by Olivier Poirier-Leroy from www.yourswimlog.com

Recently Southern California Swimming outlawed tech suits for young age group swimmers. Will more teams and organizations follow suit?

In November of 2016 one of the more powerful swimming organizations within USA Swimming—Southern California Swimming—released a policy where young age group swimmers would not be allowed to compete in SoCal Swimming sanctioned competitions while wearing a tech suit.

The policy was directed towards swimmers between the ages of 5-10 years old, who would not be permitted to wear tech suits such as the Speedo FastSkin LZR, Arena Carbon, TYR Avictor, FINIS Vapor, etc. Other age groups are also not allowed at age group invitationals and dual/tri/intrasquad meets.

The rule, taking effect on January 1, 2017, is in response to concerns from parents and coaches that the suits were detracting from the overall experience.

After all, tech suits can:

Make an expensive sport even more expensive.

Although swimming looks like a cheap sport, it isn’t.

Beyond meet fees, practice fees, volunteering dues, travel, and on and on, the sport begins to spiral out of control with costs.

For families who has more than one swimmer in the water like my parents did with myself and two sisters, the sport is not cheap. Having to purchase multiple $400-600 tech suits per year is just another swift kick to the groin of the purse strings for parents.

This added expense isn’t good for the long term growth and health of the sport–one of the reasons that swimmers quitting swimming is because of the prohibitive costs.

Create misplaced expectations.

Tech suits have been touted as game-changers for swimmers, a residue of the rubber suit maelstrom that took place in 2008-2009 (particularly at the world championships in 2009 where 43 world records were shattered—most notably by Peter Biedermann of Germany who dropped 4 seconds off his best time in the 200m freestyle to swim an unearthly 1:42.00).

That period of time left a deep impression on the swimming consciousness that has lasted to this day about what tech suits can do for swimmers in the water. While the effect of the suits is there, it’s not nearly as potent as it once was.

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2008: Banana hammocks vs rubber wet suits

Tech suits aren’t designed for youngsters.

The swim suit manufacturers design these suits for older age group swimmers and up.

At a recent age group meet I was at, a couple 8 and unders were wearing tech suits, clearly the smallest sizes available, and they didn’t fit properly. I can only hope that the parents who dished out $500 for the suit were quietly hoping, “She’ll grow into it…right?”

Keep in mind that one of the main benefits to wearing a tech suit is the benefits of muscle compression. So unless your little age grouper is hitting the juice one of the main benefits of the racing suits is null and void.

Detracts from the fundamentals.

Tech suits should be used as the veritable cherry on top of your training—it’s the last thing you should be worried about, and you shouldn’t be placing a single iota of faith in it to increase your performance.

Only you can do that. Not the suit. We are past the days where suits can make or break a swimmer.

Confuses the source of improvement.

One aspect to tech suits that doesn’t get enough attention is that it confuses swimmers and parents as to the source of improvement.

At the age of 8, 9, even 12 years of age, swimmers are dropping time like crazy. Just by the fact that these young swimmers are growing at a rapid rate, while also accruing the quick gains that come with the early stages of mastery of skill, best times are gonna happen regardless of what kind of suit they are wearing.

When a young swimmer puts on a tech suit and drops a couple seconds, it cheapens the hard work they did to get there as they almost certainly would have gone a PB anyway.

Save the tech suit for later, when your skills and conditioning begin to mature, and that tiny, fractional drop you’ll get from the suit will actually be appreciated and will actually make a difference.

You’ll have to keep a separate list of best times.

It’s not enough that you keep a shaved/unshaved list of best times, now you’ll have to keep another list of best times from when you are wearing a tech suit.

You are buying a best time (and the pressure that comes along with it).

In a lot of cases the swimmer isn’t working harder. Or improving their start. Or showing up to more workouts. They are being gifted a faster time than they deserve.

At the age of 8-12 the times don’t even really matter.

During that time kids should be dialed in on technique, developing a legendary work ethic. Kids don’t need the pressure that comes along with dropping $600 on a suit.

If it’s about emulating the best…save the suit for the big meets.

A lot of NCAA division I schools, during their dual meet season, will compete only in briefs, saving the tech suits for the conference and national championship meets.

Beyond the fact that these athletes are some of the best swimmers in the world, these schools are also sponsored.

At What Age Should Swimmers Wear Tech Suits? Save

When Are Tech Suits Appropriate?

As the SoCal Swimming policy shows, organizations are being forced to act on the issue. They have to, after all, making the sport accessible is part of their mandate. Even as far back as 2009, Swim Ontario, the largest provincial swimming organization in Canada, banned the rubber suits for swimmers under 14-years of age.

Some swim parents will note that they use the tech suit as incentive, or as a reward. Having to “earn” the suit via performance in the water, whether it’s qualifying for sectionals, nationals, or whatever, is another way to insure that swimmers are focusing on improving the fundamentals of the sport first.

(This veers off into the lesson of delayed gratification, and the importance of teaching it, but that’s a whole other topic.)

While national organizations are unlikely to act (they are sponsored by the major swimsuit brands, after all), many teams are now being forced to put tech suit policies into place in order to level the playing field and keep the sport affordable for young families.

For many of them, there is a cut-off date around 12-13-years where athletes are not allowed to rep the suits. And even then, it’s only at the major championship meets that swimmers are encouraged/permitted to wear them.

One such team, Patriots Swimming, have had their own tech suit policy since 2012. Here are some notes from their guidelines (emphasis is mine):

10 and under swimmers should not use technical suits…There is no documented evidence that technical suits benefit performance in that age demographic.

The cost of technical suits makes them unattainable for some athletes. We do not want to add any pressure on parents by increasing the cost of our sport.

Performance is not the only evaluation of success for younger swimmers. The coaches want to see a growth in technique, understanding of rules, work ethic, and above all character. Technical suits play no part in that.

The Takeaway

For most swimmers who read this post they’ll nod, agree with most of it, but they’ll still want the suit.

To which I offer a final thought.

There’s a point of pride in not needing a tech suit to race fast.

Beating someone who is wearing a tech suit is good times. After all, putting a whopping on a swimmer who is wearing a tech suit is going to demoralize them. It gives you constant underdog status, and can actually leave you feeling like there is less pressure on you.

So there’s that.

But…the desire for athletes to swim fast will never go away. Especially if there is an unearned shortcut to faster swimming at their disposal.

For as long as there are swimmers who want best times you will have athletes who are tugging on their parents sleeve asking for the newest, shiniest tech suit.

Public acclaim can distort research applications.

Carol Dweck’s research has made the Stanford psychologist a household name among parents and teachers. Since the 2006 publication of her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (and Stanford’s March/April 2007 cover story), countless articles and books have featured her ideas about helping children and adults learn. The video of Dweck’s 2014 TEDx talk on “growth mindset” — the power of believing that you can improve your abilities and talents — has been viewed more than 4.7 million times. And U.S. sales of Mindset run from 7,000 to 14,000 copies weekly, according to her literary agent, suggesting wide-ranging popularity.

But Dweck’s stardom has come with a harsh side effect: In the minds of many, “growth mindset” mutated almost beyond recognition. As she recently put it in her characteristically delicate way, “I slowly became aware that not all educators understood the concept fully.” As a result, Dweck has been reaching out to educational audiences in person and in print to dispel some troubling myths.

At its core, the concept doesn’t seem hard to understand. In decades of experiments, Dweck and colleagues have often pitted a growth mindset against its opposite, the belief that ability is a fixed trait. In one series of studies, children who were praised for their intelligence developed a fixed mindset; their goals shifted from learning to showing how smart they were. They chalked up failures to low intelligence, giving up more quickly and performing worse than peers who’d been praised instead for hard work. (See chart below.)

Unfortunately, many of Dweck’s acolytes came to equate a growth mindset only with effort — as if students’ hard work alone, without effective instruction from teachers, could help them master whatever skills they might struggle with. In a particularly egregious distortion of Dweck’s ideas, some teachers have blamed students’ failures on the students’ own fixed mindsets; others have simply chided kids for insufficient effort. But as Dweck pointed out in a talk earlier this year, a failing student who has tried harder will feel even more inept if not shown better strategies.

Such misapprehensions not only turn Dweck’s message on its head but have opened her up to criticism for furthering ideas that are actually anathema to her. In a controversial Salon piece last year, Alfie Kohn, a firebrand of progressive education, accused Dweck of supporting an up-by-your-bootstraps agenda that puts all the onus on the student.

One of Dweck’s collaborators, Susan Mackie, dubbed the cluster of misunderstandings “false growth mindset.” Dweck says that once she heard about it, she saw examples everywhere. Some parents and teachers praise children for effort even when the child hasn’t exerted much effort at all — a distressing reversion to the self-esteem tactics Dweck has devoted her career to countering. Others have taken to hollow, misleading promises that “you can learn anything” — a phrase they might have picked up from Dweck admirers Bill Gates and Khan Academy founder Sal Khan, both of whom have used it to distill her message to tweet size.

Like the #growthmindset hashtag that gets tacked onto some of the hokiest truisms on social media, the term is bandied about to bolster so many notions that it has all but lost its meaning. “It’s like everybody feels they need to say they have a growth mindset,” Dweck says, even if they don’t walk the talk.

Graphic: Nigel Holmes

There’s also the all-too-human wish for a silver bullet. Dweck says the Los Angeles school system showed teachers her 10-minute TED talk — and sent them off to implement it. She’s seen similar problems with business institutions, who often underestimate the work that goes into understanding the growth mindset and putting it into practice. One large corporation was ready to pin its future on her ideas, but by inviting Dweck to give a talk to the company’s “high-potential employees,” they showed their obliviousness to one of Dweck’s basic tenets: that a person’s true potential is unknowable.

The dilution of the growth mindset concept risks more than Dweck’s reputation. “The danger is that the idea, which has solid research backing and has yielded in some cases spectacular results, will become discredited,” she says.

What’s happened to Dweck mirrors the experiences of some other psychologists whose research captured the imagination of the public. The “grit” concept developed by Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania has often been reduced to plain old perseverance, and Florida State professor Anders Ericsson’s research into deliberate practice continues to be equated with the bogus notion that you need 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in any field.

“When any concept becomes popular, it can drift away from the original research,” Dweck says, “and it’s our job [as researchers] to do the work to bring it back.” That means not only clarifying the message but also doing further research. When Dweck’s book first came out, the scientists themselves had only a limited understanding of how to instill a growth mindset. Newer research is showing that it doesn’t get transmitted through words so much as through deeds, like probing for kids’ understanding and giving students a chance to revise their work. In one recent set of studies, graduate student Kyla Haimovitz worked with Dweck to investigate how parents’ mindsets about failure affect their children’s beliefs; they found that parents who see failure as debilitating tend to focus more on their children’s performance than on their learning — and that parental beliefs about failure foster a more fixed mindset in the children.

Somewhat surprisingly, Dweck has been suggesting that we should legitimize the fixed mindset instead of seeing it as the evil antithesis of the growth mindset: We are all, she says, a mixture of both beliefs. And rather than just proclaiming that we have a growth mindset, we ought to work to strengthen it. In Dweck’s freshman seminar, for example, she challenges students to do something “outrageously growth mindset.” One extremely shy freshman ran for dorm president; he not only survived the experience, he won — and felt emboldened to further stretch his social side.

Not every student sees such dramatic results, of course, and some even feel discouraged after the assignment. But, Dweck says, “I’ve never had an experience where the student wasn’t proud of what they did and what they learned from it.” •

MARINA KRAKOVSKY, ’92, is the author of The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit.

When Should Swimmers Start Wearing Tech Suits?