Unsolicited Advice

Do you offer unsolicited advice to other swimmers at the pool? Fix their form? Give workout suggestions? Etc. Or do you keep your mouth shut? Mouth shut, I don't want to get killed. Seriously, it happened once over the last few years. A young sprinter was pushing a massive water wall whilst booking a set of fast 100m. But it's delicate matters. So I went to see him, asked if 1. He was currently being coached 2. Why he would keep his head so low whilst sprinting He answered in a very polite way, that a coach in the past had asked him to always keep his head low. I said that the head position kept lower was probably serving him very well at lower swim pace, but when sprinting, given that the flutter kick tends to lift the lower body fairly high, a neutral head position could be just fine. I mentioned that his stroke looked awesome (I lied there, but giving unsolicited advices comes at a price right?), but that if he felt that was I was saying was making sense, he could test other head position. He immediately did, and notice an improvement of 1.5sec per 100m, right there (from 1:02.5 down to 1:01). I now coach this guy, so it wasn't a bad move after all.

Do you offer unsolicited advice to other swimmers at the pool? Fix their form? Give workout suggestions? Etc. Or do you keep your mouth shut? Mouth shut, I don't want to get killed. Seriously, it happened once over the last few years. A young sprinter was pushing a massive water wall whilst booking a set of fast 100m. But it's delicate matters. So I went to see him, asked if 1. He was currently being coached 2. Why he would keep his head so low whilst sprinting He answered in a very polite way, that a coach in the past had asked him to always keep his head low. I said that the head position kept lower was probably serving him very well at lower swim pace, but when sprinting, given that the flutter kick tends to lift the lower body fairly high, a neutral head position could be just fine. I mentioned that his stroke looked awesome (I lied there, but giving unsolicited advices comes at a price right?), but that if he felt that was I was saying was making sense, he could test other head position. He immediately did, and notice an improvement of 1.5sec per 100m, right there (from 1:02.5 down to 1:01). I now coach this guy, so it wasn't a bad move after all.