Stop Telling Swimmers What To Do: Constraints-Led Approach & the Real OODA Loop | Andrew Sheaff

Send us Fan Mail

Andrew Sheaff wrote the only book on the constraints-led approach to swim coaching. He joins No Way Out to explain why telling a swimmer what to do almost never changes how they swim, and what a coach can do instead.

Sheaff spent more than fifteen years coaching on deck at Virginia, Northwestern, Bucknell, and Maryland, on staffs that produced conference and NCAA team championships, American records, world championships, and Olympic medals. He now partners with performance programs to build skill development systems into training they already run.

He came to swimming late, trained his way past the skill gap, then hit a wall in college when getting stronger stopped paying. That wall sent him looking. He found Keith Davids and the constraints-led approach through a strength and conditioning blog, and spent the years since working out how to make the theory practical on a pool deck with forty kids and one whistle.

The problem he describes is one every coach knows. At ten swimmers to a coach, best case you speak to each kid one time in ten. And nobody can hold their elbow at 98 degrees instead of 97 in their head while their heart rate sits at 180. So Sheaff builds the correction into the activity. Put a buoy between the legs and the kick disappears, so the arms have to solve the problem. Turn the paddle upside down and the forearm has to face backward. Cap the stroke count and patience stops being a suggestion.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera hears John Boyd's destruction and creation in this, and Sheaff confirms the mechanism without having read a word of Boyd. Destabilize the old pattern at low intensity, rebuild it there, then crank the speed and the fatigue back up. That independent arrival is the premise of this show: a swim coach in Richmond and a fighter pilot in Virginia Beach describing the same loop from opposite ends of the world.

The conversation covers implicit guidance and control, which in a pool means teaching a swimmer to feel the difference between the old way and the new way rather than waiting on a coach who will not be there in the race. It covers education of attention, which Ponch recognizes from the fighter aviation debrief. And it covers the thing many coaches have backwards, which is that racing is the test and practice is where the improvement happens.

Sheaff is direct about the limits. Theory is rarely the bottleneck. Most coaches already own the drills and have not organized them around the skills that actually make a swimmer fast.

For coaches and program directors in any sport, this is what the constraints-led approach looks like after twenty years in the water.


ANDREW SHEAFF
A Constraints-Led Approach to Swim Coaching (Routledge, 2024)
Website: https://www.coachandrewsheaff.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrewksheaff
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-sheaff-69552783/
X: https://x.com/AndrewKSheaff
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Andrewsheaff

🎙️ Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/no-way-out
🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5fzIKBmVR7ARosQ3I52uNC
📖 Substack (The Whirl of ReOrientation): https://thewhirl.substack.com/
🌐 AGLX Consulting: https://www.aglx.com/
📅 Book a Call: https://www.aglx.com/book-a-call-na/

MORE ON THE CLA
Constraints-Led Coaching playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT6OAjZc6uH4
The Real OODA Loop playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaamn_TTvBz0
Rob Gray, PhD on the CLA: https://youtu.be/6jAhxyy1pRY
Rob Gardner, the Real OODA Loop in Basketball: https://youtu.be/_wVCrveQV9w

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

A promotional message for Ember Health.  Safe and effective IV ketamine care for individuals seeking relief from depression. Ember Health's evidence-based, partner-oriented, and patient-centered care model, boasting an 84% treatment success rate with 44% of patients reaching depression remission. It also mentions their extensive experience with over 40,000 infusions and treatment of more than 2,500 patients, including veterans, first responders, and individuals with anxiety and PTSD

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

X: @NoWayOutcast · @PonchAGLX · @NoWayOutMoose

Substack: The Whirl Of ReOrientation - www.thewhirl.substack.com