Segmenting

Cody Wright

June 22, 2020

While I was training for rescue swimmer school, the most common piece of advice I received from rescue swimmers was to break every day of A-school into tiny pieces. This advice has been so overused as a form of mental tenacity that I’m sure you’re well familiar with it. But given the slight chance that you’re not familiar with it, here’s a quick intro.

USCG Helicopter Rescue Swimmer School was 16 weeks of constant workouts to exhaustion coupled with daily pool sessions that would test the will of even the most experience waterman. The school is so challenging that it boasts a 60-70% attrition rate, varying slightly from class to class. One of the hardest parts of the training is dealing with the overwhelming thoughts that this routine will continue for 4 months or as long as it takes you to drop out. Here’s where the idea of breaking everything into tiny segments comes in handy. If you approach rescue swimmer school while focusing on the duration of the training, you’re going to fail. It can even be hard to mentally comprehend what you’re going to have to do in a day let alone a week. Rather than trying to wrap your brain around these long periods of time. You should just think about the next training session or even just the next exercise. If you approach training with this mentality, you’re more likely to get through it and preserve your sanity.

This is great advice! But there are some caveats. You can’t go around living your life breaking everything into little segments. It would be unhealthy and irresponsible to neglect long term goals for the simplicity of taking every task you have as though it’s the only thing you’re ever going to have to do. Instead you must selectively choose when to use this advice at the most advantageous time. I used segmenting to increase my productivity while I was in college and I use it when I have work deadlines coming up. Now I can’t sit here and figure out when that’s best for you, but I can say that it comes helps significantly when training for rescue swimmer school. You can work on this type of training now by applying it in your current training situation. It gives you the ability to drop all distractions and focus on the workout or exercise at hand.

-Cody