How to Guide Your Swimmers with Better Goals

Goal setting is everywhere in sport. But in swimming, it’s often reduced to a preseason checklist.  You sit down with each athlete. You set a target time. You talk about focus. And then… it disappears.  Months go by. Meets come and go. Training gets hard. But few swimmers are checking in on those goals. And fewer still are using them to guide daily effort in the water.

If you’re serious about athlete development, it’s time to rethink how goals work on your team.
This guide walks through a performance-driven approach that keeps swimmers engaged, accountable, and constantly progressing.

The Real Problem with Swim Goals Today

Most swimmers set:

• Outcome goals: Go 4:30 in the 400 free. Qualify for nationals.
• Process goals: Show up early. Focus on streamlines. Improve nutrition.

But they skip the middle layer:
Performance goals the measurable, technical skills that link their training to their results.

Without performance goals, swimmers are left guessing if they’re improving and motivation fades.

Why Performance Goals Matter

Performance goals give your athletes:

• Focus: They know what skill matters right now.
• Clarity: They see how they're doing and where they’re headed.
• Feedback: Improvement is visible between races—not just on meet day.
• Confidence: When progress is tracked, belief builds.

And for you, performance goals give you a framework to:

• Reinforce technical themes during practice
• Guide individualized feedback
• Track who’s improving at scale
• Write smarter, more targeted sets

What Strong Performance Goals Look Like

Effective goals are:

• Specific – tied to one technique or metric
• Data-backed – grounded in recent performance
• Trackable – updated automatically
• Time-bound – focused enough to guide short-term training

Compare:

This is the level of clarity your athletes need to stay engaged.
And the level of structure you need to coach with precision.

How Swimmer Goals Automates This for You

Inside TritonWear, each swimmer now receives three active goals, automatically generated based on:

• Their most recent training data
• Their best stroke
• Benchmarks from swimmers like them (similar speed, height, gender)

You’ll see exactly:

• Which technique metrics does each swimmer need to work on
• Where they started
• How they’re progressing over time
• Whether they’re improving, on pace, or stalled

This allows you to coach from evidence, not instinct.

Use These Goals to Power Daily Coaching

Here’s how to embed Swimmer Goals into your program:

• 1-on-1 Check-Ins: Review goals during weekly feedback loops
• Practice Planning: Reinforce key skills in your sets and drills
• Group Sessions: Align technical focus across athletes working similar goals
• Accountability: Use the Weekly Report, Athlete view to track progress across the whole team
• Celebration: Acknowledge when swimmers improve or hit their goals.

When goals are part of practice,  training becomes more meaningful.

Training Zones Are Now Surfaced

Alongside their technique goals, each swimmer now sees their pace-per-100 targets for all five training zones, broken out by stroke and pool type.

This means you can:

• Plan sets with pace and intensity aligned
• Adjust effort expectations based on current fitness
• Help athletes understand how to train each zone

Build a Goal-Driven Team Culture

Great coaching has always been about more than motivation. It’s about helping swimmers focus their effort where it counts.  Swimmer Goals brings that focus to life—with clear targets, progress tracking, and data-backed improvement. You coach the plan. The system supports the path. That’s how better swimmers are built.

Curious how this works for your program?
We’d love to show you what Swimmer Goals could unlock for your swimmers.