Effortless Swimming

Are you swimming at the same pace every session but struggling to get faster? In this episode, I join Kelly Palace on the Champions Mojo podcast to talk about why so many swimmers get stuck in the “gray zone” and how we can break through it.

As the founder of Effortless Swimming and a coach who has worked with thousands of adult swimmers, masters swimmers, and triathletes, I’ve seen how developing better technique and learning to swim at different speeds can make a significant difference in performance.

We discuss some of my favorite freestyle drills, including long dog and six-kick switch, and how they can help improve your catch, pull, coordination, and timing. I also explain why incorporating short sprints, varying your stroke rate, and allowing enough rest between intervals are essential for developing speed and building the ability to hold a faster pace.

I also share a training approach that has made a big difference in my own swimming: the 20 × 100 best-average set. It’s a challenging session, but it helped me build the speed endurance I needed to qualify for Australian Open Nationals at age 38.

Finally, we talk about the importance of staying open-minded when working on your technique. Changes can feel awkward and may initially make you slower, but with patience and consistency, the improvements can come over time.

00:00 – Introduction to Brenton Ford and Effortless Swimming

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

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Tired of your swimming goggles fogging up in the middle of a swim? In this episode, discover how to prevent foggy goggles, understand why condensation happens, and learn practical tips to keep your vision clear in the water. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced swimmer, these simple techniques can help you spend less time adjusting your goggles and more time focusing on your swim.

00:10 Why Swimming Goggles Fog Up

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

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Kelly Palace just broke the world record for the 65-69 age group in the 1500m long course freestyle, swimming 20:19 on only about 12,000 meters a week. She also broke the 400m record this summer (5:09).

Kelly is a 1984 US Olympic Trials qualifier and the first woman head coach in the Southeastern Conference. In this episode she explains why distance swimmers need real speed, shares her favorite sets (including “descend by equipment”), and describes the underwater technique behind her noisy stroke. She also talks about what she has learned from 350+ podcast guests, and why swimmers should take breaks but never retire.

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

Try the new Nanoclear Anti-fog Goggles: https://bit.ly/nanocleargoggles

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Returning to swimming after years away can leave you feeling exhausted, sore, and disconnected from the water. In this episode, we break down three key things that can help you rebuild your swimming and feel stronger and more comfortable in the water.

You’ll learn how body position, breathing, stroke length, and a more relaxed kick can make swimming feel easier and more efficient. We’ll also look at how to structure your training when you’re getting back into the pool and why giving yourself three to six months of consistent swimming can make a huge difference.

If you’re returning to swimming after a long break, these simple technical and training adjustments can help you reconnect with the water and build your fitness without relying on brute strength.

00:10 How to Get Back Into Swimming

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Want your freestyle to feel easier and more efficient? In this episode, we break down 3 simple steps to help your swimming “click”—improving your body position, creating a better catch, and using the back end of your stroke for more propulsion and smoother timing.

Swim faster, reduce wasted effort, and make every lap feel easier.

00:32 Step 1: Get Horizontal and Reduce Drag

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. If your freestyle feels like it’s way more effort than it needs to be and you find yourself gasping for air at the end of each lap, in this video I’ll share with you the three things that can help make your freestyle feel very easy like it’s almost no effort and that way you can swim for way longer without having to stop at the end of each wall. Now the first step with getting our freestyle to feel like it’s almost no effort is to get our body in a way where we can be horizontal because the first thing we need to minimize is drag. Now in order to get horizontal the step is to get long and narrow and streamlined with the body. Now the way that we do that is we think about going from our head to our toes as being really long and in order to do that we think about being a little bit open

through the chest. Now open means instead of closed, you think of someone who’s hunched and rounded, got a big curve through their shoulders and their back here and they lose a lot of the core connection and control here. That when we think about being tall and proud and we lengthen through there not only do we get more streamlined but we also find that our core, these deeper core muscles can engage and that means that we hold this firm and that way everything connects so much better than if we are hunched and rounded. So think about how would you be with good posture out of the water and that’s going to be tall and proud and open through the chest. Now don’t go too far, we’re not doing that, that’s a bit awkward but just this sort of neutral comfortable tall and proud position and we find when people do that they tend to feel like their head and their hips and their heels are all at the surface of the water and that is the first step in swings

to make sure that we can find our balance in the water and get horizontal. So we always start with that. When we look at some people who have come to our Maldives camp for example a lot of them started with quite low hips and legs even in the ocean where there’s really good buoyancy and so when we worked on tall and proud that was the first step to help them bring the hips and the legs up and if you can feel your heels tapping the surface of the water that’s a pretty good indication that you’re probably sitting quite well in the water. Now the next thing is a bit of a strange one but it is open armpit. Now we want to think about having open armpit above the water and open armpits under the water. So what does that mean? Now our recovery is when our arm comes over the top of the water. Recovery should be relaxed, should not be hard, should not be tense so we’re relaxed with this recovery over the water but we’ve got to recover with an

open armpit and open means this elbow is going to be pointing mostly to the sky this is open instead of closed. If you’re recovering with this closed elbow it’s very awkward on the shoulder which we sometimes see that people sort of coming like this and that causes a lot of zigzagging or snaking with the body so we like to think open armpit show that to the side of the pool as you’re coming through gives you this nice high elbow recovery and it allows you to then enter with your fingers first and your elbow up and what happens from there is that from that position you can then extend forwards under the surface of the water in that last little bit and that carries this momentum of your arm because it weighs a few kilos out of the water here you carry that momentum in and out in front and that allows you to get this really nice timing and rhythm with the stroke so we open up the armpits over the water that’s step one now the next step is

once you’ve extended forwards and you’re about to initiate your catch this first movement here we want to think open armpits again that just means we are looking to turn this elbow in this direction open up that armpit instead of close it and what happens with that and this is really important is from there it’s really natural to then just get the hand going down when the hand goes down from that position you can see how I’ve got what will be called a high elbow position and all that means is that and I define this as if you’re if you draw a line from your shoulders here fingers this elbow is higher than that line as you can see now from there we can then press back on the water because our hand and forearm creates this big paddle that we push back against the water that creates drag that we’re pressing against and that propels us forwards so it helps you get into a high elbow catch really easily without much effort without anything really

awkward with the shoulders and that’s a huge step and we’ve been here in the Maldives on our swim camps here so many of the swimmers here started with either a really straight arm recovery or a dropped elbow position they weren’t getting much of a hold so they weren’t traveling very far with their strokes but once we worked on just a simple cue of open armpits that allowed them to naturally get into that position so it’s a simple cue and if you set yourself up from the beginning then it’s so much easier to get in the catch as opposed to thinking about like elbow high or pull straight back or doing anything awkward and uncomfortable with the shoulders and the third step to having your freestyle feel like it’s almost no effort is think about using the back end of your stroke so this push here your palm facing backwards towards your feet using that thrust to help power the reach and extension there so it’s

not only about trying to get at the catch like we looked at but we also need to make sure that at the back end of the stroke here that we finish past the hips so we’re not coming out short and early here we need to keep that pressure on the hand to press back past the hip and that’s going to give you some nice propulsion at the back which will help you extend forwards that armpit open and then roll into that catch position now sometimes you find people finish short they’re finishing at the hips and they’re like I don’t know why it’s so hard I don’t know why I’m getting passed by these people who aren’t as fit next to me but when they think about that thrust at the back and that extend forwards there that helps them get these longer strokes and generally longer strokes mean you’re swimming faster so use that thrust at the back to extend that then helps you with the timing of the stroke so if you think of some of the bestsmas in the world you can see some footage of

amazing swimmers here they have this timing to the stroke that timing’s not one two one two it’s not this windmill it’s not this really fast cadence and turnover they’ve got this rhythm to it that’s almost like a waltz and track Tracy Bowman I’ve got this from is it’s like a waltz we’re going one two three one two three one two three one two three not one two one two so ride out on that lead arm for a little bit as you thrust at the back and that’s going to help you get this nice tempo where everything’s connected otherwise we end up spinning the wheels and wasting our effort so if we can do that then it means it is so much easier to swim for almost no effort and not only is it faster it’s more efficient but it is way more fun and if you’re looking to improve on your own stroke check out our eight-week class freestyle course in the description below thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d

like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

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Shoulder pain after swimming? Your technique could be the reason.

In this episode, we look at three common freestyle mistakes that can place unnecessary stress on the shoulder: an overly high elbow, crossing over the centre line, and overdoing the catch. Through clear demonstrations and underwater footage, you’ll learn how to make your stroke more natural, efficient, and shoulder-friendly.

A great episode for swimmers looking to improve their freestyle technique while reducing unnecessary strain.

00:10 – Why Your Shoulder Hurts After Swimming

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. After working with thousands of swimmers at our clinics, one pattern has emerged and that is that injury to your shoulder often stems from something you’re doing in your technique because quite often we’ll have swimmers come in with a sore shoulder at the front or at the back and they think it’s from something internally. But the cause of that injury has actually come from something they’re doing in their technique. So in today’s video I’m going to share with you the main technique flaws that can lead to shoulder injury and what you can do to fix it so that not only is it not painful anymore but you can swim thousands and thousands of more laps without any pain in your shoulder. The first cause of shoulder pain can be how

you’re rotating your shoulders in the water. Now if you are too flat let’s say you’re not rotating much at all. It makes it really difficult to get the arm over the top of the water and our shoulders do not move very well this way. So we need to make sure we rotate enough to get this shoulder out that we can comfortably get the arm over the top. But if you are flat here and your arm is recovering like this you imagine doing that 2,000 times in a session. That can really overload here through the rotator cuff and that can lead to quite a bit of pain. Now on the other side of that though we’ve got over rotation where I’ll usually see some is over rotating in one direction and they’re thinking of this term high elbow recovery. Now if high elbow recovery gets interpreted as your elbow should be physically very high in the water and your hand should be close to the body that is not a great position for the shoulder to be in. And even now just holding this up I can feel it

through the front. So we don’t want to bring the arm up have the hand close to the body because that is going to cause a lot of pain and probably lead to injury pretty quickly. So we just need to let the hand be away from the body a little bit because we can do this movement all day but this movement where we’re really close you’re not going to be able to do that hundreds of times in a row without causing too much shoulder pain. So we need to make sure we rotate the right amount and recover in an easy way and the easy way is elbow points to the sky hand is relaxed it’s out to the side and have this nice open relaxed recovery over the top. Now the second thing that we’re going to get into here can really lead to jamming up through the rotator cuff so if you’ve got any issues through here and through the front this can be one of the main causes. When we look at someone entering the water and extending out

in front it’s quite common to see them crossing over the centerline. Now that in itself won’t necessarily lead to shoulder pain and injury except what happens as a result of it can. So what we see is that when someone does cross over it’s more comfortable for the shoulder to go fingers up elbow down in this position if they’ve crossed over because if they have the hand down that can jam them up through here. So we often see them go to this position but the downside to that position is if you are doing that and then you begin your catch that can really start to create a lot of pain and I guess strain through that top part of the shoulder. So we never want to start our catch with our hand higher than our shoulder because our shoulder does not love that movement but it’s often that crossover that can lead to that position. So we want to make sure instead that we enter in line with the shoulder or the ear and we extend out in front and when we finish extending out in front

we need to get fingers below wrist below elbows. It’s very slight downwards angle instead of crossed over out a hand up because that’s what’s going to jam up. Jam us up through the shoulder there. Now the third thing is probably the most common cause of shoulder pain and injuries that I see in swimmers really because I think one aspect of the stroke gets taken the wrong way and they try and do too much of it. So let’s take a look at that. The catch in freestyle is probably the most common cause of shoulder pain and injury. If you do it incorrectly it can really lead to sometimes long-term damage but certainly it can lead to a lot of discomfort when you swim. Now the catch is this movement from when we’re out in front to when we’re down here. Now the two things that I see that cause a lot of shoulder pain. One is if you keep your arm completely straight and you try and push with a lot of force with this

movement that can really go all the way through the arm into the shoulder particularly into the rotator cuff there and that can be quite uncomfortable and so we don’t want to be loading up with a lot of force firstly and we don’t want to be pushing straight down because that’s where we get that shoulder pain. So what we want to do instead is keep it light as you enter and you extend forwards keep that movement relatively light so that we can bend our elbow and have the fingers point down so we can press back instead of pressing down. Now the biggest cause I think the one that I’ve seen the most injuries with is from trying to overdo the high elbow catch and what I mean by overdo is people are thinking I need to get my elbow up really high and I need to get my arms almost 90 degrees but that is not a comfortable position for 99% of people out there. It’s not comfortable it’s not sustainable. Particularly if you

have your shoulder internally rotate too much that is where we can get a lot of pain through the front of the shoulder there and so in this position if you’re applying a lot of force that is not the right position to be in particularly with your shoulder through the catch. So one of the things that we focus a lot on when we’re teaching the catch and the pull through is go relatively light like a four or a five out of ten with your catch. Yes this shoulder will move up here but we don’t want to internally rotate it too much which is what we see with a lot of people when they do it. So just let that shoulder move up but keep it in a comfortable and natural position and then as you go through here let that shoulder blades start to move down and start to move back instead of keeping it up here because if you’re going all the way through your catch and pull like that then you’re not going to use your lats your terrace major through here it’s going to be more through the

front and so we don’t want to force any positions that we do when we swim we don’t want to feel like we’re having a muscle our way through the water and so just by keeping that sense of suppleness or relaxation through our catch in our pull it allows the shoulders to move more freely and allows us to use the stronger muscles through the right parts of the stroke here so we don’t want to internally rotate too much through the shoulder there so if you are getting any sort of shoulder pain you might go through and see am I crossing over am I recovering in a in a weird way or uncomfortable way or is my catch am I doing something there that might be very extreme with my high elbow maybe I’m pushing down and I’ve seen so many different swimmers who have come to our clinics where we have identified that they’re doing one of these couple of things and they change it and straight away they’re like all right I’m actually not getting pain anymore and I haven’t felt it for two hours while

I’ve been swimming and that is really common so check that before you think it’s something that might be a long-term injury or something internal it could be something to do with your technique and if you want to get a full breakdown of freestyle technique and how we like to teach a stroke so you can swim faster and swim more efficiently click this video here thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

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In this episode, Brenton Ford interviews Jan Prins about freestyle biomechanics, stroke mechanics, and the latest technology used to analyze swimming efficiency. They explore how subtle changes in technique can significantly impact speed and performance.

00:10 Introduction to Jan Prins and his expertise in swimming biomechanics

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Jan Prins, and this is kind of come full circle because probably about nine years ago, Gary Haring, who’s coached with me for several years, he was an Olympic coach, Olympic swimmer. He actually trained under you, Jan, and I remember he mentioned you several years ago, and I thought I’d be great to to eventually get in touch with you one day. And here we are on on the podcast. You’ve recently written a book called Freestyle Biomechanics, The Science Behind the Strokes, which I’ve got here. And on today’s podcast, we’re going to get into a reasonable amount of detail and I guess technical detail on particularly freestyle and the impact that different changes in your stroke can

make because for the last 20 plus years, this is what you looked really deeply into. And this is something that I am really interested in because we do a lot of underwater filming and analysis, probably not quite to the scientific and technical detail that you’re going to cover here today. But I think there’s going to be a lot for me personally to come out of this, but also for anyone listening just to see the impact these different things have on their on the speed and velocity. So firstly, welcome and thank you very much for joining me here. Thank you.

Much appreciate the opportunity.

And so for those that are listening with you’ve got a I guess a PowerPoint here. So if you have the chance to watch this on YouTube instead or maybe on Spotify with video, you’ll get a lot more out of this podcast because you’re going to be sharing videos and some different things as well. So just a heads up if you are only listening to this. So Jan, if you want to just if you want to take it away here, I’ll ask questions as we go and as you mentioned, we’re going to show how we use the technology, the high speed cameras to look at the subtleties which stroke mechanics and I would like to start and use this in the book as well. Mark Levin was sent by the New York Times to do an article on Michael Phelps and he went to a swimming and he had to prove what was going on. So he wrote this quote, which is a real lesson for all of us because we take it so much for granted being involved with swimming from the get go, but most people they have to be

shown and gone over what swimming detail is all about and his comment of all the Olympic sports compared to swimming and of course, Fathalon open water is perhaps the most resistant to casual analysis, meaning you’re not going to walk in there and know exactly what’s happening right off the bat. So I think that’s a great quote. So we’re going to look at a high speed videography and motion analysis and this is a still picture on what we’re going to look at in a video. Before we do any filming, we have to identify key points in the body and we have to tape it because in the water the markers are washed off. So we have to tape it on and we have a battery pack and born with a belt in the back and you can see this still picture. Now I’ll show you the video. Okay, first before I show you the video, these are what the cameras look like. They are custom made. These are Digi cables very expensive that run from the cameras to the computer

that’s on the deck. So here’s a video of an actual filming. So I’m going to hand scrub and here comes the swimmer and you can see the lights and here’s the camera facing the swimmer. There is a camera on the bottom of the pool you can see and then the camera from the side. You can’t see it this time because he’s passing it. What are we looking at? We’re looking at movement in the longitudinal plane of motion from left to right. And so the graph plots velocity. How fast the hip is moving in the longitudinal plane of motion. Hip velocity, which is the bottom line. We want to see how fast somebody’s coming from A to B. So here is the classic setup that we use. You see the three synchronized cameras. These are all synchronized. The left hand side pictures are the head on and the bottom view, but as soon as the hip velocity, the hip light shows up, you can see this bar. In this particular swimmer, generating much lower velocity

with his right hand. His right hand is considerably slow in terms of generating speed that is left. And so it’s very quickly evident that we can spot out things that normally I can’t. And this is why we’ve pursued this. This is an excellent way to actually look a little bit more in detail. Now, that’s why we just said subtle and not so subtle movements. So I just as a quick example and I read some more examples that we go along, but we looked at the dropped elbow. You can see high elbow and the dropped elbow. And so we asked the swimmer to purposely drop the elbows to right hand and look at the bottom left hand graph. And the top right hand will show the lateral view as the swimmer shows up. So here comes a swimmer from the side and you can see the bar and if you if I freeze this bar right where the elbows dropped, you can see how the lateral speed just plummets. How much which is really the question because all these

numbers don’t mean much if you don’t know how much percent that drop off folks measured at 34%. So if you keep dropping 34% with each stroke cycle, this is no joke. And that’s why we all of us consider the drop level. No matter what stroke we do as one of the most serious mistakes. So I thought I’ll start off showing you what the technology can do. Now we’re going to show you more examples as I said, so let’s first look at something that’s very intriguing. And I started talking about this couple of years ago because it wasn’t really talked about too much. You’ll see from again with the high speed stuff Brandon, which is really good, really easy to identify what we’re looking at. So the question is the first initial question is why are physically the strongest persons not necessarily the fastest swimmers? The $64 question. You work with triad leads all the time. What do you tell somebody who’s pretty muscular,

who’s getting passed up by somebody who’s not as strong or some ladies? This is the question. So I think it’s a good, it’s a great question to ask. So what’s the answer here? First of all, Impulse and I don’t want to get too technical, but it’s very easy to see that applying a force over a time is what Impulse is. So here’s our land based examples. A large force in a brief time. Wrestling, if the person can hold the opponent for a longer time, apply more Impulse, they’re going to win. So how does this apply to swimming? In swimming, this is what we say. It is not necessary to apply maximum force.

What is needed is to apply a force that can maintain peak swimming velocity for an extended period of time. That is the key to apply peak velocities for an extended time. So let’s look at what the graph shows us. Before we look at an elite, let’s look at what an average freestyler, and I’m going to show you a division one freestyler from the University of Hawaii. And this is classic because we all the people we’ve filmed, other than the ones I show you why elite look like this. Most swimmers intuitively or as instructed, accelerate the hands as the stroke reaches its conclusion.

We see a surge in maximum velocity, which most often occurs during the last third of the underwater pool. So here we go. This is typical of what we see. The overall majority of swimmers will wait for the last third and then go whoosh. So that peak is very brief.

One more time. See that? And that’s how we coach before until I started realizing that this is not holding it for such a brief amount of time really isn’t paying off. Now how brief? Look at this. I know this is a still picture. That peak velocity in this particular swimmer maintained for only 14% of the underwater pool. Is it that shocking?

That’s all. So the question is then, here’s another one, show you another one, a little bit better, 25%. So not quite as peeky. See that? A little bit flatter. And so we want to ask. So these are regular swimmers, good swimmers. Can we do better? Certainly. Some swimmers instinctively apply more impulse during the underwater pool. And I’m going to show you and since I’m talking to you, Brenton and all your friends down under, this is Emory Siebel. She came over and had a chance to film this is years ago. But the data is superb. We just didn’t tell them any what to do. Because at that time I have to be frank. We didn’t I didn’t understand this stuff with impulse. So we just said, Emory, why don’t you swim? And we’re filming. Look at this in the heat three months. Oh yeah. So flat out with that. Yeah. She was maintaining maximum swimming velocity for a sustained period. Through this. Wow. And that’s something.

So I thought this is really good for people to understand. Now, I have. And again, I’m using Ozzy’s. We filmed Magnuson right before the Olympics in London Olympics. I didn’t want to put it because I want to have people look at it in the video and in the book. If you look at the book, you’ll see I showed some Magnuson speak velocity, but to go back if you like, he looks very flat. But I’m falling in back because I like people to get the book and read it. What do you think? Pretty impressive. Yeah. So for the say for the average person listening to this listening to this podcast. My takeaway for them is it could be like we’re not trying to at no point do we ever want to muscle the water or have these really big peaks in in power and speed. We want to try and just draw that out. We want to try and just maintain this consistent speed. Going out is a very expressive term. You need to sustain it. And in the book, I also talk

a little bit about acceleration because we have to be very careful about acceleration. If you’re thinking constantly of acceleration, you’re not going to be able to get a good hold on the water. How would you explain it to if you’re coaching someone, let’s say in freestyle, I mean, all the strikes are reasonably similar, but let’s say for freestyle, I mean, terms that I’ve used in the past to coach them is it’s it’s slow to fast or slow to faster. So a lot of people do go too quick to too early. Exactly. You have to change gear gradually because you’re going to lose traction the water and I’m going to talk about that in the next next part, but the water has to push back on our hands. And you have to maintain that and the more elite the swimmer, the more sensitive they are to these changing pressures. That’s the one thing that struck me all the years. And this is why Emily, as I said, we didn’t have to tell her

this. She instinctively did this. And you see when people look at the book and see Magnuson and all great swimmers do this. They sustained the velocity. Now, I have to be a little bit careful about some sprinters. They just go for it. And so you see some peaks, but they’re swimming very fast. But by and large, especially for your group for triathletes, it makes absolutely no sense to just go for broke right away. You need to feel the pressure on the water. That’s I like the way you phrased it earlier. You said that the best swimmers or the elite swimmers are very sensitive to the changes in pressure. That I think is a real. Yeah, a real key and that’s in one way. It’s a one way to describe the feel for the water. I think is that change in pressure and making sure you’re never going too hard or too soft or you’re slowing down too much at the back or speeding up too much is that that constant pressure. Interesting. There’s a little drill that you can

have people use. You stand at shoulder depth in the water, but don’t stand with your with your body against the side of the pool. You must not have the support of the side of the pool. You have to be slightly away from the side of the pool and then you pull, put your hand in front of you and pull very rapidly. Your body won’t much. Then you start your pool and gradually feel the pressure of the water and you feed your body backing up against the wall. Am I descriptive enough? Am I making enough sense to describe that? Yeah, so if you’re standing up, say about shoulder depth with the with the water, hands in front and you’re coming towards the body or you’re going down towards the. You’re doing a regular pool just like you would do a pool that you know works in freestyle. Yeah, but we’re talking about the velocity. If you engage the pool very rapidly and try to accelerate, your body is not going to budge usually to just be standing

motionless pretty much. You do it a little bit, but it’s going to be mostly motionless. Whereas if you engage the water and feel the pressure of the water, when you start to pull, you’re going to lose your balance and go back. Hmm. That’s really interesting. We do us like a drill power pools. We call it, which is like a double arm pool through under the water, like almost like an underwater butterfly stroke. And a lot of this was at the start, they go really quick and really hard at the start and they might move half a meter or a meter. But then when we get them to just build into it and gradually gradually build into it, they go twice as far sometimes further. That’s exactly what we were talking about. You know, I just used one arm because of freestyle, but both hands fine. It’s just increasing the sensitivity. And that’s why I started out by saying not the strongest rumors are not the fastest rumors.

Yeah, that’s great to see that data. For me, visually, that’s really nice to see that explains some of the more ephemeral parts of this stroke. Data to settle the subtleties of stroke mechanics, Brenton.

That’s great. You mentioned we were going what’s in the next part of the presentation here.

Why process forces are the dominant motion in freestyle? And we’re going to talk a little bit about finding new work. And so this was in the book. I use this as a beginning introduction. This is because for years, not anymore. Thank goodness. But you know, it’s funny that you are I still hear people being coached like this, using the sculling elliptical patterns. And this is the way we swim. We started the way we coached. This is sculling back and forth. I said this is an inverted question mark. So that’s how people swam freestyle. Do you agree?

Backstroke. Same story down up down. That’s the way people swim. And then the keyhole pool. You remember that?

Yes, how people were taught to swim going out and in. No more. This is a very good quote from this research group. The strokes designed to produce drag based propulsion showed markedly higher thrust. The lift based propulsion techniques resulting in reduction of drag contribution and total thrust. In other words, pronounced sculling motions reduce the thrust production of the stroke. So when you start drifting all over the place, you don’t create enough thrust. Now, one of the thrust we’re talking about is propulsive drag pushing against the resistance of the water for propulsive drag. They were easy to explain. This is propulsive drag in full action.

And we have to make sure that people understand pushing backwards against the resistance of the water. And Ernie Maglisko, who wrote a very fine book on swimming years ago, he corrected me when I sent him with my manuscript to edit. He said, don’t say pushing backwards. He said, you’re pushing against the resistance of the water. I think that’s a very important thing to think about. The water has to provide resistance.

That’s that’s such a key distinction. I think they’re pushing against the resistance of the water. So we’re going to look at we’re going to follow the thing here. This is my again. This is what I put in and this is Barry Bixler was an aerodynamic researcher, but his kids swam. So he got into hydrodynamic research. And this is what he came up with. He said, regardless of the stroke angle at which the arm is moving, keep the palm of the hand facing directly towards the feet to maximize propulsion.

Isn’t that a great quote? So trying to, yeah, trying to minimize the the turn of the hand basically always keep facing back. Yeah. So the intent of course is to engage the water directed backwards and repeat the process by finding new water. Early positioning of the hand and palm towards the feet, which is really what we talked about as early as a cat. So this is the hundred free in the games. And actually this is from Tokyo and you can see. Let’s look at the hand right there. You see the wrist going down fixing and the same thing here. You’re engaging with the cats right away. The palms are facing down and back right there. And I just want to, when you mentioned finding new water, can you explain that? How would you describe finding new water? Exactly. And Brenton, if you would hold on just a couple of a minute or two, I’ll show you. Cool. Yeah. This is another view of this. And you can see the same thing.

See how these women they engage the water. Now I also need to make sure because I read you emphasize this and sort of Jerry and all the good triathlon coaches. We don’t emphasize in the in the ocean. You don’t emphasize a lot of extension, right? You want a little faster turnover really grabbing the water. Is that correct? Yeah, it depends. It kind of depends. Yeah, I still like to. I still like some is to extend out in front of the shoulder. Sure. And but you don’t pause. You don’t really emphasize this long stroke, right? You make the the rapidity and turn always much higher in the ocean when you’re competing. Yeah, normally increases increases a bit, but it would just depend on the person I’m working with really because the stroke will change a bit. Right, right. So this is this is what we see. And then let me just scrub a little bit further. If you see, yeah, here’s some ladies doing the same thing. And

you can see the second swimmer over. This is very nice footage because you can really see what the hands are doing. Look at that right there. One more view from the side. Very expressive. So you want we want to talk about what this finding new water is all about. I said applied over a long period of time possible stroke cycle. This means increasing impulse, which we just covered. So these are the still pictures from the book bread and I broke it up. Top right or top left sequentially. You can see your hands. Palms are facing back all the way through. So I think this is a very nice way to show what we just talked about. Palms are facing back. So I was a feat. Now what we have to do is make a distinction between palms facing backwards and pushing linearly straight back. We do not want to do that because the water is not going to be resistive if it goes for too long in a straight path. Once a force is applied to the molecules, the molecules of water will

move. Resulting in a loss of resistive drag force. What we did and this again, I use this to mention this is 18th century propulsion. The paddle steamers, they may be paddle steamers in Australia in the years gone by. Yeah, yeah, some of the rivers and stuff. Yeah, exactly. So what the paddle steamer does successfully is engaged the water for a very brief amount of time. These paddles grabbed water and then get out of the way very quickly. They don’t hold and the reason we kind of do the laugh about it is because there was an investor in St. Louis who convinced people to invest in a paddle steamer that had instead of a circulating and ready. He made the vans look like this. Of course, the picture is not. I can’t find the picture. I looked for years. Can you imagine what would happen if he made the steamer look like this instead? Because the water will just be going on. And what happened is all the people, the investors came out apparently to

watch the grand opening and the thing didn’t budge, just stayed in one place. So I think that’s a very good analogy. Now, what is the new water business? Finding new water based on the observation that the molecules only offer resistance. They remain relatively still. Be aware of the pressure of the water on the pump. And somebody sent me this when they heard me talk about it. He says, yeah, it’s like when you grab the water, you don’t want your hand to move too much. Now, that absolutely is not the case in the water. Your hand is going to move. So this is what I did. I put some video trails that is flooding the path and superimposed a grid over the swimmer. And then I want to remind people, Brenton, that this, what I’m going to show you is a 2D view of what’s taking place in 3D. So this is a still picture and I’m going to show you a video after this. You see the grid and each of these are different molecule sets of molecules.

We can assume that. So here is what we said. Assume that within each rectangle of the grid, the molecules of water remain relatively undisturbed. We can now see a swimmer’s hand progressing through different quadrants of the grid successfully engaging new water. So let’s play this. Each of those quadrants is, we would assume as different molecules of water. Is that pretty descriptive? Yeah, that’s a good way to, right. And you know, I’m very happy with that myself on the back for coming up with this grid because the grid really emphasizes the fact that we’re looking for new water.

And it’s not obviously part like the hand will move a little bit side to side, but it’s like it’s finding new water in different depths as well. Exactly. And but you notice the palm, Brenton is painting back. See, we don’t see the palm facing the camera pushing back. So I think that’s pretty descriptive as to what we’re talking about in terms of finding new water. Yeah, one thing I’ve seen with some, let’s say less experienced swimmers is they try and they’re trying to work on their catch and they know I need to get my hand my forearm mostly vertical there. So what they end up doing is they end up just pushing straight backwards and they don’t end up going down with the arm and down with the hand to find that new water. And they’re really ineffective when they just go straight backwards. And so that’s a very important point you made, Brenton. And that is because also with them keeping the elbow bent at 90 degrees

or even less. If you go straight back, you’re not going to be able to do with a elbow held at about 90 degrees, you will go straight back. You need to go down and that’s why and that’s a different part and it’s in the book. So let’s go back to this picture that I just put this still picture in which is showing what we do not want to do. If you stay in a straight line for too long, you’re not going to be holding water. And that’s what you’re talking about. People that you’re working with. And when you’re talking about the 90 degree catch, so you’re saying looking from this side angle, if someone has a 90 degree angle with their arm, they’re much more likely to go straight back, which is going to be less effective. And this is why I’m going to, again, it’s not part of today’s discussion, but I made a big issue of this and we talk about that in the video as well, that we don’t go to good swimmers are not going to go 90 degree. They go

more obtuse angles. We’ll talk about this in a minute, Brenton. So anything else on this we need to talk about. No, that’s good. That’s a great way to to say it and to describe what we, yeah, what someone wants to be aiming for there. One more time. See, the grid shows different portions of the water, different molecules of the water being engaged by the hand.

All right, now I want to show you something that I had to show you this because I can’t put this in the website in the video. I can only show it to you because this is from YouTube, but it really sends a strong message. You will get the message immediately. I’m going to play. We’ll have a good laugh. This guy is riding with his buddies. What’s what’s happening? The only reason he’s whipping all his buddies is because he has minimized frontal resistance, Brenton. He has no frontal, his profile is minimally where his buddies are peddling furiously

and facing the direction of the wind. If there’s wind.

He has got rid of frontal resistance and that’s why he’s cruising past everybody. So it is, I think it’s a wonderful way to emphasize right off the bat. You’ve got to keep your profile. Minimal frontal profile. What do you think? And yeah, I’ve seen that video before. And it’s so good. Yeah. And that’s because all those guys are working away. They’re still peddling and he’s not peddling at all. This guy is doing nothing. Yeah. Good. I’m glad you’ve seen this. And then it’s even more relevant in the water. Right. Like it’s much higher drag forces. Absolutely. You don’t want to be playing at weird angles. So I said the video in the first part of the book breaks down the free side detail. I’m going to make some shows. I’m example brand and what makes this different is the addition. What makes this different in addition to efficient mechanics. I have showed some defects and this is data collected over 35 years. So I just pulled some pictures from the book

and this is their video footage of this. And these are people we filmed for 35 years and real defects. They’re not faking it. So this is like bending the knees on the up the very rock. I don’t say common defect but you need to catch that right away.

Rising to the catch. If you enter too deeply. Most rumors say oh I’m too deep. I got to get back to the surface to start pulling so they look like this. And you can see what they’re starting off with immediately a drop level.

All this rising to the catch. This is just showing how we use the video trails rented and these are the paths of the recovery. I have always a straight up and you can see the straight on recovery is definitely moving faster but you really got to watch the speed at which the hand hits the surface. And again I talk about that in the book because the velocity of the hand is much higher the further from the axis of rotation. The linear velocity.

And go ahead and just just on that like you would typically see that straight arm recovery more in sprinters. Can you talk a little bit to why a sprinter would would use that and the benefits of it. Yeah because the hand is moving faster. Through the air the fastest but the risk is that they’re going to enter with much more impact. But the benefit of it is they I was going fast over the top and they can carry that speed over and in the water and out in front is it. Yes provided again that they got a good catch and not everybody can do that.

And what would you typically would you change what you’re coaching or teaching depending on what the athlete would naturally be suited to how they’d normally come over the water or their events. I would talk to them I would seriously encourage them to do a high elbow. For one thing there’s a major stress on the shoulders Britain the further arms are away from the axis of rotation the more internal talk they develop so high recovery is brutal on the shoulders. Very very stressful and this is the reason and you can use this as an example. I’m sure you have to give something heavy to carry and say OK you stick your arms out and I’m going to give it to you and they’re going to make it much easier by pulling their arms in because the internal talk is reduced tremendously.

The speed is high so if you want high speed that’s fine but I would definitely talk people distance swimmers away from swimming with straight out and that’s why most good distance swimmer do not swim with straight out right.

Yeah yeah and that’s the reason it’s it’s a built-in safeguard.

Yeah I got some then the last the last example I’m going to throw in here is late breathing right you don’t never want to turn your head. Keep your head still turned after the hand passes the shoulder like that’s not going to work. And so I just these four examples I want again it’s a you know what I have in the book and also this this is video also you know video I show them actually video of this. And just with that like that like breathing Jan so

with with that so the way I kind of think of that like part of it I guess is the timing of the stroke when someone’s a little too rushed in front and there’s a point where there’s nothing in front of their head like they’re like this and I say they’re a distance swimmer for me that’s always felt like they’re just not able to get that much power from the stroke because this arms kind of going separately to the like rotation of the body like they’re not able to use the full full body together how would you kind of describe it Well I think late breathing has a lot to do with not exhaling enough so you’re still exhaling even after your hand has come out past the shoulder line and you’re still trying to get rid of the air.

So we’d like people to excel a little bit early so by the time the hand is past the shoulder line Britain they’ve got rid of what they have through the mouth and the nose absolutely and then they’re ready to take the next breath. If you hold your breath for too long we see that this is invariably what happens. Yeah and it’s we see it quite a bit with probably with like maybe like five to ten percent of the swimmers that we see there’s that late breath.

And yeah and obviously just it throws a whole stroke out and it’s when you pointed out to someone it’s really obvious but sometimes they’ve just got no idea that they’re breathing like it’s correct and you know it’s surprising how many people are even at the beginning I mean we have a beginning swimming school. You have to tell people they have to exhale through both their mouth and their nose. You can’t just exhale only through the mouth and the nose more air of course will come out through the nose but you must go some up through the mouth too because there’s not enough time.

So at like high at sort of race pace breathing every two is like so you recommend mouth and nose there yes more of it will come out the excess the majority will come out through the nose but you have to still exhale a little bit through the mouth to make sure they are all the air comes out. Now if you want to hold your breath and just go like we don’t go you don’t have to you don’t have to blow it through your mouth if you’re really going super fast if you get if you can get rid of all air through your nose fine good for you but I find that being swimmers are much more comfortable getting rid of the air through both the mouth and the nose before they turn to take a breath and if you want you know better swimmers maybe more and more air will come out disproportionate amount through the nose but I think it’s a good idea to start swimmers who have problems look like they haven’t breathing is to exhale through both the mouth and the nose

and I believe that and then I just had some just to wet people’s curiosity I said why the 90 degree elbow bend is no longer recommended and if you look at all swimmers now it’s all an obtuse angle this is a 111 degrees and then pulling wide you talk about the s-ball quite pulling wide doesn’t win and I show them I show the high speed video of the drop off and then swimming sideways and this is something that’s very subtle if you watch a swimmer from the water you can see their palms still facing back you see the back of their hand facing the camera Britain but the hand is sliding sideways the hand is sliding laterally even though the hand is facing back and you got to watch for that because it’s very subtle and sometimes it’s because they’re just weak which fight which part of the stroke is this is this well through any part or particularly through the front starting from the beginning to the middle their hands are sliding to the side even though

you said I want your palms to face backwards which is what they’re doing but the hands are scooting sideways.

We would often teach or the way I describe it if we’re looking at someone swimming towards the camera.

Normally say we don’t want the hand to really be going wider than the elbow because at that point they do lose some of the ability to use these stronger muscles to their back and shoulder and and it’s obviously you’re going to be slipping outwards and you may have the palm turned out a little bit with that as well. So it’s and so you say one of them one of the main causes can just be weakness through through that because they can’t hold the water and maintain that pressure and so they instinctively and I’m going to show you a really fun example of a butterfly slipping not going sideways but turning these palms up and I’ll show you in a minute. I think you really get a kick out of this.

And then we also talk about asymmetry. Nobody there’s nobody born and will be born who is perfectly symmetrical cannot but you want to try to reduce that asymmetry because some people have significant differences and we show the high speed stuff on those differences but I know a lot of coaches that try to bang their head against the wall trying to get the swimmer to agree exactly the same and you know the strange thing Monday even in Bristol nobody pulls exactly symmetrical. Yeah, you know so don’t waste your time but as long as you can reduce that and then the last thing I want to do just again I’m touching on all these things that I’ll cover in the book and the video is the business of keeping a stable base and I said due to the necessity of maintaining a stable base for the muscles the practical questions still exist through the swimmers intentionally rotate their hips or do the hips rotate naturally according to the rhythm and swimming with us.

That’s a question and you know it’s a it’s something that we need to think about.

I was looking at that part in the in the book actually and one of the things you mentioned was you feel like swimmers shouldn’t intentionally rotate their hips. It should just be like a natural thing that kind of happens within the stroke. That’s what I feel because there’s no ground reaction force. You can’t even you play golf people are taught to whip their hips right at the right time so they get more bang for the buck. You can only do that if the feet don’t move. We have no ground reaction force in the water. So we have and then you can always ask the question if you watch a sprinter Brenton their hips hardly move and the reason they don’t move as much is because they have to generate so much more force. You know muscles in order to exert force on one end has to be steady on the other end. The proximal end has got to be very stable for the distal end to move. And that is what happened. That’s just natural muscle mechanics.

You can’t change that.

And so for someone who is let’s say you’ve got an intermediate level swimmer or triathlete there and they’re too flat like they’re very they’re too flat for the hips. Yeah. What would be your suggestion to them?

Pay a little more attention to the extension up front because by extending up front you will find the torso following. That’s what I feel.

Yeah.

And yeah. So you get them to to feel like and how would you describe it to them like would you say like from with your fingers with your hand would I want you to extend forwards more and reach out more or are you talking about like would you say like through your shoulders you want to sort of initiate it from. I’m just curious in terms like the language you’d use because I find that interesting. Think about your hand. Your extremity is what finally gets your arm to where it should be. So focus on your hand because your shoulders your trunk your shoulders will follow your hand. Hand will govern how much rotating the body will rotate. So it’s easier for a swimmer to think of where their hand is going and make sure of course that the elbow goes to full extension because I’m sure you do drills and stuff where they go halfway and stop and they don’t get the same bang for the buck because they’re so count is not high or it’s too high.

So you need to go all the way until you feel like your side of your hand maybe is touching the side of your ear but you have to be careful of not forcing it to touch the side of your ear. That’s a little bit too still to me. Yeah, yeah, great. Yeah, you cannot you know we don’t we don’t submit our head and ears.

The the that’s stability of the the hips and the and the core there. So the way the way I’ve explained it in the past of people is imagine your hips are on hydraulics as opposed to like being a like a swing in a playground. It’s kind of got these like metal chains coming down where it’s like it’s going to move all around. We want it controlled. We want that that stability even though it’s going to rotate for distance swimmers. We don’t want to lose a goosey. We don’t want it wobbling around. Great. And you and you know why do you have very steady hips is because they have to generate more force and I tell people when I’m lecturing in biomechanics, you pull a rubber band and let it go on both sides at the same time. It’ll just flop down won’t do anything. If you want the rubber band to pull, you let go one end and they hold the other end and then it will exert force.

That’s a good way. That’s a good way of thinking about it with yes the extension of the arms hold on to it with the hips and yeah. That’s right because that’s muscle mechanics. Brendan simple muscle mechanics. The distal end, which is the further end can only exert force if the proximal. The end closer to the center stays stable. It has to be stability. The proximal end has to be stable and this is why the larger muscles in our body for our shoulders our pecs, our lats. Those are the large muscles they have to hold our shoulder girders steady so we can exert force with our hands.

That’s a big one. That’s set up with the technically the slowest one is they could have a really nice what looks like a really nice catch and pull through here, but if it’s not if that is not steady, then this is kind of moving on its own and it lacks that connection. So even if it looks like a great position, it’s not just not effective. Absolutely well said well said. How would you for someone who where that’s the case?

How how would you approach that with them to be able to get better connection, better stability through here? Well, that’s you know, I would I would wear paddles to a certain extent and make sure they feel like they’re holding the water and see whether you can see any more activity with their hips. Holding handbells, which would also emphasize holding the water and I don’t have anything really that comes to my mind except making sure that they feel long and tall in the stroke.

Yeah.

That’s I mean, that’s kind of like that. That’s the million dollar question and not something that would be fixed like like that in an instant. So that’s just curious as to you know how you approach it. I am absolutely against tightening the shoulders, pushing the chest down, tightening the pelvis.

All that tension just detracts from the ability to exert propulsive force, you know, pushing the chest down and things with so with the tightening the core and that sort of thing. How do you describe the I guess like posture and any sort of like

don’t have to extend your spine. Don’t stick your chest forward. You don’t want your hips to be below. Just lie as comfortably as you can. You can make people. I would do it. Well, this might be a good dream. Make people ask their spine and start swimming. They’re going to feel weird when they’re starting to pull. Why do they stick their chest out? Hmm.

Do you think like lengthening through their is a good approach? Like think you’ve just been long through the break and you can’t let in your stroke and still stuck stick your chest out.

Can’t make you stretch out and stretch your arm out.

And then now I remember what I see. I haven’t called for a while, but this is one of the things I used to stretch. When you extend your arm and you stuck. All you’re doing is adding the length of your arm. Your arm, including from the shoulder with the elbow is stretched out. Now you go and add the length of your shoulder to that length and you will see how much longer you can go because you added the width of the shoulder to the length of the arm.

Am I making sense? Yeah. So if you’re very square, yeah, if you’re very square to the water, you don’t add the width of the shoulder on the side it belongs.

But then you have to be careful that there’s not too much because all this, you know, rolling the body and stuff and I like. So it’s yeah, like you. I talked about rotation. We want to get. Oh yeah. It’s a happy medium. Yeah, I am happy with that. Yeah, Brenton, it’s just that selling a whole program based on body roll was a absolute, you know, he was pulling people the wool over people’s eyes big time because they say, okay, count your strokes and now roll your body and see how much less strokes you do. Yes, you’re doing less strokes, but you were swimming a hundred percent slow speed.

Yeah, you know. Yeah, that’s it.

So yeah, that like that rotation. It’s I think the guy like I work with a lot of newer swimmers and intermediate swimmers finding the right amount of rotation takes some time for them. But I think I’ve seen swimmers just either be too flat or they just they roll way too far thinking that the more they can reach out on their side and the more they can like if they can get to 90 degrees the better, but they lose that control and that stability. And for me, I said at the width of your shoulder on the side of arms belongs to the arm as it stretches out. And now you’re going as far as you can go.

That’s it’s a good way to describe it because you’re not going to you’re not going to overdo it if you just add exactly. And so that’s the exact is the extent to which you should be extending.

That’s good. I like that. Good. Well, I appreciate you being on the on the podcast. It’s that’s I mean, I’ve been looking at video for a long time analyzing strokes and I’m still learning still learning things here and I’ve picked up a lot of different ways to explain things and different ways to pass like show things as well for people here. So this has been really helpful for me personally, but I think for people who are listening to this podcast they’ll like that. A lot of people listen to every episode. So they’ve got a pretty good hand on on the stroke, but there’s been a lot of new stuff here as well. So I appreciate you sharing a small snippet of your knowledge on here. There’s there’s a lot of having me Brenton and as I said, I’m learning marketing because you have become you have paid the price to put it all the time and I admire you how far you’ve gotten but I’m I’m a I’m a Grammy when it comes to the marketing business.

Well, the an expert in the been a practitioner in this in this stuff. So I think it’s happy to get the get the word out here with the book. So yeah, it’s been a pleasure having you on Jan. Thank you, Brenton. We talk soon.

The post Deep Dive Into Freestyle Technique Mechanics with Jan Prins appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, sports dietitian and researcher Taryn Richardson dives into the science behind red light therapy, exploring its potential for recovery, performance, and overall health. She shares practical advice on device selection, optimal usage, and the science-supported benefits for athletes seeking faster recovery and better performance.

00:39 What is red light therapy and its scientific basis

01:25 Historical research and terminology: photobiomodulation

02:22 Claims and benefits of red light therapy

03:19 Applications in physiotherapy, veterinary, and sports

05:17 How red light interacts with the body and mitochondria

07:37 Mitochondria as batteries and the effect of light wavelengths

08:59 Impact on performance, recovery, and sleep

10:34 Best timing for red light therapy: post-exercise recovery

12:31 Using red light therapy for injury and tissue repair

13:37 Types of devices and market options

16:12 Choosing quality devices and verification

18:01 Optimal distance and wavelength considerations

18:47 Personal routine and practical tips

20:39 Additional light exposure strategies

21:40 Athletes adopting red light therapy

22:37 How to access Taryn’s masterclass

23:31 Infrared vs red light therapy: differences

24:22 Expected benefits and user experiences

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

Try the new Nanoclear Anti-fog Goggles: https://bit.ly/nanocleargoggles

Taryn Richardson

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I guess today is someone who’s been on multiple times. Taryn Richardson, almost like our resident dietician, sports nutritionist. You’ve been on a number of times. Sports dietician. Sorry, sports dietician. Helping with nutrition, though, for athletes who are either doing triathlon, swimming as well. You’ve got a swimming background. So we’ve had you on multiple times, but we’ve got a slightly different topic we’re going to cover today because you’ve been diving very deep into red light therapy. So I’d love to kind of get into that and what is it firstly? And then what made you want to look into red light therapy as for recovery, health, and what are the benefits of it? So firstly, welcome back. It’s been a

little while. Thank you. Good to be back. And yeah, I did get like super nerdy on red light therapy. It tends to be something that I do, I think. I really want to understand the science behind things and whether it’s actually evidence-based and then how to apply that science to an athlete is kind of my happy place. And so when did this sort of start for you and how long was it that you were looking into red light therapy? I probably started at the end of 2025 and spent about three months diving into the literature and there is six decades of research in red light therapy. So I’m necessarily called red light therapy though in the literature. Its technical term is photobiomodulation, which is a bit of a handful. So it’s basically the health effects and the physiological effects of light that happen in our body. And it’s just everywhere at the moment. I’m sure you’ve seen it and we’ll probably see it more in our feed now that we’re talking about it today,

but it’s just been exploding in the athlete space. And I wanted to understand if it was actually beneficial, is it something that we should be looking at? And obviously, what are the mechanism? How is this thing working? And how can we apply that to an athlete perspective to help our health and performance? So what are the broader benefits or claims of using red light therapy? There’s so many and you almost have to keep your wits about you a little bit when it comes to this because it claims to do so many things from like hair loss, college reduction, decreasing doms, increasing performance, wound healing, tissue repair, like Alzheimer’s dementia. There’s basically no medical space that it has left untouched, but originally started in physiotherapy and a lot of chiropractic clinics will use it in terms of an injury recovery type situation. So you may have been to a physio or a chiropractor where they’ve shone some red light on an injured

knee or something like that to try and get you better faster. And it’s also been used widely in the animal space. A lot of vets will use it on say horses who have got a sore knee to try and get them back to walking and running faster. And out of those ones, is there any wild claims that you sort of looked into and like, okay, it’s, it’s definitely not not helping with that. And that’s just a little bit of a stretch.

There’s quite a lot of things that have been studied in the literature over the last six decades. And I think we’re getting clearer and clearer now. The thing that’s unclear is actually athletic performance. And I think the problem with the athlete space is that we’ll talk a little bit about like what actually red light therapy or long wavelength light therapy is and the wavelengths and how many minutes you do it for and the power and the distance away from your body and all those sorts of things. So it’s actually really hard to put research into practice because when we talk about all these varied health spaces, the literature has got, you know, research in certain wavelengths for that type of thing. And then in other papers used a different wavelength again, trying to deal with it. So it’s really hard to try and just steal it down. In the athlete performance space, they’re using it pre exercise or not pre exercise and that can

make a difference and an impact in our performance. So in terms of swimming, they’ve used it in terms of time trial performance for 100 meters, 200 meters. And I think 400 meters off the top of my head and it didn’t show any change in time trial performance. But it just means that we haven’t kind of nutted down to exactly what that protocol might be or they’ve used a wavelength that maybe it wasn’t effective. And then when they have actually used the red light therapy or long wavelength light therapy is also variable too. So I think actually athlete performance like from a time trial perspective is where it’s not so clear just yet. And then how does it actually work? So how does actually interact with the with the body? Yep. So can we take a step back? Can we talk about light? Now I’m a sports dietitian, right? Light is not my area of expertise. But what I did in my total nerd hole of trying to understand red light therapy was speak to a lot of experts in

this space and read I read a lot of research. Our current modern environment is set up where we are inside under LEDs all day. And we know that that is not good for us. So just generally from a light and a health perspective, we need to be outside in the sun, not necessarily outside getting burnt, but outside say in the morning at dawn, when the sun’s coming up and also sort of dusk when the sun is setting. It’s a great time to be outside and having the sun hit our skin because the sun is the complete spectrum of light. Okay, it has all of the wavelengths in it. It’s it’s complete. When we talk about LEDs and like UVs and x-rays and stuff, it’s the lower end of the light spectrum, like small wavelength. So the waves are tight. And then when we talk about red light therapy or photobiomodulation or long wavelength light therapy or low level laser therapy or their multiple different names in the literature around what this actually is called. They use

longer wavelengths of light as therapy to stimulate these biological processes. So taking away red light therapy altogether, you need to be outside more in the sun because you’ve got that full, you know, visible and non visible spectrum of light that’s helping to interact with our cells. So you might have seen that around. Like I know Huberman’s doing a lot of talk about light and health and being outside. In terms of how red light therapy actually works, what it does is it the light shines into our skin, the longer the wavelength, the deeper it goes. However, too long and it doesn’t penetrate our skin anymore. It just kind of does surface heating, but you know, that’s a story for another day. It stimulates our mitochondria. Do you remember mitochondria from like school biology back in the day? The powerhouse of the cell. It is its main job is to produce energy or ATP for us. So the the light therapy shines on the little mitochondria and if you want to

get real nerdy, it increases nitric oxide bioavailability. So that’s a basodilator. It also increases reactive oxygen species and it also lubricates the electron transport chain. So if none of that makes sense, what I like to talk about is thinking about long wavelength light therapy as a battery recharger. So if you think about the mitochondria as a battery, long wavelength light will recharge your batteries whereas a lot shorter wavelengths like LEDs or UV will discharge the battery and that is a really nice analogy to try and understand what is actually going on here. If we can expose ourselves to more longer wavelengths, which are missing in the modern environment, then that’s going to help us recharge so that we can do more things, kick more goals, train harder, recover faster, which everyone wants to do. And then so how does that then relate to other things like sleep inflammation, our overall performance and things like

that? Yeah, so if we’ve got a full battery, it’s almost like carb loading, but if you’ve got a full battery, you should be able to, you know, recover faster from training and train harder the next time you train rather than always cruising around on empty. There’s lots of stuff in sleep, but it’s almost a different story because we’ve got our sleep and wake hormones, we’ve got our melatonin and serotonin and our gut also has its own mechanisms for action. It’s got its own circadian rhythm, which is very cool. So a lot of people have been using long wavelength light exposure before bed to almost help with the sleep process and a lot of people will report that they sleep better after that long wavelength light exposure before bed. But all of the research in trying to trigger our little mitochondria is to produce more energy is actually done in the morning when they’re more awake, it seems. I know this is super nerdy, but all

of the research is generally done before midday. So if you think of an athlete who’s training in the morning, doing some long wavelength light exposure either in the sunlight or with a red light therapy device after training is going to recharge your batteries after you’ve depleted them and then your little mitochondria produce more energy. That’s pretty cool. And so would you say it’s primarily, it should be primarily used as a recovery device as opposed to beforehand? A lot of the literature in exercise, they’ve done long wavelength light exposure pre-exercise. And I think that’s where the performance and the exercise performance with photobiomodulation is not really showing us performance improvement yet because it’s been done pre-exercise as a performance trial, like as in a time trial performance, like a hundred meter swim, for example. I think if we’re using it after exercise and we’re starting to think about that

because I work with endurance athletes, I only work with triathletes. These guys are discharging their batteries all day long, training at least once, often twice, sometimes three or four times. If you have, you know, done it after exercise from a recovery perspective to recharge the batteries, then you should be able to have, you know, more energy, the body’s humming along to train better again that day and also the next day. There’s also some research in doing it for recovery. They’re still doing it pre-exercise. I think this will change, right? I think in the next 10 years we’ll see a lot of change in protocols and studies coming out where they’re doing light exposure post-exercise to help recharge batteries. At the moment a lot of it’s being done pre-exercise, but the stuff in recovery is showing like improvement in doms and also making, like, helping to lower those markers of muscle damage after exercise, so lower CK, which is

one of those markers, reducing inflammation and also improving wound healing, which is pretty cute. It’s very cool. So if you’re using it to help recharge, then hopefully we’re getting that faster muscle recovery, better muscle recovery, reduced soreness and ultimately improved performance. And is there any other times that you think athletes should consider using red light therapy? I definitely think if you are injured, you should add this to your recovery path. I interviewed Emma Jeffcoat on my podcast recently and she had a full ankle reconstruction after sort of rolling an ankle in a run. She threw everything at it. She’s an Australian elite triathlete. She was doing like hyperbaric chamber, she was doing red light therapy, she was eating like so well and she was back up and out of the moon boot off crutches in record time. So if you are injured and you’ve got, you know, that pain, wound healing, any sort of tissue repair, then

I would definitely look at adding some long wavelength light therapy to your recovery process. Now someone who knows, like, I’ve heard about it, I’ve seen a few things here and there, but I don’t really know what kinds of devices out there. Like, what does the range of devices look like and then what should we consider using? Because how big is it? How small is it? I haven’t looked that deeply into it. So, yeah, what sort of things do you see out there in the market? Don’t worry, you’re going to start getting ads in your feed now for all sorts of things. No doubt. Yeah. They range, okay, and this is the problem with red light therapy or light therapy is that the devices are honestly a bit of the Wild West. You have, like, really small torches that like a physiotherapist might use or a vet and it’s like one LED, it’s tiny and it’s, you know, maybe battery operated and you can travel with it. All the way up to full body panels, like Lioner kind

of MRI machine or a sauna almost of, like, full body panels top and bottom, but there’s, you know, face masks there. I’ve seen undies with red light therapy on them. All sorts of wrap based things. There’s just going to be more and more products coming on the market. I’ve seen it toothbrush as well. So, the problem with the devices is they can go from, you know, a couple of hundred dollars up to, like, tens of thousands of dollars for essentially the same thing, but you’re also not going to get any more benefit from exposing your body to more light. It definitely is a switch type process. So, we turn on the switch, takes about three minutes for the mitochondria to be stimulated by that light to have an effect and then the more you do it, the more it seems to kind of wash it out and the effect becomes soggy. So, please don’t spend thousands and thousands on a massive device. Just get something small if you want to use it. And the other

thing that’s really so cool that I discovered is that mitochondria have this communication pathway. So, if you’ve got a sore knee, you might shine your red light therapy device on your knee, but within 24 hours, the mitochondria in your whole body have communicated and they’ve picked up some of the benefit and are improving their ATP production as a result. So, another reason why you don’t want a massive panel. Interesting. Okay. So, let’s say you’ve got a sore knee and a sore shoulder. You’ve got one device. What you’re saying there is it doesn’t, like, it doesn’t matter too much where you shine it because it’s going to have that effect through the body. Yeah. I would shine it on your knee for, like, three minutes. I call it five minutes. Shine it on your shoulder for five minutes and do that not every day, but maybe every couple of days. Is there a difference in the quality of devices or, like, is it fairly standard

and you’re not necessarily, the more you pay, the better the quality of the red light is. Yeah, no. It’s really hard. I think the barrier to entry into this market is very, very low because there’s so many products and a lot of them are coming out of China and the components that go into it is literally, like, cheap LED lights. What you want to look for though, I wrote an entire masterclass and walked people through how to find a good device, is you want to find a company that has actually tested the wavelength of light that their device is spitting out with a light spectrometer. That’s really important and not many do that. I found a couple of companies that I’ve listed in my masterclass that do do that. Otherwise, you’re kind of winging it with someone that may not necessarily have all that much trust in it if they aren’t being really up front and clear around how much, like, this thing is kicking out. So you’re looking for

particular wavelengths and you’re also looking for, like, a radiance it’s called, so the power. Okay, and so they’ll be the things that will kind of vary between the devices but you can’t trust what the company’s saying unless they’ve verified it externally. Which, you know, I think it’s really important, right? I talk about supplements all the time and from an athlete perspective, you want third party batch tested supplements to make sure there’s no wider prohibited substances in there. It’s almost like that with red light therapy. You want to make sure that they’ve done, like, it probably costs a lot of money to do it so not everyone’s going to do it but look for a company that’s tested their devices with a light spectrometer and giving you the numbers, like, super clear on the website to say this is how much power this thing’s kicking out at these wavelengths. And then how far apart would you, so how far away from the body would

you, do you need to have it? It depends what you’re trying to treat but relatively close. So the companies will tell you at a certain distance what the power is so whether that’s like two inches, three inches, seven inches away, you want it fairly close

so that it gets into the skin. The longer the wavelength, the deeper it will penetrate. So if you’re looking at treating something like muscle then you want wavelengths at around the 850 nanometers but if you want to treat something surface level like you want, you know, beautiful skin, Brenton. Increase collagen production in your skin or you’re trying to heal a wound then you’d go a slightly shorter wavelength that’s sort of 660 nanometers.

Interesting, okay, wow. And now with me, it’s all up here. I remembered every wavelength, every number. I’ll have to watch this one back. So then for you, what has changed for you? Like what does your kind of weekly routine look like with red light therapy? Yeah, so it is something that I’m using personally. I think pretty much every athlete would benefit from using it and I don’t say that lightly. I say that because there’s no real harm. There’s nothing bad that’s going to come from exposing your body to some long wavelengths of light particularly if you work indoors and you’re sitting under LEDs all day. So I have a red light therapy device. It’s actually on behind me at the moment kicking out that beautiful light. It’s forming two functions in my life. Podcasting light. I use that two to three times a week because once you’ve stimulated those little mitochondria guys, like I said, more is not better. You don’t want to wash it out and

make it go all soggy. The effect should last for about five days. So twice a week is enough or, you know, up to three. Like so do it every sort of two to three days. Ideally in the morning after a training session when maybe your battery is on the lower end and like no more than 20 minutes really at a time. The other thing that I’ve done like if we’re not even talking about red light therapy is to put an incandescent globe on my desk. I also have that on right now at the moment. An incandescent bulb is the old school ones with the little filament in there. It is also the full spectrum just like the sun. So I sit with that at my desk in the mornings until about lunchtime and then I turn that off so that I’ve got my exposure to the long wavelength light even though I’m sitting inside at my desk.

And even just having it like off in the corner is kind of a enough like it doesn’t need to be that close. No, those incandescents kick out a lot of heat. I don’t know if you if you remember them from childhood they don’t tend to make them anymore. You can buy them online. They do kick out a lot of heat so in winter it’s really nice and warm and light from that just bounces around everywhere. Yeah, okay. Something I would never have thought of. The interesting thing here like I know from previous like podcasts and knowing you you don’t mince words like you’ll tell it how it is and you’ll tell you and like you’re very direct direct in what you in what you think. So you wouldn’t be saying would be saying this if you hadn’t studied it and everything. So it’s I think it’s such a yes that’s an interesting thing to be looking at and considering and obviously I imagine a lot of athletes have now started to pick this up and

started to started to use it as well. Yeah they have. I am very much a sports dietitian but I love to improve people’s health for the long term and also performance in their sport and I’m a very holistic type person so I’ll sort out somebody’s nutrition but I’m not afraid to tackle sleep and all the other things that go into making your body just this like humming little machine that’s working at its best. So a lot of my athletes do use it. They have a small device. They have a company that I’ve recommended for them because they’ve done that diligence of testing there with a light spectrometer that’s global and I’ve sort of also helped them. My masterclass helps people with the protocol of how to do it from an athlete perspective. And where can people find that and we’ll also include this on the show notes but all your research you’ve kind of condensed into this masterclass and all the all the all the work and and study has sort of gone

into this so how would you how can people find that? Yeah definitely don’t do what I did. Definitely don’t do what I did and spend three months or more just getting real nerdy and reading six decades of research. It did take me a lot of time to go through. The masterclass is available on my website dietitianapproved.com. If you go to the home page you’ll be able to find it and I can share the direct link with you too.

Excellent thank you we’ll put that in the show notes and anything we haven’t covered that you think would that we think we should mention as well for this stuff. Yeah one of the things one of the common questions I get is can I just go to an infrared sauna and they’re two completely different things. So the red light therapy or photobiomodulation is long wavelength light therapy and infrared sauna is it is still a very long wavelength but it’s too long it’s gone too far to the point where it’s not actually penetrating into your under your skin and stimulating those biological processes with your mitochondria anymore. It’s causing your skin the surface of your skin to heat up which is why I feel sort of hot and sweaty in an infrared sauna. So two completely different things even though they both have red in the name you might be able to go to an infrared sauna though and ask them like a lot of places locally now have a red light tower

that you can request to add on for an extra ten dollars or something if you go into the sauna. You could also try red light therapy or long wavelength light therapy at a lot of gyms like I said this is exploding so there might be a way that you can try before you buy it is a long it’s a bit of a long game though like you know you need to wait about probably 12 weeks to feel a benefit and it’s not like drinking a cup of coffee and you’re like yeah feel awesome. It is a more of a slow burn benefit and something you can do at any age at any stage and has no harm really if you’re doing it the right way.

And what would what would those benefits like be that you would would feel like is it that faster recovery less less Dom’s that sort of thing. Yeah I have I’ve got some personal examples like the first time I used mine I felt like I just drunk a coffee doesn’t feel like that anymore like it just felt so much energy I felt super charged. I’ve also used it on like really sore quads just gone too heavy in the gym and had really bad muscles on us and use that and by the end of the day it was gone like that’s anecdotal evidence you’d have to see how it felt for yourself but like it’s some of a lot of it is instantaneous and then other is more slower burn of like feeling more energized less run down wound healing is faster. You know maybe you’ve got some more hair growth on your head if you’re starting to lose that I lost all mind through having baby so I’m looking forward to that coming back with some red light therapy actually.

Yeah nice well I appreciate you jumping on the podcast again and completely different topic this time but something I knew of but didn’t know much about so this has been really insightful and I think I’m on my way to

get a red light device after that because I trust your trust your opinion and obviously you’ve done the research on it so yeah I don’t need a whole lot of convincing after that so yeah that’s my next purchase that’ll be this afternoon I think so yeah thank you so much and for those that are listening how can they best get in touch with you whether that’s the red light stuff or for anything dietitian related. Best place to find me is website at dietitianapproved.com I’m also on Instagram at dietitian.approved on YouTube the same name Facebook as well LinkedIn pretty much everywhere I have my own podcast called the triathlon nutrition academy and I’m going to send you the master class Brenton you can watch it on two times the speed and I’ll give you my recommendation on what product you should buy with discount code if you’re lucky fantastic that’s going to be my next question so yeah thanks again Sharon great to chat and no doubt we’ll have you back

on in the next couple of months thanks Brenton thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post Can Red Light Therapy Help Your Swimming? with Taryn Richardson appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Discover the nutrition secrets that could make or break your next long swim—are you fueling properly?

Swimmers and endurance athletes often overlook crucial aspects of fueling, leading to fatigue, poor recovery, and even injury. In this eye-opening episode, registered sports dietitian Eliza Kelly shares behind-the-scenes insights from a 55-kilometer open water swim, revealing how altitude, heat, and unexpected challenges demand real-time nutritional adjustments. Her experience coaching elite swimmers and triathletes will change how you approach long training sessions and races, ensuring you stay energized and perform at your best.

00:11 Introduction to the episode and guest

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

Try the new Nanoclear Anti-fog Goggles: https://bit.ly/nanocleargoggles

Get in touch with Eliza:

https://www.fluidperformancenutrition.com.au/

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Eliza Callie. And Eliza is a registered dietitian and sports dietitian. And we met up in the Kimberley on basically because she was up there to help support Andy Donaldson, who we’ve had on this podcast a number of time, who is an ultra marathon swimmer, world record holder. And he was doing his 55 kilometer swim down the Ord River. And we were on the same boat together for that swim. And so I want to get Eliza on today to talk a little bit about some of the things that we saw in person in real time on through Andy’s swim and some of the things that had to change halfway through with his nutrition. And then covering some topics that Eliza’s worked with a lot of swimmers and a lot of marathon swimmers, some of the main mistakes they make some of the gaps in their nutrition. So how can you as a triathlete or a swimmer, make sure that you’re fueling the right way so that you can

recover better and ultimately perform better with your swimming. So Eliza, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. What an introduction. We did literally meet in the boat.

Yeah, that’s a 12 hours together, you get to know someone reasonably well on a boat for 12 hours when you’re going down the river. So you’re the partner of Andy Donaldson. And so you’re kind of along for the swim there. But you’re also a registered dietitian. And it was interesting to see you kind of have to respond to what you saw Andy was going through on that swim and then maybe change up the nutrition plan a little bit. So I think that’d be really good to cover here. But before we get into that, you yourself for a summer, and you’ve worked with a lot of swimmers as well. So can you just give us a quick introduction about your background and who you typically work with? Yeah, for sure. I think my, I guess, as a quick overview of my journey into being a dietitian and sports dietitian started off with my background of rowing, which that originally sparked my love for community, sports, how can I go better, move faster, move together as a team. And then

that sparked my interest in sport. And then I went down the sports nutrition. And then through that, I kind of when I went into private practice, saw a lot of different rowers come in, which I’ve now realized are actually quite similar to pull swimming training. The load is actually quite high at similar hours, things like that. And then that also prompted to boot quickly onto triathletes. Because when I finished rowing, I then picked up cycling classic. So then that tripped and fell into triathlon. And then I saw that in my client base as well. And I just always had a really big interest in the longer distance. I do see also, I see also team and shorter, but I love that journey of planning a long distance event, because there’s lots of different things to think about. Not just how do I get from A to B as quick as I can, what curveballs do we have to also consider. So and then that kind of actually doing some

talks for a swim club here called eSwim, the coach kind of cornered me and said, I made a comment like, Oh, I’ll do a roto swim one day. And she’s like, Why not this year? And I was like, Okay, and then that kind of that’s how I met Andy. That’s how I made a lot of friends and tripped and fell into the open water swimming community. And I found my way onto the boat there. I hope that’s a nice little summary. So that’s kind of shows in my work and clientele of who I see as well. Yeah. And I think that’s a great introduction. And in terms of like the interest that I found for me with coaching, it’s like I was always interested in technique and how can I personally get better. And so I was always watching videos and DVDs and always just trying to improve as a swimmer by improving technique. And then that fed into my actual work as a as a coach when I started off. And it sounds very similar for your nutrition journey as well.

It’s like you got an interest yourself. So I think that’s a provides a lot of motivation to want to learn and be able to grow and improve as a as a dietitian. And if we fast forward, so if we go back to the being on that boat. So just a quick overview of that swim, it was 55ks down the Ord River in fresh water. That’s about 28 degrees Celsius. And this this swim, it’s in basically it’s quite a hot place. It’s it’s very it’s a dry heat, but the sun’s out. And it’s essentially very different than what Andy had done in the past. Yeah, he’s used to these cold water swim. You don’t have to worry about getting sunburned and things like that during the North Channel and English Channel. So this was something that was very different. And so it seemed like just that not necessarily the preparation for it, but just like the the planning for it was very different than what it would be for those other swims. And so we saw

some different things happen to him throughout that swim that we that you kind of had to account for in terms of his feeds and stuff like that. So can you take us through what you noticed was happening, how how you ended up sort of dealing with it and changing the feeds and that sort of thing? Yeah, it was actually a really interesting experience to be a part of. It was kind of like a live case study. So I know he is my partner, but if I think from a like a work, a work perspective, it was really interesting to observe because this is the first big swim I’ve been with him on. So seeing how professional, well him and also his handler, Jay, they do a really good job and they’ve done it quite a few times before. But as you said, it’s been, I think it was only one hot, one other hot swim in the Ocean Sevens. I can’t remember which one, but it might have been Japan, I think, yeah. Yeah. And but other than that, it’s been

pretty cold. It’s been the total opposite, the opposite environment. So this type of swim as we started, it all started fine. We started in the dark, so that was OK. And it was tracking along well. And one thing I think we knew it was going to be hot. But as you said before, the 28 degree water along with just like open, there was no, there’s obviously no shade. So it’s pretty, it was pretty intense. And we found it even sitting on the boat until we put up that makeshift shade and then it just cooled off. And so that was us getting shade. He’s swimming and not getting shade. So he was, I think his speed plan was looking around about. Every every 20 minutes, 30 grams of carbs and around around the 20, 300 millifluid ish doing his awesome technique. But then as we were going, I started kind of getting a bit concerned if he was replacing enough sodium or enough electrolytes that he was losing, because that’s a common thing I’d see in swimmers

is we kind of forget that you’re still sweating because you’re in water. And we can actually, everyone’s has a different individual sweat rate. That’s the first consideration. Then everyone has an individual sweat sodium loss as well. So as we were in the boat, I was kind of just looking at him and going, like trying to wrap my brain of ages of a while back when I was asking him if he’s had a sweat and personalised sweat tests. And I was like, why didn’t I think about this yesterday? But to double check everything, like dot the dot across the T’s dot the I’s. But he started kind of, I overheard when he was talking to Jay, I think, him saying he feels a bit lethargic. And I just that kind of started my brain of going, Oh, no. Okay, have we accounted for the sweat loss and also sodium loss? And then I started second guessing how much sodium is he getting per hour? And then is that split up evenly across the feeds?

So not just in one, one bolus or like one time is it spread out because it not only replaces what we’re losing through sweat, but also helps us absorb fluid more efficiently. So that when he’s getting that shot down, is he actually holding on to that? Or is it going straight through as well? Because that’s another really relevant consideration. So yeah, he was feeling lethargic. And then I think that’s when the conversation started of talking to the other boat because there was two, two boats and that all the feeds were on the other boat. And I was with you on this boat. So that’s when we kind of, I jumped. We kind of was like, get, get me on that boat. But I just kind of, we came around and I hopped on and had a discussion with Jay, which was really helpful just to say, do we need to increase the sodium? Or it was actually more spreading it out over across the feeds, making sure each one definitely had electrolytes in there.

And then up the carbohydrates a bit as well, because he was feeling a bit, so energy was going was lower and he was feeling lethargic. When you’re in that situation as the swimmer, you don’t necessarily clock it yourself yet. And I think that’s the main things that we were kind of noticing because his form looks good. He has good technique, but it was more what the swimmer is saying. And then also chatting to Ryan and as we were getting a bit nervous going, can you ask him some silly questions? Just to make sure kind of like checking for hyperthermia that making sure they’re not getting too cold, is he getting too hot? And then eventually, so we swapped the feeds and then also we actually, which was run more by the other boat was getting him up close to the boat to get some shade, which was pretty, which was good. But upon reflection, I think a few things, which is really good upon reflection, there’s, we’ve learned a lot through that swim

and therefore going forward on hot swims, what can we do more in the lead up to make sure he’s starting really hydrated and then get on top of that earlier? I think we knew it was gonna be hot, but not that hot. If that, I don’t know if I explained that well. Well, I think also towards the end, I think there’s like a mixed up some of the nutrition a bit as well, just to kind of change up the flavor and the taste and what he was consuming as well, because it’s 12 hours is a long time to have the same type of nutrition. So I think that ended up getting changed a little bit too. And I think also just in terms of like sun protection, I don’t know how much like zinc and like sun cream and stuff will end up getting used. So it’s like, that’s it’s like on reflection, there’s you learn so much. And I think back to like my first and only Ironman and my first and only Roto swim, I looked back and go, oh my God, I wish I knew this beforehand.

And maybe I wouldn’t even have taken that advice, but like I learned so much by doing it. And yeah, so for me, that was the second like a marathon swim I’ve been on the boat for. One was probably, I don’t know, 15 years ago with a friend who’s doing I think a 30 or 20 something K swim in the Bay in Melbourne. But this was definitely the longest one. So for me, I found it really interesting just to kind of see one of these in person, which I hadn’t hadn’t done before. So yeah, really cool experience and just to see how you got to react in in real time. That was actually was a very good point as well. Towards the end, he started going, no, I don’t want that. Which as we, I think as a part of the support crew, that’s something really, you really need a clock early if they start turning back feeds. It’s not a great sign. And it’s also, but it’s good to problem solve in that moment. So what else do we have? Is there a different taste?

Is there a different potentially texture? Water in water and long swims is a bit different, but still, I mean, it wasn’t a race for time. So he could have stopped and had something to eat rather than actually just shutting it down kind of thing. So it depends on the race, the event, how they’re feeling in the moment and just being adaptable. Because the thing about these, which I’m sure we’ll go on later is one thing I really like to emphasize with the endurance athletes, but also ultra endurance is you train to a certain distance and we can prepare as best we can. But from here to here, we don’t know completely how your body’s gonna react. So we have to make sure we have problem solved and thought about all the possible scenarios that can happen. And then what are our plans in place? Because we can’t get to, if something’s going wrong or something changes, stressing about it and freaking out and going to a spiral isn’t gonna help the situation.

It’s going, okay, we need to accept what’s happening. And then what can we do? What are our steps to move forward? And something like an ultra swim, you have a great support. I don’t think I realized until on the two boats with the wealth knowledge on those boats, I was like, this is awesome to be a part of. Yeah, and it’s everything I realized on that boat as well is it’s important to have people. So Andy and Jay have worked together a lot. It’s like you need those people who will tell you how it is or kind of obviously they gotta work with you and you’ve gotta be agreeable and stuff. But like when you’re in the moment and you’re 10 hours into a 12 hour swim, you’re not going to be thinking 100% clearly and you won’t know exactly why you’re feeling the way you are or exactly what’s going on. And so you need that support crew to be able to problem solve and do the thinking for you. And yeah, that was a big realization for me with that swim.

So you’ve worked with triathletes and swimmers. So I’m sure you’ve come across a whole lot of common mistakes that you see people make or gaps in their nutrition. Things that people probably don’t know or don’t consider. What are some of those things that you’ve seen across the board with a lot of the athletes that you work with? Yeah, I’m gonna start with a bit of a boring one, but it’s so important is I think underestimating how much you need to fuel throughout your training, really. Cause that’s where kind of we gotta get the most successful or how we’re gonna develop the most and show up the best we can on event day is having a successful training block that we don’t get sick or injured. It’s actually completing the training. And to do that, we have to eat enough, fuel our training. So make sure that every time you go into a session, we’re going in well-fuelled, well-hydrated, knowing that we’re gonna use energy and sweat.

And then afterwards, make sure we refuel after and then have enough throughout the day. Cause most of the athletes I see, I do see some professionals, but also a lot of everyday athletes that perform really well, but they don’t, I think the gap is they don’t classify themselves as athletes, so they don’t treat, even though they’re doing the same training load as an elite athlete, but these guys are getting paid and they can nap all day. These guys have a family and have to go to work all day. So I think it’s making sure that you’re firstly accepting that you’re doing an awesome thing and your training load is really high and we need to make sure we’re matching that with food. Cause if this gap turns into, well, if it prolongs over a certain amount of time, that’s where we see weird things happen, like getting injured, getting sick frequently, changes to our hormones. It affects every prolonged low energy availability,

affects all aspects of our body. So yes, fueling our training. So I think one thing would be making sure on heavier training days, you’re eating more. If you want specifics, go see a dietitian, but rule of thumb is fueling in and around your training more on heavier training days. So double session day, we’re using more energy. Our muscles preferred fuel sources glucose, which comes from carbs. So we need to make sure we’re fueling up and recovering well after. And then keeping it and keeping it simple as well. I think for these busy athletes, so everyone’s busy. So going, what are simple ways to add more into your day? If you have two breaks in work, can you add two, can you add three snacks instead of two or one? Or if you know work super busy, can we have liquid nutrition? Just getting it in, and that’s gonna help us in the long run. So one is definitely overall eating enough, which I see from adolescents and professionals,

to be honest, eating enough and then utilizing your training to practice race day strategies. So I’d say also gut training for these ultra or endurance sports and also ultra endurance sports, we can’t expect our gut to be able to tolerate something if we’ve never tried it before. So never try anything new on race day. Golden rule. We wanna make sure we’ve test and trial everything in training so that we are not coming up on into some uncharted territories or going, oh, that gel looks good. I’m just gonna have that halfway through my iron man for the first time. And I still see it. I made that mistake before. Yeah. Cliff bars on the ride. I thought, oh, they look yummy. So I’ll buy those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, made that mistake once. Yeah. And I think as well, like as an adolescent, as a teenager growing up, there’s no way we fueled enough through training, like doing a seven K, eight K session where the majority of it, you’re like working your ass off

and like no fuel whatsoever throughout that, throughout that two hour session. And I don’t know how we made it through, but somehow we did. But yeah, there’s not a chance that we were, we were fueling nearly enough, but I think there’s a lot more education around it these days and it seems to be more, more accepted, more known, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have, a lot of some is still not fueling enough. I mean, it’s just, yeah, it just happens. At what point or what duration of a session would you consider having something within the session? Mm-hmm. So we store a certain amount of, where we wanna always go in well-fuelled and then going in well-fuelled, we use that energy in our training, but we also tap into our stored energy called glycogen and that lasts about 90 to 100 minutes of continuous movement of seven to 8% intensity. So I would say anything over the, if it’s for swimmers, running is a little bit different,

but for swimmers, I would say like 90 minutes, if that, you can get from A to B fine, but if it’s 90 minutes hard or a priority session, and if you’re also clearly hitting a wall at some point, that’s a really good indicator that you would benefit from having something within because the benefit of topping that up is it is energy for your muscles to use and we want an efficient session. So all it is is just making sure there’s energy available for our muscles to get from A to B well and have the stress and the stress come from the actual training session itself, not from your muscles running out of fuel. Knowing your own body, I would say for priority sessions, if it’s at that 90 minutes to two hours, then you could definitely benefit from something. And then if it’s within that 90 minutes to two hours or even one hour to two hour mark, you could just go lower and like 30 to 60 grams of carbs and then anything over the two hours,

that’s when we start increasing it slowly. But I always tell my kids the adolescence of like have emergency snacks in your back. Then you can run there, if you’re really hitting a wall, then you can run there and grab it. But it’s, I know there are a lot of barriers, like swimming, now having the experience myself of being in a squad. I was like, you can stop and have water. Like you can, there’s no excuse, like kind of thing. And then my first experience in a proper squad, I was like, looking at the clock, like, and there’s stuff everywhere and my water bottles over there and I’ve gone through the whole session and I don’t have anything. So I’m like, okay, there is barriers here, but we can also work around them and just try our best. But yeah, having that problem solving mentality, yes. And also the other thing with pool swimmers is the load is actually wild. It’s almost like an endurance training. So it can be four or five hours a day of swimming

for even just like the speed. So it’s making sure we’re fueling that and to have quality sessions. So we’re not ending the session, we’re not crawling to the end of the session and we’re not ending the sessions starving and ravenous. Yes. It always comes back to bite you. I think like I on a day where like a day I might go, might swim in the morning and it’s like a threshold session and it’s like, it’s a hard, it’s a hard main set. Like it might be 2100 is best average. Then I’ll run with a friend for 40 minutes and then I might go for a surf. That’s like be a big like Friday. And on the days that I don’t like, I know I just don’t eat enough. I’m like, I’d be fine, it’d be fine. And then by like three o’clock I am just, I’m looking for any chocolate, like anything I can get my hands on and I end up just eating crap. And so for me it’s, yeah, I just try and make sure that I feel enough because it always comes back to bite you.

And for me that comes to just having more like sugary, more processed food because I’m just, I’m ravenous and there’s nothing that I can do to kind of satiate it. And so yeah, it ends up just being poor nutrition or fueling. And that’s really common. I think it can also cause a bit of food noise and a bit of head noise. I find that with a lot of my clients that are new to open water swimming and to well, distance swimming. So they have never trained for that long or hard in their life. And they’re like, I’m hungry all day. And then I can’t concentrate at work kind of thing. So that’s actually one really big, one tweak of having something within, make sure you’re fueling your session, your two hour session and then having something that balanced breakfast within the hour after that has protein, has enough carbs, that helps later on in the day because when our brain is yelling at us or getting, having sugar cravings

our muscles prefer to run off glucose. Our brain only runs off glucose. So it’s not just necessarily screaming for like sugar. It’s like, I need energy man and you have not given me enough today. You’ve used me and now I need more. So, but then in today’s society it’s like it comes out with a sugar craving. But if you think about what where glucose comes from it also comes from sourdough and pasta. But it went in that moment when it’s intense we go for something that’s gonna get us, get it quick. So it’s not our fault. It’s just, that’s what happens. So it’s just being, having that curious mindset and thinking, yeah, what can I tweak tomorrow? Tomorrow’s a new day. What can I add to my training or add to my day afterwards? Cause also the busy, busy schedules like rushing from training to something or even double sessions is rule of thumb always having something between sessions. Not just for yourself there. That’s an awesome fun day.

But, and the other thing is yet when we enjoy our sport all of it is still sport and it’s all movement. So it’s all using energy but we don’t kind of classify it as that. But all moving from like pool to land or pool to gym, always having something between and getting into that routine. A few things that have helped me over the last couple of years is like having staples, having the same, something easy that I can throw together or having the car. So I get like these blue dinosaur protein bars. I just keep those in the car for after training. Just something easy on the way home before I have proper breakfast. It’s having like I normally have a sushi bowl for lunch. So it’s just like rice, tuna, cucumber, avocado. It’s just like something easy to throw together and it covers most of those, those macros there and that way it’s just, I know that if I’m short on time or if I am a raveness, I can throw that together pretty quickly

and just having those quick go-tos has made a big difference with making sure I do eat better and not resort to the more sugary stuff. And you waste money as well. I find if I’m the type of person that if I’m hungry I will go buy something straight away. Like, but knowing your capacity that week as well takes the pressure off. So going, I get a lot of clients put pressure on themselves and go, I must have everything fresh, homemade, no packaged foods. But then if you think about your capacity that week, if you’re a busy parent that’s also trying to train for Roto Channel Swim or something big or an Ironman, yet have kids busy, work full-time, that capacity that week is low. There’s no point putting extra stress or even then shame and guilt after if you’re not doing enough, like you’re doing a lot. So going, what can I lean on? Tuna, rice cup, bag salad mix, like that is actually fine. There’s a lot of really good convenient options

that we can call upon in those times because something’s better than nothing. And then, so what do, yeah, what do we have? Build your set, your environment up for success. Don’t underestimate the car snacks. That’s actually great. Having a little car snacks is a great hack and always having something in your bag because yeah, it does save money and it also helps you still feel like you’re fueling your body well because even if we grab those extra foods, it’s not necessarily horrible but we’re probably missing a meal to have that. So then we are probably underfueling as well. So yeah, knowing your capacity that week, if it’s a low capacity week, then calling upon those packaged foods that are still very nourishing and very fueling. And then if you have on a week, your high capacity, you can make homemade everything and homemade bars and meal prep. But there’s no point beating yourself up for trying this. No, that’s right.

And I think having the, like having that resistance to and trying to sort of fight the convenient option, like it just makes it worse. You know, like I’ve done a lot of like meal prep in the past and on a Sunday, you know, it’s like plan for the week and make some like music bars and granola and all this sort of stuff. But I haven’t done it for a while because I’ve just, I just haven’t. But then I think if you put the pressure on yourself and shame yourself for doing that, it only makes it worse. So just accept, all right, I’m busy this week. And yeah, I may have to resort to these more convenient options that aren’t perfect, but they are better than nothing. And it’s a little bit like the, like you mentioned with getting through training. Like the thing that stops most people performing on race day is that they’ve gotten injured or they’ve had to stop training for two or three weeks or four weeks because they’ve gotten sick.

And yeah, that’s what’s gonna impact you more. So just trying to train and be consistent is gonna get you so much further than trying to be perfect on everything. Yeah, I think people quick to the, I mean, like everyone we want kind of quick. We forget about the basics sometimes. So I normally, especially when educating adolescents I have this like priority pyramid and the bottom is just eating enough. And then we go to macro nutrients, micro nutrients timing around training. And then the top is supplements because a lot of them, especially I’ve noticed young kids coming out of conflict. Adolescents, teens going straight to the supplements. And I’m like, are you eating any food? There’s no point having your creatine if you’re not having enough carbohydrates. Like, but you can, it’s potentially something to talk about once you’ve gotten all of this correct. And then that’s the cherry on the top or it’s supplementing something that’s missing.

So it has to be used with a purpose and an intent not just a waste of money because they can also be expensive for your parents. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I was my, I think my dad who’s a swim coach and he was saying back when we were growing up we’d like, we’d often get our iron tested and he’s had that done recently with all of the, with all the swimmers in his squad at the moment. And it was something like, I think the ferritin levels should be at 50 as a minimum or something like that. And there were, and something like 80% of them or 90% of them were below that. And so what, I don’t know how much you know about like iron ferritin levels, but like is, how common is that in swimmers or endurance athletes? What causes it? How can you, how can you make sure you’ve got enough iron and enough ferritin? That is a very relevant topic. And I think I talk about it nearly every day because it is really common. So yeah, ferritin is our stored iron

which is a bit more, it’s a better measure to test as an indicative of our long-term iron storage. So when we look at ferritin, me with my dietitian or my sports dietetic brain on, I clock it at 50. And when it’s going below that, I’ll flag it with the athlete if they bring in their blood tests. If you’re just getting it done by the GP or the doctor, there’s ranges are slightly different. The bottom end could be 30 or could be 20, but I normally find 20 or 30, you’re still feeling pretty bad because not only it doesn’t just reduce your energy levels, the purpose of iron is to transport oxygen around your body to active working muscles. And we want, when we’re swimming, we need oxygen to the active working muscles. So it can affect our performance as well, even if we’re not necessarily feeling super flat. So definitely the things I’ll check for is like our iron, our B12 and even vitamin D, which is kind of wild for the pool swimmers

because well, some people train inside and then go work inside or train in the morning, even if it’s an outside pool, it still could be low vitamin D, which is quite wild. So they’re the things that can really affect our performance and our energy levels. When we’re talking about our iron, we get it through our diet, through a few different types of food. So there’s two types, there’s our heme iron, which comes from animal based products. And that is more readily absorbed by the body. And what we think about like red meat, that’s why they say you need to eat more meat kind of thing when you think about iron. And the other one is called our non heme iron, which comes from plant based sources, which is a little bit less readily absorbed by the body, but there is certain ways we can enhance absorption, like having it with a source of vitamin C, they can help absorption and having it away from things that inhibit absorption,

like our tea, coffee, high amounts of calcium. Like if you had a, you wouldn’t take an iron tablet and a calcium supplement together kind of thing. Or you wouldn’t take your iron supplement, drinking a coffee. Ideally you want to separate them for absorption, but requirements are just quite high, to be honest. It goes from adolescents, males and females, like eight, like the levels eight for requirements a day milligrams. And then for females, when they get their period, it goes up to 15, and then after 18, it goes up to 18 milligrams a day and guys stay at eight. So eight compared to 18, it’s actually a lot to get in your diet. So I find the common cause is rather higher losses, which could be through a heavy menstrual cycle. So more bleeding, it could be athletes just working hard. They don’t actually know what. So there’s these levels, but we don’t, there’s not a specific level, if you’re an athlete that you should strive for,

it’s just, we want adequate iron stores probably a bit more. So, but there’s not a specific level yet that they’ve figured out. We just know it’s high. I just get my athletes, if they can do like a yearly blood tests to make sure it’s going up and we can try optimize it as much in our diet as we can. But then sometimes we do have to supplement in times of heavy training or maybe if they have a really heavy cycle and then look deeper into why aren’t you absorbing it? If your, if our diet is perfect, where’s it going, what’s happening? So then we look down the path of something like celiac disease can be quite common with chronic low iron or is there something happening with our cycle? But then we have the medical team on board as well and we can all collaborate together. But long story long, it’s good to check your blood tests if you’re an athlete. Yeah, that’s really good. And it’s, I would imagine that small test pool

is probably pretty indicative of what would be happening with a lot of, at least adolescent swimmers, but also probably adults swimmers who are training consistently and triathletes as well. So I found that very interesting. So that’s, it’s good to know and something that I don’t think probably gets considered a lot, you know, like iron deficiency necessarily, probably by you, because that’s your will, but not by your average Joe, not by like, yeah, average person. And runners as well is actually, that’s a good little point to add on to that is runners, it’s really common as well because your foot strike also, well, that reoccurring foot strike also enhances your iron losses as well. So if you’re a runner, a triathlete,

then that can also increase your requirements too. How’s that, how’s that work? That sounds like a bit of a strange thing. It’s weird, all the little blood vessels on your feet, they kind of, they, well, I don’t think that’s actually the proper term, they don’t burst, but that’s how I describe it because I’m a very visual person and they regenerate as well. So it can increase your iron losses. Interesting. First time I’ve heard that, the last one. Little addition. Yeah, yeah, there we go. Well, Eliza, appreciate you being on the podcast. For anyone who’s listening to this and they are looking for some help with their diet or nutrition or they’re experiencing any of the things we’ve kind of covered here, what’s the best way to get in touch with you? Probably through either Instagram or my website, I would say, and then through there, just submit in inquiry or ask me any questions. I would love that. Excellent. What is your website and Instagram?

True, that’s a good point. It’s Fluid Performance Nutrition. That is my website and my Instagram. I always freak out when I’m put on the spot. It’s Fluid Underscore Performance Nutrition.

Great, we’ll put that in the show notes for everyone. So yeah, great to catch up again after being up in the Kimberley and I appreciate you sharing your insights on the podcast. I’m sure this would be relevant for a lot of people who are listening. I know I’ve got some good stuff from this, particularly on the iron as well. I haven’t had mine tested, but I would imagine it’s probably low. So might get a blood test. Thanks for having me. Awesome, thank you. See you later. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Why You’re (Likely) Under-Fuelling And Under-Performing with Eliza Kelly appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

How To Swim Freestyle With (Almost) Zero Effort

Want to swim freestyle with less effort while moving faster through the water? In this episode, Brenton shares the three key principles that make freestyle feel smooth and effortless: improving your balance and body position, using rotation to maximize efficiency, and timing your stroke and kick so your whole body works together. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced swimmer looking to conserve energy, these simple technique adjustments can help you swim farther, faster, and with much less effort.

00:46 The #1 Secret: Let the Water Hold You Up

01:23 Head Position for Better Balance

02:59 Use Your Lungs to Improve Buoyancy

04:29 Step 2: Rotate for an Effortless Stroke

05:15 Relax Your Recovery

07:40 Step 3: Master Your Stroke Timing

11:53 Beginner vs Faster Freestyle Programs

Transform your freestyle to be effortless and smooth with online video analysis:

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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer, and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. In this video I’m going to share with you the easiest way to swim freestyle with almost zero effort. If you look at the smoother swimmers at your local pool, you’ll notice that they’re probably not trying harder than you. They might not even be fitter than you. But what they do really well is they know how to let the water support them and balance their body and how to use their catch, their rotation, their kick and their timing to help propel themselves forward with very little effort. So in today’s video I’m going to share with you the three things that will help you swim freestyle for almost no effort, but it’ll make you look smooth, it’ll help you move through the water very comfortably and it might even be a little bit faster than what

you’re currently doing. So the first thing that we want to make sure we get in place is that we let the water hold us up. We let the water balance our body because if we’re swimming in a way where our hips and legs are really low, it takes so much effort to overcome that. And the very first thing I always go to is head position because your head weighs five or six kilos, so how you hold your head in the water can really impact what happens out the back of your body. So the way I like to think of this is we look anywhere from straight down to 45 degrees and more importantly think of your head like an iceberg where just the top of it, 10% or so is above the water, but the majority of it is below. And that’s one thing that will help you balance in the water. Now, the second part of this is how you hold your body. And this is your posture. Now, you may never have thought about posture before when you swim, but posture

is very, very important. And the reason for that is if you have bad posture or poor posture when you swim and the way I think of that is like a teenager lying on the couch, hunched through the shoulders. It’s really hard to firstly use your stronger muscles like your lats. Secondly, your body is going to have this curve through it and it won’t have this tautness through the frame. And we want to be like a needle, not like a noodle in the water. So we need to think about being tall and proud and really long through the body. And the other part of that posture is imagine you’re trying to squeeze into a tight pair of jeans where if you did that squeezing here, you’d suck your tummy and you’d squeeze your butt cheeks together. I’ve got that from Andy Donaldson, which is a good way of thinking about it. Now, with that posture and frame of the body, we have this tautness or this little bit of tension through the body so we’re not wriggling and moving around.

And that is the real key to then being able to use your lungs for balance and buoyancy. Because for most people, your buoyancy will come from your lungs, the air that’s in there. So if you imagine you’ve got a balloon, you try and push it down. It’s really hard to do. It wants to come back up because of all the air. Now, we’ve got a similar thing here in our chest with our lungs. So if we hold our body tall and proud and we apply a little bit of downwards force through the chest, that’s going to help bring the hips up and the legs up because that’s going to change the balance of our body for the better. So we need to do those couple of things to make sure that we are horizontal and not dragging our toes along the surface of the bottom of the pool. Now, the third part there is with our legs. What do we want to do with our legs? They are not necessarily for propulsion, even though you’ll get a little bit from it.

Your legs are more to help you rotate to the other side and to help counterbalance you as well. So the way I see the legs working is it’s not like we’re using them to kick really hard and move ourselves forwards. It’s like if you were to throw a ball, you’ve got something stable to press off of and then you can really throw a ball fast and a long way. But in the water, we’ve got nothing stable to really work with. So our legs out behind us are providing that counterbalance to work with, to be able to press off and help us rotate to the other side. So that’s the main purpose of it. And the key to swimming with almost no effort and making sure your legs do the right thing is I want you to feel like you’re bringing everything into the center, like you’re almost bringing your inner thighs together and we’re just doing this little flick of the foot and that little flick of the foot is going to help you rotate to the other side

as opposed to doing this big kick like you’re riding a bike, for example. So if you can do those three things, that means that you’ll be horizontal. You’ll feel the water supporting you. And that is step number one to swimming with freestyle with almost no effort. So the second step in swimming easy freestyle is using our rotation to help us recover easily and to help us reach and be long in the stroke. So we’ve built the frame of our body. The next step is we’ve got to rotate side to side. Now, we need to rotate enough so that we can comfortably recover our arm over the top of the water. Because if we stay flat, it’s really hard to get the arm over the top because our shoulder just doesn’t work very well that way. So we need to rotate enough to comfortably get the arm over the top. Now, the important thing here with our recovery is that it’s called recovery because we shouldn’t be tense and shouldn’t be stiff.

So I like to think of a relaxed hand or relaxed wrist as I come over the top of the water. And we want to be opening up this underarm here, almost showing this underarm to the side of the pool. And we want to feel like the elbow is the thing that’s almost carrying the rest of the arm over the top. That is how we have this relaxed recovery. Whereas a lot of times people will be very stiff and very tense as they come through. So we want this sense of relaxation over the top. And your arm weighs a couple of kilos. So that means that when we swing this arm forwards, we generate some momentum with it. And if we do this in a relaxed way, we carry that momentum forwards. And then as we enter the water, we want to enter fingers first with our elbow up. Because in that position, we’re going to carry that momentum in and send it out in front of the shoulder. And that’s where we start to get that feeling of like we’re skating through the water

or gliding through the water without much effort. Now, once we enter with our fingers, we want to feel like we are just straightening the arm in front. Don’t feel like you are spearing the arm in because it can cause you to do some funny things. We want to feel like we are just straightening the arm and that will send us out in front. Now, you’ll notice as I rotate, that also gives me a little bit more length in the stroke. I get a little bit further up here. And so generally a longer body is going to be a faster body. So that will help us get an extra few centimeters within the length of our stroke as well. So we want to rotate enough to comfortably recover and enough so that we can get into a good long position and strong position with our arm out in front of us. And a good position there to start is making sure your hand and your fingers are about underarm depth when we finish extending forwards. Because that’s where we’re going to be most streamlined

and that is a really good place to then begin our catch. Because what we don’t want to do is enter and drift up and put the brakes on as we call it. But we drift up and press against that water because that’s going to slow us down. I also don’t like it when swimmers go too deep with the hand because if you’re starting that far below your shoulder, that does create quite a bit of drag on the arm. So I like to teach get to shoulder depth when you finish extending forwards. And so our starting position or our base position every time is arm up here, rotated on the side, that is where we’re going to be very streamlined. And if you can transition from that position here to that position on the other side and you do that on a continuous basis, that’s when you start to get that feeling of this effortless way of moving through the water. But that’s not going to be enough. We need to make sure we do step three.

Step three to swimming freestyle with almost no effort is making sure that we time the stroke correctly and that we do something effective with our arms. So we use them as for propulsion. Now, the timing of our stroke should be what I’d consider front quadrant. Now, all front quadrant means is that if you split the body into four quarters, the front quadrant would be always having an arm above our head or in front of our head if we’re swimming. And the way that we do that is we need to make sure we’re patient with our arm as we’re extending forwards in front. So the last thing we want to do is enter and immediately go down. Even though it feels like we’ve got to get going when we want to pull through, you’re actually better off entering and extending out in front and rotating at the same time because you’ll be longer in the water and you’ll also be more streamlined in the water. And more importantly, it’ll help with your timing.

So if you keep that arm in front a little bit longer as you’re extending out and you give this arm a little bit of a chance to not catch up completely, but catch up almost to it. So we get to this position here where this arm is about to begin what we call the catch and this one is about to pass our head. That will mean you’ve always got something in front of your head. And the reason that’s really helpful for swimming freestyle with almost no effort is because then we get to coordinate all these different parts of our body together. So we first to get to begin the catch here. So we’re starting to press back. The momentum from this arm is going to come over and then we’re going to tie that together with our shoulder rotation where everything goes together. And that means that we’re not just swimming with our arms and our legs separately. It means we get to tie in the whole body. And that’s where you can really start to notice that difference.

So take a little bit of time to reach out. This arm comes through and then we swap. We swap. So almost this arrow position is like your trigger point. That is when we start to swap. So that’s the timing that we need. The next thing is with our arms, we want to make sure that we’ve got a good amount of surface area pressing back on the water. Now, the way that we do that is we want to get a high elbow catch. But rather than thinking of a high elbow catches, your elbow needs to be right up near the surface. That’s not a good way to think of it. Really, it just means the hand’s got to be a bit higher than the fingers. But the way I would think of it is if we’re looking on the side and we were to draw a line from my shoulder to my fingers, that elbow should be somewhere above that imaginary line. And that way we’ve got our hand and forearm, which is our big paddle, that’s going to be pushing backwards. And that means we’re going to move forwards with it.

So the way to do this is to not think of your catch as the power phase of the stroke, but think of it as the setup phase of the stroke. And all that means is we don’t want to muscle that initial movement because we’re not very strong overhead. And our main goal there is to get a high elbow catch, meaning we need the hand and forearm to face backwards. And it’s easier to do it if we go for something like a four or a five out of 10, in terms of the effort and the power through the catch, instead of a 10 out of 10. That’s where a lot of people try and rip hard at the water, which we don’t want to do, particularly at the start of the underwater phase of the arm. So in order to get that high elbow position, there’s two things that I think of. One is we want to get the fingers to point down. And secondly, we want the elbow to bend or fold. So it moves out to the side, it moves a little bit wider than the hand while it’s moving down.

And that gives us a space to be able to set up this high elbow position. Then you end up getting this big armful of water, which you can then accelerate back past the hip, and that is what’s gonna help move you forwards. There’s a number of drills you can do, which we’ve got inside of our membership, and you’ll probably see on this channel as well. But the main thing is we need to point the fingers down, let that elbow go out to the side. Now the last thing that’s gonna help you swim with effortless freestyle, where it just feels very, very easy, is to use our kick the right way. And your kick does not provide that much propulsion for most of the swimmers that I coach, but it’s very important to do it well. The main role of your kick is actually to help you rotate to the other side and provide a little bit of a counterbalance and stability out behind you. So the way that your kick works is when you’re reaching forwards

and you’re about to start your catch. So you’re in this streamlined position on the side. Your kick on that leg that is lowest in the water there, or the side that you’re on, that’s going to, you’re gonna kick down and that’s gonna help you start rotating back onto the other side. And that’s what’s then gonna help you go through your catch and your pull through, and you’ll be rotating back and that will get everything to work together. So if we’ve got something like what we’d call a two beat kick, which is one kick per arm stroke, then that kick is gonna be the thing that will help you initiate the rotation back onto the other side. And that is when you time that well, that is when it becomes really easy. So the way you can think of that, there’s two different ways to think of your kick timing. One is you can think of your opposite hand entering the water when your other leg kicks down. So that might be your left hand

enters the water as your right leg kicks downwards. Now the other way you can think of it is think of your catch happening at the same time. The leg on that side is kicking. So same side kick and catch. Now it doesn’t matter which one you think of, they’re kind of the same thing because if you think about it, your left hand is gonna be entering roughly when your right hand is finishing the catch and you can kick down on that right leg. Same thing, just a different way to think about it. Now that’s a little bit more advanced for a lot of swimmers, particularly if you’re new. But if you can get that right and use that kick to help you rotate back onto the other side, then your freestyle and your timing will feel very easy and that’s where it starts to feel effortless. Now if you’re not sure where to start, we have two courses available. One is our beginner freestyle program. The other one is our eight week faster freestyle program.

I’ll put the links below. If you’re a beginner and you’re struggling to go more than 100 meters, get the beginner course. If you can swim 400 meters without stopping, then the eight week faster freestyle course would be the best option. I’ll include those below. Thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe. We put out videos every single week to help you swim faster. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

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