Michael Phelps: Plan your disasters

Imagine going blind during a race. That’s what happened to Michael Phelps during the 2008 Olympics. It was the 200m butterfly race and water seeped into his swim goggles in the first 50m. Phelps couldn’t see the T-marks on the bottom of the pool or the wall ahead.

But Phelps did not panic. He simply closed his eyes and started counting his strokes. He had practiced the race so many times that he knew exactly how many strokes it would take to reach the end. So he simply counted and continued swimming.

And won the gold!

But was it only practice that helped Phelps?

Michael Phelps is coached by Bob Bowman. And Bowman has a simple philosophy. You cannot control the environment during the competition. So you must train to be comfortable in unpredictable and uncomfortable environments.

How? By controlling chaos.

During various training sessions, Phelps had to undergo hardships that no other swimmer had to.

• He had to swim with heavy buckets tied to him.
• There would often be “transportation issues” during travel. Phelps would reach late to swim meets and would have to jump straight in - without doing his warmup routines.
• Meals would also be delayed sometimes during travel. Phelps would feel intense hunger right before major practice races.
• During late night training sessions, Bowman had occasionally switched off lights to the pool completely. This was why Phelps had a habit of always counting his strokes.
• Oh and yes, Bowman once stepped on Phelps’ swim goggles before a race as well!

Out of this grueling training regime was Michael Phelps forged.

There is difficult training, and then there is controlled chaos training.

Phelps was sent to a Navy Seals training bootcamp as part of his training as well. And he was often forced to swim even when he was dead tired. In fact, one time over a 3 day period, he was enrolled in 21 swim meets!

But many other swimmers are similarly coached to do hard things well. They are pushed to their limits. What Phelps was taught on was what to do when things break.

Controlled chaos is 2 steps:

1. First master the skill
2. Then remove a dependency

Goggles, light, food, time. Sabotage deliberately.

Control the breaking of things during training, plan your disasters.

Because that is what teaches adaptability.

You cannot control the environment, only your actions. So disrupt the environment during training. This is what raises your panic threshold. Trains your amygdala - the fight or flight part of your brain - to not panic in discomfort. To not spike your adrenaline and tighten your muscles when shit actually breaks.

Training to perform flawlessly when things disrupt around you is how you gain immense confidence in your own abilities as well.

But there is a dark side to discomfort training as well

After the end of every Olympics, Phelps would struggle with depression. He was constantly trained to view comfort as an enemy. So when stress vanished and he had made it, Phelps had no idea how to live without daily discomfort.

His dopamine came crashing and he would become depressed.

So what to do?

You 80/20 the chaos

The fatal flaw in Phelps’ coaching was that mishaps happened way too often.

Dr Stephen Seiler studied elite athletes from various fields over a decade. And he found something astounding: heart rate data showed that the athletes at the top of their field spent roughly 80% of their time in zone 1 and zone 2. And only 20% of their time in high intensity training.

While Dr Seiler’s research wasn’t done on controlled chaos, his research does show that the body adapts best when it isn’t constantly under stress.

Managing stress is the important part. So the hard combined with the chaotic training should total up to 20% of the time spent.

Action Summary:

• Use controlled chaos. Remove a dependency, and break things during training. Train to be comfortable in uncomfortable environments.
• Stress + rest = growth. Keep high stress to about 20%.