Julio Zarate

In swimming, the conventional model has long been clear: Build the aerobic base first. Add speed later. More yards. Longer practices. Endurance before everything else. It’s a system many of us grew up in. It’s what we were taught. And for a long time, I followed it too. But it’s worth asking a simple question: What if we’ve been building in the wrong order? The Case for Speed First For most of my career, I was taught to believe something simple: Swimming is an endurance sport. That idea...

In competitive sport, especially at the elite level, everything tends to orbit a single idea: excellence. We want to be excellent. We want to achieve excellence. Times. Rankings. Podiums. Records. More. From a young age, athletes are taught—explicitly or implicitly—that excellence is the goal. As coaches and parents, we reinforce this idea through qualifying standards, rankings, and performance benchmarks. Even our mission statements often include the word excellence . But after years of...

In coaching circles today, we hear a lot about "connection." Coach the person, not just the athlete.” “Build relationships.” Invest in the whole human.”