When a lot of coaches asked me what it is that you should have studied as a swim coach, I would say, behavioral psychology. So you can understand when somebody looks at you, or walks into the door, the shoulders are down, they are sad, or they don’t speak the same way, you know that there’s something that’s going to affect them physiologically. Because if somebody hasn’t been able to sleep well their stress level is up, their cortisol levels are up, there’s so many things that they’re not in the right place, that you might not want to have a very hard practice, you might want to have a nice conversation, where you can put that person down, bring a person down, and maybe have to give them a recovery practice. So you have to play with different things. The physiology, the biomechanics, the psychology. So it’s the same thing as a coach.

Before I correct anything from anybody, I would watch that person, and then understand how that person moves and talks, and does something, and then try to adapt whatever knowledge I have in whatever I’ve learned from the talent of that person and have them mold to it. It’s like you’re a chef and you can have a recipe. It’s not about the recipe. It’s how you mix the ingredients. That’s it, you know, I think that’s a very important thing.

If you watch Joseph Schooling when he was 12, or 13, and he would get into the water, he would swim in freestyle, and his fingers would find the water and then catch it. Not many people have that awareness when they are in the water. That was, “Wow,” you know, it’s like, you watch him like a fish. What is he doing? And then you can see that he’s looking for the water, and then he catches it. And now he holds the water with everything, and you can push so much.

As a coach, you have to learn from the athletes, and the athletes need to allow themselves to learn from the coaches. Nowadays, all these young kids have so much information on the internet. They think they know more than you, you know, “I should be doing this type of set instead of this set because, you know, I’m a sprinter, I’m this, I’m that.” Okay. So you have to create that relationship and teach them when you make a mistake, you know, apologize, correct it, move on. Also, in a coach-swimmer relationship, the swimmer needs to feel confident. It’s not just about him, you know, if he swims well, it is not the coach’s success and if he swims bad, it is not the swimmer’s failure, you know. Because a lot of people see that. So it’s a partnership, you know, for the good and for the not so good. So, learning to do that is important.

Molly Turner, Longitude fellow, The Juilliard School:

As a classically trained musician, you might think I have very little in common with Sergio or swimming, when in fact, throughout our entire conversation, we kept finding really nice similarities. In fact, one of Sergio’s favorite movies is “August Rush” and he suggests that many swimmers watch it. He said to me that in “August Rush,” “The kid tries to find his parents through music, you know, it’s a very interesting concept of how he hears something and makes a movement with the instrument. And swimming is the same thing. We have to ask how you generate energy with the way you move your hands and your feet.” Both music and swimming involve movement, breathing, time, discipline, and of course, performance. Sergio talks in his sound byte about noticing psychologically when an athlete might be having a bad day. Musicians also have bad days. Everyone has bad days. Sometimes when a difficult passage in a music or technique is not working in a certain way, it can be really frustrating. Sergio gives us powerful advice to not push through it. Of course, we have to set high expectations for ourselves. But his emphasis on the psychological part of coaching and reading nonverbal cues from his athletes shows that Sergio is not only an incredible swim coach, but a life and person coach in general. He’s not coaching a statistic or a robot. He’s coaching a person. And at the end of the day, coaching swimming isn’t about the perfect workout, or pushing your athlete over the limits. It’s about getting to know them as a human. And we can extend this to anything, we do not only  apply this to swimming or rehearsals and music, but business meetings or anything else. And we can’t forget that it’s really okay to have a bad day.