The Athlete's Improvement Curve

This is a simple model that can be helpful in understanding the long-term development of a swimmer. The scale on the left side represents the athlete's competitive performance. The scale on the bottom represents time over the span of the athlete's swimming career. Along the top, the dashed line signifies the athlete's ultimate potential. The three lines represent the Improvement Curves for three different theoretical athletes. Their trajectories follow three distinctly different paths, starting from roughly the same point.

Athlete 1 (bottom curve)
This athlete experiences moderate improvement early on in his career. Perceiving himself to lack skills that might make him a good swimmer, he mostly participates in swimming "for the exercise" or because his parents make him or both. Though he enjoys swimming, he is not highly motivated to get faster. He listens to his coachesat practice, but never really commits to making technical changes. His parents are only slightly supportive, believing that as long as their son is staying active, his activities are serving their purpose. Consequently, they only drive him to practice twice a week when he is 10 years old and only three times a week when he is 14. He does get taller, stronger, and more athletic as he grows up, and this means he does get faster, though at a much slower rate than his peers. His improvement flattens out in his teenage years as he enters high school. Competitively he lags far behind his same-age peers. He has no idea what his potential could have been because he never really made a strong attempt to find out. Athlete 1 represents the lower extreme of competitive swimming experiences.

Athlete 2 (middle, stair-stepping curve)
This athlete experiences an improvement trajectory quite different from Athlete 1. He too experiences improvement early in his swimming career. One of the key differences in Athlete 1 and Athlete 2 is that Athlete 2 perceives that he has some true ability. This occurs because he has a coach that believes in him, because he beat many of his peers at a meet, or because his parents encouraged him. He becomes highly motivated when he sees the connection between the work he does at practice and his own increased performance. After a string of steady improvement that may last for years, he goes through a rough patch where he doesn't improve with each swim or hardly at all. His improvement curve flattens out. This might happen because his workout attendance suffers, because his technique is limiting his performance, or maybe just because he is getting older. Eventually though, he gets back to near-perfect attendance, he and his coach figure out his technical glitches, or he gets taller and stronger. This leads his improvement to kick back up again, and soon he is dropping time again. This cycle of improvement and plateau repeats itself in varying time spans and for varying reasons for the remainder of his swimming career. He comes to understand that the stair-stepping pattern is part of the process. He takes failure in stride and looks forward to working toward his next success. Because of his persistence and enthusiasm, he enjoys his experience and succeeds in reaching high levels in the sport. Athlete 2 represents the broad majority of swimmers with a wide range of potential.

Athlete 3 (top, steepest curve)
This athlete experiences a meteoric trajectory over the course of his career. He experiences rapid improvement as a youngster. Immediately tapped by coaches and teammates as a prodigy, he is perfectly motivated from a young age. His parents take him to practice every single day and never have to convince him to go. He improves regularly even if by small amounts, and never has a meet where he doesn't go all best times. He does this by continually adapting and improving his technique, and never letting his motivation flag. As he grows taller and stronger, these physical adaptations exponentially magnify his improvement to even higher levels. Eventually, he becomes an unbeatable winning machine. Athlete 3 does not exist.

The reality is that nearly every swimmer follows an improvement curve that is similar to that of Athlete 2, depending on his natural talent, work ethic, commitment, and a host of other factors. More on the Improvement Curve in a later post.