, Bob Bowman, Phelps' long-time coach said. “It means Michael’s done what he wanted to do: affect the sport of swimming,” Bowman added.

Among those he turned back in the butterfly final was Milorad Cavic of Serbia, who nearly outtouched him in 2008. “I cannot be compared to Michael Phelps,” Cavic said. “I’m a one-trick pony. He does it all."

Excerpts from nytimes.com (08/04/2012). Crouse, Karen. "With One Last Gold, Phelps Caps Career That Inspired a Generation."

Progressive Relaxation Helps Michael Phelps to Gold

"When I step onto the blocks to race, I switch into a different gear. It doesn't matter what kind of training I have or what's going on in my life, I'm always going to rise to the occasion."

--Michael Phelps.

Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps' coach, says that structured relaxation has been a part of Phelps' prerace routine since he was 12 years old and is a key to his success. Bowman introduced Phelps to progressive relaxation and includes a recitation of cues.

Every night before Phelps went to sleep, his mother, Debbie, would sit with him in his dimly lit bedroom, read a script, and command him to relax different parts of his body. With considerable practice, Phleps could relax without his mother's cues. With more practice, he became adept at placing himself in the same meditative state in the ready room before a race.

Once he cleared his mind and loosened his limbs, Phelps would swim each race over and over in his mind. In addition to a perfect race, Phlep pictures himself overcoming every conceivable obstacle to achieve his goal time so that when he stands on the blocks he feels as if nothing can stand in the way of him and his quest.

"I do go through everything from a best-case scenario to the worst-case scenario just so I'm ready for anything that comes my way," Phelps says.

So, for example, when Phelps' goggles unexpectedly filled with water during the finals of the 200 butterfly at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, he did not panic. He counted his strokes so he knew where the walls were and was able to lower his world record and win the gold medal.

Excerpts from the New York Times (July 26, 2009).

For more on progressive relaxation, click on Peak Performance eCoach.

For more on Peak Performance, click on The Handbook of Peak Performance.

Michael Phelps, Leaving a Legacy

"My only real goal is to leave the sport bigger and better than I found it."

--Michael Phelps, in 2005, when asked by Dick Ebersol of NBC if he would be open to swimming events in the morning to enhance Olympic coverage on television in the United States.

Taken from the New York Times, 8/25/2008.

Michael Phelps, Peak Performance Case Study

"I executed the plan, nearly to perfection."

--Michael Phelps.

There will be many people that will look everywhere for the secret of Michael Phelps' success as a swimmer. One need not look far. His mother, revealed the secrets to Robin Roberts on Good Morning America on ABC television, August 20th, 2008.

Research suggests that consistent peak performance consists of seven competencies: a passionate vision, the ability to fast-forward, the proper mindset, the development of a game plan, deliberate practice, perfect execution, and continuous performance review.

Debbie Phelps reveals the key peak performance competencies as practiced by Michael Phelps during the preparation for his stunning performance in Beijing.

Success Requires Having a Game Plan, Discipline, Patience, and Execution

"It was just remarkable execution of what Michael hoped to do and had a passion for."

--Debbie Phelps, Michael's mother.

"It took a regimen, a routine, a schedule. It took time and patience," said Debbie Phelps, who gave her son the support and guidance he needed to succeed.

"I'm not the agent. I'm not the coach. I'm the mom."

"Michael had a plan of action. He had a game plan. He knew exactly what he wanted to do," she said.

To view the accompanying article and the entire interview with Debbie Phelps on Good Morning America, go to: http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=5616633&page=1

Rewind: Michael Phelps' Olympic triumph

"There have been so many greats who have come before me, and what Mark [Spitz] did is still amazing. It's a very hard thing to accomplish. I think it shows whatever you put your mind to, you really can accomplish."--Michael Phelps.

Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps’ Swim Coach: Building a Swimming Machine

“You’ve got to understand how monotonous and boring our training is, and hard.”

--Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps’ coach.

Vision

“My job is to be in the water and swim. That’s about it.”

--Michael Phelps, discussing his intense focus.

“Nothing. I just get in the water and race.”

--Phelps, when asked about what goes through his mind during a race.

Peak performing athletes are produced by a confluence of factors; "a perfect storm of circumstance." These athletes must, of course, have rare natural talents and abilities; the opportunity and access to use state-of-the-art training and coaching; and a set of mental and psychological characteristics, including ferocious ambition, discipline and a capacity for self-sacrifice.

Michael Phelps has been Bob Bowman’s all-consuming project ever since Bowman found Phelps and decided “to build the perfect machine.”

He started the preteen Phelps on intense six-days-a-week practice regimens, often making him swim more than once a day, to work systematically on his mechanics, his endurance and his strength. He recognized Phelps’s potential aerobic capacity, challenging him to swim at least 50 miles each week. He knew that prepubescent children can, through training, increase the size of their hearts and lungs in ways that are no longer possible later on.

“The larger the heart and lungs,” he has noted, “the bigger the aerobic engine.” Beginning when Phelps was 12, he worked the swimmer seven days a week, guided by the assumption that competitors who rested on Sundays were at least one-seventh less conditioned. “Michael has a pretty easy life, if you don’t count the five hours a day of torture I put him through,” Bowman said.

Discipline and Preparation

Bowman is High Performance Coach of Club Wolverine, the elite Ann Arbor, Mich., swimming organization, whose members include Phelps. From 2004 until his resignation earlier this year, Bowman was also the head coach of the University of Michigan’s swim team.

Bowman’s current training regimen for Phelps included thin-air training, a proven and perfectly legal means of boosting an athlete’s red-blood-cell count, which increases the oxygen delivered to muscles. Training schedules featured three sessions in the pool per day and an additional hour of “dry land” activities like weight training or Pilates, for a total of 70 workouts over a three week period.

Although Bowman was dedicated to mixing up the training regimen to keep his swimmers from getting too comfortable or complacent, he followed certain patterns: the early session featured 90 minutes of low-key, continuous aerobic exertion — three or four miles of wake-up laps. Midday practice was an intense two-hour affair, putting the swimmers through their paces at top speeds or at the very threshold of their endurance; dry-land work followed for an hour. Later in the afternoon, the day’s final workout focused on muscle power rather than lung power, featuring drills with parachutes, fins, paddles, kick boards, floats, limb-disabling bands, snorkels and other accouterments designed to isolate particular skills. Bowman made sure that his swimmers had little time or energy left at the end of the day for anything but eating, sleeping and occasionally slumping in front of the television.

Phelps, who is said to require 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day to sustain his efforts, spent much of his free time napping or in pursuit, as he puts it, of “whatever I want to eat, whenever I want it, however much I want.”

Performance Feedback

“Swim-power tests” were administered to transmit measurements of velocity and force 60 times each second. A camera mounted on a track on the pool wall followed Phelps him down the lane and another camera filmed him from below. The apparatus, which Genadijus Sokolovas developed, analyzes a swimmer’s effectiveness according to 25 to 30 different parameters and gives coaches a way to quantify the costs of a swimmer’s mechanical flaws.

“Before this,we were just guessing — high elbow position is better than low elbow position, or pulling in the middle is better than pulling from the side. Now we can test any hypothesis.

The Future

“I’m pretty sure his records will be broken in 5 to 10 years. The swimmers who are going to do this are already in the system.”

“There is no point at which athletes can’t continue to improve. You can always do higher-intensity training, or maybe higher volumes. A swimmer can do more training on land; or more strength training in water, like swimming against resistances. You can improve your technique. You can improve your nutrition. Basically, I don’t see any limits in swim performance. We’ll never build the perfect swimmer. The records will go up and up.”

--Genadijus Sokolovas, a former pentathlete from Lithuania and the sports-science director for USA Swimming.

Excerpts from Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine, 8/3/2008.

Vision: Michael Phelps Looks at the Future

"I don't want this sport to be an every-four-years sport. In between the four years, there's really not as much exposure as I'd like.

"My whole goal is to change the sport of swimming in a positive way. I think it can go even farther. That's where I hope to take it.

"I just want people to get involved. This sport has changed my life and allowed me to do so many things."

--Michael Phelps, thinking about the future of swimming and his role in it. Phelps also plans to return to the Olympics as a competitor in London in 2012.

"Michael is the biggest thing that sport has ever seen. Not swimming, but sport in general. He just made the pressure putt to win the U.S. Open. He just won the Tour of France. He just knocked out Muhammad Ali. And he did it in one week."

--Brendan Hansen, fellow U.S. Olympic swimmer and teammate on the medley relay that helped Micheal Phelps make history.

Excerpts from the New York Times 8/18/2008.

Michael Phelps, Relaxation Equals Gold

“I’m able to relax and I’m having fun.” --Michael Phelps.

Michael Phelps, 23, tied Mark Spitz’s record of seven gold medals in one Olympics by winning Saturday morning’s 100-meter butterfly.

Phelps' eighth and last race will be Sunday’s 4x100 medley relay.

“That may be one of the reasons I’m swimming so fast. I’ve never been this relaxed," said Phelps.

Michael Phelps, Feats of Olympic Greatness

“He’s not from another planet. He’s from the future.”

--Simon Burnett, British freestyler, describing Michael Phelps to Eddie Reese, U.S. Olympic swimming coach.

Michael Phelps collected his fourth and fifth gold medals in the Beijing Olympics, becoming the career leader in Olympic gold medals with 11.

“I’m having fun,” Phelps said. “I’ve never been this relaxed.” He added, “I think one of the reasons I’ve been able to be like this is because I’ve been there before.”

“Michael kind of performs independently of his feelings.”

--Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps long-time coach.

Handling Pressure in Beijing

SWIMMING

“Growing up, even though breaststroke was my worst stroke, I wanted to swim it. I wanted to race in it. I didn’t care. I like challenges.”

--Michael Phelps, responding to questions about the pressure he felt when having to meet the challenge of an 2008 Olympic medley race.

WOMEN'S GYMNASTICS

"I just tried to stay in my own little box. my own little world and ignore what was going on around me. I knew there were things happening around me that I couldn't control, so I really tried to stay focused. Sometimes, I talk to myself to keep my mind busy."

--Shawn Johnson of the USA gymnastics team and reigning women's gymnastics champion, following a qualification round in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, during which injuries on the team put additional pressure on the remaining members. Johnson, with 62.725 points, helped the USA team finish 1-2 in the individual all-around to make the finals.

"I feel like the whole day was crazy, but we just proved to everyone that we could handle anything. I think China probably thought this was good because we showed some weakness. But this brought us together even more and made us even stronger."

"It made me a little more nervous because I knew that we had only four girls competing now. Our team was slowly dwindling down, and I definitely felt like I put a little bit more pressure on myself to do better."

--Alicia Sacramone, USA gymnast who qualified for the finals in the vault, discussing handling the pressure of competing and dealing with the favored Chinese team.