October 20, 2021 • 23 mins
Hall of Fame swim coach Bob Bowman is one of the best-known and most successful swim coaches of all-time. Coach Bowman served as the primary coach for 28-time Olympic medalist Michael Phelps, was the 2016 USA Olympic Swim Team Head Coach, and currently leads the Arizona State University Swim Program. Coach Bowman joins Nick to discuss the transformative power of sports on kids’ development, the importance of mental health, and how he applied his coaching philosophy to help guide Phelps’s historic career.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Michael basically did the same program as anybody in our
age groom team until he had already made an Olympic team.
It wasn't like the Michael Felps programs, the North Bons
Park Body Clubs program. This is the Reformed Sports Project,
(00:24):
a podcast about restoring healthy balance and perspective in all
areas of sports through education and advocacy. I'm Nick Bonacore
from the Reformed Sports Project podcast. Joining me today is
Bob Bowman, head swimming coach at Arizona State University. Coach
Bowman has worked with a talented group of collegiate and
Olympic swimmers over the years, including one of the greatest
(00:46):
of all, Michael Phelps. I'm excited to talk with him
as he has a very unique perspective of working with
athletes from age group swimming two professionals. I'd love to
have your inside, your perspective on the specialization that's being
pushed in like almost the professionalization in kids that are
sub twelve years old to play one sport become a specialist.
What do you think about the kind of culture that's
out there right now. I think there's clearly benefits for
(01:09):
kids playing lots of sports and having a wide menu
of things to choose from just from a physiological standpoint.
We get kids in college these days who can't throw
a ball, can't balance, can't do a lot of things
because they just didn't play a lot of things when
they were growing up. So I feel like it's critical
that they do that. And I think what I see
(01:29):
in youth sports, particularly in the sport of swimming today,
is a lot of programs are training age group swimmers
like college swimmers. They're giving them absolutely every tool, every
possible modality at a very young age, and I think
that's doing them a disservice. See that is such a
powerful message. And here's where I'm finding a lot of
concern is that you're seeing youth participation numbers in overall
(01:53):
sports declining. You're seeing kids being priced out so they
can't play. And I firmly believe the greatest thing that
you take away from the partist a base in new
sports are the life lessons that serve you as a husband, father,
wife without questions, and it opens up doors for kids
to try other things. What's important about sports is not
what you get, it's what you've become in that process,
and it's all of the things that successful and well
(02:17):
adjusted people need to make their way in life. You
learn how to manage yourself, You learn how to set
a goal and work for it an intelligent way. You
learn how to deal with others, You learn how to
work in a team environment. All of these things are
critical to your success as a person, not just an athlete,
and I think it carries over, like you said, to
other things. I'm a big musician. I grew up playing
(02:39):
lots of instruments that have a large background in music,
and the two things are very, very similar. You're just
learning skills which make you a better person. Whether you
can play the piano as well as the others, I
guess you can figure that out later. Or swim any
faster than anybody else, it doesn't really matter at the
end of the day. I wasn't a particularly good swimmer,
but I was able to learn things and love things
(03:00):
about the process of training at the environment of our
swimming program that just kept me in at the rest
of my life. So you know, it's not all about
the end or the result. It's much more about the process.
I never played an individual sport. I was a football
baseball guy, but my older boys started wrestling four years ago.
I knew nothing about it, so I can, for the
first time just be a fan. And I realized, wait
(03:21):
a minute, I might be a little bit of a
crazy parent here. So it was I opening to be
naive to the sport. And that made me realize that's
the way it's supposed to be as a parent, right exactly.
I take it a step further and I saw my
boys being taken out of their comfort zone. Meaning in
baseball and other these pay for play organizations, you pay
and your kid gets on the team, he gets on
a roster. They don't have to really overcome much adversity nowadays.
(03:42):
And when I saw wrestling, I was like, wow, this
is stripped down raw. This is real life stuff that
they can use later on, whether they become wrestlers or not.
So my thought is almost the culture, with pay for
play being so expensive and all of these things, it's
almost handicapping kids. They're not learning how to overcome any adversity.
That's absolutely right, and you see in youth sports today
is no one wants their child to fail at anything
(04:05):
right or be uncomfortable, which is the single most important
lesson you learn, and sport if you ever wanted to
swim in the Olympics, the essence of Olympic competition is
getting comfortable being uncomfortable. So what you get is you
get these kids too. At the first side of adversity,
they just shut down. We encourage our guys to solve problems.
We build an environment that is full of adversity so
(04:28):
that they can overcome these things and become confident, because
that's how you get confidence. Nobody gives you confidence. Confidence
comes from demonstrated ability under adverse conditions, and when you
do that, then you know you can do it in competition.
It's amazing how I'm finding. Initially I'm like, well, maybe
this is just as a certain couple of sports there
and there. No, it's not. This is a cross over
every sport. I don't care what it is. The mindset
(04:51):
is really the same. It's amazing though, how I'm finding
a lot of high level athletes and you can speak
to this, and I think it's something that's not talked
about enough. Is the mental health aspect of it. If
you're thirteen fourteen year old kid, I remember for me
it was hard enough developing and being insecure, let alone
with Instagram Snapchat, and now the professionalization of sports, like
how does that impact a kid? How much more of
a microscope visit? It app acts it a lot, And
(05:13):
particularly now we have a lot of websites about swimming
and thinks for the kids go all the time, and
all of these people who know absolutely nothing about the
process or development of athletes comment on their performances right
and set expectations for them, and they should be able
to do this if they did this in certain meat,
(05:35):
and it's very detrimental. I myself stopped reading those comments
because they say bad stuff about me on there. But
look for the kids, it's really bad because you have
expectations are really they're kind of like important, and then
they're the worst thing in the world at the same time. Right,
you want to have some reasonable expectations about where you
(05:55):
should go, and your coach you can help you do that.
But if you have unrealistic and or things that don't
match up with where your ability level or performance level
are at a certain time, I think it causes a
lot of mental health issues with everyone, not just the kids.
I agree with that. What concerns me is that is
you're gonna see I really believe sports is an overall
micro cosum for the society. Now, I'm not suggesting that,
(06:18):
I'm we're trying to do. I mean, hopefully we can
make invents and change people's thinking, But you know, I
think it's a micro cosum to where kids are being
so sheltered that unstructured play is like a thing of
the past. Everything is organized, structured game after game after game.
Kids aren't just going out there and playing wreck and
having a good time, which I hear from many pros
and I know myself that's where you get creative and
actually learn how to have a lot of fun. Do
(06:39):
you agree with so unstructured play? How can we maybe
incorporate that more? Can you try to do that? Well?
I don't do this so much in the workouts have now,
But when I was going to little kids, we used
to do it all the time. We would have a
day where we just play games, or we would just
see if they could learn at certain skill, and then
we have fun with it instead of making everything just
like a lesson. Right. I would definitely include that when
(07:01):
we were doing it with the younger guys, and I
probably should do it more with my older ones. Glad
you're reminded me of that. I talked to Jacob Casper,
who was an All American wrestler, and I did a
post about him. I talked to him least he's the
assistant coach at Duke right now, and he said, Nick,
once a week, we're incorporating a soccer game, something to
keep these kids excited because they're coming to college and
they don't have the same movement skills that we did
(07:21):
or other kids that by playing multiple sports, He's like,
we're almost teaching kids to do things they should have
learn when they were eight, nine, ten years old. Completely
agree with that. We put some of that stuff in
the early season with my college teams were definitely out
on the track or doing some things, doing a little running,
playing a few games. And we tried to get him
to play ultimate frisbee and half the kids can't move,
throw and catch. I'm more worried about him getting hurt
(07:42):
now because they just not used to doing Yeah, I
totally are you. I think it's a great thing. After
the break, Coach Bowman and I we'll talk about the
science behind youth athlete development and how he designed Michael
Phelps training program. I'm Nick bonecor and you're listening to
the Reform Sports Project podcast. Welcome back to the Reform
(08:07):
Sports Project podcast. I'm Nick Bonacourt, and today we have
Bob Boom, head swim coach at Arizona State University. Where
we left off, Bob and I were about to dive
into how science based training programs helped young athletes developed
the right way, both mentally and physically. So there's one
thing I really want to touch on with you because
(08:28):
I spoke to Frank Bush, and I spoke to several coaches,
Jim Calhoun, Mike Fox, he's the head coach at University
of North Carolina, and all saying the same thing. You
are bought what Jim Calhoun said. I think it's important
because a lot of parents, I hear they're chasing the
tiger Woods, the Michael Phelps with their kids. Jim Calhoun said,
he goes Nick. Nothing supersedes talent. He goes Ray Allen.
No matter how much I coached him or not, he
(08:48):
was gonna be a star. He was that gift. He
was one in a million, like Michael Phelps, like a
Tiger Wood Lebron James. But I think people are chasing
that and that's not normal. Would you agree with that athlete?
I totally agree with that. And you know what, we
didn't chase it with Michael Phelps. It just happened. Michael
basically did the same program as anybody in our age
(09:09):
group team until he had already made an Olympic team.
It wasn't like the Michael Phelps program. It was the
North Baltismore quantity club program. After he got it pretty
good and was starting to get to the top three
or four percent of world performance, he probably did some
more specialized things. But until then he didn't train twice
the day. Until he was almost fifteen years old, he
was just in the regular program. Quite frankly, we were
(09:31):
trying to keep him from turning into a star. We
wanted him to be as normal as possible for as
long as possible. So we talked a lot about the
physical attributes, you know, with youth athletics and kids playing
various sports and developing the whole body and such. But
what I wanted to ask you about and hear your inside,
is I hear a lot from baseball coaches, in particular
about the signs that's involveds data and analytics that's become
(09:53):
part of the game and all these things, and at
times it could be used in a negative way, but
in the right hands, it's really how really helpful, you know,
with people who know what the hell they're doing. Tell
me about the science, the way the human body works,
and all this stuff in development, specifically with dealing with
mp you know, Michael felt, well, you know, in swimming
it works on a different many different levels. So you
(10:14):
have the biomechanic area, so that's got the stroke technique,
how certain limbs work as levers, how you apply pressure
to certain points, all of those things. The one that
we've probably delved in the most was the physiology, right
and the physiology of training. We felt like we wanted
everything we did to be based on sound principles of
(10:35):
science in terms of training, and we developed a program
over the long term that really addressed what we thought
were critical windows during his growth patterns or any athletes
growth patterns, so that we were addressing the appropriate type
of training at the appropriate age developmental age. I'm glad
you brought that up because I hear Eric Backitt, who's
(10:55):
the head baseball coach in Michigan. Um, you're a former
Michigan guy at Cold Yeah, coach backage is like the
data supports and the science supports, six to twelve is
an age window where kids should be just playing, you know,
kicking hard and swinging hard, jumping up. He calls it
letting your body organize itself. And to me, I hear that,
I go, well, that's all pre puberty? Is that kind
(11:16):
of what you're doing. Is there like a natural development
phase that you don't want to interfere with before kids
hit puberty exactly? You know? And um with Michael, he
played all different sports, right, baseball, soccer, lacrosse, And with
our younger kids on our swim team who are just
coming to swim team, all the eight Hunders would go
outside and run and skip and hop and learn to
do movements, and a lot of them I was shocked
(11:37):
don't know how to do the basic kind of kid movements.
So we would teach about to do it. And I
definitely believe that in the early development stages they need
a wide menu of exercises and movements so that they
can then choose from things later on. And if you
don't learn how to kind of do a lot of
different things as a kid, you're really locked into some
specific movement patterns and at some point are just gonna
(11:59):
say as you get older and train more. So it's
very important. I think that the pre puberty kids are
having a variety of different options in terms of how
they move and the wrong hands when it comes to swimming,
the data that you use and you know, because now
that in baseball talk about exit velocity and all these
different things, Well you're standing there with a stopwatch, you know,
(12:19):
and the wrong hands. Can that be manipulated or used
it and hurt an athlete? Or how how do people
know how to use the science the right way? Well? Absolutely,
And the first premise in swimming is that swimming is
a technique based sport. So if you don't have proper technique,
you're you're gonna limit your potential. Okay, So the first
thing that kids need to be taught is how to
(12:41):
swim properly. And the way that you do that is
not under the stress of training, right, It's done in
a way where they can focus on the nerm muscular patterns.
They can kind of build up there can their fitness
level to actually be able to do the technique. And
because needs to know what the right technique is, So
there are you know a number of things that go
with But I've seen so many kids who just got
(13:03):
thrown into a pool and swam a million yards and
they got really fast as young kids that they did
it with poor technique. And when they get to the
final level, so they're trying to get to a national
team or to the Olympics, that's a real limiting factor
if they have poor technique, because everybody there has good technique.
You can't be without it. So that's one phase of it.
The other one is they're just getting inappropriate uh modalities
(13:26):
of training. In my mind, and what I've seen in
youth sports since I've been coaching now for thirty years,
is that age group coaches are looking at what college
coaches do and they're using the same modalities. Right. They're
asking them to do resistance training, to pull on buckets
and things that we have for swimming. Now you can
(13:47):
actually swim against resistance, right, and they're not ready to
do that when they're twelve, eleven, thirteen, fourteen fifty. Michael
didn't lift weights until he's did in an Olympics because
we wanted to save that part to add so his
career would keep moving. Um So I think all of
that goes back to what's an appropriate thing to do
with a kid at a certain age, And for me,
(14:07):
it would work like this. There would be a phase
where it's skill based, only technique based, and just some
general conditioning like we said, jumping, Jack's running, swimming a
little bit, doing all the strokes, kind of learning everything.
Then there's gonna be a phase where you would start
to develop the aerobic system because we know that actually
pre pupacent kids can develop their heart and lungp size.
(14:30):
You can actually increase heart and lungp size prior to
puberty if you do some training. But that's not like
training like Michael would do when he was twenty. It's
appropriate training for eleven twelve year old. So you give
them a capacity, an aerobic capacity, but then with the
skills you have that, so you have aerobic and skills,
and then you start moving on to more anaerobic training,
(14:50):
more kind of power based training, and by the time
they get to college, they're ready to lift weights, they're
ready to do resistance and power based training because they
have a back ground of all these other things. But
it has to flow and it has to go into progression,
and if you ignore that progression, you just end up
really stunting how far they can go at the end
of their career. So let's say you know, you recognize
(15:13):
or a parent I have no idea, a coach recognizes
like you did you know a Caleb dress Sole, Michael Phelps.
You know these kids that are just wow, you know
this kid is special. Do you intentionally and I mean
you see it, you've seen it before, you see this
could could be an outlier? Do you intentionally not press
the envelope so that you don't over exert them? Because
I think what people do is they see this potential.
(15:35):
I don't know, but my guess is they automatically go
into we gotta step it up a little bit. Is
that like the quickest way to burn a young kid
as the quickest way to ruin that? Actually, Michael just
came out with this documentary called The Weight of Goal
and there's a tiny clip of me and they're giving
what I think is my first TV interview ever, and
my words are, we've limited his training so that we
(15:56):
can add things later on so he can get a
lot better down the road. Yeah, and we we deliberately
limited his training early on. He slammed once a day,
where a lot of people would have tried to make
him some twice. Um. We saved the weight training where
a lot of people would have thrown him right into that.
And we tried to have a deliberate plan for how
we would develop each one of his strokes and each
(16:18):
one of his training qualities over time so that when
we finally got to the top level, the Olympic level
for him, he had all the tools in his tool box.
He wasn't missing something so and he could also do
an injury free That's a big part of what happens
when you start getting advanced training modalities early. The kids
get hurt and there shouldn't be eleven and twelve fourteen
(16:40):
year old kids with chronic shoulder problems in swimming that
just should not exist. That means you're not doing it correctly.
So you know, all of these things factor into what
a smart development plan is. In my opinion, how did
you recognize, like we gotta be calculated? I think a
text mession was that this all stuff that you have learned,
because it seems I don't them. Did you coach a
(17:00):
Phelps type person before? Like, how did you know this?
I studied. I studied Phelps type people because I wanted
to coach them, and I worked with coaches who had
developed that kind of people, you know, I could. I
worked with the coach who had developed Tracy Calkins is
probably the best of email swimmer ever. You know, if
it wasn't for the nineteen eighty boycott, everybody would know her.
(17:21):
She came back in eighty four once and medals, but
she was, you know, set American records in every stroke.
I worked with other coaches who had developed young swimmers
to the very top level and watched how they did
that and talked to them about it, and you know,
so so I was learning about it. And it was
obvious with Michael right, he wasn't just a good age
(17:41):
group swimmer. He was like you just had a feeling
that he was special. So you wanted to make sure
that you were going to give him every tools so
that he could maximize that. So that's kind of where
I approached it. So the long term I want to
say long term development, but like having the long lenses
is not something that you advent, like that's been going
on forever, because now it's a yeah, I love good
coaches have been doing that forever, right, That's how you
(18:04):
know them. They got people to really high levels because
they smartly developed them or they intelligently developed them. They
didn't just try to get everything now because they have
this kid who happens to be pretty good. So that's
what it takes. And I feel like today everyone and
it doesn't matter the sport. It seems like they want
to make a name for themselves. So let's get this
kid as good as they can. And at times I'm
just trying to connect the dots. It seems like we
(18:26):
are speeding it up and at times we're doing the
kids a disservice. Is that what we're Absolutely anytime you're
speeding that up, you're doing them a disservice. Everybody has
a raid at which they progressed. How Michael I would
be perfectly honest, Michael's chronological age did not match up
with his developmental age. Right, No fifteen year olds make
the Olympics, boys, you know he did, so you know
(18:47):
so that there is that piece. So he was probably
accelerated in terms of what I would do with somebody
who's his same age. That's not his talent level. But
in general, you always want to be moving at the pace,
and they'll tell you what the next step should be.
If you're a good coach, you're observing how they adapt
to what you're giving them. Are they swimming with better technique?
(19:07):
Are they able to handle this workload and still come
into practice with a positive attitude and not be the
walking dead, you know, because you're killing them. Are they
happy doing what they're doing? Are they racing and progressing
over time? And if you're also your job to kind
of make some of these things happen. Like for Michael,
I knew on day one that his best event was
the two hundred butterfly. Okay, you knew it was gonna be.
(19:30):
I didn't let him swim that for almost a year.
When he started something, he we kept him from swimming.
So I got him at eleven. He didn't really swim
it into meat till he was thirteen that because you
want to be uncomfortable, Well, no, I wanted to get
his strokes right, and I didn't want him to start
swimming this event that all these older people swam and
just burn himself out on it. Right, So Michael swam
(19:53):
the two hunter fly, the first time he ever swim
in the meeting qualified for the junior Nationals, and then
the next time he got third at in your Nationals,
and the next time he broke in Nashal as your
bigger by five seconds. So it got a spiral from there.
Uh So it was you know, I think it tells
you planning of how new events they swift, how you
choose to compete. Just because everybody's competing in a certain
(20:15):
way doesn't mean you have to do that. What we
thought was important for his development at thirteen and fourteen
is he would go to meets and swim nine events
a day. He would swim a lot of events at
these beats, and he got used to swimming back to
back events. But it wasn't done in a way that
was you know, we weren't going home and swimming twenty
thousand yards a day. It was just the meets would
present the challenge that he loved to raise. So he
(20:36):
loved the challenge of seeing what he could do. Could
he win three events in a row in a program,
Could he come back at night and do the same thing.
Could he do the best time in all those events?
So you know, you kind of have to know your
athlete and know what they're capable of and then you
are pushing them, right, You're pushing them to the next step.
You're not going from step ten to step a hundred.
(20:57):
You are from step ten to step eleven to twelve.
Maybe sometimes you skip and go to fourteen, but you
don't skip and go to twenty five. You know, tell
me this. You keep using the word compete, compete, compete.
You know, parents and kids are looking for the secret sauce.
From what I'm gathering, the willingness to go out and
compete like a killer. Uh you know what I mean
by that. But to compete to win seems to be
(21:18):
what every college coach wants. They want athletes that want
to compete. And from what I gather, Michael's in the
category of a Jordan Like Michael loved to win, but
he hated to lose more. How important that, Oh, it's
absolutely important to what drives everything we do, right, because
we tie everything we do and training back to the
(21:39):
next meet. So we're doing this because we want to
develop this quality of your strokes, and then when you
get to the next meet, you'll be able to do
this at this time of the race, and then everything
has meaning, right. See, I think a lot of people
they just kind of go to practice and the coach
just kind of gives them something and they do it,
and then it might go well, it might go poorly,
and then they go to a meet and they went
(22:00):
well and it's un poorly, But they don't tie the
whole thing together. You know. It's sort of like the
practices are your homework and the needs are your tests
your quizzes. Right, so you find out if you learned
the material about and then from the results of the needs,
you can go back and change what you're doing in
the classroom so the next time they do better. So
that's how I approach it. It's it's not just trial
(22:20):
and error. It's a plan system. And then you can
check your results, go back and tweet something, throw something
out at something in that you think they need, and
then over time, if you do that well enough, you
can refine it to a point where you can get
really predictable results. That classroom analogy I think everyone can
relate to. But Coach Baum and this has been awesome.
I know you're busy, I know you've got a lot
(22:40):
going on. I thank you so much and I always
appreciate you here. Thanks for listening to the Reformed Sports
Project podcast dom Nick Boncourt and Our goal is to
restore a healthy balance and perspective in all areas of
sport through education and advocacy. For updates, please follow us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or check out our website
by searching for the Reform Sports Project
Michael basically did the same program as anybody in our
age groom team until he had already made an Olympic team.
It wasn't like the Michael Felps programs, the North Bons
Park Body Clubs program. This is the Reformed Sports Project,
(00:24):
a podcast about restoring healthy balance and perspective in all
areas of sports through education and advocacy. I'm Nick Bonacore
from the Reformed Sports Project podcast. Joining me today is
Bob Bowman, head swimming coach at Arizona State University. Coach
Bowman has worked with a talented group of collegiate and
Olympic swimmers over the years, including one of the greatest
(00:46):
of all, Michael Phelps. I'm excited to talk with him
as he has a very unique perspective of working with
athletes from age group swimming two professionals. I'd love to
have your inside, your perspective on the specialization that's being
pushed in like almost the professionalization in kids that are
sub twelve years old to play one sport become a specialist.
What do you think about the kind of culture that's
out there right now. I think there's clearly benefits for
(01:09):
kids playing lots of sports and having a wide menu
of things to choose from just from a physiological standpoint.
We get kids in college these days who can't throw
a ball, can't balance, can't do a lot of things
because they just didn't play a lot of things when
they were growing up. So I feel like it's critical
that they do that. And I think what I see
(01:29):
in youth sports, particularly in the sport of swimming today,
is a lot of programs are training age group swimmers
like college swimmers. They're giving them absolutely every tool, every
possible modality at a very young age, and I think
that's doing them a disservice. See that is such a
powerful message. And here's where I'm finding a lot of
concern is that you're seeing youth participation numbers in overall
(01:53):
sports declining. You're seeing kids being priced out so they
can't play. And I firmly believe the greatest thing that
you take away from the partist a base in new
sports are the life lessons that serve you as a husband, father,
wife without questions, and it opens up doors for kids
to try other things. What's important about sports is not
what you get, it's what you've become in that process,
and it's all of the things that successful and well
(02:17):
adjusted people need to make their way in life. You
learn how to manage yourself, You learn how to set
a goal and work for it an intelligent way. You
learn how to deal with others, You learn how to
work in a team environment. All of these things are
critical to your success as a person, not just an athlete,
and I think it carries over, like you said, to
other things. I'm a big musician. I grew up playing
(02:39):
lots of instruments that have a large background in music,
and the two things are very, very similar. You're just
learning skills which make you a better person. Whether you
can play the piano as well as the others, I
guess you can figure that out later. Or swim any
faster than anybody else, it doesn't really matter at the
end of the day. I wasn't a particularly good swimmer,
but I was able to learn things and love things
(03:00):
about the process of training at the environment of our
swimming program that just kept me in at the rest
of my life. So you know, it's not all about
the end or the result. It's much more about the process.
I never played an individual sport. I was a football
baseball guy, but my older boys started wrestling four years ago.
I knew nothing about it, so I can, for the
first time just be a fan. And I realized, wait
(03:21):
a minute, I might be a little bit of a
crazy parent here. So it was I opening to be
naive to the sport. And that made me realize that's
the way it's supposed to be as a parent, right exactly.
I take it a step further and I saw my
boys being taken out of their comfort zone. Meaning in
baseball and other these pay for play organizations, you pay
and your kid gets on the team, he gets on
a roster. They don't have to really overcome much adversity nowadays.
(03:42):
And when I saw wrestling, I was like, wow, this
is stripped down raw. This is real life stuff that
they can use later on, whether they become wrestlers or not.
So my thought is almost the culture, with pay for
play being so expensive and all of these things, it's
almost handicapping kids. They're not learning how to overcome any adversity.
That's absolutely right, and you see in youth sports today
is no one wants their child to fail at anything
(04:05):
right or be uncomfortable, which is the single most important
lesson you learn, and sport if you ever wanted to
swim in the Olympics, the essence of Olympic competition is
getting comfortable being uncomfortable. So what you get is you
get these kids too. At the first side of adversity,
they just shut down. We encourage our guys to solve problems.
We build an environment that is full of adversity so
(04:28):
that they can overcome these things and become confident, because
that's how you get confidence. Nobody gives you confidence. Confidence
comes from demonstrated ability under adverse conditions, and when you
do that, then you know you can do it in competition.
It's amazing how I'm finding. Initially I'm like, well, maybe
this is just as a certain couple of sports there
and there. No, it's not. This is a cross over
every sport. I don't care what it is. The mindset
(04:51):
is really the same. It's amazing though, how I'm finding
a lot of high level athletes and you can speak
to this, and I think it's something that's not talked
about enough. Is the mental health aspect of it. If
you're thirteen fourteen year old kid, I remember for me
it was hard enough developing and being insecure, let alone
with Instagram Snapchat, and now the professionalization of sports, like
how does that impact a kid? How much more of
a microscope visit? It app acts it a lot, And
(05:13):
particularly now we have a lot of websites about swimming
and thinks for the kids go all the time, and
all of these people who know absolutely nothing about the
process or development of athletes comment on their performances right
and set expectations for them, and they should be able
to do this if they did this in certain meat,
(05:35):
and it's very detrimental. I myself stopped reading those comments
because they say bad stuff about me on there. But
look for the kids, it's really bad because you have
expectations are really they're kind of like important, and then
they're the worst thing in the world at the same time. Right,
you want to have some reasonable expectations about where you
(05:55):
should go, and your coach you can help you do that.
But if you have unrealistic and or things that don't
match up with where your ability level or performance level
are at a certain time, I think it causes a
lot of mental health issues with everyone, not just the kids.
I agree with that. What concerns me is that is
you're gonna see I really believe sports is an overall
micro cosum for the society. Now, I'm not suggesting that,
(06:18):
I'm we're trying to do. I mean, hopefully we can
make invents and change people's thinking, But you know, I
think it's a micro cosum to where kids are being
so sheltered that unstructured play is like a thing of
the past. Everything is organized, structured game after game after game.
Kids aren't just going out there and playing wreck and
having a good time, which I hear from many pros
and I know myself that's where you get creative and
actually learn how to have a lot of fun. Do
(06:39):
you agree with so unstructured play? How can we maybe
incorporate that more? Can you try to do that? Well?
I don't do this so much in the workouts have now,
But when I was going to little kids, we used
to do it all the time. We would have a
day where we just play games, or we would just
see if they could learn at certain skill, and then
we have fun with it instead of making everything just
like a lesson. Right. I would definitely include that when
(07:01):
we were doing it with the younger guys, and I
probably should do it more with my older ones. Glad
you're reminded me of that. I talked to Jacob Casper,
who was an All American wrestler, and I did a
post about him. I talked to him least he's the
assistant coach at Duke right now, and he said, Nick,
once a week, we're incorporating a soccer game, something to
keep these kids excited because they're coming to college and
they don't have the same movement skills that we did
(07:21):
or other kids that by playing multiple sports, He's like,
we're almost teaching kids to do things they should have
learn when they were eight, nine, ten years old. Completely
agree with that. We put some of that stuff in
the early season with my college teams were definitely out
on the track or doing some things, doing a little running,
playing a few games. And we tried to get him
to play ultimate frisbee and half the kids can't move,
throw and catch. I'm more worried about him getting hurt
(07:42):
now because they just not used to doing Yeah, I
totally are you. I think it's a great thing. After
the break, Coach Bowman and I we'll talk about the
science behind youth athlete development and how he designed Michael
Phelps training program. I'm Nick bonecor and you're listening to
the Reform Sports Project podcast. Welcome back to the Reform
(08:07):
Sports Project podcast. I'm Nick Bonacourt, and today we have
Bob Boom, head swim coach at Arizona State University. Where
we left off, Bob and I were about to dive
into how science based training programs helped young athletes developed
the right way, both mentally and physically. So there's one
thing I really want to touch on with you because
(08:28):
I spoke to Frank Bush, and I spoke to several coaches,
Jim Calhoun, Mike Fox, he's the head coach at University
of North Carolina, and all saying the same thing. You
are bought what Jim Calhoun said. I think it's important
because a lot of parents, I hear they're chasing the
tiger Woods, the Michael Phelps with their kids. Jim Calhoun said,
he goes Nick. Nothing supersedes talent. He goes Ray Allen.
No matter how much I coached him or not, he
(08:48):
was gonna be a star. He was that gift. He
was one in a million, like Michael Phelps, like a
Tiger Wood Lebron James. But I think people are chasing
that and that's not normal. Would you agree with that athlete?
I totally agree with that. And you know what, we
didn't chase it with Michael Phelps. It just happened. Michael
basically did the same program as anybody in our age
(09:09):
group team until he had already made an Olympic team.
It wasn't like the Michael Phelps program. It was the
North Baltismore quantity club program. After he got it pretty
good and was starting to get to the top three
or four percent of world performance, he probably did some
more specialized things. But until then he didn't train twice
the day. Until he was almost fifteen years old, he
was just in the regular program. Quite frankly, we were
(09:31):
trying to keep him from turning into a star. We
wanted him to be as normal as possible for as
long as possible. So we talked a lot about the
physical attributes, you know, with youth athletics and kids playing
various sports and developing the whole body and such. But
what I wanted to ask you about and hear your inside,
is I hear a lot from baseball coaches, in particular
about the signs that's involveds data and analytics that's become
(09:53):
part of the game and all these things, and at
times it could be used in a negative way, but
in the right hands, it's really how really helpful, you know,
with people who know what the hell they're doing. Tell
me about the science, the way the human body works,
and all this stuff in development, specifically with dealing with
mp you know, Michael felt, well, you know, in swimming
it works on a different many different levels. So you
(10:14):
have the biomechanic area, so that's got the stroke technique,
how certain limbs work as levers, how you apply pressure
to certain points, all of those things. The one that
we've probably delved in the most was the physiology, right
and the physiology of training. We felt like we wanted
everything we did to be based on sound principles of
(10:35):
science in terms of training, and we developed a program
over the long term that really addressed what we thought
were critical windows during his growth patterns or any athletes
growth patterns, so that we were addressing the appropriate type
of training at the appropriate age developmental age. I'm glad
you brought that up because I hear Eric Backitt, who's
(10:55):
the head baseball coach in Michigan. Um, you're a former
Michigan guy at Cold Yeah, coach backage is like the
data supports and the science supports, six to twelve is
an age window where kids should be just playing, you know,
kicking hard and swinging hard, jumping up. He calls it
letting your body organize itself. And to me, I hear that,
I go, well, that's all pre puberty? Is that kind
(11:16):
of what you're doing. Is there like a natural development
phase that you don't want to interfere with before kids
hit puberty exactly? You know? And um with Michael, he
played all different sports, right, baseball, soccer, lacrosse, And with
our younger kids on our swim team who are just
coming to swim team, all the eight Hunders would go
outside and run and skip and hop and learn to
do movements, and a lot of them I was shocked
(11:37):
don't know how to do the basic kind of kid movements.
So we would teach about to do it. And I
definitely believe that in the early development stages they need
a wide menu of exercises and movements so that they
can then choose from things later on. And if you
don't learn how to kind of do a lot of
different things as a kid, you're really locked into some
specific movement patterns and at some point are just gonna
(11:59):
say as you get older and train more. So it's
very important. I think that the pre puberty kids are
having a variety of different options in terms of how
they move and the wrong hands when it comes to swimming,
the data that you use and you know, because now
that in baseball talk about exit velocity and all these
different things, Well you're standing there with a stopwatch, you know,
(12:19):
and the wrong hands. Can that be manipulated or used
it and hurt an athlete? Or how how do people
know how to use the science the right way? Well? Absolutely,
And the first premise in swimming is that swimming is
a technique based sport. So if you don't have proper technique,
you're you're gonna limit your potential. Okay, So the first
thing that kids need to be taught is how to
(12:41):
swim properly. And the way that you do that is
not under the stress of training, right, It's done in
a way where they can focus on the nerm muscular patterns.
They can kind of build up there can their fitness
level to actually be able to do the technique. And
because needs to know what the right technique is, So
there are you know a number of things that go
with But I've seen so many kids who just got
(13:03):
thrown into a pool and swam a million yards and
they got really fast as young kids that they did
it with poor technique. And when they get to the
final level, so they're trying to get to a national
team or to the Olympics, that's a real limiting factor
if they have poor technique, because everybody there has good technique.
You can't be without it. So that's one phase of it.
The other one is they're just getting inappropriate uh modalities
(13:26):
of training. In my mind, and what I've seen in
youth sports since I've been coaching now for thirty years,
is that age group coaches are looking at what college
coaches do and they're using the same modalities. Right. They're
asking them to do resistance training, to pull on buckets
and things that we have for swimming. Now you can
(13:47):
actually swim against resistance, right, and they're not ready to
do that when they're twelve, eleven, thirteen, fourteen fifty. Michael
didn't lift weights until he's did in an Olympics because
we wanted to save that part to add so his
career would keep moving. Um So I think all of
that goes back to what's an appropriate thing to do
with a kid at a certain age, And for me,
(14:07):
it would work like this. There would be a phase
where it's skill based, only technique based, and just some
general conditioning like we said, jumping, Jack's running, swimming a
little bit, doing all the strokes, kind of learning everything.
Then there's gonna be a phase where you would start
to develop the aerobic system because we know that actually
pre pupacent kids can develop their heart and lungp size.
(14:30):
You can actually increase heart and lungp size prior to
puberty if you do some training. But that's not like
training like Michael would do when he was twenty. It's
appropriate training for eleven twelve year old. So you give
them a capacity, an aerobic capacity, but then with the
skills you have that, so you have aerobic and skills,
and then you start moving on to more anaerobic training,
(14:50):
more kind of power based training, and by the time
they get to college, they're ready to lift weights, they're
ready to do resistance and power based training because they
have a back ground of all these other things. But
it has to flow and it has to go into progression,
and if you ignore that progression, you just end up
really stunting how far they can go at the end
of their career. So let's say you know, you recognize
(15:13):
or a parent I have no idea, a coach recognizes
like you did you know a Caleb dress Sole, Michael Phelps.
You know these kids that are just wow, you know
this kid is special. Do you intentionally and I mean
you see it, you've seen it before, you see this
could could be an outlier? Do you intentionally not press
the envelope so that you don't over exert them? Because
I think what people do is they see this potential.
(15:35):
I don't know, but my guess is they automatically go
into we gotta step it up a little bit. Is
that like the quickest way to burn a young kid
as the quickest way to ruin that? Actually, Michael just
came out with this documentary called The Weight of Goal
and there's a tiny clip of me and they're giving
what I think is my first TV interview ever, and
my words are, we've limited his training so that we
(15:56):
can add things later on so he can get a
lot better down the road. Yeah, and we we deliberately
limited his training early on. He slammed once a day,
where a lot of people would have tried to make
him some twice. Um. We saved the weight training where
a lot of people would have thrown him right into that.
And we tried to have a deliberate plan for how
we would develop each one of his strokes and each
(16:18):
one of his training qualities over time so that when
we finally got to the top level, the Olympic level
for him, he had all the tools in his tool box.
He wasn't missing something so and he could also do
an injury free That's a big part of what happens
when you start getting advanced training modalities early. The kids
get hurt and there shouldn't be eleven and twelve fourteen
(16:40):
year old kids with chronic shoulder problems in swimming that
just should not exist. That means you're not doing it correctly.
So you know, all of these things factor into what
a smart development plan is. In my opinion, how did
you recognize, like we gotta be calculated? I think a
text mession was that this all stuff that you have learned,
because it seems I don't them. Did you coach a
(17:00):
Phelps type person before? Like, how did you know this?
I studied. I studied Phelps type people because I wanted
to coach them, and I worked with coaches who had
developed that kind of people, you know, I could. I
worked with the coach who had developed Tracy Calkins is
probably the best of email swimmer ever. You know, if
it wasn't for the nineteen eighty boycott, everybody would know her.
(17:21):
She came back in eighty four once and medals, but
she was, you know, set American records in every stroke.
I worked with other coaches who had developed young swimmers
to the very top level and watched how they did
that and talked to them about it, and you know,
so so I was learning about it. And it was
obvious with Michael right, he wasn't just a good age
(17:41):
group swimmer. He was like you just had a feeling
that he was special. So you wanted to make sure
that you were going to give him every tools so
that he could maximize that. So that's kind of where
I approached it. So the long term I want to
say long term development, but like having the long lenses
is not something that you advent, like that's been going
on forever, because now it's a yeah, I love good
coaches have been doing that forever, right, That's how you
(18:04):
know them. They got people to really high levels because
they smartly developed them or they intelligently developed them. They
didn't just try to get everything now because they have
this kid who happens to be pretty good. So that's
what it takes. And I feel like today everyone and
it doesn't matter the sport. It seems like they want
to make a name for themselves. So let's get this
kid as good as they can. And at times I'm
just trying to connect the dots. It seems like we
(18:26):
are speeding it up and at times we're doing the
kids a disservice. Is that what we're Absolutely anytime you're
speeding that up, you're doing them a disservice. Everybody has
a raid at which they progressed. How Michael I would
be perfectly honest, Michael's chronological age did not match up
with his developmental age. Right, No fifteen year olds make
the Olympics, boys, you know he did, so you know
(18:47):
so that there is that piece. So he was probably
accelerated in terms of what I would do with somebody
who's his same age. That's not his talent level. But
in general, you always want to be moving at the pace,
and they'll tell you what the next step should be.
If you're a good coach, you're observing how they adapt
to what you're giving them. Are they swimming with better technique?
(19:07):
Are they able to handle this workload and still come
into practice with a positive attitude and not be the
walking dead, you know, because you're killing them. Are they
happy doing what they're doing? Are they racing and progressing
over time? And if you're also your job to kind
of make some of these things happen. Like for Michael,
I knew on day one that his best event was
the two hundred butterfly. Okay, you knew it was gonna be.
(19:30):
I didn't let him swim that for almost a year.
When he started something, he we kept him from swimming.
So I got him at eleven. He didn't really swim
it into meat till he was thirteen that because you
want to be uncomfortable, Well, no, I wanted to get
his strokes right, and I didn't want him to start
swimming this event that all these older people swam and
just burn himself out on it. Right, So Michael swam
(19:53):
the two hunter fly, the first time he ever swim
in the meeting qualified for the junior Nationals, and then
the next time he got third at in your Nationals,
and the next time he broke in Nashal as your
bigger by five seconds. So it got a spiral from there.
Uh So it was you know, I think it tells
you planning of how new events they swift, how you
choose to compete. Just because everybody's competing in a certain
(20:15):
way doesn't mean you have to do that. What we
thought was important for his development at thirteen and fourteen
is he would go to meets and swim nine events
a day. He would swim a lot of events at
these beats, and he got used to swimming back to
back events. But it wasn't done in a way that
was you know, we weren't going home and swimming twenty
thousand yards a day. It was just the meets would
present the challenge that he loved to raise. So he
(20:36):
loved the challenge of seeing what he could do. Could
he win three events in a row in a program,
Could he come back at night and do the same thing.
Could he do the best time in all those events?
So you know, you kind of have to know your
athlete and know what they're capable of and then you
are pushing them, right, You're pushing them to the next step.
You're not going from step ten to step a hundred.
(20:57):
You are from step ten to step eleven to twelve.
Maybe sometimes you skip and go to fourteen, but you
don't skip and go to twenty five. You know, tell
me this. You keep using the word compete, compete, compete.
You know, parents and kids are looking for the secret sauce.
From what I'm gathering, the willingness to go out and
compete like a killer. Uh you know what I mean
by that. But to compete to win seems to be
(21:18):
what every college coach wants. They want athletes that want
to compete. And from what I gather, Michael's in the
category of a Jordan Like Michael loved to win, but
he hated to lose more. How important that, Oh, it's
absolutely important to what drives everything we do, right, because
we tie everything we do and training back to the
(21:39):
next meet. So we're doing this because we want to
develop this quality of your strokes, and then when you
get to the next meet, you'll be able to do
this at this time of the race, and then everything
has meaning, right. See, I think a lot of people
they just kind of go to practice and the coach
just kind of gives them something and they do it,
and then it might go well, it might go poorly,
and then they go to a meet and they went
(22:00):
well and it's un poorly, But they don't tie the
whole thing together. You know. It's sort of like the
practices are your homework and the needs are your tests
your quizzes. Right, so you find out if you learned
the material about and then from the results of the needs,
you can go back and change what you're doing in
the classroom so the next time they do better. So
that's how I approach it. It's it's not just trial
(22:20):
and error. It's a plan system. And then you can
check your results, go back and tweet something, throw something
out at something in that you think they need, and
then over time, if you do that well enough, you
can refine it to a point where you can get
really predictable results. That classroom analogy I think everyone can
relate to. But Coach Baum and this has been awesome.
I know you're busy, I know you've got a lot
(22:40):
going on. I thank you so much and I always
appreciate you here. Thanks for listening to the Reformed Sports
Project podcast dom Nick Boncourt and Our goal is to
restore a healthy balance and perspective in all areas of
sport through education and advocacy. For updates, please follow us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or check out our website
by searching for the Reform Sports Project
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.