Yeah, of course

... 'cause, but if you look at it collectively, things we've, I've spoke about there, the, the, the stuff that happened in the one month leading up, put it all together and I think it does help and did help the team bond more closely together.

I don't think that's necessarily that hard for a Scottish team in a Scottish home Commonwealth Games, that the athletes would get behind that.

But, you know, you do have to kind of, you know, create standards that you want people to uphold to get athletes to buy into those.

We let the athletes have a lot of input into that as to how they wanted certain things to operate for them.

I thought it was really important that we, we, we got the staff once, once we had the, the staff lined up, and there was 15 staff dedicated to the swimming team, which were the co- you know.

There was additional people who had further input.

You mentioned a few already in, in the podcast, but, um, you know, pretty remarkable.

Mm-hmm

... very well.

But to start having some conversations around how the 15 staff that make up the team, a-alongside the swimmers, how they will work together during the prep and during the... particularly during the games time.

Uh, you know, and a little bit of scenario planning, but also how we as a staff unit want to be at, and should be, and can be at our best, and what we need to work, uh... watch out for.

So we did a little bit of a, uh, a session on that.

A little bit of chance for the staff to socialize as well around that.

Then we brought the swimmers in and did a, uh, a team meeting session with them where I obviously outlined some of my expectations and aspirations, but it was also a chance to get them involved in discussing how they op- want to operate as a group of athletes, and how they would like things to go for them, and how they would like to be communicated with, and what their own measures of success look like.

Yeah.

How did he or his philosophy shape your coaching philosophy for yourself? And then importantly, for a lot of the club coaches and younger coaches out there, how can they adapt in a normal club environment some of the resources, some of the key principles within their programs?

Yeah.

I mean, I would never proclaim myself to be a physiologist or an expert scientist in the sport, but I think I had a, a relatively decent understanding.

I'd read a lot of books, you know, spoke to a lot of coaches on all the courses and stuff, and tried to understand as much of that as I could.

But I always had questions in my mind about, well, what happens actually to the body when you do this set compared to that set? Or if you change the reps or change the rest time and, um, you know, what's the impact of that or the adaptation that you might get or not get from doing that? And I really didn't have a good understanding of that.

And a lot of the, you know, maybe the more local physiologists that I tried to ask that question of didn't really have, have a, a satisfactory answer.

And the two main people I would say who were able to provide answers to that were, were Jan Albrecht, um, as I'll touch more on in a moment, but also Tim Kerrison at the time, who worked for British Swimming at the time and then gone on to work for British Cycling, uh, amongst other places, um, and really expert in, in physiology and coaching.

Um, what are you, what are you doing these days to tap into your own CPD, your own learning to keep you intrigued? Um, and are there any particular resources which, which coaches could get access to for that?