Michael Phelps’ commitment and dedication to his craft are almost as legendary as his Olympics achievements.
The US swimming star is the most successful and decorated Olympian of all time, having won a record 28 Olympics medals – 23 of which are gold.
The Baltimore Bullet’s relentless approach to training and diet saw him work out 356 days a year, including Christmas, and consume a whopping 10,000 calories per day.
Phelps employed numerous training techniques during his career to help him squeeze out that extra hundredth of a second, which was often the difference between first and second place.
Visualization was a key component of Phelps’ strict training regimen – something he learned from bodybuilding icon turned movie star and politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In his recent self-help book, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, the 7x Mr. Olympia explained that having a clear vision and goal was a necessity for achieving success.
Arnie would visualize his way to winning contests, which would boost his confidence as he had already ‘experienced’ success in his mind long before he ever stepped out on stage.
Phelps did the same, mentally rehearsing every aspect of his races, from the start to the finish, including how he would handle potential obstacles like a late start.
“I would visualize probably a month or so in advance just of what could happen, what I want to happen and what I don’t want to happen because when it happened I was prepared for it,” Phelps said in 2017.
“I mean the biggest thing, I think, that really separated me through my career was my mental game,” he went on.
“Everything that was in between my ears like for me it’s just, I eventually got to the point where I was competing against myself because I was so hard on myself. And you know, for me, to improve, I had to get stronger mentally and I had to find a way to do it.”
Schwarzenegger mentioned Phelps’ mental fortitude and visualization practice in his 2023 bestseller.
He wrote, “The Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps was famous, all the way back as a teenager, for visualizing his split times down to the tenth of a second during training and nailing them lap after lap.”
However, The Flying Fish took it one step further than The Terminator ever did.
Phelps would often color over his goggles with a black sharpie and swim in the dark. At first, the somewhat unorthodox technique seems a little kooky, but there were two main reasons Phelps decided to do it.
The first was so that he could really feel his stroke and balance from side to side. Taking his sight out of the equation enabled Phelps to find a rhythm and count the number of strokes before hitting the wall.
“We do it so you can really feel your stroke.,” he said. “It’s weird, sure, but we want to be ready for literally anything that comes our way. I never want to leave that comfort zone.”
The other reason Phelps swam in the dark was to create the most adverse training conditions possible.
He knew he had to prepare for all eventualities, and blacking out his goggles was a way to replicate what it would be like if he ever got water in his googles during an importance race.
His rationale was that if ever the worst happened, he would have experienced something similar in training countless times before, and therefore wouldn’t be freaked out by it.
Lo and behold, that very thing happened at the 2008 Beijing Olympics – the grandest stage of all.
During the 200-meter butterfly final, Phelps’ goggles started to fill up with water about 25m into the race.
He was basically blinded from the end of the second lap onwards and 175m of the race. However, like he anticipated, his training in the dark paid dividends and he was unbelievably able to finish not just with the gold medal, but a new world record of 1:52.03.
Recalling the race, he said: “I revert back to what I did in training and counted my strokes. And I knew how many strokes I take the first, second, third, and fourth 50 of all of my best 200 flies. So I reverted back to that and I was ready for that because I was mentally prepared for it.
“If I didn’t prepare for everything that happens, when my goggles started filling up I’d have probably flipped out. That’s why I swim in the dark.”
Phelps picked up a record eight gold medals at Beijing in 2008 – eclipsing Mark Spitz’s 1972 record of seven at a single Olympics and to this day the greatest ever medal haul by an athlete at an Olympic Games.
Four gold medals and two silvers followed at London 2012, and at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Phelps won five gold medals and one silver.
Phelps’s approach to mindset proved that no matter how many meets and events he was involved in during his life, no race was more important than the one against himself.
The Olympics are on talkSPORT this summer, and you can tune in via our free online streaming service at talkSPORT.com
News Summary:
- Michael Phelps used special yet highly unorthodox Arnold Schwarzenegger inspired training technique that enabled him to become an Olympics legend
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