Do Swim Camps Take Phones Away? Inside the Swimpros No-Phone Rule

If you are weighing up a performance swim camp, the phone question is a fair one to ask. Here is our answer, and more importantly, what we actually watched happen on camp that made us change the rule.

What is the phone policy at a Swimpros camp?

Phones are collected during the training day. After the evening session and dinner, sometimes after a game or a team challenge, there is a window of an hour or ninety minutes where swimmers call home, post what they did in the flume, and talk to whoever they want. At 9:55pm the phones go into a bag, we count them, and the swimmers go to their rooms.

Gaming devices and tablets stay at home. Swimmers over 18 get a conversation rather than a rule, because I cannot tell an adult what to do, but I can explain the reasoning and ask them to try it.

This is not about cutting anyone off. It is about deciding when the phone is out, instead of leaving that decision to a tired 15 year old at 11pm.

Why did we change the rule?

We did not start here. We started with the reasonable version: the swimmers keep their phones and take responsibility for them, with one rule, no phones at the table.

That rule lasted about half a day.

By the end of it I was watching 17 year olds eat dinner with both earpods in and one hand on the screen, while their own teammates sat around them. They walked up the hill to the pool on their phones. The two and a half hours set aside for a power nap between sessions turned into two and a half hours of gaming, and then they were rushing to make practice instead of arriving in a groove. And at 11pm, when we sent a message meant to be read in the morning, the read receipts came back one after another.

They were not social. They were not focused. And they were not recovering.

The easy route is to let them have their phones. They stay quiet, they stay busy, and you do not have to deal with it. I do not want the easy route.

What actually changes when the phones go away?

The moment they have no phone, they have no choice but to talk to each other. And they go deep fast. You know the kind of conversation where twenty minutes in it feels like you have known someone for two years? That happens constantly.

They find out who swims the 100 breaststroke, who is the same age, who is just as nervous as they are. Little groups form between swimmers who would otherwise never have spoken, including the shyest ones, because there is nothing else to hide behind.

Being present in a conversation is not a soft skill. It decides how a job interview goes. It decides whether someone trusts you enough to tell you something real. On my own calls with camp families, the whole thing rests on being genuinely present for half an hour. That is a trainable skill, and you cannot train it while your thoughts are still on TikTok.

The recovery side is simpler. Ten days of proper sleep inside a training block is not a small thing. If you want the longer version of why recovery is the lever most swim families underrate, we wrote about that in the recovery window after practice.

What does the dopamine research actually say?

I want to be careful here, because this is not a Harvard study I am quoting. It is my sister, who listens to a lot of Andrew Huberman, explaining it to me, plus what I have observed on deck for years.

The idea is that dopamine is not unlimited. Spend ten minutes scrolling the moment you wake up, and the rest of the day has less left to give. Everything after that feels flatter by comparison: the coffee with a friend, the conversation with a teammate, the set that went well. Those are the things that actually move your life forward, and they are competing against a screen that already took the reward up front.

I am 38 and I still had to change it. My phone is not in the bedroom. If I wake up at seven with my kids, I try not to touch it before nine or half nine. My quality of life got noticeably better.

The trick I am going to test with the swimmers this season: put the screen in greyscale. Mine goes black and white at 9:30pm automatically. When it is grey, it is simply not interesting, and I have no motivation to scroll. It is worth a week of your own life to try it.

Is this just a camp rule, or does it stick at home?

The point of camp is never the ten days on their own. It is what the swimmer takes home into the other 355.

So we explain the why rather than just confiscating. I am getting my sister to walk the swimmers through the dopamine side, so they understand what they are doing to their own brain instead of hearing another adult tell them to get off the phone.

And we pair it with the gap versus gain habit: at dinner, or in the car after training, write down three wins from the day. Three things that actually went well. It sounds almost too simple, but changing what you are focused on changes the emotion, and the emotion changes what you do next.

The feedback that keeps coming back to me from parents is not about swimming. It is a version of the same sentence: since we started doing this there is no phone on the dinner table, and I am hearing stories I had no idea were happening. If you want the at-home version of this without turning it into a nightly fight, that is exactly what the No-Nag Method screen-time deal is for.

Why does this matter more than it used to?

Two things have changed for this generation, and neither is the teenager's fault.

The first is that they cannot always tell what is real. I work with AI every day and I can usually spot a fake video. People show me clips they fully believe are real, and they are not. That gap is going to get worse, not better, and fast.

The second is the highlight reel. Nobody posts the fear, the bad night of sleep, or the worry about providing for their family. They post the camp with the world record holders and the new personal best. A teenager who is not old enough to discount that is comparing their whole interior life to somebody else's showreel, and concluding that their own life is the broken one. Michael Phelps did not post that he had been suicidal. He said it years later, on podcasts. The kids scrolling never saw that part.

Several countries are now moving to restrict social media for under-16s. I am glad somebody is testing it. But I am not waiting for legislation to decide what happens on our deck.

Will my swimmer hate it?

For about an hour, possibly. You should have seen their faces when we told them. Pure shock, followed immediately by "where are the phones going" and "when do we get them back".

That reaction is the whole argument. If handing over a phone for a training day produces that response, the phone is not a neutral object in their life.

It is also worth saying plainly: this is more work for us, not less. A swimmer in their room gaming is an easy swimmer to supervise. Running the evening properly, noticing the quiet one who has not spoken all day, setting up the games, that costs coaching hours. We think it is the trade worth making. If you are wondering whether that makes us the strict camp, we answered that honestly in are swim camps too strict.

What is the point of all this?

The Swimpros mission has never been only to make faster swimmers. It is to use competitive swimming to build a stronger character. What happens outside the pool is as much of the work as the swimming itself.

And it connects back to the thing I opened the episode with. I just hit 10,000 kilometres on my e-bike. That is a quarter of the way around the world, roughly Zurich to Tokyo, accumulated three kilometres at a time without ever leaving Zurich. One percent better every day compounds to being about 37 times better in a year.

Nobody wants to hear that, because it is not magical. The phone has trained all of us to expect the reward now. Learning to delay it, and to stay present while you wait, might be the most useful thing a swimmer takes home from ten days on camp.

Frequently asked questions

Do swimmers have to hand in their phones at a Swimpros camp?
Yes. Phones are collected during the training day and handed back in a designated evening window. At 9:55pm they go into a bag before the swimmers go to their rooms.

Can my swimmer still contact me during camp?
Yes, in the evening window, and the coaches are reachable at all times. If you need to reach your swimmer outside that window, you contact a coach and it gets handled immediately.

What if my swimmer needs a phone for schoolwork or a meeting?
They get it. The policy is about removing the default scroll, not about blocking anything that matters.

What about swimmers over 18?
They get a conversation rather than a rule. We explain the reasoning and ask them to try it for the camp, because we cannot tell an adult what to do with their own phone.