Why Excel Is a Terrible Swim Coach

Excel is great at many things. Swimming coaching is not one of them.

Yet a surprising number of swimmers still rely on spreadsheets to plan their training — meticulously colour-coded, carefully periodised, and completely blind to reality.

What Excel Can Do (And What It Can’t)

A spreadsheet can:

• Store numbers

• Add volume

• Track planned sessions

• Look reassuringly organised

What it can’t do:

• See how tired you are

• Notice declining efficiency

• Respond to a bad week

• Adjust load when life intervenes

  
  

In short, Excel can plan training.It cannot coach.

The Illusion of Control

Spreadsheets feel good because they create the illusion of precision.

You’ve planned 12 weeks. You’ve ramped volume by 10%. You’ve ticked boxes.

But swimming isn’t linear.

You don’t adapt because a cell says you should. You adapt because your body responds — or doesn’t — to what you actually did.

Excel only knows what you intended to swim.It has no idea what happened in the water.

Where Spreadsheet Training Breaks Down

1. It assumes perfect weeks

Miss a session? Swim tired? Pool too busy?

The plan doesn’t care. It just keeps marching forward.

2. It can’t see fatigue

Heart rate creeping up. Pace dropping. Stroke falling apart.

These are early warning signs — and Excel is blind to all of them.

3. It encourages “pushing through”

When the plan is fixed, swimmers tend to obey it — even when their body is asking for adjustment.

That’s how stagnation and burnout creep in quietly.

Coaching Is a Feedback Loop

Good coaching is simple in principle:

1. Set a stimulus

2. Observe the response

3. Adjust the next stimulus

Excel only does step one.

SWIMMA closes the loop.

It looks at:

• What you actually swam

• How hard it was (heart rate, efficiency, calories)

• How you’re trending week to week

Then it adapts what comes next.

That’s not “AI magic”. It’s just what a coach would do — consistently, objectively, every week.

The Bottom Line

Spreadsheets are excellent record-keepers.They are terrible decision-makers.

If your training tool can’t adapt, can’t see fatigue, and can’t respond to reality, it’s not coaching you — it’s just documenting the plan you wish you were following.

Swimming deserves better than that.