My HSC Study Tips: How Exercise Keeps Me On Track

As strange as it sounds, studying and swimming are, in a lot of ways, pretty much the same thing. As a Matrix scholarship student and competitive swimmer with very little time, I’ve found that factors like self-discipline, consistency and health management are required for both effective study and elite sports. So, let’s take a look at what top-ranking students and athletes have in common, and consequently, what top HSC study tips you should be taking from the pool and into the classroom.

1. Consistency

Say you are training for a race. Over the next year, you need to complete 100 hours of practice every month to get fitter and achieve the qualifying time needed to compete. There is no way that you can cram all 100 hours into the last week of the month, having done nothing the other three weeks. Your body will tire out, you won’t achieve the qualifying time, and you’ll likely injure yourself and end up in worse shape than if you hadn’t trained at all.

A couple of years ago, I was writing a speech for school the night before it was due. I’d forgotten about it, then procrastinated, and now I was trying to ideate, compose and revise a 5-minute speech mere hours before the deadline. The next day, I was sleep-deprived. When I got up to give my speech, I could not read my own writing. The words blurred together and I was tongue-tied. It didn’t matter how hard I’d worked the night before. I was unfit, unpracticed, and come race day, I simply didn’t have the necessary preparation backing me up.

Just like how you wouldn’t try to cram training for a race, you also shouldn’t cram studying for a test. The reality is that trying to effectively study a term’s worth of content the night before an exam is both impossible, and it will likely impact your sleep, health and other factors that may adversely affect your performance on test day. This HSC study tip is all about sustaining a consistent study schedule within your weekly routine, making sure that you do not waver from it except to allow for unexpected circumstances or things out of your control. After all, you are training for a big race, and when it comes to mental fitness, consistency is everything.

2. Self-Discipline

You’ve been practising. Hard. Your muscles are sore, and your bed feels too warm to get out of. You had a really great training session yesterday, and the first thought that pops into your sleepy brain is, “I did really great yesterday, so I don’t really need to go to training today. Besides, I can’t do much with sore muscles.” While this may partially be true, you choose to ignore the fact that training with sore muscles does make you more pain resistant and stronger, provided that you do not overwork them.

So, I get out of bed. Not only that, but every day before training, I do a dryland strength training workout in the gym next to the pool. While it isn’t compulsory, it is a resource that my coach says will further enhance my strength and speed while swimming. Ultimately, the discipline required to get up earlier than my friends to go to do the dryland warmup is what has enabled me to achieve better results when I train, instead of being half asleep and cold before getting in the pool.

By maintaining a disciplined mindset, holding yourself accountable and sticking to your routine, you will see dramatic results. The athlete who gets out of bed early every day and hits those dryland warmup sessions will improve faster than their peers. In the same way, the student who consistently sticks to their three hour study schedule every afternoon, no matter what’s on TV or how far away the deadline is, will see a much greater improvement. This HSC study tip is all about keeping yourself accountable, and never losing sight of the bigger picture, even when you aren’t feeling motivated.

3. The First Dive

As a swimmer who puts in most of her training hours at the pool…. in the mornings… before school, it is especially hard for me to wake up in winter. It’s pitch-black outside, the air outside is practically freezer temperature, and only my blanket can protect me from. Add a lack of sleep from studying night before, not to mention my anticipation of ice-cold pool water, and I am looking for any excuse to procrastinate. To lie in my cosy bed for another five minutes.

The reality is that the hardest part of swimming is actually starting. That first foot out of bed, that first dive into the frigid pool, they are where you meet the greatest adversity. After that, once you start actually moving, your body warms up, and after a couple of laps, you quickly forget about how impossible it all seemed just minutes before. In fact, you actually forget that you’re doing the task at all. And studying is no different.

Those first few words on a page, that first maths question, they feel like a momentous slug, something you’ll do anything to avoid, until you actually do them. Once you get into a good rhythm, you enter a flow state. You become too focussed on actually completing the task to have much brain power left over to worry about how much you don’t want to do it.

This HSC study tip is deceptively simple, and effective. Sometimes, all you need to do is just stop thinking about how hard it will be. Stop standing idly by the water’s edge, and just dive straight in. And, if you need more help overcoming procrastination, check out 99.9 ATAR student Ymer’s top tips here.

4. Health = Performance

While studying is important, nothing is as important as your health and wellbeing. While “eat healthy”, “get more sleep” and “look after your mental health” are all overused phrases, these factors are essential to your performance. In the context of swimming, you need to consume adequate carbohydrates, proteins, and vitamins to fuel your muscles, allowing them to grow faster and stronger. You need to keep hydrated to keep your body functioning. Sometimes, when I swim, I am so surrounded by water that I forget to drink; dehydration seems implausible in the pool, but it’s actually where it happens most. And it will affect your performance if you don’t fix it quickly.

Similarly, as you study hard, when you’re in the zone, it can be easy to forget to care for your basic human needs. Looking after your health is a priority, from both a wellbeing perspective but also a practical perspective too. You will become less productive when you study if you don’t have the energy to keep going, or if you are too distracted by hunger, thirst, or sleep deprivation. Sometimes, these deprivations aren’t obvious either, but instead manifest as a waning concentration, or an inability to focus.

For me, doing things other than studying (such as swimming) to refocus and clear my mind have been really effective. While techniques on how to de-stress are different from person to person, some include: doing a hobby (such as knitting or baking), meditation, self-mantras, bushwalking, and reading. Personally, after a long week of studying hard, I will bake my infamous raisin cinnamon loaf and curl up with a good Disney show. Not only does this leave me feeling refreshed and ready for the next week, it also gives my brain a much-needed break.

This HSC study tip is all about acknowledging that your mental and physical health are connected, so be sure to look after them both. I often see friends lose themselves in the madness of studying and exam stress. While this stress usually stems from how important their education is to them, which is perfectly normal, it can quickly become unhealthy. You never see a swimmer jumping around nervously before their race. Instead, they have faith in their consistency and training, deploy techniques to relax and focus, and they conserve their energy before their big race.

5. Exercise As A Study Tool

In this blog, I’ve talked a lot about my experiences of competitive swimming, and how the techniques I learned there can be transferred to study. While this is very true, my time in the pool has also taught me that just the act of swimming itself can boost academic performance. This brings me to my last HSC study tip: exercise. Regular exercise has been shown to not only support the development of self-discipline and the release of endorphins, but also to promote faster cognitive processing. More anecdotally, I have noticed that the afternoon or day after a swim, I have an improved mood, and feel much more receptive to learning.

The Take-Away

Ultimately, while “school” and “pool” don’t seem to have much more in common than the fact that they rhyme, they both demand a distinctly similar set of skills. Be consistent, grow your self-discipline, take that first dive and exercise. But most importantly, take care of your health, because without that, you can’t function, let alone attain your desired HSC result!

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