We often get asked by kids “I want to go to the Olympics, what should I do?”. and although we never managed to qualify for the Olympics, we do have a saying here in Mexico that might be appropriate for this situation. It translates to “The pupil surpasses the teacher.” So in the hopes that one of you goes to the Olympics as an athlete, a coach or a parent, I compiled all my knowledge into a pyramid of what I think are basic swimming needs to help you surpass us and go to the Olympics or to help you help someone make it to the Olympics. And now that I think about it, these could work for any sport. But before we go to the pyramid, just know that you can work hard to improve all of them, except #6. 1- Love for the sport. 2- Having enough money. 3- Good technique. 4- A good coach. 5- Endurance and pain tolerance. 6- Good genes. 7- Family members, friends, and teammates. 8- Injury prevention and/or treatment. 9- Rest, proper nutrition, sleep. 10- Strength and mobility. 11- Mental training. Now, before you write angry comments on this video, I just want to make something clear. You don’t need to have 100 percent of one step to climb to the next. Some of the higher steps in the pyramid will actually help the lower ones. For example, having good teammates will definitely increase your love for the sport, or good mobility and strength will also help your technique. Maybe it’s my fault, maybe instead of a pyramid, it should look more like this! It’s always a good idea to focus on what you are lacking the most and improve those weaknesses using your strengths. For example, you can use your mental training to strengthen your pain tolerance and endurance. If you do make it to the Olympics one day, make sure to come back to this video and add to the pyramid of needs in the comment section. If you are new to skills and talents welcome! We mainly focus on swimming and occasionally we do fun videos like this. Skills NT Shop: https://skillswimming.com/swimming-shop/ Our favorite Amazon products: http://bit.ly/SkillsNAmazon Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/skillsntalents Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SkillsNTalents Thanks for watching! Swim fast! Sources: https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/Fulltext/2017/11000/Sleep_and_Athletic_Performance.11.aspx#R3-11 Bird SP. Sleep, recovery, and athletic performance: a brief review and recommendations. Strength Cond. J. 2013; 35:43–7. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBdNNZ2atw

The majority of swimmers used to be very young, not very athletic outside the pool, and good at only one thing, swimming. Because of this many swimmers got injured or bored of the sport and left. Olympians and competitive swimmers retired at a very young age and swimming was considered something very young people did. But for the past 20 years or so, all of that has changed. This birth of a new type of swimmer is being fueled by a combination of several things: a better scientific understanding of how the body and the mind work, the introduction of masters swimming in more countries, increasing number of triathletes, Crossfit athletes that want to be good at everything, including swimming, YouTube tutorials and more recently because during the pandemic swimmers were forced to look at what did could improve outside of the pool. I’m not even talking about the pro-olympic-level swimmers. I’m talking about what the best coaches and athletes of every swimming level are doing, the local kids of your city that just started competing to the masters that do it recreationally or even competitively at national or international level. This new breed of swimmers, no matter their age, are athletic, strong, mobile, resilient, and very importantly they actually enjoy swimming. If you have been following us for a while, you probably have some of those skills already. But now we are taking our community to the next level. Instead of just giving you generic swimming advice, we will give you more specific, measurable and community driven guidance. Let me say that one more time, because this is important if you want to improve your swimming and enjoy all its benefits. Specific, measurable and community driven guidance. Specific; because we studied the 7 skills that are necessary to become this new type of swimmer. And then divided those 7 skills into 29 sub-skills to make it even more specific. Measurable because they say that “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” The way our community members will measure their improvement will be the topic of another video, but I can tell you right now that we have more than 200 tests ready for you. With the help of these tests you’ll improve even the things that you cannot measure like that great feeling of being in the water and moving however you want to. And community driven because you will be a part of this. By asking questions, answering our polls, doing the tests, texting us or by going to our swimming camps, you will now more influence on what type of content we make. Our most active community in fact is on the discord app. I’ll leave a link on the description. Since I uploaded the first swimming video to this channel, I have learned a lot about swimming and how the body and the mind ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrgk_gox4as