How you can take swimming lessons from video games

I have a lot of friends that absolutely love video games (me included), and often our parents and significant others aren’t exactly thrilled about us sitting in front of a TV all day killing zombies. But I like to think that someday we will be rewarded for preventing the apocalypse.

But seriously, how can Super Mario help you swim a better 100m freestyle?

Your brain on video games

Have you ever experienced a time warp while playing a video game – one second you’re sitting down to play and 10 seconds later its way past bedtime, you’re hungry and have an urgent need to go to the loo?

That happens because our brains devote so much of our attention to the game that things such as time, surroundings and even your body’s needs fade into the background. This is a process psychologists refer to as Flow, and it is the secret to unbelievable performances in the pool.

Flow Secret

One of the keys to Flow is harnessing that video game experience – be able to focus so intently on one task that you lose track of everything else.

Remember the story of Muhammad Ali? The moment Ali viewed his opponent as the guy that stole his blue bicycle, nothing else mattered. His entire being became focused on one thing: childhood revenge. He understood Flow.

By now, you are probably beginning to understand what I mean by Flow and you might call it something different: A-game, on fire, hack mode, in the pipe, in the zone… regardless of what we call it, we have already acknowledged that we recognize it when you see it in A Glimpse of God In A Speedo.

Here are three key factors present in video games that can help us:

1) Balancing boredom and stress

In his book, “Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi illustrates that your skill level needs to be close to the level of the challenge at hand. If your skill level is much higher than the challenge presented, you get bored (typical swim practices tend to be quite boring) and if the challenge is much greater than the skill, you will likely get stressed out (trying to execute an outside smoke maneuver).

We see the same thing happening in a video game. If you keep failing on a particular level without getting any closer to beating it, then you get overwhelmed and quit. On the other hand, after you beat the game for the 30th time, things tend to get a bit boring. This is why game developers implement a technique called Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment to allow games to adapt to your level of skill.

2) Autonomy

As an athlete’s maturity increases, so should their sense of autonomy increase. It’s been proven that, as humans, when we feel in control of our choices, our level of motivation increases and stays elevated much longer than if we were given rewards.

Whether it’s a video game or a sport, the player needs to feel involved in the process and outcomes. An athlete that is involved in the planning of their training regimen feels empowered and is much more likely to make smart decisions in the absence of a coach.

A coach is a coach is a coach… not a babysitter!

3) Intrinsic Motivation

The power of intrinsic motivation is severely underrated. For a swimmer to have breakthroughs in tough moments, there has to be some internally rewarding factor. Mark my words: If you have no intrinsic motivation, you will not enjoy the sport and you are very likely to become a dropout statistic. I shared how detrimental a lack of intrinsic motivation was for me in 4 things great athletes need to succeed. I was motivated by money (the very thing research has proven leads an athlete to become amotivated).

To illustrate the power of intrinsic motivation, let’s look at the results of this study conducted in 2003 with Canadian swimmers. It was hypothesized that a more autonomy-supportive coaching style would lead to higher levels of competence, autonomy, intrinsic motivation and higher levels of persistence.

Results supported this hypothesis. Approximately one and a half years into the intervention program, athletes perceived their coaches as significantly less controlling and as more autonomy supportive. In turn, athletes’ levels of perceived competence and intrinsic motivation toward swimming increased, leading to several adaptive consequences. The levels of attendance in the practice sessions increased dramatically, and the annual dropout rate decreased from 35% to less than 5%. A control group of swimmers who were not part of the intervention still displayed a 35% dropout rate. In addition, 85% of the athletes who were part of the intervention reached the national performance standards, four were selected to the Canadian Olympic swimming team, and one won a silver medal in the Seoul Olympics.

There is more to Flow than can be learned through an analysis of video games, but for now we are just learning from three factors: balancing skills and challenges, autonomy and intrinsic motivation.

Are these three factors worth implementing? Well, I believe the results from the Canadian Olympic swimmers speak for themselves. If you want to reach the top quickly and actually enjoy the process, start with intrinsic motivation.