Most coaches have seen it. A swimmer with real talent suddenly tightens up on the blocks, replaying a bad split on a loop, going quiet on the deck in the hour before a big heat. It is easy to file these swimmers under “can’t handle pressure” or “mentally soft.” But often, what is happening is anxiety, and the relationship between anxiety and athletic performance is one of the most misunderstood things in sport. Even the best feel it. Olympic champion Caeleb Dressel has spoken openly about the mental side of the sport. In the clip below, he describes having panic attacks in the pool.
At its core, anxiety is the body reacting to a threat. It is the fear of a bad swim, of letting the relay down, of missing a cut, of being judged from the stands. But the brain does not know the difference and responds as if the threat is all consuming.
It tends to show up in two places. In the head it sounds like worry, self-doubt, and a running commentary about everything that could go wrong. In the body it is a pounding heart, tight shoulders, shaky hands, a churning stomach. Both hurt performance, but differently: runaway worry scrambles focus and race execution, while physical arousal can actually sharpen a swimmer up, right until it tips over into too much.1
Here is the part that is easy to miss: anxiety is not the enemy. It just means the swimmer cares. The real question is never whether anxiety shows up, but what the swimmer does with it.
No swimmer walks up and says, “Hey coach, I am dealing with performance anxiety.” What coaches see are the behaviors it hides behind. Sometimes it looks like perfectionism, fixating on one bad turn, chasing impossible splits. Sometimes it looks like avoidance, dogging the hard set, hanging at the wall, finding a reason to scratch a race. Other swimmers just go quiet, snap at lane-mates, or seem unusually fragile before a meet.
From the outside, that can read as not trying. In reality, they are trying their hearts out. Their attention has just shifted from racing toward not messing up. Once a coach sees the behavior as fear rather than laziness, it gets easier to handle.
One of the biggest myths in the sport is that the best swimmers do not get nervous. They do. The goal was never to make the nerves disappear. It is to change how the swimmer relates to them.
There is no single “right” emotional state that produces a great swim. Some swimmers are at their best calm and steady; others need to feel fired up. What matters is not the feeling but whether they can stay locked into the race in front of them.2 How a swimmer reads those nerves makes a real difference: people who treat stress as something that can help them rise tend to handle it better, physically and mentally, than people who treat it as pure danger.3 That racing heart before the start is not always a warning light. A lot of the time it is just the body getting ready to go, a point Swim Like A Fish makes well in Performance Anxiety: How It Helps and Hurts.
Coaches almost always mean well, but one of the most common mistakes is accidentally cranking up the pressure. “This is the biggest swim of the season.” Those lines are meant to light a fire, and for some swimmers they do. For the anxious ones, they pour gas on the worry.
In reality, the swimmer already knows the race matters. Reminding them rarely helps; it pulls their focus onto the clock instead of what they need to do. The better move is to shrink the moment, not inflate it. The pool is the same length and the race the same distance as in warm-up. Giving a swimmer less to carry to the blocks is often the most useful thing a coach can do.
When swimmers tie their worth to their times, racing turns heavier. A bad swim or a missed cut stops being a normal part of the sport and starts feeling like a verdict on who they are.
That is why anxiety and performance so often turn into a loop: anxiety chips away at focus, the swim falls flat, and the swimmer reads it as proof that something is wrong with them. The next race feels more threatening and the anxiety climbs.
The takeaway is not to lower the bar or go soft on accountability. It is to help swimmers see that performance matters while their worth is not riding on a time. Swimmers who feel valued regardless of the result compete with more confidence and bounce back faster. Swimmers who feel like every race is a referendum on their value tend to unravel.
Coaching behavior shapes swimmers’ anxiety, confidence, and overall experience in the sport.4 A few things tend to work:
Coaches are not therapists, but there are simple tools any swimmer can learn:
1.) Breathing: The most basic and one of the most effective. Box breathing: four seconds in, four hold, four out, four hold. It settles the body’s stress response and has been a staple of stress-management work for decades.6 Here is a short guided box-breathing video a swimmer can run on the deck before stepping up.
2.) Self-talk: Most swimmers talk to themselves in a way they would never talk to a lane-mate. Swapping “Don’t miss the wall” for cues like “long and strong,” “hold the water,” or “I’ve put in the yards” pulls attention back to what they can control, and research shows that shift can lower anxiety while boosting confidence and performance.7
Here is a short clip on how athletes can put better self-talk into practice:
3.) Pre-race routines: A consistent routine, the walk to the blocks, the goggle check, a breath and a cue, gives swimmers something steady to hold onto when the pressure climbs, keeping their focus on execution instead of the clock. Routines are linked again and again to better performance when it matters most.8
Anxiety is not a flaw, and it is not proof that a swimmer cannot hang. It is what happens when someone cares deeply about something hard. The job was never to get rid of it, but to help swimmers build a better relationship with it.
Coaches cannot take the pressure out of racing, and they should not try. What they can do is shape how swimmers read that pressure and whether they see performance as something they do rather than who they are. How clearly a coach separates the swimmer from the scoreboard may decide whether anxiety becomes a wall or just another thing they learn to handle.
By: Simon Wright, M.S.
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