Effortless Swimming

In this episode, Quest Meeks shares his inspiring journey of transforming from a non-swimmer to comfortably swimming over 1000 yards without stopping. He opens up about the mental and physical obstacles he had to overcome along the way.  Join us as we dive into this episode!

This podcast is brought to you by NanoClear — our own range of anti-fog swim goggles, designed by Effortless Swimming with the anti-fog treatment bonded into the lens itself (not sprayed on, so it doesn’t wear off after a few swims). Check out the NanoClear anti-fog swimming goggles here and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off.

for me to sign up for a half iron man knowing good and darn well, I don’t swim. The idea is that you’re pushing your mental boundaries and limitations. If you believe you can do it and you put in the time and energy, then you get it done. After about 150, I was very tired and I was not breathing easy at all. And that was a mental limitation for me because when I see videos of people who swim well and even when I’m at the pool and somebody else is in another lane, who I know is a good swimmer because it looks effortless and inviting. It looks like they just slowly turn and they take a big gulp of air, maybe spit some out if they’ve got too much air and then they turn and they go back to it. And it’s just like I’m after 150, I’m gasping. 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.

Before we dive into it, I want to let you know about our upcoming freestyle clinics that we are holding. We’ve got clinics in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane. I’m going to have one clinic in Perth, so you’ll have to jump in quick to secure a spot there. And then I’m also going to be over in Queenstown in the South Island, New Zealand. So if you are anywhere near the South Island over there, I’ll be running some clinics in November over there in Queenstown. So go to our website, EffortlessSwimming.com, go to the Freestyle Clinic section and you’ll see the details on how to book there. Now, in today’s episode, this is a rebroadcast of an episode that we did two years ago. And this was our most popular episode of the year, and it was with a guest called Quest Meeks. And on this episode, Quest details his journey on how he went from a non-summer to being able to swim a thousand yards or more than a thousand yards

comfortably without stopping. And I think this was our most popular episode because Quest has got a very interesting story, but he also details some of the mental hurdles he had to overcome, some of the physical hurdles he had to overcome. He was a fit and strong guy, but he really found swimming a challenge. So hearing him talk about how he was able to get himself to the point where he could relax, could be comfortable in the water and move in an official way, he details that really well. So let’s jump into the episode with Quest Meeks. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Quest Meeks. Quest, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, man. It’s a pleasure to be on. I’m excited to even be in the position to talk swimming with someone based on how horrible my swimming was when I started out maybe a few years ago and even as recently as a few months ago when I signed up as a stroke analysis member.

So it’s great to be on for many reasons. Well, I’m excited to have you on because when you sent that message, maybe it’s like a week or two ago, you basically said, I swam 1,150 yards continuous and so it wasn’t a fluke the first time I did it. I was like, that is that’s awesome because you started like we started working together fairly recently and your progress over that time has been really, you know, it’s been really impressive. So I thought it’d be great to have you on the podcast to share what you’ve changed and what you’ve gone through to, you know, go from almost the beginners from making 50, 100 meters and kind of struggling to get further than that to then where you’re at today, being able to swim over a thousand yards continuously and just feeling much more comfortable in the water. So to sort of kick it off, what’s your background with swimming? Did you learn to swim as a kid at all? Or is this just something you started as an adult?

Yeah, so originally I didn’t learn to swim as a kid at all. No swim lessons, anything. And the interesting thing is I recall growing up, I grew up mostly just south of Seattle and Washington State. And I had friends who would go to the lake during the summer and I always wanted to go. And I think my parents were always told me no, but were really concerned because they were like, you don’t know how to swim. You might drown in the lake, but at no point did it click for them or for me to say like, let’s get swim lessons and then you can go to the lake. It was just like, don’t go to the lake. So all throughout my childhood, no swim lessons didn’t do any major swimming. Um, at some point in like my late teenage years to early adulthood, I came to believe I had the ability to like mimic a breaststroke so that I could like, if I fell into a pool, I could, I could mimic that. And that would get me out of the pool, which maybe happened once or twice in life.

And it wasn’t until I took my first job after grad school, which was based in Southwest Georgia. And there just like, wasn’t a lot to do, wasn’t a lot going on. So I found all sorts of ways to fill my time that I stopped and thought like, it’s a little ridiculous that you don’t know how to swim. And your best case scenario is maybe you fall into a pool and you mimic breaststroke and then you won’t drown that way. So I actually signed up for an adult swim class. This was at the age of 25 at the YMCA in Southwest Georgia. And this adult swim class was taught by a teenager. And just like a bridge version of this story is, you know, I’m already pretty self-conscious as a 25-year-old going to this adult swim class. As it turns out, I was the only person who had signed up for that session of the adult swim class. So when I arrived, I check in at the front desk and say, I’m there for the adult swim class, which is, you know,

I had to get over a bit of my embarrassment to do that. And everybody, the person at the front desk, they called the manager over who was managing the facility. It was like, what are you talking about? There’s no swim class because they had internally canceled it because I was the only one to sign up. Nobody had told me or called me or communicated with me about it. So here I am in my swim trunks. I’ve got my flip-flops on and I’m just like, it ends with me sitting in the facility manager’s office, just like explaining like, you know, everything I’ve shared with you so far, like, no, I never took lessons as a kid. I don’t know how to swim. I got up the courage to sign up. And so basically after hearing my sob story, I think she’s felt bad enough for me and ended up, there was a lifeguard on duty who was a teenager. And she asked her whether she would be willing to just like start teaching the like four week series swim, swim class, which would only be me.

And, you know, I don’t want to put too much on the young lady, but suffice it to say she was non-plus about the idea of teaching the swim class that day and certainly not teaching me, which she made clear with her facial expressions in the office to her boss with me sitting there just looking up there. And she’s like, you’re going to do it. So we head out and it’s like me and this young lady and she’s going to teach us swim class. And I get in the water and she’s asking me about my history of a swimmer. So she knows where to start. And I tell her all the things I’ve told you and she says, all right. Well, you say you can mimic breaststroke, like show me what you can do.

And at the same time, some of her friends from school were at the pool. And so she’s sitting poolside talking to them. I start doing my mock breaststroke and I have pretty decent upper body strength. Don’t know any form other than I’m just doing this. And like I’ve got my goggles on. I kind of put my head down and I’m going and I finally just get to the point where I’m like, all right, I’m a bit tired. I feel like I’ve shown her enough what limited skill I have. So I stop only to realize I’ve swam into the deep end. So I push my feet down and I then can’t touch the ground. And I look down and realize into the deep end. I freak out. I start flailing and struggling. I can kind of see out of my blurry goggles with water splashing all over in front of me that I seem to have caught her attention and I just start doing. I play out, you know, I play out what the fear I’d had my whole life of like, well, you’ll fall into a pool and you’re going to have to use the spot

to get back to the shallow end. And I get back over to her and she goes, is everything OK? And I was like, no, swim lessons over for the day. And so that was my first swim lesson. And that just wasn’t a good start for me trying to to get comfortable in the water. But with that said, I never had any fear of the water or putting my face in the water or anything. So that was how I started with swim lessons. And I finished that series, really didn’t end up with any more skill than I started with, which was, all right, I’m not going out to anybody’s lake or river for recreational swimming. I’m not coming to a pool for recreational swimming. I’m not swimming laps, but I feel a little bit more confident in my foe breaststroke if I fall into a pool because it’s battle tested. It’s field tested at this point. So so I kind of left swimming at that point. Felt like I checked the box and at least taken an adult swim class

and I left it alone. So flash forward to so this was that was when I was 25. So that was probably 2008. So flash forward to about a decade. I’ve had a few jobs in my career. I’ve moved around a good bit. And I’m living in New Orleans and I get the bright idea. I have this buddy, Trey Monahan, and he and I take turns putting the battery in each other’s back to do kind of these crazy things. So we signed up for and ran ultramarathons together. We signed up for and trained to do the berf, which is this kind of really physically involved what’s become a CrossFit workout, but was started by this Navy SEAL that was killed in action in a workout he used to do on military bases and it basically involves doing all these pull-ups, push-ups and squats with a 20 pound vest. And I’m not a very big dude at all and not super strong. So the idea of being able to pull that off with the vest on seemed impossible. And so Trey and I signed up and did that together.

And it all the common thread is, you know, I personally, and I think Trey shares this vision and thought like to sign up for things that seem physically impossible when we sign up for it. And so we kind of centered around this idea of doing a half Ironman. Mind you, Britain, I have never done a triathlon in my life. At the time in 2018 when we decided on this, I did not own a road bike or any bicycle and my swimming skill at that time, I had left off a decade earlier with my four week swim class with the YMCA high school teacher. So as far as I’m concerned, you know, I am a runner and I was a runner and we’d done ultra marathon at that point. So the running piece of it, fine. Cycling, I can get there. And but wanted to sign up for this because the idea of being able to swim 1.2 miles still to this day seems impossible. It seems more probable now after working with you. But in 2018, I was like, I’ll never be able to do this.

So let’s sign up for it and try it and push ourselves. So in 2018, we’re gonna do a half Ironman and really where I need to put my focus is swimming. So my buddy Trey, he can swim, has been a good swimmer his whole life, grew up and as his family had lake properties and so they’d spend summers on the lake. So he would have been one of those friends who was going to the lake that I would have just not been able to join. So I gotta get swimming right. And so my next foray into swim training was I thought, man, I gotta start with some basics. I talked to a few folks who are triathletes and triathlon coaches who had done half Ironmans in New Orleans and gotten pools and they were like, man, your swimming is really bad. You gotta get some basics down. So I found a local swim class by this guy who I don’t know if this is his real name or just a monarchy he goes by because it makes sense in his profession but his name is Mr. Fish.

And so he was teaching children’s and adult beginner swim classes. So I signed up for the 10 week series with Mr. Fish or it was 10 lessons. It might have been two lessons a week with Mr. Fish. And the first day I go, we get in the pool and it’s me and maybe four or five other adults. And the first thing Mr. Fish has everybody do is like, let’s spend 20 minutes getting comfortable with the water. And so we’re putting our face in the water and blowing bubbles. And it just was like, that was not my mode. And to be clear, I’m not denigrating anybody who starts at that point because there are people who you gotta start where you gotta start. But I’m highlighting that because I think in some of what we’ll talk about one of the things that kept me from progressing initially was I had this concept and I would hear over and over that you have to get comfortable in the water to be able to swim well because relaxation makes it easier

for you to apply and float in those things. And I struggled making that click because I’m not afraid of the water. Like even though I swim like trash like I’ll get in the water, I’ll put my face in the water I’ll try to float in the water and as long as it’s not in the deep end and there’s no real risk of drowning like I don’t have that in like entry level level of fear of the water. And so Mr. Fish started everybody with kind of blowing bubbles and I was just like, oh man, I need the cliff notes of this I need to flash ahead something because like this is, I know what I need to do. I’m on a mission. I’ve gotta be able to swim 1.2 miles and I’m not gonna get there blowing bubbles in the water. So we largely did that and like they, Mr. Fish was great. I think for the lessons that he provided for really what his target demographic was, I came out of those 10 sessions with probably like a greater confidence where I think I could comfortably start

at one end of the pool and swim to the other end and not worry about drowning in the drowning in the deep end. Like I’d swim past the deep end and to the other side of the pool. So that was progress but nowhere near the progress I would need to attain to be able to swim the half Ironman distance. And so I started talking to more half Ironman coaches,

a few folks who were kind enough to give me pointers on swimming but really I kept running into the same problem of folks would say like, look I can train you in your overall triathlon training, your overall half Ironman training and I can even give you swim sets as part of that overall training but there weren’t a lot of folks who were swim specific coaches geared towards working with people who were generally athletic and had this goal of swimming distance for whatever reason but starting at the beginning. And so it was kind of this gap of a need. I didn’t need the Uber beginning coach like Mr. Fish but I also wasn’t advanced enough to take the swim sets given by the triathlon coaches. And so something significant happened in kind of my swim journey. I ended up taking a new job and moving to New York and I met this guy who runs an organization or a group he calls CAN-O-C-A-N-A-W stands abbreviation for CAN and will

and the whole focal point of his organization and the philosophy is similar to the very thing that guided me and Trey to sign up for all these physical feats and for me to sign up for a half Ironman knowing good and darn well I don’t swim. The idea is that you’re pushing your mental boundaries and limitations. If you believe you can do it and you put in the time and energy then you get it done. So he and I put in some work in pools in New York he really was the first person and coach to push me and was the first coach to be in that kind of sweet spot of I understand you’re an athletic person you have this significant athletic goal but we need to start you with the basics and we’ll push along the way. And so we were starting to work at a good clip had gotten to the point where I could probably swim 50 yards without feeling the need to stop or being completely exhausted but ended up having to in that training because I have had Crohn’s disease

since my last year in college and it just started to with the change of the new job I was traveling a good bit the New York pace of life is a bit faster and a bit more aggressive and just like things went completely haywire and so ended up getting really sick on that front had a rough end of 2019 that was a rough 2020 generally all together aside from the issues with the pandemic but also ended with me having three major surgeries at the end of 2020. So it just put a halt to any of my physical activity being sick from Crohn’s for most of that year and then trying to recuperate from surgeries and so got through those three surgeries in August, October and December of 2020 and then January really kind of renewed my focus

my verb, my desire to push myself kind of in many forms but really physically because after all the surgeries I had just such a renewed appreciation for you’re not promised physical well-being and health and so if you find yourself with it

cherish it and do with it what you want in the time that you have it and what I choose to do is really try to push myself

to see what’s possible and really exceeding like mental boundaries and so I really started to focus and fixate again on this idea of doing a half Ironman because in my mind I had unfinished business and it still seemed completely impossible to be able to do the swimming portion because where I’d left off midway through 2019 I can only swim 50 yards without being completely exhausted. So I started working with some physical therapists based in New Orleans. These guys, Mirage and RT who run the stride shop and they focus on physical therapy with runners and so we started working on trying to get me back to running form because that’s always been my base to the extent that I consider myself an athlete in my adult age I’m a runner but really what they helped me do was when I walked in to see them for the first session in January of 2021 post the three surgeries like I was struggling to stand up straight because I just kind of been hunched over

and kind of really feeble and not able to walk more than a few blocks at a time without getting exhausted. So what they helped me do with the ultimate goal of getting me back to running was just really start to rebuild my body and so we went through that process and maybe about five or six months into that where I finally was comfortably jogging and running and standing up straight and able to work out with the good folks at Cypress Fitness and lifting weights and felt strong in my body. I just, I started to probably and I want to say it was May or June. I just started often to hear like the voice in the back of my head saying butt swimming, you know?

You’re hitting these strength sessions and my trainer is Brian with Cypress Fitness and like I was doing stronger than I had been and like feeling good and every time he’d like put significant weight on the or hand me significant weight whatever the exercise was I’d do it and I swear I would hear this voice butt swimming and the same thing with the strideshop guys like I started running and like got from walking to jogging and I’m running again and I finished running five miles for the first time and feel good and just have a hear butt swimming and so I started to go down that rabbit hole again and so started the same process where I’d left off a few years before I reached out to triathlon coaches that live in and around the New Orleans area and it was kind of the same process. Folks were incredibly generous with their time, met with me at pools, watched some video that my girlfriend was kind of up to shoot with me

in pools and it was back to that same spot of like look man here’s the exercise you need to start you need to be able to do the swim work these are the swim workouts you need to be able to do to start down the path of training for a half hour and people gave me advice about you know what I needed to do to get stronger in swimming but these folks are triathlon coaches not really just swim specific coaches for athletes and so they’re like I don’t have a lot of time to just meet you and watch you and help you focus on swim and so I started getting in the pool more because one thing I heard consistently from folks is you have to swim you got to get in the pool so I started forcing myself to go three times a week at minimum no matter how much time I spent in the pool no matter how much I at many yards I swim just go to the pool get in the pool and I even signed it up I signed up for after a recommendation from a friend

I signed up for a quarter of tower 26 and those guys are top notch I’ve heard I know I think you’ve either been on Coach Jerry’s podcast or vice versa or maybe both so I think that they are really good coaches and have like a great program but where I where it wasn’t the right fit for me was again that same problem of I joined in during the race ready phase and I would look at some of the swim workouts and I was like race ready man I can only swim 50 yards without stopping and to give some context because I know one of the big reasons you wanted to chat with me

was there are probably a lot of folks who listen to your podcast who consume your content and social media that are similarly situated in terms of starting off and trying to build significant swimming ability when I say I could swim 50 yards and then would be gassed or tired and I timed this because I kept having the conversation with people and they wouldn’t understand what I meant when I said I’m gassed I would swim 50 yards and I would need at least three minutes and 45 seconds before I could swim another stroke and I wasn’t like swimming 50 yards taking three minutes and 45 seconds of a break

and then swimming another 50 yards that was if I wanted to swim another 25 like that’s how gassed I was

so you know I had access to all of the or the to the tower 26 workouts kind of that came out week by week and I would look and I’d be like I’m not doing four sets of 100 anything I can’t do one 100 and one of the big things that jumped out to me that made me think like I’ve got so much work to do and this might not be the right resource for me at this time was like they would have you put in your 100 yard your best 100 yard time and I was like zero I can’t do it basically can’t do it so I got nothing and so I think at the same time as I was starting to realize like this might be a more advanced resource then will work for me at this time I signed up for the effortless swim annual subscription which you know you know well I need to explain to you your product but like it gets you access to a lot of the workouts and lessons and videos that you have available and I was like okay I’m gonna just start consuming content I’m gonna watch YouTube videos

I watched a lot of effortless swim YouTube videos I watched in tower 26 YouTube videos there are a few other resources where I just like I’m a visual feedback learner so when I’m trying to do something I want to watch people who do it well do it I want to then try it and I’m usually best if I can videotape myself doing it and I can watch it and I can see the difference between the way the person who does it really well does it and how I do it and what’s off and then I can do that as a loop and try to get better and better so I just started watching as much video as I can and I started getting in the pool and I would go and I would work out and just like

I was getting more fit and I know this because just by watching more video

doing as much as I could of the tower 26 workouts and just modifying them to my ability which to be clear if they listed four by 100 I was doing eight by 50 with like a good three minutes in between and it just that would be I would either have to I wouldn’t do eight by 50 I just do two by 50 so that I wouldn’t be in the pool for hours and hours and so I finally got to the point I want to say it was

July or August

so late summer I swam a hundred without stop

and I can’t remember the exact time I think this is right but it was like 214 and I was when I say I was gassed I got out of the pool I was left for the day because I thought I might have an asthma attack and pass out of the pool and drown in the shallow end of this pool I was swimming

but I was so ecstatic that like I could put a time as slow as I thought it was that I could put a time into the tower 26 page but it also made me realize like okay there

I have the ability to progress

this rate of progression is too slow to be able to swim to do a half Ironman by the end of 2022 but it is it is a more significant rate of progression than going from 25 yards to 50 yards over 10 years so I’m an optimist by nature so I was like all right we got something to work with and I think it was around that time that

I know exactly I was struggling to remember what caught my eye about the effortless swim stroke analysis subscription I know exactly what it was I was listening to one of your podcast and in that particular podcast you advertised that

you were going to offer like a stroke analysis of one video for a member you’re going to pick somebody at random and I was like oh let’s see if this is not being worthwhile so I sent the link to my video wrote you a note and then it just got me thinking and I sent you a separate note asking for details about stroke analysis the stroke analysis subscription and I realized you know what

if I want to fully commit to this you seem like from all of your content that I consumed

you really understand swimming you have a good brain for it and I was like look I’ll pay for the stroke analysis we’ll try it for a bit and either we’ll see some more significant progress than going from 50 yards to 100 yards in two months or we won’t and I can at least say I tried it and I will say that I’ll confess that I like a lot of people these days before making that decision to join the stroke analysis membership really fell victim to this idea that there’s a hack for everything I think that a lot of ways when I was watching YouTube videos of swimming or listening to podcasts about swimming or getting advice from local triathlon coaches or people I had the benefit of talking to you know I kept thinking like oh you know there’s one type of workout if I just do that type of workout three times a week then by you multiply that by however many sessions and in two months I’ll be swimming and it just ain’t that you got to put in the work

yeah it’s not a nice secret to it is it no not at all not at all and so I signed up for the stroke analysis and it has been phenomenal not not to overly plug you on your own podcast but I

I give credit for my progression from somebody who at best could do 100 yards without stopping to now

I can I’m gonna have to swim this week I’m gonna comfortably be able to go out and do 1200 yards without stopping to having the stroke analysis subscription because one I think you you have amazingly high swim IQ in terms of coaching having been a swimmer yourself I think your level of patience was phenomenal and helpful and then for me in particular that audio feed or visual feedback loop that I described earlier which is the best way I learn it’s great because then I’m getting the benefit of not only I can watch all the swim video of people who swim really well that I want on YouTube and throughout the effortless swim general subscription that you have the videos you have available but also then I get the benefit of watching my swimming and then having your feedback and analysis of my swimming so that it highlights and pin points exactly what I’m doing wrong and what I need to focus on and we just keep sending videos and we see what gets better

we see what kind of what got better and maybe what got worse and so that’s that’s been that’s been I think the difference maker along with a few other things but I realized I’ve also kind of been I ran you soup to nuts

I want to make sure I have a gut I have a few more things to share that I think were helpful in terms of what were the difference makers for me getting me to the point where I could swim more than a thousand yards without stopping but I want to make sure I’m I’m talking about the things that you think will be helpful for your listeners too yeah well I appreciate the

the sort of history of your swimming there because particularly that first lesson you got as a 25-year-old I didn’t know about that and to come back and you know be willing to swim again when you’ve had that experience good on you because you know it’s it takes a lot of courage to for I think for adults to go to the pool and accept I’m a brand new at this I don’t know anything and to they’re just being in your bathers sometime your swimsuit you know that alone could be enough of a deterrent for people to want to start swimming so oh I can tell you I had all of it my friend and I went through this so I was going to public pools in New Orleans and I’d had friends who were swimmers in high school say and a couple like reading going down the rabbit hole of researching triathlon swimming technique everybody was get some jammers get some jammers you got to have jammers because that’s going to reduce drag that’s what’s going to make you know you look like a real swimmer

and I will I took a pair of jammers to the public pool in New Orleans and there was a kid swim class happening and I will tell you it was like one of those record stop moments when I came out of the locker room with my jammers on all of the moms watched me get into the pool and I was just like this is this is horrible and then on the flip side for I had a scent of being a member of a master swim group that I would get up and go swim try to swim at five in the morning and it just was past my skill set at the time but having had the bad experience at the public public pool with the jammers I then just wore regular swim trunks and then all these folks are in jammers and speedos and they’re looking at me like the smuck who doesn’t know what he’s doing so exactly to your point of just having comfort in your own skin and going to a place where

you’re not used to being in and around pools so everything is mystifying and you always feel you’re worried and more self-conscious about taking the wrong step or being viewed as a person who’s an outsider in the space so I’ve had that too yeah This podcast is proudly sponsored by Form Smart Swim Goggles Form have recently released their new Gen 2 version of the product which includes an integrated heart rate monitor as well as a swim straight digital compass for open water navigation they’ve also updated the ice seal so they’ve got a new proprietary ice seal that accommodate a wider variety of facial structures and they ensure for a more comfortable and secure fit I’ve been testing these new goggles for the last couple of months and I’m a huge fan of the new heart rate monitor this is the first time that I’ve been able to see my heart rate in real time when I’m swimming and that’s allowed me to adjust my effort and my output

based on my training zones so if you’re a triathlete or someone who wants to make sure that they’re not going too hard or too easy within a session this is a really good way to do it you can see your heart rate in the top corner of the goggles so it’s always there right in front of you and that can make sure that you are actually training in the right zone where I find a lot of swimmers do go either too hard or too easy so this has been a real revelation for me in terms of the effort that I’m actually putting in when I’m going at certain speeds and certain paces so if you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the new gen 2 version of the FormSmart swim goggles go to formswim.com forward slash effortless to get yourself a pair of the new gen 2 goggles if you’d like to get the gen 1 goggles you can save 10% going through that link at formswim.com forward slash effortless yeah absolutely and at the end of the day yes it might be uncomfortable at the start

but I think at the end of the day people are only really concerned about themselves you know it might be a brief moment where they look over and go okay there’s a guy he’s wearing jammers people don’t wear jams it just pull that off and so that’s that’s interesting but at the end of the day they’re not going home and thinking about you so that’s what I try and keep in the back of my mind if I ever feel like I’m standing out in the wrong way but I want to go back to when you so when you first joined the the membership you sent a video through for our monthly members call which we’ve got one coming up today and and so I analyzed your video there and from memory like one of the main things that we looked at there was you’re kicking really really hard really like I could say and was like man if I was kicking that hard I wouldn’t be making 50 meters either and actually I filmed a beginner freestyle course so after work with you

and there’s a couple of other swimmers in a sort of similar situation I’ve worked with recently in the stroke analysis membership I finally filmed this beginner freestyle course for people who are struggling to swim 50 or 100 meters and one of the things I had to do for that video or that course that we’ll be releasing soon was I had to do some of the incorrect things that we see people do such as kicking really hard and and over kicking and when I was doing that I was exhausted after 20 meters of it so it’s like okay it’s a good indication of like what people are going through if I try and replicate that so from that initial video it was the kick and there was something else but I can’t remember was it the breathing

it was um I want to say kick and breathing I’m trying to remember because I know another big thing early on but I don’t know if it was in that first video was

I was plunging my upper body too deep in the water but I think that’s right that I can’t remember I don’t think that was in the first video I definitely remember the kicking from the first video though

so when you when you get that first a lot of feedback

you went back and tried to change what happened what happened there and what sort of did you did you experience yeah and that you know what now that you you pose that question the plunging my body too deeply that’s what happened after I tried to fix it right so

the kicking right like I as I as I’m two things relate to that as I mentioned like I’m not a very big person I am I have like a slender have always generally skewed skinny but like when I’m working on and running more athletic build and so like decently muscular which just feels like I sink and I’m interesting story had a woman I was dating who was like no everybody floats in the ocean we’ll go out to the ocean watch you’ll float in the ocean and she’s like lay your head back and I sank like a rock even in the ocean so I think I’m one of those like negatively buoyant folks and so I was kicking so aggressively because that was the only way I could get what felt like any float because if I felt like if I slowed down the any at all my back end would just drag and sink and then the rest of me would eventually sink especially especially after 25 yards or the tail end of 25 yards and so when you gave me that feedback I really tried to be thoughtful

about slowing it down but then it would also it would then immediately cause my legs to sink so then what I started doing the compensate was I started plunging my hands deep down into the water as I went like through each stroke and so that kept my back end up but my front end was kind of like doing this in the water so it created a new problem like a submarine yeah exactly and then so I still was only able to do 25 50 yards because when I would go for I would plunge down legs would stay up but when I had to breathe I had to come up all of this so I was like swimming like this you know a dolphin but for the wrong reasons yeah I was thinking like a dolphin without doing that highly technical great looking dolphin kick that like professional swimmers do

yeah it’s and over the like and then after that but like not too long after that you you join the stroke analysis so you start working together there and it’s like I’d describe it as being a slow and steady progress and some things you’ll change and then they might regress a little bit but we get back on top of them and it’s just this continual you know climbing up the mountain climbing up the mountain with a yoyo where it’s like yes improve me improving okay going back a bit and we do that overall that trajectory is going upwards and to the point where obviously you swam that you know that continuous distance twice because it wasn’t a fluke and and you mentioned that it was a lot sooner than what you had expected to to be able to do that as well oh yeah absolutely to be clear the the thousand yards there was no time frame or timetable to hit that because that was still in the impossible realm like the thousand yards maybe three weeks ago

might as well have been the 1.2 mile distance for the full half Ironman swim to be honest I actually ended up swimming for the first time the thousand yards on accident because you and I had been going back and forth and I think I had decided of my own accord

I needed to push myself because I’ve been swimming consistently because this happened in I want to say early November so this is all very very recent as of

the time we’re sitting here talking and as like at this point I’ve been swimming consistently minimum two swims of two hour long swims a week usually I’m hitting three sessions a week my swim cardio is up so and I’m also I’d started running more distance so like general cardiovascular fitness is much greater so in my head and as I was rationalizing it I was like it can’t all be cardiovascular fitness or swim fitness as I like accepted that excuse when I started so some of this has to be mental block so I just I have to push and try and so I started with I think trying to do 200 and just accepting like I’m going to go to a pool where there’s a few in New Orleans and the word I use doesn’t have like a deep end like the deepest is maybe like five and a half feet so I’m going to go to that pool and I’m going to push it and try to do 200 yards because worst case scenario if and I’m going to push it to the point where like not I’m worried not I’m nervous

not I’m afraid like I physically have to stop and I’m going to push to that point and if I do worst case that happens is like I stand up and I’m out of breath and it sucks and I’ll have to go to the to the pool but I’m going to push it and so I went to do the 200 and I think somewhere along the way like I did the 100 and it was okay and then around 150 I got really tired but I was like I’ve got to do it and somewhere along the way of doing the 200 I lost track and I ended up doing like 250 or 300 based on like the watch measurement because I just like lost count I was so fixated on being out of breath and like freaking out that I was like

I don’t know if I hit it so I got to keep going but I had hit it and the keep going was like an extra 50 or 100 yards and so I think that was I wrote you that first note saying like holy smokes and what I realized is in the

private coaching chat you had already written to me that it was time to start pushing it because you thought some of it was you know mental limitations and so who I was like oh well as it turns out I’ve already I’ve already met your challenge without knowing it and you as a good coach is out to do double down and said okay well now go 350 or whatever it was I think it was 350 and so I was like oh shit okay I’m sorry for that but that was that was my real reaction after reading your note and knowing I was heading to the pool that day like oh man what a okay all right I got to do this though I got to do it and you know kind of back to the point of hitting a thousand sooner than I thought a thousand was not on my radar period I was not thinking about hitting a thousand with any sort of time frame other than I need to be able to swim 1.2 miles to do this half Ironman that I’d like to do sometime at the end of 2022 that was the only way I thought

about swimming a thousand yards instead the metric I’d set for myself was when I started out on this restarted this journey at the end of summer of this year I said look by the end of 2021 you need to be able to swim 500 yards without stopping because in my brain when I was looking at those tower 26 and the other triathlon specific swim workouts other triathlon coaches that tried to give me like the longest thing on there was a 500 yard swim whether it was a warm up a cool down or whatever it was so I was like oh if I can physically do that then I can start the training and whether or not I can actually swim 1.2 miles I don’t know if we get there but at least we can start down the traditional path that everybody has talked to me about which is like doing these swim workouts as part of your overall training so that was my goal and so when you sent me back to the pool after doing the 200 to the 250 saying go for 350

I was like okay so I get in and I’m doing it and what I found was

after about 150

I was very tired and I was not breathing easy at all

and I that that was a that was a mental limitation for me because when I see videos of people who swim well and even when I’m at the pool and somebody else is in another lane who I know is a good swimmer because it looks effortless and they’re gliding it looks like they just slowly turn and they take a big gulp of air maybe spit some out if they’ve got too much air and then they turn and they go back to it and it’s just like I’m like after 150 I’m gasping and so it was not comfortable swimming or it was not comfortable breathing but after 150 I realized like oh it’s not comfortable I’m kind of gasping but I’ve got enough and I can keep going and so I’m trying to count in my head I got to like 300 and it was the same thing where it was it’s not comfortable breathing but it’s enough and something clicked in that moment while I was swimming where I realized it feels the same at 150 as it feels at 300 so this isn’t I’m out of breath

and I need to stop this is I’m uncomfortable and this whole process is about pushing past discomfort so we’re gonna push fuck it let’s go so I keep swimming and again I kind of lost count somewhere between whether I was at

300 or whether I was at 350 and I said let’s just keep going because now I feel confident that this is just a it’s discomfort I’m not gonna die in here I’m not gonna like lose all ability to breathe let’s push past discomfort and let’s go for 500 because that’s the end of the year goal which I felt for the first time after I hit that 200 I felt hopeful and positive that I’d be able to achieve it by the end of the year and I said I’m here I think I could do it and if I hit the 500 now that takes the pressure off the end of the year and I’ll feel really good and so I just kept going for it and then I had lost count and I was like okay now I’m not sure if I’m at 400 or 500 but I’m still feeling that same feeling of it’s not comfortable it’s not easy but I’m getting I’m getting enough oxygen to keep going it’s uncomfortable as hell but I’m getting enough so let’s just keep going and then it just got to the point where I didn’t know

I couldn’t tell whether I was at one measurement or 100 ahead of it so I didn’t know it was started with I don’t know if I’m at 300 or 400 now I don’t know if I’m at 400 or 500 and I just find it was like screw it let’s just keep going and so I just kept going and I was like assume you’re behind and

just try to hit five and once I hit five I was like I just keep going and I just kept going and I just kept going and I just kept going and it kept being that same feeling of

it’s not comfortable but I’m not dying I’m literally not dying and I’m getting enough breath to keep going okay and then finally I was like I think I’m probably somewhere around like 900 this is incredible for the guy who three months ago was struggling to swim 50 yards this is an accomplishment I came up and I stopped swimming and I will tell you Brenton I looked at my I swam with a Garmin and it said a thousand yards

I thought for sure that was wrong I it also said that I’d been swimming the

measurement was 21 minutes as a matter of fact you know what I might have I don’t think I had my Garmin that day I think I just had my Apple watch because I left my Garmin at home and so the Apple watch I just like is more off with my stroke count so I thought for sure it was wrong and I was like this is going to end up having been you know frickin maybe 300 yards and and when it said a thousand and I’ve been swimming for 21 minutes for a brief moment I thought perhaps I did die in this pool and I am I am hallucinating I’m in heaven and I’m in this like this heaven where I’m a good swimmer all of a sudden because this makes no sense the idea that I swam for 21 minutes without stopping that was impossible as of when I got in the pool like earlier in that session and I will tell you my only saving grace and I’m just so grateful that I had done this this day my girlfriend was out of town and so I didn’t have her to shoot video

with the GoPro in the the extended kind of selfie stick so I’d suction cup the GoPro to the side of the pool to be able to kind of send you some video of me doing what was supposed to be like the 300 or 350 assignment and I was like I’ll be able to count on the GoPro video and I had done it and I think I even took two days to send you the note saying that I did the thousand because I wouldn’t send it until I had time to download the video and watch back and forth multiple times and so it just ended up being this thing where

it wasn’t anything I intended to do I didn’t have a goal for when to hit a thousand I had a goal for when to hit 500 which was like aspirationally end of this year so

yeah I know you that was a long answer to you asked me what was the when was the time frame for a thousand I would say nebuary 32nd

I didn’t have it in mind at all it’s uh that’s had so like I have a feeling in the next like six to 12 months you’ll you know you look back at where you were when you started and be like wow okay that’s I can’t believe I was like struggling to make you know 50 meters and I had to take that that rest and look it might be the case case now but it’s like it’s such a huge transformation and what like what sort of sort of comes to mind for me is with that breathing I wonder if it’s just because obviously with the water you when you’re in the water you get your breath and your face is in the water and you’ve got no option except to you know to get that next breath when your face is out so unlike being out you can breathe whenever you like and that it’s that uncomfortable feeling of you have to sort of control your breath that way do you feel as though like that’s the thing that was like this is a bit uncomfortable but I can do it but initially it’s like

it feels like I’m going to die because I I can’t breathe in when my face is in it does that sound like it’s right for you? No that that’s absolutely spot on and you know what you and I have a side thread that you and I have had for

maybe the last month maybe starting two weeks before I hit the thousand for the first time is this idea of working on doing some breath work and I had started around the same time that I signed up for tower 26 and signed up for the effortless swim general subscription I’d started some pranayama training and I think the way you just described is exactly it and what I realized the pranayama training has been grateful for helping to expand my lungs and like thinking about the idea of breath and breath control and being thoughtful about the breath and you sent me some helpful notes on what you do like even the little practice you have as you’re heading to the pool and what I’ve realized as I started to think about that is even with

pranayama training or anything unrelated even to swimming where you think about the idea of breath control I think most people think about it in the concept of like

take a breath in how much how long can I hold that when you’ve got oxygen in I think the problem with swimming though is and where the the discomfort comes from is you need control and to feel comfortable on the exhale once it’s all of the oxygen is out of your your lungs or you’ve expelled it all

that’s where the worry and the concern comes in right and so

I think I did a I’ve started incorporating a drill that you recommended the sink downs where now before I start any swim I’ll do six sink downs where it’s just essentially like I’ll kind of be up in the water and I’ll submerge myself and I’ll sit and I’ll just expel all the air out of my nose and then once I feel like it’s all out I push out whatever I feel left is left through my mouth and I’ll just sit there for like at least five seconds and like my lungs are screaming whatever part of my reptile brain is freaking out like you moron get out of here you’re gonna die and I that’s the same thing that’s triggering when you’re swimming and like you feel like you’ve exhaled and didn’t get enough air with that whatever your last breath was and you’re not going to die just from like a few more strokes like maybe if you keep doing that forever but like you can get enough air and so the sink downs then you once it’s out you kind of float back up

bring your mouth just above the water take a breath and then do it right back down so that you get your body used to because you have to get your body used to the rhythm and concept of you fully expel you’re going to get a short window with your mouth out of water to breathe in air and you’re going right back to it because I think the struggle for a lot of folks especially if you don’t have a background as a swimmer and with that rhythm of breathing is when you fully exhale and your body goes into this panic oh crap moment and there’s no oxygen in there then immediately the thought is I need to start gasping and getting air in as quickly as possible but you can’t do that if you continue to swim because you’re only going to get that brief moment to get air and you’re back to the same thing so it’s getting comfortable with okay

my body is freaking out I’m fine get the little bit of air and then go right back to it and that that’s been exactly the way you described it and the only thing I would would add is that that bit of the freak out comes from holding your breath when there is not any lungs or isn’t any air in your lungs yeah yeah that’s it’s good I said that Alex Butchie’s podcast that was fairly recent so maybe three or four before this episode he talks about breath control and that was that was really good as well as one I’ve done with Darren Sturianovic from Dynamic Breathwork they’re really good episodes to listen to for anyone who’s listening to this podcast and yeah I think like the breathing it we don’t consider it very often because it’s just we just do it but when we do think about it and practice a couple of basic exercises I think it allows us to be able to control our our head a bit more and to

and a number of other things as well like for me the one that I mentioned to you is on my way to the pool in the mornings I’ll normally do some box breathing so it’s five in hold at the top for five exhale for five and then hold at the bottom for five and I’ll just do that 10 15 minutes on my way to the pools I’m driving in and when I do that I find that in the main set if it’s a difficult one they’re like we’re working pretty hard so on Mondays we’ve been doing like a 800 4×1 and then 600 and then 4×1 and a 400 4×1 and it’s like just getting faster and faster I find within that set I feel like I’m just I’m under control I’m keeping really calm and collected even though the pace is right up there and I feel as though it’s it’s because of that breathwork at the start where I just sort of put you in that parasympathetic

I put you this every time but you know it’s it’s that

phase or that stage where you’re not you’re not panicked you’re you’re relaxed and your parasympathetic nervous system is is the one that’s sort of taken over there and that’s like flight or flight you know it’s yeah we’re not in that stage and so I think I find that sets me up really well and the other one that’s quite beneficial too is holding your breath of holding it at that full exhale so there’s a oxygen advantage is a like quite a well known breathwork company and one of the things that I saw them post recently and I posted it for a while is that when you have nothing in your lungs it doesn’t take long for your mind to go oh crap like all right start to panic because you need to breathe and all like all that is is just your mind you know panic is your mind panicking and if we can just train ourselves to go it’s actually okay you know it’s you’ve got you got a long time you’ve probably got a full minute before you really have to start to breathe

then you know then we can just start to get our mind under control and so obviously we don’t want to get to that point when we’re spinning freestyle where we’re like oh shit you gotta breathe every time you want to just feel normal but I think it’s a good way to practice it so what I’ll often do is like if I’m walking somewhere I’ll sometimes just like take a few breaths in and out and then I’ll exhale everything I might walk 15-20 steps and by that time like oh crap gotta breathe and then I’ll I’ll just keep training that and it’s just training my mind to be able to keep cool and I know it’s similar stuff to what some of the big wave surfers do is just training your head to stay calm I think that last bit is a phenomenal suggestion Britain after you and I have started talking I started doing the same thing just like walking around or like sitting still and holding after the exhale and I I don’t go more than like three or four seconds

and like my brain is going crazy and I was like oh yeah this is and this is me sitting out here with as much oxygen as I want and of course this is causing a freakout when I’m in the water and this kind of connects to the point I was making in the beginning where I was highlighting that Mr. Fish would start with folks and say let’s make sure you’re comfortable with the water and I scoffed at that thinking like okay I don’t I’m comfortable with the water I don’t have that problem but I’m not I haven’t been comfortable with the water because it exasperates this freakout in that fight or flight deal where it’s like I this is I’m not okay I’m not okay but the the more I’ve done work to say like no you’re okay and even the sink downs are getting easier to tolerate where like I’ll sit down there and like take five seconds whereas before it was a struggle to like as soon as all the air was out I would be on my way up I wouldn’t even be able to sit still

for a full second I’d have to because I would worry that something would go wrong as I was floating to the top for the breath so I would cheat it and so now I sit at the bottom and then I’ll start to float up and it’s exactly as you were saying conditioning your mind to be like okay when you’re short on breath in this way you’re okay especially for a beginner swimmer who has issues with breath control issues with breathing it’s going to help you be able to swim further and like the swim conditioning and the cardiovascular fitness will come with more time in the pool

yeah that’s right and the other thing that one thing I want to mention there is that for someone listening to this they might be newer to swimming and they’re similar to yourself a couple months ago don’t feel like yet when you’re swimming you don’t feel like you have to exhale everything completely out of your lungs where you’re like you’re getting every last little bit out before you take your breath in like you’ll exhale 90-95% of it you don’t feel like you have to go that extra 10% because sometimes that can lead people to being like to just over exhaling and then they sort of struggle to get that breath but the other thing is

I reckon a lot of people similar to yourself a few months ago some of that uncomfortable feeling comes from just holding the breath a little bit because when we when we swim it’s generally like you get your breath in you kind of hold your breath yes you might exhale a little bit through your nose but you’re holding your breath for a couple of seconds where your sort of lungs are out here your sort of ribcage is stretched a little bit and a lot of times that can feel a little bit uncomfortable and so even just that small that small part of it can cause some of that discomfort so in this beginner course that that I put together the very first thing is is breathing like mr fish you know it’s like it’s an important important thing and one of the exercises there is like you’re just hanging onto the wall getting the breath in put your head in hold it for two or three seconds and then you just exhale through the nose on the way up and you repeat that

20 times 30 times because that’s a similar sort of breath pattern that you’ll have when you when you swim and you’re just training that sort of breath pattern because a lot of people are uncomfortable in that breath hold phase where it’s two or three seconds so I think that can be where some of it some of it comes from where a bit of panic compared to just when you’re out of the water it’s like in out in out there’s no hold at all yep oh yeah so um yeah it’s a question I know we’ve we’ve gone for about an hour here I really appreciate um really appreciate you jumping on the podcast because it’s um it it makes my it makes more than just my day when I sort of see someone who like yourself who’s had these kind of results and from when you know you thought like swimming a thousand yards and it’s like you know maybe another year or two away um to have that sort of confidence and belief in what you can do and I mean once you’ve done that you know

you could really you could essentially you could swim 2,000 yards it’s not really that much difference apart from a bit of swim fitness so you’ve kind of got over that that bigger hurdle of you know two or three hundred yards I think so it’s awesome to see and yeah I appreciate you sharing your journey on the podcast here because I know for a lot of people it’s uh it’s hard to swim 50 or 100 yards but to see that it’s possible it really gives a lot of other people that sort of belief yeah look and and then I just want to reiterate my thanks for having the opportunity to to come on the podcast and kind of share a bit about my swim background it feels nice to be able to say that actually just last week was telling my girlfriend and a few friends I gotta stop saying I can’t swim I was calling my swim sessions my modified drowning sessions but I can actually swim now so I’m tremendously grateful to you and I’ll give a plug that maybe you won’t like

if folks are listening I would consume as much effortless swim content as you can check out the videos on YouTube listen to the podcast and I would sign up at minimum for the general subscription because it’s not very much money you get access to a ton of resources workouts other videos and I would just consume as much of that as you can has that helped me tremendously yeah I appreciate that quest and I’m going to add that beginner course as soon as it’s ready to the membership so if you are listening to this and your where quest was a couple of months ago that’ll be available for for members and you’ve got that opportunity as well to record some video and send it for our monthly monthly call because I know for a lot of people sometimes it’s just like you just need like that one or two bits of information that’s specific to you to like just kind of take the handbrake off and that’s kind of what it was for you with the kicking I think yeah

because that was one of the the big ones and and like you just don’t know what you don’t know yeah if I was to go into riding horses I wouldn’t have I wouldn’t have a clue what I was doing doing wrong you know so it’s right right yeah sometimes you just need a little bit of help and that can sort of kick start the journey absolutely absolutely wholeheartedly agree

so thanks again quest and you will no no doubt be keeping in touch but yeah thanks again for being on the podcast thank you man I appreciate you

The post From Gassed Out At 50 Yards To Swimming 1000 Without Stopping with Quest Meeks appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, we have Carl Reader, a functional movement coach with a background in exercise physiology and Pilates. We will discuss the connection between hamstring strength, mobility, and how it can improve swimming performance. Carl has extensive experience working with swimmers to improve their movement and strength training. Join us as we delve into his research and practices in today’s episode.

00:00 Introduction

More About Carl Reader:

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Do you want to work with me personally to improve your technique? Join my swim technique coaching here:

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You’ll find that especially with swimmers, maybe with poor posture as well, is that they overuse their glutes and their back muscles to swim if the hamstrings are weak. So, you know, that then stops the whole flow of energy. When the hamstrings aren’t firing, you don’t get that support through the knee. So knee pain’s a big one. Lower back pain, definitely got to consider like weak hamstrings on the one side. Any sort of muscle imbalances where you’re told your one leg is longer than the other or your pelvis is out of alignment, that’s often a hamstring issue. 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. Today, we have a return guest. We’ve got Carl Reader. Today, he’s here to talk about the relationship between hamstring strength and, I guess, mobility as well

and how that can actually improve your swimming. Carl, this is something that you’ve been looking into quite a bit recently. And just to give people who might be new to this podcast a bit of background, you’ve been on the podcast quite a bit. You’ve worked with a lot of the swimmers who are inside of our membership to help them move better and to be able to help them do their strength and conditioning a lot better as well. And so you’re kind of in the trenches with a lot of people on a regular basis and especially with the people that I work with as well. So I’d like to get you on to talk about the stuff that you’re researching, the stuff that you’re doing in your practice. So I’m looking forward to getting into today’s episode. Yeah, Brenton, thank you. Thanks for having me. And for those who don’t know me, as Brenton said, my name’s Carl Rita, functional movement coach, trained as an exercise physiologist. And my passion has always been about just

how understanding how the body works and good body mechanics and how we can avoid injuries and improve performance through just teaching people how to move better. And just really looking at also understanding the body as an electrical device. It’s something that we’ve spoken a lot before on the previous podcast and understanding how all the muscles are like the things she battery packs and how this flow of energy and electricity to the body works. So it’s been an exciting journey. It’s been wonderful working with the swimmers and again, just seeing them, just watching them get their progress through injuries and improve their sometimes their personal base. But overall just really just always like anything, just rinse and repeat and try to improve techniques and form. So tell me a bit about the research you’ve been doing into hamstrings and what relationship that has to swimming and how that can actually help people improve their swimming.

Yeah, so much attention given to the glutes and core which we know are very important. But I’ve just really just, with swimmers I’ve just been working a lot with strengthening their hamstrings and in a functional manner which we’ll get to later down the podcast. But just really just seeing how once we got the hamstrings really strong, how that really supported them in the water. And we talked about one of the things with hamstrings is that when you have weak hamstrings, you get this feeling that your legs keep dropping. And so that just simply by getting them functionally strong through hamstrings, how they said they’re able to just feel like you’re in a pool and we’ll touch that, we’ll break down all the different reasons why hamstrings are strong now. So I mean, the way that I kind of see it from a technique analysis perspective is we see people in the water and they might have a really great body position with the top half of their body, their hips, their torso

and their head might be quite high. But if they’ve either got tightness through the hip flexors and by the sounds of it, weakness through the hamstrings and sometimes the glutes, it makes it hard to keep the legs up in line with the rest of the body. And if you can’t hold yourself up in that position, then you’re going to be having to work quite hard to be able to maintain your speed. So how would you assess whether it’s weakness or tightness through the hamstrings or the glutes or hip flexors? Like where’s that relationship set? Yeah, that’s obviously what we do in the physical assessment, obviously we’re in the pool, but you’d see that as a coach, you would see them struggling with that, but then we would assess them and do some muscular assessments and see where there are, where does it break in that chain or that connection. And I think it’d be good to maybe start with the Y, like why hamstrings are so important

and a use of touch on hip flexors, but one of the causes, I mean, they’re all interrelated, but one of the causes of weak hamstrings are tight hip flexors as well. And you find that especially with swimmers, maybe with poor posture as well, is that they overuse their glutes and their back muscles to swim if the hamstrings are weak. So that then stops the whole flow of energy and that whole last week, we’ve discussed the Serape effect where the energy comes from the one side, the body crosses over to the top half, but so it’s a big problem. And the other one is weak core muscles that are specifically lower core muscles, which I’m finding and I work with the clients. And so a lot of my clients or your clients or your members are playing, so they’re doing some sort of core exercise, but they are on the one side of the body, that core is shut down. And what I mean by shut down, it’s just not getting enough contraction,

there’s not enough stimulus or signaling to that muscle. So it’s working maybe 70%. And that’s been quite a big breakthrough as well as you improve those lower core strength and the hamstrings straightaway also improve their connection. So it’s sort of a troubleshooting that we do online. And it’s not like with those lower core muscles, I think the way that people are not able to use them, it’s not like you need to be doing big, heavy weights. It’s like, it’s first of all, just getting that activation happening and getting those muscles to work properly in certain exercises and then building up and loading up from there, right? Like a lot of times people don’t have much strength or activation through there at all.

So there’s two sort of schools of thought and one is the idea that you’re hollowing and that’s drawing in the navel to spine. It’s very, it was made sort of famous in the Pilates time in the era of where there were ideas was to contract that deep corset muscle which is known as the chances of dominoes. So it’s referred to as hollowing, but it’s for me, I’m all going into the, like it’s a bracing that I’m looking for, you know, the bracing and again, you said it’s a nasty, it’s not a bracing like you’re gonna get points on the stomach, but there’s a bit of a stiffening and tensioning of the tonic muscles and the lower, lower, it’s actually not even the abdominals. If you look here, there’s abdominals coming down here. It’s more what we call the internal external obliques. So people are way more familiar with like strengthening their abs, but it’s actually getting into those internal external oblique deep down

and down in the pelvic inlet there. And the bracing is like, it’s just, when you tense the muscle, it actually expands, it doesn’t come inwards, you know what I mean? So if you contract biceps, you won’t see biceps getting depressed and sort of bulged out. And so the idea is that we want to actually not draw in too much and hold that tension inside as more bracing, a gentle stiffening is the word you want to like it. Gotcha. And with that, what about, what’s the relationship with calf muscles as well? It’s something that I remember you talking about previously. So. So when the hamstrings are weak or not connected, well, they’re never not connected, but we’re talking about like weak connection. And I think a bit of like a wifi signal like you have a weak connection, it’s that the calf then has to overwork and generate sort of power electricity force, which often causes a lot of cost strain, it restricts ankle mobility.

And as you know, as a swimmer, if you have nice and loose ankles, it’s a real aid and it helps a lot. So having good, that hamstring, and remember you’ve got the calf hamstring going into buttocks, then you’ve got lower, you’ve got the lower, you’ve got the back muscles going all the way through to the neck. So in that chain, if you’ve got a, like anything like a link, you remember the body’s just linked. So if there’s a break in the chain or in that link or in that connection, then often it’s the hamstrings and it really has a huge effect right through the whole body. Would it have any impact on how often someone gets cramps through the calves? And I’ve got no idea. I’m just curious about this because it’s such a common thing. I was training on Wednesday and we did a final 50, all out 50 max effort. And one of the guys pulled up at 25 meters because his calf was like a rock and he had to make his way back to the wall

and finally stretch it out. So I know it’s a really common one for a lot of people, especially triathletes. So is there any relationship there? There can be. I mean, it depends. It can be many, maybe no cramps can be caused by dehydration, mineral, like if there’s mineral loss there or like, you know, there’s quite a few things that can contribute to cramping, but it certainly can. If there’s a shutdown in the hamstring and it loses that connection, then costs are going to overwork and eventually cramps. So it’s a potential cause yet. So what are certain reasons that people might have poor hamstring strength and connection? Yeah, so we just touched on that. So weak corn is a big one. Tired hip flexors is another one. Poor posture is obviously very common. And then you go, which is also a result of poor hamstring strength again. You’ve got things like poor body mechanics. So just not moving through other day rides or maybe you’re exercising

and you’re not engaging the hamstrings enough. So those are the common ones that I see and there’s a lot of, I mean, people, the average person who’s doing exercise is aware that he could be strengthening hamstrings and we’ll get to that just now. But it’s just, the method they use to strengthen hamstrings, which is where we really wanna dive and just not into, that really does make a difference. And yeah, and then just, you know, too much good activation. I think if you, you know, if you Google best at exercises for lower body, you’re often here, like you’ve got to get the guts to buttocks strong or buttocks strong. It seems to be the key at the moment that everybody’s still focused on buttocks when they squat, you’re pushing through the heels, activate the buttocks, you are mainly activating buttocks. So it’s almost like it’s gone extreme now. So now everyone is like forgetting that there’s a hamstring and a clover cord

all working together. And so it’s interesting how we are, you know, it seems to be what the internet’s where the science is going. That’s when you tend to focus and then we’ve begun about the other, the other important muscles as well. It’s all about the booty, hey? No one comments on how good the hamstrings look. So yeah, I know a hundred percent of no one’s, no one’s really thinking like, are you like thinking about activating hamstring as you get up in a squat or anyway, but it’s not, it’s not so, yeah, it’s back to body when it, but for swimmers, it’s, it’s a really, it’s such a, you feel that different shade of weight and quite a few comments something from the members is I feel free and more power in my upper body because you’ve got, we talked about that if you were swimming with like slippers, how it’s make life so much easier. And that’s that deal. If you’re swimming and you feel like you’re supported from the hamstrings and you know you’re activated

and that’s, it’s doing its job.

Yeah, totally. And I, the comment that a lot of people make is that when they swim with a pool boy, they sit high in the water, things are really easy. When they take it off, they might be five or 10 seconds slower per hundred. Now, what I see there is that you’re holding your body in a way where you’re obviously sitting higher, but your legs are sitting in a better position as well. And I find that having that a good pool boy between your legs, it can actually sort of make you switch on that middle section of your body a bit to keep it in there. And it’s a little bit of that, yeah, that kind of engagement or activation that we want while we’re swimming, when you don’t have that in between your legs. So if you can have that same sort of sensational feeling, all that is going to help you sit better in the water. Well, the pool boy, the pool boys essentially take, is taking the role of the hamstrings. Does that make sense?

Like it’s compensating for that weakness there. So essentially, like if you, this is what it really seems to see here, if they’re good guys who are, if they do that work the hamstrings to get that improvement and get that feeling that they feel, wow, I really feel like my legs have been supported. So let’s get into some ways that people can start to get them working better and strengthen them and what sort of stuff you’re doing with these clients. So depending on the level of the other way, where they are in their journey, you know, if you’re an asteriathlete and it’s a lot easier, if you’re maybe someone who’s got poor posture and you’re not as big into exercises, but the simple things, there’s a few little simple techniques you can do. And one of them is simply like doing like a yoga stretch where you stand like wide apart with your feet and you soften the knees, bend your hips a bit and just bend down gently to touch the ground.

So not touching the ground with your hands and legs straight, but that sort of free sort of stretch, dynamic stretch, which I like, not holding the stretch. So you bend down and come back up and just doing like three or four of those, really just sort of activates and then proves that neural connection through then. The other one is, which is you can do with the, even before swimming, but even in the gym, which I do a lot of the members as well, is the thing called tapping, where you basically just, you just kind of like slapping, tapping the muscles over. You’re not hard, just, you can even just rub, but you’re just trying to draw, get attention and connection through those muscles and you’ll laugh, but if some people, they’ll be, when they tap their hamstrings, they’ll be like, oh, you want me to tap here? And I’m like, no, yeah. And then, so it’s just a gay body weight. It’s like, it’s amazing how many people

have to, they don’t know where their hamstrings are. So, yeah. So that, and then you can also, one that’s quite popular with physical therapists and the physios here in South Africa, is they make you do plantar dorsiflexion with the ankle. So just basic movements back and forth activates the hamstrings. I mean, it’s a weird sensation. Like you’ll do an exercise and you won’t feel it. And then you’ll do a couple of these little plantar flexion, dorsiflexion movements and suddenly you’ll feel the muscle actually activating. So you have to experience that for yourself. And then the other one is simply rotting your feet out. You find that people who are pronators who have got flat feet and are pronated, they struggle to get hamstring activation. If you get them to roll their feet out, my hands are your ankles in the video here. If you roll your ankles out to the side, supination, you get a much stronger activation through the hamstrings.

So those are the four. So those last two are from a standing position. And you can do those, those last two standing or sitting in the chair just rolling, rolling out. These you can do sitting or standing. Even ankle circles before you just swim even just that is the average person will do that just to mobilize ankle, not knowing that they’re actually are activating hamstrings as well. Gotcha. So that’s a, there are a couple of ways people can start to, to activate them, get that awareness around where they are and getting them working. What about ways to use them better? How do we, how do we strengthen them? How do we start to develop that?

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So get yourself a great ocean wetsuit. I personally use the gold model of the wetsuit. It just depends on what your goals are. So greatoceanwetsuits.com, effortless20 at checkout. I know you’ll like them. Yeah, so, you know me, I’m a squat guru here on this, but squat squats are one of the best ways to strengthen hamstrings, but often which I’ve been finding with the swimmers is they’re not activated or they can’t actually feel their hamstrings. So we just take them back a bit and there’s a exercise that I really do is the seated stagger position where you get people sitting on a chair and you put the one leg about two to three inches in front. And then you ask them to stand up and very often they’ll wanna push through the heels to get the glutes, but what you wanna do is as you’re standing up you wanna push the hips through and gently pull the knee back and that activates the hamstrings straight away. They’ll often feel that

and then you’ll make them switch, they change legs, so they’ll change the other leg in front and then they’ll find them on one side like, oh, I can’t use my hamstring on that side or it’s getting my back and then you’ll go back and test that and that’s why the tests we see to see what are they actually using the hamstrings. But most people it’ll be like 98% glutes, like not much in the hamstrings. Some people have a lot of hamstrings, but not a lot of glutes so that it all depends on the person, but in the general you’ll see that they are mainly glutes and lower back comes in a lot, they’ll feel a lower back trying to compensate for weak hamstrings. So, and then you’re, yeah, sorry, jump in there. Oh, no, so now you continue on. I’ll ask this question at the end. Yeah, so once they got that, then the other thing is that your hamstrings, when people think about hamstrings, they think about bending their heel, picking their heel back into their buttocks,

you know what I mean? That is a typical, and that is a function of the hamstring, but that’s in what we call an open chain. So the foot’s not grounded on, planted on the ground, but it’s typical hamstring exercise you see would be lying on your stomach with the weights on your foot and your gym machines and then pulling your heel back towards your buttocks and so that will be concentrically working the hamstring and it does strengthen, but you must remember that again, that’s not something that you do in life functionally. You know what I mean? You’re very rarely lying on your side that it pulls something towards you and even when you walk in and riding it, yes, you’ve got that selection of the leg, but it’s not against 50, 60, 100 kilograms. It’s a very light, easy, but where you are loading it is in a squat position. So when you are bending down and then getting back up again, it’s the hamstrings that provide that sort of as you,

if you see the video here, as you squat down, the hamstrings are actually eccentrically loading, they’re actually getting longer and as you stand up, they’re concentrically shortening. So glutes, I mean, your squats, once you’re activated are a very powerful way to safely progress through into the squats here. Gotcha, and just thinking like for someone who’s listening to this, what would be a good indicator of someone who might want to consider looking at these exercises? Like what would a couple of signs be? And I know we’ve sort of talked about, we’ve talked tight hip flex and those sorts of things, but is there anything in sort of daily life that someone might experience that could be an indicator of take a look at this? Yep, knee pain. When the hamstrings aren’t firing, you don’t get that support through the knee. So knee pain is a big one. Lower back pain, definitely got to consider like a weak hamstrings on the one side.

Any sort of muscle imbalances where you’re told your one leg is longer than the other or your pelvis is out of alignment, that’s often a hamstring issue, then yeah, and you’re gonna find it’s interesting, but even shoulder pain, like because of the power, like once hamstrings and lower core get involved, like shoulders becomes three. So even links to shoulder pain. And again, that we talked about how you have that support in the water, your upper body can actually have energy and freedom to move if the hamstrings are dropping, that would have been dropping, I’m dropping like dropping ball pitch, they’re not strong, then that upper body has to really work hard and that can be the result of shoulder issues as well. So those are the big ones to watch out. And if you are doing squats or lunges and you just feel your knees and your quads and your buttocks and you don’t really feel hamstring involvement, then that’s a good time to stop

and just sort of go, hang on a minute, then you check what I’m doing here or maybe I need to cap or get connected. What I’m thinking of there, you mentioned shoulder could be shoulder issues. You know, it’s quite often like the process that I’ll need to go through with people, particularly those who are slower than about two minutes per 100, quite often they’ll be swimming, we talked about the low legs, okay? So that’s the first thing and that causes them to swim very flat because they can’t rotate properly and because things just aren’t connected and that can load up the shoulders a lot because they’re having to muscle their way through rather than it feeling like it’s effortless and it’s just flying well. So yeah, sometimes it’s just coming back to actually holding the body straight, making sure the right muscles are switched on and we’re holding that midsection of the body the right way and then we can rotate

and then we can actually move a lot freer through the catch in the pool and over the water. So yeah, it’s an interesting one that shoulder issues could be hamstring related. Related, yeah, and you make a great point. And that’s another function of hamstrings, hip internal accelerations as your pelvis is dropping and the legs are, these are my legs, moving in the water, that’s all hamstrings. Okay, obviously the buttocks is also involved with glutes but that’s all hamstrings. So it actually has many, many roles that the stabilizer, so when your one leg is kicking the hamstrings is holding the other leg isometrically contracting. So it’s actually pretty awesome how much functions these muscles are doing at microseconds. It’s all happening and that’s back to the electricity. It’s happening in milliseconds and it’s like the voltage has been shifting and the signaling is like you got to contract, you’ve got to eccentric, you’ve got to,

now you’ve got to pull, now you’re going to stabilize, now you’re going to internally rotate. So this is again why I reached out to you just saying these muscles, once we address, and again, you’re not saying don’t strengthen glutes, don’t strengthen lats, don’t strengthen your other muscles but this is an important part of the chain to really pay attention to. Terrific. Is there anything else you’d like to add or anything else people should be thinking about when it comes to use of the hamstrings, strengthening them and those sorts of things? So if you’re doing squats, again, back to squats but if you are doing squats is to really just make sure that you can feel the hamstrings and not dominating but activating in the squats and build that what we call baseline strength that you’ve got a solid foundation that you feel supported that you can move up and down easy if you’re not feeling it back and then you can start to load

so that loading could be in many ways there’s different variations of squats as you know but before you start doing heavy deadlifts and maybe like goblet squats or even like movements where you’re lifting up and that just make sure you’ve got that connection because that will provide a really strong base for you to move from and often we find with the squats people are really again, they’re trying to really get strong in the knees with the quad muscles and the glutes and which you do need for squatting obviously but it’s that the hamstrings and I’d also just quickly just pay attention to lower lower core like if you are doing core exercises just to kind of see if you have a check she put your hands on the lower if I was to draw like a cross here like blocks I’ve got like four blocks to feel like when you’re working even if you’re just lifting a leg up and down in the movement in the gym feel do I feel like this is contracting the same as that?

Is it balance or do I feel like an overwork and what I’ll tell for the final quickly for those is that you’ll often feel like your hip like so your quad muscle gets tired pretty quickly so if you’re ever doing any core exercise even the plant you’ll feel the quads jumping that’s the indication that you’re dropping voltage or you’re losing power in the core and so that’s just those are some sort of easy tip like your information that helps people. Fantastic, well Cal thanks so much for this I’ll link to the other episodes that we’ve done in the past for those that are listening to this because we’ve talked about the squat quite a bit I’ve also just talked about some common causes of injuries in those sorts of things as well so I’ll link to those episodes in the show notes and for anyone who’s listening to this and you’re wanting to get some professional help with these sorts of things Cal you work with a lot of our members

and just people who listen to the podcast online you’re based in South Africa but you work with a lot of them online so we’ll put the link to your website there if anyone wants to book in with the session with you and I appreciate you being on the podcast we’ll look down the track in another couple of months and seeing what else you’ve been looking into. Sounds great Bryn thanks for having me. 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 Your Neglecting Your Hamstring Strength Is Making You Slower with Carl Reader appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Prescott Balch is an ironman triathlete who started at 2:10/100m, and is now able to consistently swim under 1:30/100m. He recently broke through a plateau in his swim times by focusing on one change to his swim technique. In this podcast, we delve into what changes Prescott made and some unique approaches he took to fixing these areas of his stroke.

Related Content: [Case Study] What To Do When Your Open Water Times Are Slower Than Your Pool Times with Prescott Balch

This podcast is brought to you by NanoClear — our own range of anti-fog swim goggles, designed by Effortless Swimming with the anti-fog treatment bonded into the lens itself (not sprayed on, so it doesn’t wear off after a few swims). Check out the NanoClear range here and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off.

15 months of staring frustratingly at 130 on my watch every 100 yards, I said I got to fix that core weakness because it’s either just plain old weakness or it’s a lack of attention span through folk fully through the strokes. And long story short, the attention to that paid instant dividends. Developing that kind of cue for me has been fantastic because I could do that every lap. I could do it two or three times a lap. I could do it every kick if I wanted to. 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 someone who was on the podcast in late 2021 and I wanted to get him back on the podcast to talk about a recent breakthrough he’s had in his speed and his times with his freestyle because we’ve been working together for the last couple of years and the swimmer who I’ve had on has hit a bit of a plateau, but managed to break through. So I thought it’d be great to dig into that because I know a lot of people listening to this experience the same thing. They get stuck at a certain pace and they’re just banging their head against the wall trying to figure out what they can do to see a breakthrough. So Chris Scott, welcome back to the podcast. Well, thank you. I’ll start by correcting you. We’ve been working together for six years now. Six years, isn’t that crazy? It was 2018 when I first started in triathlon and after my first horrible race, I figured I needed a coach and I found you. So we’ve been at it

quite a while. It’s been great too. It sure does.

In terms of the recent breakthrough you’ve had, could you dig into the details there, like what pace you’re stuck at or that kind of thing? Yeah, for sure. So just a sort of a brief total history started six years ago doing triathlons. First time I was competitive swimming ever in my life. Not first time swimming by any means, but first time competitively swimming. And I had one pace, 210, 215, somewhere in that neighborhood. And when I started with you, we took a whole bunch up right away. That’s perfectly normal, you know, big jump downward. And then I was on this really steady progress trajectory down to 150s, down to 140s. And then leading up to about 15 plus months ago, I had hit a plateau at 130. And I found my top end speed and my all day speed sort of compressing, right? And instead of everything dropping, I was getting to this point where my top end speed was was not much better than 130, but I could cruise at 132 for a really

long time. It was really bizarre that everything wasn’t coming down together. Now, if I went all out, I could, my best at that point was 117. So like gas, fully gas, I could get down into that fast. But, you know, any tempo work, any race, pace work, whatever, what it was, every time I looked at my watch 130, 130, 130, 129, 131, it was just so beyond frustrating. And we were working on a lot of stuff. And I was not like I wasn’t putting in the time I was swimming at least four times a week, sometimes five or six. And I was doing, I’m focusing on at the time, primarily stroke rate, and a mild amount of strength training and stretching. Because I had, I had sort of recognized that those were weaknesses of mine. But in terms of in the pool swimming, I had been focusing on stroke rate. Because as, as you’ve said to me many times, like there are two variables here, there’s stroke rate, and there’s distance per stroke. And whatever you’re doing

needs to be attending to one or both of those. And, and the more directly, the better. So you and I were working on some, you know, some small things and focused things. But the real focus for my, for my work during that time period was stroke rate. And I had had a really slow stroke rate when I started in the fit, like mid fifties, maybe, and I was gradually working it up. But here I am working it up, I’m getting to be comfortable with 64, 65, 67, 68, pushing it a little bit. And the pace isn’t moving. It’s, it’s hard to work, but I’m not going any faster. And it, it ultimately ended with, I think, for lack of a better phrase, sort of an aha moment. The, the videos that I was taking myself and sharing with you, I would replay those all the time, you know, partly out of frustration. I’ve got, I’ve got to figure this out. There’s got to be something that’s holding me back. And it’s two variables. What is it that’s in the

way? And what really has resonated in my mind since the, the new succamp that I went to with you guys was something that one of your other coaches said to me, that’s rattled around in my head since he said it. And it was your back end looks like it’s along for the ride. And in the front view, you can see the back end wiggling. And in the side view, you can see it undulating. And enough, not a pretty undulation either. It’s not like a, it’s not like a combo of a butterfly stroke and a freestyle stroke. It was more like what, what it looked to me in hindsight was, it was, I’m taught as I’m going through the catch and the pull, as soon as a pull is done, my back end just sort of gives up. And that was causing this undulation of the back end. And the mind is a funny thing when you’re, when you’re watching yourself, or anybody else, for that matter, when you’re watching a video, you see what you want to see. And you overemphasize

in many cases, good things, and you sort of overlook some of the bad things. And the more I looked at it, the more I slowed it down. The more I freeze framed it, took snapshots. I finally got to the point where I took a snapshot and I sent it to you and I said, look, this is really bad. It was a pun fair snapshot because it was the worst possible undulation where if these are the hips, you know, the legs were like that.

But that was the low point of the undulation. And in a freeze frame, it really highlighted not a big problem. Even if it’s coming back up real quickly, you’re dragging your legs like a seahorse through the water. For some period of time, a half a second, a quarter of a second doesn’t matter. You are a dead weight anchor pulling through water for part of your stroke, every single stroke, because you’re not keeping your body taut. And that was the light bulb that went off. And so I took that and I coupled it with two things, stroke rate, distance per stroke, I put aside all the work on stroke rate, and that drag through the water has to be, I figured, has to be affecting distance per stroke. So winding back a little bit to come back to where I am now, I have always felt since the day I started swimming competitively that I’ve had a weak core and a weak upper body. But in this particular case, it’s the weak core

that matters. And so my 15 months of staring frustratingly at 130 on my watch every every 100 yards, I said, I got to fix that core weakness, because it’s either just plain old weakness, or it’s the lack of attention span through folk fully through the stroke. It’s one or the other or maybe both. And long story short, the attention to that paid instant dividends. And I was giddy. The next time I pinged you, and so I just, I just did, you give me a workout to do. Whenever 12, somewhere between 12 and 20, 100, whatever you can do, out of VO2 max pace, 30 second rests, tell me what you’re going to hold. And I went and I nailed it at like 124. 12, I think I did 12 in a row. I was a bit winded after that, but I figured 12 in a row. And staying in a narrow window 124, 124 and a half, whatever, I think it was a home run. And I thought, this is it, this has to be what caused the problem. And so, you know, long, long story, eventually the Aja bulb goes off,

you realize what it is, it’s been staring me in the face probably for 15 months. And once you sort of admit what that big problem is, and, and focus all your attention on it, you know, the other mechanics were decent. So it’s not like something else is going to be a problem. Once I focused on that, and it just, it just clicked and I took 345 seconds off that kind of aggressive, but not, not overly aggressive pace.

And was it, was it a combination of strength training for the core or just more about what you focused on in the, in the water? Well, initially it was simply paying attention. So there’s another thread here I can talk about in a minute, which is the ongoing works I’m doing to improve the body line in the water or the core strength, et cetera. There’s a program set there now that hopefully will continue to pay more dividends. But in the short term, it was simply, I can tell from the video that I’m letting go of the back end as my pull finishes. But before the next one starts, just simply staying focused on that and, and trying to try to discover cues in the water that allow me to know that I’m paying attention. It’s not, it’s not, I’m not losing it. Now, there’s no rear view mirror in swimming when you’re in the pool. You can’t see your legs. And so depending on how good your appropriate assumption is, and your awareness of, of how

you’re sitting in the water. And I don’t think mine was that good. I could sort of feel the undulation as it was recovering, but I wouldn’t feel it as it was, as I was going into it. So I’ve, what I’ve done since this aha moment was every few strokes, I will make sure that my, my legs, my feet, my heels are not that far from the, from the waterline. And all it takes is a little bit of a bend. Oh, it should take is a little bit of a bend in the knee for the heel to pop out of the water. If I had to bend the, a lot to feel the air, then I know that I’d let it go. And developing that kind of cue for me has been fantastic, because I could do that every lap. I could, you know, I could do it two or three times a lap if I, I could do it every kick if I wanted to. Periodically, I will, I will exaggerate the slap of the, of the foot to really feel like I’m out of the water and slapping it just to make sure that as I’m swimming, I’m not losing that connection between

the head, hip and heels. It’s been fantastically helpful because I catch myself losing that connection to the back end every once in a while. And it over time, you do it whatever every last trip every hundred several times, you’re eventually going to get to this point where it’s baked in to the muscle memory and your feet are never dive bombing, like they have meant in the past. I find, I find it, you know, the numbers don’t lie. I didn’t magically get faster or stronger. I changed this one variable and the pace dropped several seconds. So it’s, it’s been the easy cause and effect relationship. So it’s really interesting to hear, but like the only thing essentially you’ve changed is that body awareness and making a change to, to how you hold the body so that you’re just reducing drag. Because whenever I’ve spoken to, whenever I’ve had elite swimmers or really good swimmers who are triathletes on the podcast, they often talk about that body awareness and

just recognizing when they’re out of position. And so if that’s what the very top athletes are doing, I think for those that aren’t at the top, those that are maybe age group triathletes or whatever it is, it’s like, you probably need to do that times two or three, like you really need to have, try and build that, that body awareness because it can go so easily. And I mean, I’ve been doing a few analysis sessions with, with a couple of pro triathletes lately. And now you would think at the very top level, they generally would have quite good technique and be aware of the head position and all of that. But there’s a lot of them who still just have to get the head position right. Like we’re looking at it and going, okay, you’re lifting your head up too high as you go to breathe, probably just a consequence of swimming open water and siding. But you can see the hips dropping a lot. So it doesn’t matter what level

you’re at. It’s just the basics. I think if you can get those right first, have those front of mind, then you can build from there. But body positions should always really be number one. Yeah. And speaking as an adult onset competitive swimmer, a category of people that need some sort of support group, I think body awareness is terrible in the, in the water. Right. And walking around, running, cycling, perfect body awareness. But put yourself in the water and legs drop, the hips drop. And if you know, no, no offense to coaches out there who are, who have been doing this forever. But when you say things like engage the core, those of us that are adult onset swimmer is just sort of nod and say, yeah, sure, whatever. I have no idea what you mean, but I don’t want to, I don’t want to say that I don’t because I’ll be embarrassed. So there’s this to me that, that other thread that I talked about before of the, the strength training, the flexibility training, et cetera, that’s become

an extremely important part. And I think as importantly for the body awareness as for the pure strength and flexibility that it delivers, and to in, in air, rather than water, to be able to control the, the hips and the heels in, in air, being able to do that through various exercises, what one of which I’m focusing on right now is handstands of all things. If you look at somebody doing a perfect handstand, you would say, if only that dude looks like that in the water, that would be great. You know, it’s perfect shoulders, hips, heels in a vertical line. And when you’re really bad at that proprioception and that control of the hips and the heels in air, where gravity is way more your enemy than water, you get on the wall and you can’t even pull your feet away. You don’t, you don’t have the muscle awareness to even pull your heels off the wall, gently, like for a quarter in a handstand position you’re talking in a handstand position.

Right. So over the last several months, as I’ve been doing this more and more, I can feel that, that core engagement getting so much better. And if I can do it in 100% gravity, then I can certainly do it in the water where, you know, what a one-tenth your weight or something like that. I don’t remember the number, but you know, you’re a lot less your total weight and it’s so it seemingly should be a lot easier on the muscles to be able to manipulate the heels and the hips to the position that you’re after. But it’s just, it’s trying a lot of different things, both in and out of the pool, cues in the pool, using certain new muscles, feeling them as you’re using them to bring the heels up and it’s doing it out of the water in various calisthenic type activities to just continue to build that awareness. So I think I have to imagine that a lot of adult onset swimmers who just don’t have that experience

have never had to use those muscles in that way, that, you know, they, like me, they didn’t realize they had a problem there until it stared them facing the video. And they had to try to do something about it. And 15 months of being stuck at 130 finally finally made me shake it up. Talk to me about where you have picked up some of these dryland exercises. So one thing that I find quite funny is we had another athlete, somebody who’d been to one of our clinics who had done Jay Mueller on the podcast and he’d made some really good improvements in a pretty short space of time. And he said one of the things that helps him was hanging, just dead hangs off a bar. So now we’re into handstands. We’re just getting people to go, yeah, all in all different directions. There’s no shortage of directions you can be hanging. Yeah. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Form Smart Swim Goggles. Form have recently released their new Gen 2 version of the product, which includes an

integrated heart rate monitor, as well as a swim straight digital compass for open water navigation. They’ve also updated the ice seal. So they’ve got a new proprietary ice seal that accommodate a wider variety of facial structures and they ensure for a more comfortable and secure fit. I’ve been testing these new goggles for the last couple of months and I’m a huge fan of the new heart rate monitor. This is the first time that I’ve been able to see my heart rate in real time when I’m swimming. And that’s allowed me to adjust my effort and my output based on my training zones. So if you’re a triathlete or someone who wants to make sure that they’re not going too hard or too easy within a session, this is a really good way to do it. You can see your heart rate in the top corner of the goggles. So it’s always there right in front of you. And that can make sure that you are actually training in the right zone where I find a lot of swimmers do go either too hard or too easy.

So this has been a real revelation for me in terms of the effort that I’m actually putting in when I’m going at certain speeds and certain paces. So if you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the new Gen 2 version of the Form Smart Swim Goggles, go to formswim.com forward slash effortless to get yourself a pair of the new Gen 2 goggles. If you’d like to get the Gen 1 goggles, you can save 10% going through that link at formswim.com forward slash effortless. I have been doing dead hangs too. Based on your suggestion, I’ve always had an upper body strength, not problem, but just lack of lack of upper body strength. Prior to swimming six years ago, my endurance activity was running and cycling only. No swimming. I ran for 20 years. I never needed upper body. In fact, I wanted less upper body mass to be really good at running. So even before the 15 months of frustration, I knew this was a problem and I started doing

a little bit about it. I was kind of dabbling. It’s called program surfing. You find one guy’s program on YouTube and you do that for a while and you go do something else. It’s so horribly inefficient way to do this. And finally, I stumbled on this book called Overcoming Gravity, a well-known huge multi-inch thick book by a guy named Stephen Lowe and a bit of a biblical text for calisthenics. And I just built a program, just push exercises, pull exercises, some flexibility, and then a group of handstand related things. I stumbled on the handstand thing not for swimming. I just thought it would be cool if I could do it. I knew that it would help with shoulder strength for sure. It’s a little hard to be upside down on your shoulders for a minute at a time. That’s not easy work. So I figured it would be beneficial, but I was just doing it because I was intrigued by it. And he leads his book by saying people

that are the best at calisthenics are the ones that are the best at handstand. It was a lucky confluence of activities. The general calisthenics, calisthenics instead of, say, weights because I can do it at home. I don’t have to drive 20 minutes to the gym. And I’m so weak with my upper body. I don’t need weights. So just body weight was plenty for a while. And to put that in perspective, for the first 59 years of my life, I couldn’t do a single pull-up ever, not one time ever. And as part of this training, now I’m doing five sets of six. So not lightning the world on fire, but that’s a big jump in a small amount of time for an old guy. Yeah, it was just sort of lucky the connection between swimming. And I figured that calisthenics and weight training in general couldn’t hurt. Muscle mass is a predictor of longevity. And I’m not getting younger. So I might as well make sure I still have some muscle mass before it all wastes away. So I figured it would just be generally

healthy. And it turned out to be ideal with certain groups of exercises, ideal for swimming. Yeah. And it seems like it’s paying off big time. And it makes so much sense that just that control, especially through the core, the phrase that I, for the cue that I heard was you’ve got to swim from the inside out. And to me, that just means strong core. If you haven’t got control over your core and your hips, then everything else is going to be operating without much connection to everything else. So I think that strong core makes a huge, huge difference there. And I just want to shift gears a little bit here because you had a race recently where those good swim times were reflected in training in a race. And, you know, you’ve only had sort of one race since then. So you’ve got another race coming up soon. Just make sure it wasn’t a fluke, but talk to me about that race, how it went, how you paced it, because there was a couple of interesting things that you

mentioned in our coaching thread that stood out to me that would be useful.

Yeah. So it was us, Half Ironman in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And it’s a river swim. So I wasn’t going to be happy or sad at the time because I don’t know how strong the current was going to be or what have you. I was judging performance solely versus the rest of the field. And lead from six years ago to today, I’ve been making steady progress as a place within the field that do a little better in local races, obviously, do a little more mediocre in some of the either national or big time Ironman events. But it was steady progress down as a percentage of the world field. And I surprised myself with this, where I finished in the top 5% of a field that based on overall finishing times was very strong. 124 finishers, I finished seventh out of 124 in the swim. I’ve struggled, and this goes back to like two and a half years ago, the focus of our previous podcast, I’ve struggled with open water swimming. I’ve generally done

significantly worse per 100 in open water than the pool. And I think out of frustration, I’ve said a few things like, I don’t think I can swim slow in the pool if I tried. So to have a good result in open water was great. To be top 5% in a really top field was just over the moon. The hindsight 2020 criticism I’ll give myself for previous open water problems is not quite panic, but tension, I guess. And so this time around, job number one, chill out. Chill out a lot. There was going to be no warm up based on the logistics of the start. It was just you’re going to get in and go. And so I had to clear your mind. Think about nothing. Don’t think you’re not right. It’s just a casual swim in a river. Casing wise as part of that, I’m going to, I’m going to start at a pace that’s a little bit richer than all day. And I’m going to gradually turn it up. Because I got in hindsight, in prior performances, if I start too fast, I don’t recover from that. Even if I slowed out, even if I break into a

backstroke, whatever, I never recover from going out too hard. So I had to definitely dial back the beginning, make sure I wasn’t going too hard. If I, if I nail it perfectly, I’ll get to that point where it’s just a little bit faster than the all day pace, and it’ll ratchet up to somewhere north of the temple pace. But I’m done. And so clear the mind, chill out, laugh a couple of times, make jokes with some people, just relax, that’ll work great. The next, the next decision was where do I seed myself? It was seeding by your estimated time in a normal 70.3. So they said, you know, whatever you would normally do in 1900 meters, seed yourself there, you’re going to go faster than that per per 100. But, you know, the current is the current and it will be different depending on what they it is. So anyway, my strategy for seeding is put myself in the proper seeding. If I think I’m going to do 32 that I’m going to put myself in the 31 to 33 group or whatever it is,

don’t overseed yourself and don’t significantly underseed yourself. And there’s a reason for that, that became really obvious during the swim. And that is, there’s a tendency for other participants to oversee themselves. Some people didn’t go to the course talk and hear the instruction, seed yourself by your normal 1900 meter pace. They said, oh, this is a river swim, I’m going to be really fast. And they got themselves in the 25 minute group, right? But other people, they generally think I’m having a great day. And I’m going to, I’m going to out swim my, my, my times, you know, so I better, I better put myself up in the two, two pods ahead of myself, whatever. And if you, if you do that, people will pass you all day long and it gets really depressing. You don’t have a maybe with form goggles you do now, but without without form goggles, you don’t have any indication how fast you’re going, except relative to other people. So by seeding myself properly, if I’m having a decent day, I

should be passing way more people than are passing me because I’m having a good day. And I’m probably doing a little bit better than my seeding, but everybody else is overseeding themselves. And I’m not in the water. And it was a 20 to one ratio of people that I passed to pass to me. And it felt fantastic. I felt like I was flying. It’s annoying. When you, you know, you get into this, you hit a wall of three people swimming side by side and you have to decide that I’m going to go around them or even go over them, whatever. That’s not fun, but that only happens a few times when you carry on. But to me, that strategy works great because like I said, mentally, looking back on old performances, it’s a mental problem. It’s not a physical problem. I can, I can swim way faster than I have at races. But I get tense. I get pissed at myself. I, you know, all the, all things go wrong. So to, to try to maximize things going right, I don’t want to be passed a lot because then I’ll feel

like I’m having a bad day. So that was, that was number two. So stay calm, seed yourself properly, pass people all day long. I pushed for negative splits. So just gentle increases in pace every time I watched buzzed and my watch would buzz every, I think I had it set for like every 200 yards or something where it would buzz. And you feel most of them, you don’t always feel it, but it’s sort of a cue for, okay, you can pick it up a little bit as long as you’re not feeling really tight in the chest, you’re not, you’re not breathing too hard whenever. And looking back on my, the race was actually longer than 1900. It was 2,500 yards. And a negative split, the whole thing, every, every 500 yards was faster than the previous one, except for the very last where there was a traffic jam at the exit. So it was a really well executed race. The mental strategy during the race was one, the pool cue that I talked about with my, with my feet coming out. So it’s harder to feel

the wind on your bum when you’re lifting your hips out of the water with a wetsuit on. But your heels are still bare. So every once in a while, I would just lift my heel up. Am I close to the water and close to the water? Obviously I got some help with the wetsuit. But I just, like, I liked that cue. It works in the pool. I’m used to it. I’m comfortable with it. And it’s comforting mentally to know that, yep, I’m not letting go. I’m doing fine. So that was part one of the, of the swim mechanics. Part two was just metronome. Just get into a rhythm, full reach, catch, pull all the way through, and just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. And it worked out great. And I had another benefit with the sighting. We were swimming under bridges so you could sight off of the bridge instead of buoys that are barely above the surface. And it was a straight line race down the river. So it was really easy to stay straight, really easy to sight.

And I got into that metronome, passed the people left to right, feeling really good about the swim and gone out of the water. And, oh my God. To put it in perspective, the current must have been really strong because I did, my fastest 100 yards in the pool is 117. And my average pace was 112. So there was no doubt a really strong current. I’m comparing myself against everybody else. Everybody else swam in the same current and I beat all but six of them. So it was just a phenomenal result. And for the other two disciplines, at least for me, I end up doing way worse on the bike and the run if I have a bad swim, no matter the reason. Beat just gets in my head. But if I have a good swim, then I come out, I feel great. I can chill out a little bit at the beginning of the bike and recover the heart rate a little bit. And everything goes better after a good swim. It really sets the tone for the rest of the race.

Oh, there’s so many good things you mentioned there. One of them is just in terms of comparing yourself from previous races. Events are different distances, conditions are different. So I think you’re best just to use your general rankings against everyone else as a way to figure out where you’re at. But I think the mental thing is a huge one. I have, I work with a lot of different swimmers and they either go one of two ways. Sometimes they’re too tense and they tend to panic a bit in races. Then sometimes people are just too relaxed and they go too easy where they haven’t even gotten out of zone one really for their swim.

And we kind of want to meet in the middle somewhere there. And I think certainly that’s the, it’s almost like a, you just get this boost of energy. Every time you pass someone, you’re going, yeah, I’m swimming well. Like I feel good. You probably feel like you’re going faster than you are just whenever you’re overtaking someone. That’s a really sort of nice boost to have. So I’ve given the advice in the past, you know, see yourself up a bit to try and hold times. But in terms of mentally, well, that’s a, that’s a really good way to go about it. Yeah, I think if I were, if I were a lot faster, if I were way up towards the pointy end, I would say, yeah, put yourself up further because that’s where you’re going to find people that you can actually latch on to and draft off of. But further back, and it’s, I mean, I’m not, I’m not back in the pack if I’m finishing seventh out of 124, seeing my age group, but in terms of the overall race,

I’m probably, I don’t know, 30, 30% of from the front, they’re probably another four or five groups ahead of me, maybe more, I don’t know, but in any event, if I were faster, I would say stay, go up further because you’re going to draft. But where I am, you have no idea if the people that you’re starting with are draftable, they’re probably going to swim slower, and you’re going to leave them in the dust right away. And so it’s just a, if you’re looking for somebody to draft off of, it’s a coin toss in that sort of 30 to 35 minute range and a half Ironman, and you’re, you’re better off, my opinion, at least I’m better off going with feeling good about my swim. And if I get some drafting benefit, as I’m passing people great, but I’m not, I’m not looking to latch on to somebody’s legs and hang on for 500 yards. And the thing is too, you actually get, you do get some sort of drafting benefit from about

like a tiny bit, about eight to 10 meters away. But yeah, if you’re, if you’re coming up behind someone, I’d recommend, you know, come up like right behind them, get that draft, and then just as you’re about to overtake them, you can just kind of go around the side of them, because you are going to get that, you know, that draft off them. If you think about pushing off in the pool, if you’re going five seconds behind, you might be about five, six meters away from them, you still get pulled along quite a bit. So, you know, if you’re getting that little bit of draft every single time you’re going to overtake someone, that adds up as well. So, let’s say almost a way to actually get some draft as opposed to other times where you might not get any if you’re setting yourself higher. So, I think that, I mean, there’s so many, so many good things there and I love to dig into what’s caused a breakthrough for someone.

And for you, it sounds like it was the thing that was staring, I guess, both of us in the face was this body position, that undulation and just then addressing the problem and going about making a change there. What do you see as being, what do you foresee in the next six to 12 months as being the thing that will sort of help you continue to progress?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m going to ask my coach. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, if we’d sit in six years, we’d been working on a couple things at a time for at any one time. And I’m going to keep that strategy because I think it works. There’s a second coaching phrase that’s stuck in my head for all these years besides the one that Mitch told me in Nusa. And that’s one that you told me, which is, if it sounds innocuous, you’re going to be really disappointed that this is when it’s stuck over six years. But there’s a lot going on in freestyle. You said that to me once and that’s been in my, so there is a lot going on there. And it’s easy to focus on one thing and then let something else suffer or type, digress, regress. So I have to keep reminding myself, you know, check in on all those other things that I’m supposed to be doing well. Am I breathing right? Am I rotating enough or too much? Et cetera, et cetera. So I have to keep sort of going back and focusing

on those things. But in terms of what’s next, once I’ve eliminated that undulation, I just think it’s, all right, it’s back to blank drawing board. It’s time to look at new video and see where I am and see what the biggest bang for the buck is. And maybe it’s back to stroke rate. Maybe I, maybe we’ve got some room there. I think the leading candidate though, now that I think about it, is the first thing that you corrected in my stroke six years ago was front quadrant. I was horribly not front quadrant. And true to form, I overdid it. I got too good at it. And to the point where I have a pause out at the front of the stroke and, you know, it’s not bad. It looks good. It looks like a nice stroke. I think it looks like a really nice stroke, except for the back end and the undulation part. But in terms of the front end, it looks really good. And I had been working on fixing the cues that will fix that. So I think I’ll be heading back there. My guess is I’ll be

heading back to that, if not trying to incorporate it at the same time I’m keeping, keeping my hips and heels at the surface. The cue that I adopted to get front quadrant was keep your hand out until your, your pulling arm is doing its recovery. And there’s not to be too late. So what I’m trying to do is switch that to you need to start your catch as you’re finishing the exit. So it’s sort of counterintuitive. If you’re thinking front quadrant, you know, like, you should exaggerate it so that there’s definitely an arm out there. But it causes too much of a pause. And so there’s this, this speed up during the pull and then a slow down from not having any stroke going on at all for a fraction of a second. And then you speed up again, you slow down. And it’s, it’s not super perceptible, but it’s there. You can, you can see it. And I think eliminating that cause is going to be really important next. That would be my prediction. But again, we’ll look at the video, we’ll figure it out

and see what the biggest return ends for either stroke rate or distance per stroke. I think you’re right on there. Because the undulation there is still some undulation, as you know, like it’s not, it’s not completely eliminated. So I think that’ll take a while to really iron out completely. But already those results are great to see. So when you get that even better, there’s still another couple of seconds there, I think. So that certainly should be number one, just working on better body position. And one thing that I was thinking about recently was we posted that footage of, I posted that footage of Dan Smith a couple of years ago. And most, most people have probably seen that if you haven’t just look up Dan Smith effortless swimming, he does a really easy one minute, 10 hundred freestyle looks like he’s going about two minute pace. And I heard him talking the other day, because he’s doing a little bit of

coaching with some junior swimmers. And he was really focused on their, on their body position. So he was talking about the downwards pressure through the chest, drawing the belly button into the, in towards the spine. And just, yeah, he talks about that, like downhill swimming. And I’ve always kind of avoided that term because whenever I’ve seen someone thinking about it, they tend to bury their chest and head too deep. But everything’s got its right place and time. And that pressing down the chest to help raise the hips can be a really useful tool for a lot of people. And I’ve, I’ve been thinking about that as well. What, what is the cue there that works for me? I think everybody mentally processes those cues differently. And for some people, they’re slowing down, you know, that sounds dumb. I’m not going to do that. For me, I’ve been thinking of it in terms of finding the right balance point in my body.

So I think that the goal of saying swimming downhill is, is really to affect the, the balance point. Because I think there, at least for me, there was a tendency to have my, my head pointed a little too high, which would bring the hips and the heels down. And if, and by telling somebody who’s doing that swim downhill, they’re actually going to swim straight. So it’s sort of, it sort of depends on where the person’s coming from. And, and if you’re in that adult onset club, then, you know, that phrase swim downhill could actually work, not because they really are swimming downhill, they might overcraft and sink their head in the water. But there’s this natural tendency to, to be swimming just a little bit upright. At least that’s been my experience. And I’ve been thinking about just, just get the balance point further back so that, so that your hips and heels are coming up a little bit more naturally. And if you focus on that in the water, you can, you can feel, you know,

like you’re coming up with that no effort at all, just because you, you’re adjusting ever so slightly to change that balance point.

Yeah, absolutely. The most adult swimmers that I’ve worked with who are, who are really new, they hold their chest and hold their head like their face is just in the water. They’ve got to have their head like an iceberg, 10%, 20% out, but the rest needs to be in. And for whatever reason, I think it’s just comfort and not fear necessarily, but it’s just, it’s uncomfortable for them to be that much submerged in the water with their head or even, even just having their ears out. I think it’s like sometimes it’s that too. They don’t want to have their ears in the water because maybe they get a bit of water in there and it’s uncomfortable. But yeah, that, that useful cue of just sinking downhill can, can rise the hips. Yeah. Well, well, we, we don’t walk sideways. We don’t walk backwards. You know, our silly little eyes are always wanting to be focused on where we’re headed and swimming is different in that regard. And it’s just a, it’s a hard thing to fight. And I think it’s,

it’s just a matter of finding the right cue that works for you to get you to the right balance. And I’m, I’m bullish up on swimming downhill as a cue because I know what it’s trying to achieve and I know what it’s not trying to achieve as well. But yeah, I just, I just play around with the different cues and see what works and, and whatever sticks, sticks and it sort of doesn’t happen. Once you’ve, once you’ve equated the cue with the immediate physical changes necessary to achieve what you’re after, it doesn’t matter what the cue is anymore. It should be banana and, you know, be great. Swim like a banana. As long as you’re getting the results out of it. And, and I think that’s why so many different cues for the same thing have, have evolved because they just speak to people differently. Yeah, totally agree. Although I can’t believe it’s, it’s been six years, how time flies. I haven’t given up yet.

Hopefully look back in another, another six years and you’re just getting, you’re getting fitter, you’re aging backwards and you can tell you’re going to get faster. So yeah, thanks so much for being on the podcast. This has been terrific just to get your experience because I know how much you think about your stroke and your swimming and you’re looking for different avenues to find speed in, in all three sports. And you’ve been able to convey that I think to, to people listening. So I’ve got no doubt that this will be helpful for people. So thanks again. And it’s been, been great work with you. Well, thanks. It’s been fantastic work with you and let’s keep doing it.

The post How This Triathlete Cracked The Code To Swim Under 1:30/100m with Prescott Balch appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, we discuss three ways to generate more propulsion without getting tired, along with a drill that will help you practice each of these methods.

00:16 Generating propulsion

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So what I’ve recommended to a lot of swimmers lately is to experiment with those couple of things. How do we play around with those three components to find the right amount of each of them and the right amount for you? 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. Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. On today’s episode, I want to cover a couple of things that’s going to help you increase your speed. Now, in a lot of videos that I’ve done in our course, like the five-day catch challenge, we focus a lot on the position of the arms, how to get a high elbow catch, how do you move through the power diamond, all those technical positions, which are very important. That really determines the size of the paddle that you’re working with. One thing that we

don’t cover in a lot of detail in that course, and often in some of the videos, is what are the other steps to generating propulsion? After doing some underwater filming with Annie Donetson, the Ultramarathon Swimmer, who we featured on last week’s episode of the podcast, and also just hearing a few things from Coach Andrew Schafe, I realized that I was neglecting two key things that can really help increase your speed. When we think about what generates propulsion, it’s a combination of things, but primarily it’s what your arms are doing underneath the water. That is where most of your propulsion comes from, and how do you tie that in with your rotation and your kick and the timing of the rest of the stroke? That is what primarily generates your propulsion. Now, there’s three main things that we want to consider when it comes to that. The first one being the size of your paddle. Making sure you’ve got your hand

and forearm facing mostly behind you as you move through the underwater phase of the stroke, so having that big surface area that’s pressing back. We cover that in the five day catch challenge. I’ve covered that in quite a few videos, making sure we get into something that resembles almost a high elbow catch. The way I’d normally think about doing that is after we finish reaching forwards and we’ve rotated onto our side, we then want to do two things, which is point the fingers down and get the elbow to bend a little bit, almost hinging at the elbow. We get this little bit of internal rotation of the arm where it’s like the elbow is going out to the side, so we need to set up our catch in that way. Another way you can think of it, and a friend of mine who’s a coach, Ben Gidd, talks about this. He says that you want to think about getting your arms around a swiss ball, one of those big blow-up exercise balls, a swiss ball. Get your arms around it like you’re giving in a big hug,

but your arms are over the top of it. That’s how your arms should be when you’re at the end of the catch. So we need to make sure we’ve got a big paddle to work with. A mistake that a lot of people often make there is that they will try to pull straight back when they’re moving through that catch. So they don’t move downwards with the arm, they just pull straight back, but quite often they’re not getting deep enough to get enough surface area to work with. Now, on the other side of that though, a lot of people pull through with a very straight arm and they’re too deep. So it’s good to maybe watch the arms and just see where you think you might be with it, but we want to make sure at the right depth. So not too shallow, not too deep, but somewhere in between. And it’s probably, just think about that now, the depth of it would be something like probably 50, 50 centimeters, 60 centimeters with your fingers below the

body. That would be about the distance away from your body. So we need to make sure that we set up our catch and power down and get our hand and forearm angling in a way where we’re pressing back towards our feet. Now, that’s the first thing. That’s the size of the size of the paddle. But outside of that, what else generates your propulsion? Well, it’s the power that you’re applying and it’s making sure that you accelerate through the stroke. So with the power of it, we want to make sure we’re not overpowering the beginning of the stroke. So as you move through the catch, that’s not the power phase. That is the setup phase. So as you’re going from reaching out in front, being fully extended to then getting your fingertips to point down, I would think about that as being usually like a three or four out of 10 in terms of effort, the amount of power I’m putting into it three or four out of 10 in that initial phase of the stroke. So we’re not going really soft and really gentle,

but we certainly don’t want to put too much into it because that overhead movement is not that strong. We’re not using our primary muscles there, our stronger muscles. So that’s the first thing is the catch is a setup phase. We put a bit of power into it, but not too much. Where the power really comes in is under the body. As your hands moving through the catch and moving underneath the body, so your hands are passing under your shoulders to moving just past that. So it’s that middle section underneath the body where it’s out. That’s our main power phase of the stroke. And the more power that you put into it, the faster you’re going to go to a degree. So we want to make sure that power is just gradually built up. It’s the most as our hands are going underneath our shoulders through there. And then it will just ease off a little bit out the back. So we don’t want to rip super hard out the back because firstly, we’re really just using our triceps in that last

movement. We don’t get a whole lot out of the exit. So we want to make sure that we press back past the hip, but we’re not going super powerful out the back. We just get it going past the hip and release it. We let it go from there. So we need to increase the power as we go to increase our speed. But that’s very incremental. And speaking with Annie Donson from last week’s podcast, what he was mentioning is that when he thinks about going faster, he’s looking to add just that little bit more power to it. And I think a good way to picture it and something that’s really helped me in the last two weeks, I’ve been, I’ve been swimming the last two weeks and hitting some really good times. Whereas for the six weeks, seven weeks before that, I was, I was going quite slow. I’d been sick. I’d hurt my back and I could hardly swim for a while. And then the last two weeks, I’ve been really, really good. And for me, it’s been a

combination of thinking about the size of my paddle, just being more mindful of that, because when I was watching and filming Andy, what I noticed is what he’s just very good with his catch and pull. He’s not trying to force it in any, any way. He’s just keeping that big hand forearm underarm there, just underneath the water. So that’s helped a lot. And particularly the power, just making sure that I’m applying the right amount of power and just increasing that as I’m looking to go faster. So being really measured with that power, but the mistake that I, I see and the reason I really wanted to make this podcast was that because we quite often focus so much on the positions, the high elbow catch and the power diamond, often we neglect the power side of it. So if we’re going very slowly and weakly through those movements, it doesn’t matter how good the movements are, if we’re not putting anything into them. So we have to make sure we balance it with,

with the right amount of power. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Form Smart Swim Goggles. Form have recently released their new Gen 2 version of the product, which includes an integrated heart rate monitor, as well as a swim straight digital compass for open water navigation. They’ve also updated the ice seal. So they’ve got a new proprietary ice seal that accommodate a wider variety of facial structures and they ensure for a more comfortable and secure fit. I’ve been testing these new goggles for the last couple of months and I’m a huge fan of the new heart rate monitor. This is the first time that I’ve been able to see my heart rate in real time when I’m swimming and that’s allowed me to adjust my effort and my output based on my training zones. So if you’re a triathlete or someone who wants to make sure that they’re not going too hard or too easy within a session, this is a really good way to do it. You can see your heart rate in the top corner of the goggles.

So it’s always there right in front of you and that can make sure that you are actually training in the right zone where I find a lot of swimmers do go either too hard or too easy. So this has been a real revelation for me in terms of the effort that I’m actually putting in when I’m going at certain speeds and certain paces. So if you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the new Gen 2 version of the FormSmart swim goggles, go to formswim.com forward slash effortless to get yourself a pair of the new Gen 2 goggles. If you’d like to get the Gen 1 goggles, you can save 10% going through that link at formswim.com forward slash effortless. So that’s the second one. Now the third one is go to accelerate through the stroke. So in order to generate that propulsion, we need to start slow, finish fast. We need to have that gradual acceleration through the stroke. And again, we’re not looking to go so fast out the back that our hand flicks

out back behind us and sends all this energy back that way and out the water. Now again, just more, you want it to be measured, gradual acceleration. So what I’ve recommended to a lot of swimmers lately is to experiment with those couple of things. How do we play around with those three components to find the right amount of each of them and the right amount for you. So in training, if you’re going to the pool this week, and you’re doing some hundreds or 200s and you’re getting timed or you’re looking at your times and you’re tracking that, play around with each of those things and see what helps you move the needle with your speed. And I think a really good way to do this is to do some build or descend sets. For example, maybe you’re doing three, two hundreds and you’re going one at 70%, one at 80% effort and one at 90% effort. It’s kind of like easy, medium, hard. See what you need to do to make sure your speed increases

across those. And I would imagine that it’s going to be a combination of adding a little bit more power to those strokes, that stroke rate coming up slightly and perhaps a little bit more acceleration through it. So if you keep the same catch and pull, so the same number one aspect of it, that’s important, but it’s really the power that’s going to change. And with that, the stroke rate will probably come up a little bit as well, but really it’s just more force. And I was doing this, I was on a webinar for coaches and Michael Sage, who’s coached Chelsea Gubeca, who’s on the Australian team,

a lot of really good distance swimmers. One of the things that he mentioned was that someone asked how to think about the catch when you’re thinking about when someone’s going faster. And he says, I think they just put a little bit more power into it. They put a little bit more pressure on the water. And if you play around with that, you’ll probably find that you start to really get that dialed in knowing how much you need to put in. And if it’s too much and you are gassing out after 50 meters, then obviously you need to back that off. So it’s very incremental. So finding that ability to just move the needle a little bit each time is what can really help make the difference. A couple of drills that I think can help you work on each of these things. One drill I really like is what I call keyhole drill. Now this is typically a butterfly drill, but it applies really well for freestyle. And in this keyhole drill, I’ll get swimmers to be faced down in the water. If they’ve got a

snorkel, I’ll get them to put that on. So faced down the water, you push off the wall, you’ve got your hands in front of you, just shoulder width apart. And then when you’re ready, you pull through from the front all the way to the back. Now it’s called keyhole drill because your hands will make the shape of an old style keyhole where it’s kind of circular at the top. And then it’s almost like they’re a bit of a triangle at the back. So make it circle as it goes from out in front of your head to just past your shoulders. And then as you’re going past your navel, that’s where it will come in near the body and then finish out a little bit wider at the hips there. So that old school keyhole shape. Now when you go through one of those pull-throughs, you will be able to experiment and find what’s the most effective way at sending myself forwards. How do I shoot myself forwards and cover the most, cover the most distance

with each pull through that I’m doing. So if you repeat that for 25 or 50 meters, experiment with where your arms are. Make sure one mistake I see people do here is they’re starting in front and they go out really wide with their hands like a breaststroke stroke. But when you do that, you’re not getting your fingers to point down. You’re not getting your hand and forearm to be this big surface area underneath you. So when you’re going from out in front, get the fingers going down, get those elbows to bend out to the side, move in that keyhole shape. So it’s a little bit of a cool with each arm or a semi-circle with each arm and play around with those things. And whichever gives you the most amount of distance forwards is probably going to be the best possible path. Now the other things you can experiment with there is the power. You’ll find that if you try and go too hard in the beginning, it’s not very comfortable and you don’t shoot yourself forwards very well. So you’ll

need to when you do that, start somewhat gentle and then build into it so that the maximum power is coming from when your hands are coming underneath the shoulders and not at the very beginning. And you’ll also find that you’ll need to build up in speed. So I find that’s a really good way to train that in the stroke and get a sense of it. So next time you go to the pool, play around with the power that you’re applying. And if you really focus on the catch in the pool, make sure that you’re not focused just on the shape of the arms but also the power and the acceleration. I’ve found it’s helped a lot with my own stroke in the last couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to just continuing to develop that. And one thing I’ve actually noticed that this happened this morning, we were doing some stroke count 50s. I actually had my lowest ever stroke count in a 50 freestyle. So in this side I normally set

the rules as three underwater kicks and not stopping and pausing with the arm in front but just having a very light either two or kind of six-beat kick. But three underwater strokes, three underwater kicks I should say and yeah seeing how fewer strokes I can do for a 50. And I got down to 20, well 22 strokes with a big light at the end but that was the least I’ve ever done by I think two strokes maybe three strokes. And that was a combination of these couple of things we’ve just been talking about. And also just making sure that I’m keeping my hips and my legs high by just pressing my chest in the water and then engaging my core just sucking my tummy and drawing that belly button into the spine. Keeping some tension through my backside and hamstrings just to make sure I maintain that horizontal body position. And it worked really, really well. So I’m excited to see where this goes over the next few weeks

and next few months because it’s been a while since I feel like I’ve had a breakthrough in my stroke and this has certainly been one. So I’d like to see where this this goes with some fitness behind it because I’m probably not that fit at the moment as well. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did enjoy it, one way you could help is if you listen on Spotify or listen on Apple iTunes, if you could leave a review, that helps a lot. And if you know anyone who’s looking to improve their swimming, please share this podcast with them if you feel like it’s going to be helpful for them. So thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you next week with another episode. 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, we have a special guest, marathon swimmer Andy Donaldson, who is a three-time world record holder. Andy shares his insights on freestyle technique and how he is able to maintain an impressive pace of 1:12 per 100m for 4 hours. This episode focuses solely on technique, as we delve into Andy’s thought process and approach to his stroke. Tune in now!

00:00 Andy’s Background

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Some of the drills that we were doing was single-arm freestyle, really just breaking it down, swimming with one arm in freestyle and allowing you to really focus on that hand entry, gliding forward, initiating the catch and starting your pull and then really maximizing. Getting a feel for the water because that traction is so important on the catch so that you can pull as much water as possible and gain that portion. 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. Hi and welcome to this week’s episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My name is Brenton Ford and today I’ve got an episode that’s a little bit different than usual but it’s on the topic of freestyle technique and you’re going to hear it from one of the best. I caught up with Andy Donaldson who’s a three-time world record holder.

He completed the Ocean 7 in under 12 months which is swimming across seven of the world’s toughest channels and he also holds the world record for crossing the Cook Strait between the north and south islands of New Zealand. He did that in 4 hours and 33 minutes and averaged 1 minute 12 pace per 100. So incredibly quick. Now if you’ve been a podcast listener for a while you know that we’ve had Andy Donaldson on the podcast twice. Now this is a slightly different episode because we’re talking purely technique. I wanted to get it from the horse’s mouth about what he is thinking about in his stroke. So let’s jump into it. If you want to get some footage and see how he swims underwater and in the open water, we’ve got some great footage as well. So I teamed up with Sam Sheppard from Great Ocean Wet Suits. He did some really good drone footage of Andy swimming and I captured some underwater footage of him at the pool that I normally swim at.

So that’s on our YouTube page. If you want to check that out we posted a video last week with that footage. So go and check out that episode there too. And if you want to get all of the footage that I took with him and a full breakdown by me of his technique, I’ve posted all of that footage inside our Elite Swimmers section in the Effortless Swimming Membership. So I’ll put the link to join that below as well. If you do enjoy this episode there is two ways that would really help me out. That’s either showing this episode with a friend. If you know anyone who’s looking to get faster like this would be a good place for them to start, please pass on this episode to them. And if you are listening on Spotify or Apple iTunes, leaving a review helps us out more than you know. Thanks so much. Let’s jump into the episode. Where is your head position? With my head position I’d say it’s usually looking slightly forward tilted up

and when I’m turning to breathe, it almost follows the body rotation around turning my head to breathe but it’s not an over rotation. So I’d say the waterline is perhaps halfway across and I don’t want to be rotating any more than that because it’s putting straight on my neck. I’ll usually breathe every two. My preference is breathing to my left. I make sure that I do try balance it out and what I’ll try to do is in training I’ll breathe to the same side. So if I’ve gone down one length to breathing to say for example the dive pool I’ll make sure that I’m coming back and breathing to that direction as well. Just making sure there’s balances in my stroke. One of the reasons for breathing every two is just to get more oxygen into the body especially in the longer distances where you’re swimming in a aerobic zone and you need as much oxygen coming in to keep the body pumping. With posture I mean obviously in swimming we want to be as streamlined as possible.

You know if we think of ways to get faster we can put more water, get more propulsion or we can be more efficient in having a good posture. Good streamlined position helps with that efficiency. So one thing I remember learning when I was growing up was engaging your core and one of the tricks was imagine you’re pulling on a tight pair of jeans and you really haven’t as sucking as you zip up and get your jeans on and that’s to sort of subconsciously I think that’s what you want to be doing. Obviously not creating too much tension because that is using energy but in that position that’s nice, tall, good posture, engaging your core and you’re nice and rigid for when you’re pushing through the water. How do you use your kick? In the longer swims tend to kick less. Your thighs, your leg muscles are big muscles so they use up a lot of energy. So I’m using my kick less for propulsion and more for stability and the timing of the stroke, keeping the rhythm.

So I probably have a 2B kick in my longer swims, just means I kick twice per stroke and I’m not thinking about trying to create propulsion I’m not trying to drive forward using my legs. It’s more just feel for the water, keeping the body nice and balanced especially when you’re in the open water and you’re in conditions that might be thrown you around. Legs can certainly help with that stability and keeping you in a good position. What does your recovery look like? So with my recovery I’m wanting to get my arms back to the front as easy as possible. When you think of swimming that’s not where propulsion comes from the propulsion is everything under the water so if I can expend the least amount of energy to bring my hand from my hip back to the front then that’s really good and for me the most relaxed way is a nice high elbow and I’m just really letting the arm glide forward over the surface of the water

and comes with timing of the stroke so the other one’s going and cooling under the water and the opposite side of the body is coming across and in sync with that and placing your hand into the water we were talking about efficiency and I find that my nice high elbow allows me to place my hand into a position and get it into a position of catch where I can really anchor and initiate the pull section of the stroke. I find I can do that easier with a high elbow and find that position where I can really create traction I can find that easier with a nice clean hand entry. One of the reasons why we want a clean hand entry is because when those bubbles it’s harder to get that traction on the water you’re not pulling on clean water where you can create more propulsion if it’s disturbed and it’s got bubbles in it so clean entry as you set up for your catch and really get that traction to maximise your pull and catch and pull.

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I personally use the gold model of the wetsuit it just depends on what your goals are so greatoceanwetsuits.com, effortless20 at checkout I know you’ll like them what is the end of your strike like? after my hand entry I’m really trying to maximize the length in each stroke so I do glide quite a lot everyone’s different my stroke I really try to stretch out because I want to maximize the length of from the top of the stroke where I’m pulling all the way to where my hand gets to the hip that’s where my propulsion is coming from so I’m really gliding forward and it comes in conjunction with your body rotation so if we have our hands out here if I rotate, I’ve gained an extra whatever that is, 10cm that I can use to pull on each stroke and when it comes to marathon swimming and ultra marathon swimming and one stroke, small differences tiny margins in each stroke you do thousands of strokes and one of these marathon swims it all adds up

and makes a difference over time what about your rotation? my rotation, I’m a predominantly left hand reaver so I probably rotate more on my left because that’s where I breathe I don’t tend to rotate as well on this side personal preference, I think there’s maybe it is something I could do better but at the same time if it’s going to cost me more energy thinking about it then is it a change that I should make or not perhaps not, so I’m quite comfortable with having better rotation on this side when I breathe to my left because I’ll predominantly breathe left on race day and in a marathon swim how did you develop your catch? my catch and pull was something that I perhaps developed a bit later in life I actually wasn’t very good at pull growing up it was more when I got into distance swimming and distance freestyle that I was really forced to work on my catch, my pull and make it more efficient and then really get more out of each stroke

so some of the drills that we were doing was single arm freestyle really just breaking it down allowing you, swimming with one arm in freestyle and allowing you to really focus on that hand entry gliding forward initiating the catch and starting your pull and really maximising getting a feel for the water because that traction is so important on the catch so that you can pull as much water as possible and gain that propulsion so single arm freestyle was a good one and for those that are comfortable doing it and quite confident I think things like really doing a lot of pull and only work that certainly helped me to become quite efficient with your freestyle because your legs are sinking you really have to rate up and maximise each stroke in order to get that lift in the back and stop your hips from sinking How much power are you putting into each stroke? I would say in terms of pressure when we’re talking about catching through the pull

it’s increasing to about here and then slowly decreasing towards the back for me the way I think about it you’re getting most bang for buck or you’re getting most returns for your effort here and you’re recruiting and using stronger muscles here than you are at the back end of your underwater pull I’d say this would be at the peak and then easing off slightly again here as you come through the back and then bringing it forward through recovery What do you do to increase your swim speed? To increase speed there’s a couple of things that I’ll try to do to go through the gears creating more propulsion so that could be either by increasing your stroke rate more strokes per minute or really trying to create more power with each arm pull so I’ll probably emphasise more power per stroke great I feel more comfortable with that and I’ll just really try to tidy up and get more traction in my catch and really try to power through each stroke

swimming in a more efficient manner so we’re talking about efficiency being tighter and more streamlined so I’ll think about my body position in the water my hand entry making sure that it’s clean engaging my core and really trying to be quite tight and streamlined through the water and then if I really want to pick up the speeds and this will be mostly for short distances and sprints I’ll start to really bring in the legs and get that extra drive in propulsion through my kick How do you like to train? So if I’m training for a big marathon swim or a channel swim I’ll typically do a bit less then I suppose many people out there might do I’ll swim 30km in a week and really focus on working the right energy zones and working quality with good technique so for me I’m a big believer of if I want to swim at a certain pace I need to be training at a higher intensity so that I’m more comfortable up here I’ve expanded my zone of comfort

so that something down here is a little bit easier and more sustainable over a longer period of time if those longer swims are in places that are with rough conditions or I can expect it to be quite cold I’ll obviously make sure I acclimatize and do some practice in there but a lot of my training is done in the pool I’m more controlled and we can measure our training in those environments What pace do you aim for? For me the target pace I want to be holding is around 1,1200m a low heart rate so for me if I can get that to become a 2 pace so 140 beats per minute that would be something I’d look to sustain over a longer period of time and if I do happen to drop off on the day, on race day it’s still a pretty handy pace to be holding for those periods of time What strike are you aiming for? When I’m doing longer distance swims I try to have my team on my boat communicate key statistics to me so things like time time elapsed, distance covered

but a big one is stroke rate so my coach and I have been working really hard to hold around 60 strokes per minute we find that that’s a very efficient stroke rate and enables me to hold a good solid pace of around that 1,1200m speed 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.effortlessswimming.com

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In March of 2024, Dean Summers set out to break the record for Australia’s longest ever unassisted swim. Leaving from Newcastle’s Nobbys beach and planning to land at Palm Beach, Sydney for a total of 95.6km. Battling blue bottle jellyfish, hallucinations and less than perfect conditions, Dean had a challenge ahead of him. The swim had been unsuccessfully attempted by two other swimmers in the 1980’s and 90’s, including well known Australian swimmer Des Renford whose shark cage sunk off the coast after treacherous conditions. In this episode, you’ll hear the story of an expedition into waters that have never been swam in.

This podcast is brought to you by NanoClear — our own range of anti-fog swim goggles, designed by Effortless Swimming with the anti-fog treatment bonded into the lens itself (not sprayed on, so it doesn’t wear off after a few swims). Check out the NanoClear range here and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off.

I see a couple of big shivers of stingrays, which are a beautiful sign and if you’ve ever seen them, they’re just 100 stingrays fly around in the water as even one and they were beautiful. And just as I was appreciating that, I got smacked on the arm with a blue sting and I thought, oh man, I hope there’s not another one of those around. But over the next 31 hours, I was stung constantly. I reckon every 20 minutes just stung, stung, stung. It was just essentially me in the black ocean with a nice guy at night. Beautiful. And as this milky way started to shine, all the stars started to come out too, like little suns, and so, so bright, so clear. I put my hand in the water soon after it got black and I was so happy to see bioluminescence. And I don’t know if you swam with them, but when your fingers go, it’s like shooting little stars out the end of your fingers, it lights up these little pingy lights and they just all around you. 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 the early hours of March 13, 2024, an adventure was set to begin from the sandy shores of Newcastle’s Nobby’s Beach. A lone swimmer, Dean Summers, stood facing the ocean’s vast expanse. His mission? To break the record for Australia’s longest ever unassisted swim, charting a course all the way to Palm Beach, Sydney. A staggering 95.6 kilometres through some of Australia’s most treacherous waters. But Dean wasn’t just battling the distance. The ocean here is alive with dangers that read like something out of a mariner’s nightmare. From the stinging embrace of blue-bottle jellyfish to the unpredictable whims of the sea itself, every stroke through these cold, dark waters was a test of will. Now, if that wasn’t daunting enough, let’s talk about the mental game.

Hours into his swim, as the shore became just a distant memory, Dean began to experience hallucinations. The isolation and the rhythmic, monotonous motion of swimming can play tricks on the mind, blurring the lines between reality and illusion. And let’s not forget, this swim had beaten back challenges before. In the 80s and 90s, two other swimmers tried to conquer this same route. One of them was the legendary Australian swimmer, Des Renford, whose attempt ended in high drama when his shark cage sank after hitting treacherous conditions. So here was Dean, every stroke pulling him deeper into what could be described as the abyss, facing not just physical fatigue, but the ghosts of past attempts whispering doubts as the miles stretched on. Will Dean make it to Palm Beach? Or will the ocean claim another dream? What drives a man to face such perilous odds alone? Stay tuned and let the story of Dean Summers remind you.

Some of the most fascinating stories are those where humans meet the raw, untamed forces of nature head on. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Dean Summers. Dean, you recently completed an incredible swim from Newcastle to Sydney, 95km, which is on its own a huge distance to swim. But the fact that you’re in the water for 31 hours, you did it successfully. We just spoke before that you felt the best you’ve ever felt coming out of a swim. That to me is quite, quite remarkable. So firstly, congratulations on the swim. And I can’t wait to hear about it and just the experience of it and how much preparation went into it. Because to me, that is something that just seems unfathomable to think of answering for that long and that far. Thanks, Brendan. And even now, a few weeks afterwards, it’s quite unfathomable to me too. But, you know, my head was in the place and it paid off. And now my head’s drifting away from that. So I’m happy to record this.

You’re right. Talk to me about the, where did that idea originate from? I mean, I know that there’s been two Summers who have attempted it, and you’re the first person to ever do it. So where did that idea originate from for you and how long has it been sort of, you know, nagging at you that this is something that would be good to do? Well, it hasn’t really been nagging at me for very long, but I’ve been aware of it the whole time I’ve been swimming international channels and it’s in Australia and it kind of felt like unfinished business for a very long time. Dez Renford, who was the ultimate showman and did a fantastic job of promoting himself and swimming in Australia at one stage, the king of the channel and just a local in Kuchy as well, where I swim. He had the idea of trying and he tried a whole lot of other swims. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the technology. He didn’t have the forecasting and whatever else he didn’t make it. And that was in the early 80s. In the 90s,

Susie Maroney, a household name in Australia, a champion swimmer, just a wonderful person as well. She tried it, but the weather packed him behind her and she couldn’t get it. So it was kind of unfinished business, just sitting there in the ether. And I thought one day I’ll get around to her looking at that.

Because you’ve completed a lot of other very well known swims before this, doing six of the ocean seven, you’ve got the triple crown as well. So quite a, I’d say quite a history in long distance. I mean, but this is not something that you did all through your life. I know you swam early on, but there was a big, a long period there where you weren’t really seeing much at all in my life. That’s right. So I was a swimmer as a kid in Fremantle. I’m reminded that we swam in the Fremantle Aquatic Center, no heating. And at first with no goggles either in a chlorinated pool. So we spent a great deal of, I spent a great deal of my time in the ocean of Selateland, Port Beach. So I loved it. Like everybody around was just lit for the water, but then I gave it away at maybe 18. So 16 to 18. And just work to work a life got in the way. I never really came back to it until about 12 years ago. I just fell in with Vlad,

notorious coach in Sydney and you know, it’s Vlad. And he’s enthusiasm and he’s vibrancy caught me up in the, in the squad sessions. And I started looking at those international channels. So I had a big break from swimming.

And so with the, I went and swam with that Vlad once or twice when I was up there just for some, some coaching and a lot of very say unassuming swimmers. So we went out to the cafe, you know, just got the coffee afterwards and got introduced to yourself. And a few of the other summers there and a lot of the swimmers, they’re doing some very big swims, crazy swims. And you were very, Vlad, you castled it to Sydney. No, no big deal kind of thing. It’s just a lot of amazing swimmers that aren’t doing it for you know, to big nut themselves and I think just looking to, looking for challenges, looking to see how they can push themselves. And I think that’s, that’s remarkable. Just that I love that sort of attitude and just to get out there, let’s do it. And you’ve obviously got a love for swimming, looking to promote open water, long distance swimming here in Australia, because I know I’ve talked about big swims overseas, but in Australia, there’s nothing really iconic, no, no long

distance swims that are necessarily that iconic right compared to the English channel and some of those other ones. That’s exactly right. And what Vlad’s done is created a group at an environment in the pool in ABC and Summer in Victoria Park in Sydney in winter, where it’s normalized and at any time you could have 10 English channel swimmers training in the squad. And it’s just completely normalized. They don’t stand out. They’re just done it and they come back into training. They might take off another tangent or they never come back to the pool again, but newcomers come in and are quite taken away by it. And it is pretty impressive, I think. And then they just get into that slide into that normality of it. And then before long, he’s off training someone else for another English channel. It’s only just under 80 people that he’s personally trained, given programs to and cross success with the English

channel. It’s incredible. It’s a great stable. And it’s a good environment. That’s amazing. And all those things you say are correct. People have different takes on what it actually means. For me, it’s a progression through the ocean seven. Now, I think it’s probably the ocean six because Japan’s out of reach for just about everybody. But there’s a progression and people are taking it in all different directions. I think, and I agree with your comments, Australia offers some of the most beautiful conditions that are accessible to everybody. You know, the rottenness channel is a good example of how much encouragement, enthusiasm is around for open water swimming, which in itself has increased over the COVID years. But there’s got a thousand people in the water at any time. That’s an incredible swim. And it should be. Timmy Garrett’s champion, the Palm Beach to Shelly swim here in Sydney. That’s a beautiful swim. 26 kilometers,

open water race, I think would have to be the longest open water race in the world now. And I just think there are other opportunities as well. I hope someone takes up the challenge of Newcastle to Sydney because that is a beautiful safe stretch of water. If you couldn’t shizzle out that time to find a window, it’s certainly doable.

So it talks to me about how you went about getting the team around you because so the swim’s unassisted, meaning you’re not touching a boat or anything like that. But you’ve obviously got a support team there to help you through it. So how do you go about getting the right people on board for that? Well, this is the biggest challenge and I’m reminded that I first started talking about this swim five years ago. So it hasn’t taken five years to pull together because we had a couple of years of COVID, of course. We had some other family problems that we had to deal with and come back after that. But everything’s very positive, but five years and slowly I planned it. But it’s different than all the other swims because any of the channel swims you roll up, you pay your money, well, very increasingly a high amount of money, and you go into the swim with all the logistics taken care of, the weather windows taken care of, everything else,

and you just do your bit and that’s to swim. And after which you come out and pat in the back is great. This one we had to create it. So where are we going to even take off from? Dez took off from the inside of the channel. I’m told because there was a camera crew there. Dez loved the camera crews and who doesn’t? Susie took off from Merriweather, I think. So there was nowhere. So I thought if we’re going to establish this swim and I was sure I was going to be successful, then start at Nobby’s. That’s the first beach just outside of the heads of Newcastle Harbour and under English Channel rules. I’m assisted as you said. So English Channel rules is what you wear, what you can’t touch, what you can feed, all of those things that we all know now. But that’s sort of setting the standard and the next person that takes that I hope will take it from the same place, try to beat my time, beat my distance,

whatever else, but I’ve kind of established that. So the difficulty for me was to bring together some people and I know plenty of people in their own rights, but bring them all together looking at the same objective on the same page was quite difficult. The first thing I did and was highly successful was to appoint what I call an expedition leader. And it really was an expedition for 100 different reasons. Calling an expedition got people’s interest, perked their interest. Everybody I came close to wanted to be part of the expedition and were very excited to donate generously their time, their resources, their energy and everything else. It was just a great feeling. So I’ve got an expedition leader in Warwick Norman, a man from the maritime industry from which I’m from. And Warwick knows everything there is to do about big ships, everything. I mean, the guy is an encyclopedia. He’s a yachtie, he’s a navigator, he’s a merchant seafarer,

he’s like I am. So he was a good guy for it, but he knew nothing about swimming. So okay, he’s okay with the boat. Then I found I was very lucky to find Dino, Doug and Queen in New Castle who donated their time and a very large boat, a 60 foot steel boat, and had to bring them, they knew nothing about swimming at all. And they’d known, in fact, the guy who wanted the boat, his brother of all was the pilot for Des Renford in the 80s. What a remarkable coincidence. And so I spoke to Des as pilot from the 80s. And he was just, it was like speaking about it was yesterday, it was fascinating. And he said no one’s as strong as Des, no one can be Des. Des just had it all, gutsy strength, determination. And he was just so enthralled with Des, you know, 50 years later, it was a beautiful thing. That’s awesome.

And in terms of the, like, it’s a big commitment to anyone who’s looking to get involved and help out because obviously the preparation, that’s a big part of it. But then the swim itself, it’s 31 hours, you’re going through the night, you’ve got kayakers, I’m assuming that are sort of changing in and out. It’s a big thing for them too. I remember when I did the rotten ass swim, just like trying to get to convince my mate to come over, kayak with me the whole way. It’s like, you’ve got to be good salesman. You’ve got to be able to pull these people in and get them to help out there. So what about the team as well? Well, again, I was lucky. A lifetime in the maritime industry gave me access to meteorologists, gave me access to professionals in the field, ships captains, engineers, crew members. So they will come on board without any sort of hesitation. And in the swimming world, I had access to all the people who understood kayaking.

Of course, I had Vlad on, it wouldn’t have been a swim without the coach and observer on there. So Vlad came along. I had four kayakers, including my daughter, and they rotated three hour shifts around for 31 hours. They were exhausted. It was hard getting on the boat. It was really hard to retrieve them after their three hour shift. You can imagine at midnight with a dimmest, dimmest amount of light, trying to get on a pitching boat. And the boat was rolling and pitching and it was just so difficult for them. I’ve seen some videos, oh my God. Our focus all the time was on safety for the crew. The swimming stuff, we know that will come second, but we had to have nine people on that boat safe at all times. And that was a challenge. But again, Warwick knows about safety. We pulled together a safety case and some threat analysis or whatever else we needed to put together. And it came together very, very well.

So four kayakers, two captains, an expedition doctor. His life is an expedition doctor. So that was fantastic to have him on board. He flew himself up from Tasmania for the event. We had two observers, Vlad and one other observer. So a crew of nine and then three shore-based crew, including my wife who was following us down, maintaining radio contact all the time, making sure everything was on track. And in terms of the swim itself, tell me how it played out. How are the conditions? How did you feel throughout? What was that story of the swim? Well, the first part is the weather window, as you know, for any swim. The weather window is critical. And we’re looking at a 40. So I’m budgeting for 40 hours. And it was really hard to identify that. And the weather on this coast over the last little while has been all over the place, rain, storm. This year is better than the last three years together. So that sort of come together. We had two false starts where we thought we had a good weather.

And then right at the last minute, we had to abandon those. So we had people flying from Melbourne, Tasmania, driving up from Sydney, the boat ready to go. And then we had to step down twice. So it was getting pretty tough. And I didn’t want to keep the crew on tent hooks for another week, for example. So I was getting time. I had to expand the parameters. One thing I wanted to do is keep away from the Northwest wind because that brings in blue bottles. But in the end, I just had to say, look, we’ll lift the wind limits. We’re not going to get a perfect day. Lift the wind with the direction, the temperatures, the waves, everything else. And so we decided we’re ready to go. Got to go ahead. And in we went on the 13th of March out of Nobby’s Beach. And that was an incredible time because I’ve walked all through my head a hundred times. But I’m thinking, I didn’t consider that at one stage, everyone’s off

to the boat. And I’m standing on the beach with my son, just him and I, looking out to see, ready to start this big swim. And he was going to follow down in his car as well. So I’m standing on the beach just after six o’clock in the morning. It’s dark. I don’t know this beach. Someone’s told me that there’s a reef to the left, a reef to the right. And if you go just in this direction, you should be okay on a low tide. So I dive in very lonely, cold beach with just a red light on the back of my goggles. And I dive in and got smashed by a set of waves because I couldn’t see him coming in the dark.

Made my way through the reef without any problems at all to the light where I thought it was the boat, but there was a couple of guys fishing. So I got to the wrong boat and eventually come around and found my boat and joined that probably three k’s off the coast. And we started the course down. The navigators had organised a route that they thought we could come out a long way off the coast and were designed to come a long way off the coast to get away from natural gyres, whirlpools and other things because it’s quite a craggy coast and the water coming up and down from tides will develop different whirlpools and different shapes. So if we get that far enough, then we could have a long shot straight down to Sydney and get away from all the waterways and confused water. And that worked pretty well.

Wow. And what about your feeding strategy throughout? It was you were, how awesome are your seeding? Do you have a certain kind of hydrates you’re trying to get in each feed? How does that play out for you? I’ve been working with Samantha Lewis, who’s a sports star of the bone, right? And also a nutritionist in Sydney that we had arrived at a 40 hour feed plan. Okay, new for me because the longest I’ve ever swam was 20 hours in Molokai. And you can just sustain yourself with carbohydrates, I think. But over 24, everything changes and everything has to be reconsidered and put in a different sort of time frame. So mainly carbohydrates in the form of just cheap multidextrin with cordial. And so that’s the backbone of my feeding plan. Every 45 minutes, maybe an hour for the first, probably 12 hours. And then some protein on the way through, I had rice, bits and pieces. It wasn’t really scientific, but it was enough to keep me going. And my stroke rate

incredibly stayed at 64 strokes a minute from the first to the last, which Vlad was pretty impressed. I’m happy to impress my coach. That just signals that the nutrition, even though it wasn’t very tasty at times, was spot on because it kept my energies up, didn’t dip. And the best thing about nutrition for me is to make sure you don’t dip because then it’s hard to get back up on top of that again later. Yeah, very hard to get back on top. And did you practice with that in training with that sort of the rice and that kind of thing? Or you just thought, I’ll be right to do it? Yeah, I didn’t do that distance in training. So I thought rice would be okay. And my wife was arguing that it should be savory. I thought sweet. In the end, of course, she was right. I don’t know why I have a question to her, but it could have been savory because sweet was just too much all the time. There’s an interesting factor that

because it was such a community expedition and everyone wanted to be part of it. The local restaurant in Kujih, where I come after some swims, donated beef cheek ragu with gnocchi. So that was pretty bougie for the swim. And the crew were going to have all that. But when I was swimming at night and thinking, what am I drinking sugary water for? Well, I know there’s beef cheek ragu on board. So I asked for some of that. And every now and then I was rewarded with some warm beef cheek ragu. And just before I was going to feed it every time a wave would wash into it. And so I got a bit salty and a bit, but it was good. And the important thing that I sort of stayed in my mind this time that I hadn’t really picked up and it’s a no brainer is that those feeds should always be core temperature, your core temperature. In the cook straight, I was caught out because I had them cold off the deck. And that was maybe 20 or less than 20 degrees.

And eventually that made me cold. So I didn’t want it hot. I don’t want to artificially warm me. I just want it as core temperature and that paid off in spades.

So so 36 degrees, you always try and get it around there. How did they do that? Did they have a microwave on board or like what was their strategy to do that? So it was very deliberate. They kept them warm on board at the temperature in warm water. And then they would put them in an esky because it was a three hour feed cycle that had to take three hours of feed out in the kayaks. And the last one had been sitting in a tiny esky for three hours. So just put a heat back in the bottom of that. And it kept it around the temperature I needed.

Interesting. Okay, there you go. I guess every little bit counts, especially over that distance at that time. Now you said you had to lift the wind direction restrictions that you put on your plan to leave. And so that northwest wind you said would bring in blue bottles. And I know that was a big thing to you this swim where you encountered blue bottles. When did you when did the first one start to start to hit? I reckon the first one hit me within within an hour. So I was swimming out. The dawn was just breaking. So I’m swimming along as the sun’s just coming up. It’s beautiful. The water’s clear. I see a couple of big shivers of stingrays, which are a beautiful sign. And you have seen them, they just a hundred stingrays fly around in the water as evil as evil one. And they were beautiful. And just as I was appreciating that, I got smacked on the on the arm with a blue sting. And I thought, Oh man,

I hope there’s not another one of those around. But over the next 31 hours, I was all stung constantly. I reckon every 20 minutes just stung, stung, stung. And the thing I was trying to get away from the worst thing for me when people say, what about sharks? What about this? That’s, you know, you can avoid them. You can sort of, you can mitigate those. But there’s nothing you can do with a blue bottle. And you just have to swim through it, peel it off. Although I have found through experience, if you stop and swear very loudly, it kind of helps a little bit. I did plenty of that. Yeah. At least, at least the creamy that you’ve been here by blue bottle at that point. I woke him up a few times. I was complaining. And does it get, is it the same every time that you get stung that it’s just as painful? It’s like, just like a new one, or do you just start to get used to the pain or you, you know, stung in the same spot? So it’s not as bad. What’s, what’s it like?

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So it’s always there right in front of you. And that can make sure that you are actually training in the right zone where I find a lot of swimmers do go either too hard or too easy. So this has been a real revelation for me in terms of the effort that I’m actually putting in at when I’m going at certain speeds and certain paces. So if you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the new Gen 2 version of the FormSmart swim goggles, go to formswim.com forward slash effortless to get yourself a pair of the new Gen 2 goggles. If you’d like to get the Gen 1 goggles, you can save 10% going through that link at formswim.com forward slash effortless. It’s hard to describe. They sting and they sting bad every single time. I worry about the buildup of toxins and they’re designed to disable muscles. So I didn’t have that. So maybe I was just lucky in that time of their life cycle or something, but they weren’t disabling me

and they weren’t going to my muscles, but they were just, it was just the pain and an interruption every 20 minutes. I like to get into a swim and just lose myself in the swim. And I’ve done it before. I’ve told the story in the North Channel that I’ve lost an hour of the time and just getting in this beautiful Zen-like state. But then you don’t have an electric shock every 20 minutes, reminding you that you’re in the ocean and they come across your face, their tentacles come around your neck, around your body. They get stuck on your swim line of your bathers. And so you just have to take a couple of minutes to peel them off. At night, when you can’t see them, you have to hold your hand up to the stars and try to find those little tentacles and think you’ve peeled them off. Vlad came up with an ingenious idea, and he just had a little chups wipe on a rope. And so every time I go stung, they’ll throw me the chups wipe, and I’ll try to wipe the tentacles off. And so that

helped a little bit. It’s almost like if you’re trying to get to sleep and you’re just about to doze off and someone just talks to you and just, yes, wake up. Yeah, as soon as you’re about to get into that really nice place when you’re swimming, that Zen-like state. Yeah, that’s no good. That’s right. I was reading in one of the articles that was written about the swim, about what was it, 10 plus hours where dark sky, it’s just you, you’ve got Milky Way out there, the bioluminescence as well. What was the night time some experience like? Well, for the previous two or three years, I live on Kujizu at night, you can see the sea, you can hear it. I’ve been, dreading’s not the right word, but I’ve been a little anxious about a whole night swimming out in the ocean because it’s past the horizon from where I live. And I know soon I’m going to be out there in the water on my own with a kayak, and it’s going to be a tough night.

I thought maybe I’ll get a full moon so I can see things, but the full moon wasn’t there. There was only what’s called a thumbnail moon, just a tiny sliver of moon, but not enough to give any light. The sun was going down. The water was okay. It was just a little bit of chop and a big lazy rolling swell, so that was quite okay. The kayakers were set. We’re all ready for the night time. I’d been in the water already for 12 hours, but I wasn’t feeling tired. I was feeling good. Okay, this is the next stage, and I’m ready for it. Let’s do it. So the sun goes down, goes down behind the mountains. I can see way off from the distance to the land side, and it was getting darker in the water, but then all of a sudden night fell, and the water just switched to black, just completely black. Okay, I’m ready to go. The kayak’s next to me, and I’m looking up, and I can see the Milky Way starting to shine, and it was just sort of at nine o’clock, I

suppose it’s seven o’clock, and it looked beautiful, but really, really bright. So bright you could read a book off, I’d say. There were no other lights around me. We designed it in the back of the kayaks. We just put this tiny little red glowing light in the well of the kayak, so there was no direct light. It was just a loom, and that’s what I could follow. The big boat, the pilot boat, was quite a way off, maybe half a kilometer away, so that had no ambient light to it at all. So it was just essentially me in the black ocean with a nice guy at night. Beautiful. And as this Milky Way started to shine, all the stars started to come out too, like little suns, and so, so bright, so clear. I put my head in the water soon after it got black, and I was so happy to see bioluminescence, and I don’t know if you swam with them, but when your fingers go, it’s like shooting little stars at the end of your fingers.

It lights up these little pingy lights, and they’re just all around you. Then your other arm goes in, same happens there, and you create a little cloud of stars that just gently, as you move through the water, ping into your goggles and explode gently into your goggles in this beautiful bioluminescence color of blue and green. And so you’ve got the Milky Way up here, you’ve got the stars that seem to be so low, you could almost reach out and touch them, and underneath you’ve got the bioluminescence, giving a same sort of look as stars. So no horizon, too dark for that, but, and there’s nothing on the horizon, or you can see the stars all around you. It was the most beautiful, beautiful night. The crew say it was a little choppy, a little uncomfortable. I didn’t feel that. All I felt was beautiful stars and just the universe helping me along with this swim. And I wasn’t hallucinating, it was just 12 hours, a little

tired. But for the next 10 hours, every stroke was rewarded by bioluminescence. Beautiful. That’s not good. That’s got to be one of those things that you’ll look back at 20 years from now and just go, well, it wasn’t that a magical moment, a magical time. And I mean, people would pay big money to get on some sort of drug to have that sort of experience, right? That’s amazing just to have all of that sort of come together. And probably I’m guessing like the further you’re getting into a swim, the more you’re just getting into the groove, but you’re also, I mean, obviously lucid, but the longer these events go, the more you tend to, the more you tend to just, you’re not fully there kind of thing, like you’re really just in the moment, right? Is that what you, what you felt and experienced? You give yourself over to it, don’t you? You give yourself over to feeling, this is the universe, this is my environment. You are just flying through the stars

in a good pace, but not a breathtaking pace. Everything’s there for you. It was beautiful. You’re right. I shall remember that forever. And I’ve, I’m an emergency for myself and I know plenty of other guys who go to sea and very few have seen 10 hours of bioluminescence in the water. And I don’t know anybody else who’s seen that, but man, what a, what a reward if the clouds had to be, you know, we had been a bit more clouds that would have blocked out the line. How I got a full night of bioluminescence was just like a reward from the universe. It was just came together wonderfully. So the only thing that was upsetting that was getting stung by bloody blue bottles. And that was interrupting. I had imagined that I could get into that zen state you mentioned before and just proofed away, get into the rhythm, listen to your own bubbles, feel your own rocking back and forth, bioluminescence. And I could have just gone on forever that way, but the stinginess and

it chipped away as death by a thousand cuts. Talk to me about when the sun started to come up. So you started at six o’clock in the morning, you’re getting to six o’clock the next morning, so 24 hours into it. What was that experience like? And are you getting updates on how far along you are? Or are you just sort of going with the flow? You probably can see some landmarks here and then maybe like, what was that like for you coming into the next day? The second sunrise, I was 16 kilometres at sea, so I couldn’t see anything, any land.

And the land has a very clear operational requirement not to tell swimmers where they are. And that works perfectly well for channels. The English channel can be so deceiving sometimes. Molokai, you think you’re nearly there and you’ve only got 20 kilometres to go. So it’s a good idea not to, but we had discussions afterwards. And for me, I would want to know where I am in future. It settles my mind down, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 24 hours more to go, as long as it’s in my head. I think every swimmer will be different. And I think it’s a conversation that coaches should have with their swimmers before they take off. It could work forward, it could work against, but for me, I desperately wanted to know how far I had to go, where I was, am I making way? Because sometimes the currents are with you, sometimes they’re against you, 16 kilometres at sea, and you’re into your 25th hour of swimming. So that was okay. It was not a bad sunrise. It was okay. You’re tired,

sunrise is the excitement’s wearing off a little bit by the second one. The water’s still very clear. The stingers are still there every 20 minutes, and I can feel it starting to get a little bit lumpier. Our weather window would have suggested that there was a front, a subtly front coming up, and it should have been 24 hours away, but it was coming up much quicker. That was coming up to meet me. I was still 16 kilometres out at sea, and I’m making a decision I’m going to swim through this front, but 16 kilometres at sea, he’s been swimming for at this stage 28 hours. What are we going to do? They made a decision to bring me closer to the coast so that if I needed to get out earlier, I could have been closer to the coast rather than having another five hours in.

I did, and the front kept on coming, and I kept on coming in, and I’ve seen weather maps after it. It’s just like I nicked in front of that, and I didn’t have to go through that front. They steered me directly to Palm Beach, that’s the Sydney beach, so that would have achieved, and it certainly did achieve my objective to swim from Newcastle to Sydney, and it was still a very, very long way to go. My daughter was kayaking for me, and even she was listening to Vlad rather than her own father. I said, how far to go? It’s just there. It wasn’t just there. It was still four or five more hours, and at one stage I got the captain, and I swam towards the boat, and I said, you tell me how far I’ve got to swim. This was just before daybreak. He said, I think you’ve got another 12 hours to go. I thought, oh, God, so I have it all tanned, I just wore underwater, but as long as you’ve got that 12 hours in your head,

you’ve got 12 hours. That’s all I needed to get my head around something, but with all the stings, with the weather starting to close in, I’ll start to hallucinate. The sun had risen, it was probably nine o’clock in the morning, on my way into Palm Beach, and I started to imagine that there were crash rails on a highway either side, and they said, swim towards that. I’d swim towards that, but the current would take me somewhere else, and it’s just outside of a big waterway, so the waterway was emptying, the current was coming out, the tide was coming out, but water was confused. I was confused. I’ll start to hallucinate. That was probably the toughest part. Of course, I always had my little blue friends to shock me back into reality, and that didn’t just become harder and harder. Something I did experience is hallucinations aren’t rainbows and unicorns, every swimmer knows. There’s something much different, and it’s a state of mind more than

anything. My state of mind was telling me that, sure, you’re getting stung and getting stung across the face, but everybody’s getting stung across the face. Sure, I’m tired. Everybody’s tired. Sure, I’m just feeling like I’ve had enough of this ocean going up and down, but I imagined everybody was in the water with me. It was like a big training swim. I don’t know why, but it kind of helped a little bit and stopped me complaining about the stings, and I just needed a direct line. At one stage, I could see the beach. I thought, now I’m getting closer. Now I know exactly where I’m going. Things started to settle down. The kayaking crew was sort of putting up with a bit of grumpiness from me. That was great. I wasn’t feeding or taking water as much as I should, but I still felt all right just starting to lose concentration a lot. At that stage, I thought, this swim isn’t over, because if I lose it, I’m not going to get to the beach, and it’s not going to be a swim.

I just lobbed in on the kayak, and I thought, the kayak’s here. I’m swimming here. All I had to do is follow that big orange thing, and so that helped me get through the worst of the hallucinations. Then you’re heading towards Sydney. Could you see the big headland there as you’re sort of making your way? Is Palm Beach, is that the very top of Northern Beaches? Yeah, it is. It’s near Barron Chilling Lighthouse.

Could you see that landmark? You’re like, okay, I know where I am now? No, I could. It’s a bit hazy. I think there were some bushfires or whatever. I couldn’t see it, still in kind of a hallucinogenic state. I just got closer. Vlad was telling me, this is where you’ve got to go. My daughter’s telling me the boat, so crash rails, everything sort of will leave me to the right way. As I get closer, I could see a lot of white water in front of me. The swell really started to pick up, and that was like a big sand bank, maybe a kilometer out of the beach. That was picking right up. I know now that the entire beaches were closed because the swell was so big it was dangerous for anybody to swim or surf. All those beaches were closed. What I could see was the white water getting picked up as it was smashing directly onto the sand. That was the least of my problems. The crew, Warwick, had contacted the lifeguards and said,

we’ve got a swimmer coming in. No one’s to touch him. No one’s to get in front of him. All the rules that we know. And I didn’t know, but this guy, this young guy paddled out and said, Dean, the best way is to go towards those trees. It’s going to be rough as hell, but those trees will offer you the least resistance coming in. Stay away from here because it’s breaking, net breakers on the beach. Okay, so I was famous. I wonder how that bloke randomly knew my name. Of course he’s been talking to the crew. My daughter who’s been with me, I know a lot of swims jumped in and she wanted to come in behind me and finish the swim with me. Vlad was the same, so they were having a great time just crashing through the surf. And then I tell my daughter, it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I was posed with a question, should I save my daughter when she gets tumbled by the waves and risking losing the swim? Or, you know, will she understand? Well, she’ll understand. But she was rescued by

we can look at lifeguard. So she wasn’t unhappy about the result. But I come to sure, and just before I could see the white waves crashing, I can hear it crashing. I kind of know that it’s going to be a rough finish. But I see all these people with clothes on up and down the beach. And it wasn’t a beach day. It was a terrible day for visiting the beach. And I thought they must have been some corporate meeting or something and then come down for lunch or afternoon tea. I think it was around two o’clock. What are those people doing? And as I changed course, as they’re directed by the lifeguard, all these people ran down the beach. They looked so out of place. I thought it might have been a religious ceremony or something was going on. And I thought, look, I’ve changed course. And now they’re all going to get in the way where I’m going to stand. This is really rude. Can they just get out of my bloody way? And I don’t want to touch anybody right at

the end. Anyway, the waves come. I got tumbled over a few times. My daughter was getting looked after. Vlad looked after. That was fine. Got to my feet and walked ashore. And I felt good. I felt good. I threw my arms in the air. My wife was there. It was a strong finish, I think. Wow. And those people on the beach, that was there? Was that media? Was that people would come out to see you? They’d heard the swim was finished? It was all my friends. They came from Koogy. They came from the northern beaches. All the people I’ve swam with over the last five, sometimes 10 years, came from everywhere to welcome me ashore. And they’d been following the tracker down. And they’d been exchanging emails and texts and everything else. So it was a real buzz. But I didn’t think that. I had it in my head. Oh, okay. How am I going to get these kayaks back to my home? How am I going to pack the boat up? What’s the boat crew going to do? Oh, God, I hope there’s something left in the

fridge. I’m hungry as hell. I think I could really slam some soda water because my face, my nose has burned 31 hours from the salt. The throat was burned. And just as I was coming in, I missed this bit, just as I was coming in, a blue bottle got me right across the face and sort of swung its whole body up my nostril. And that was like 20 meters away from the end. So I’m cuddling in the turn trying to pull this thing out of my nose. They just didn’t let me go. But I was so surprised that they were all my friends. And it was just a really beautiful thing. And how would you say you were when you finished? Did you start to come to a bit more because it’s finished? Were you quite lucid and able to recognise what was going on? I saw I recognised someone with a bottle of champagne and that felt very good down my burnt throat. But I gave a television interview. There was one TV camera there. I gave an interview within four or five minutes. So I felt good. Apparently I could speak okay to them.

I spoke to everybody around the place. I was lucid. The hallucinations were at a time. I think I came out of those before I came to the beach. The crashing beach and the white surf sort of made me refocus my attention. I was fine. It was strong finish. I was standing up talking to everybody. I felt good. And I remember consciously feeling my shoulder because I had a reconstruction less than two years ago. And even as weary as I was in my mind, I could put all my body weight on the shoulder and that was a great feeling too.

And what about six weeks after the swim now? What’s it been like since you’ve set this big goal? You’ve trained for it? You’ve accomplished it? Is there a sense of, obviously a sense of satisfaction with it, but are you already sort of looking at what’s the next thing? Where are you at in terms of goals and what’s next? What a crazy sport we’re involved in. Everybody says, well done. What’s next? That’s good. You’ve set an Australian record 95 kilometres, but you’re not going to sit on that for a while. It’s been six whole weeks.

But it does. The things are going through my mind. I’ve still got a high level of fitness, I think. What is next? I don’t know. I’ve got some ideas. I’m talking to people about it, but I picked up a lot of things. One of the most important things for swims over 24 hours is to analyse how you’re going to manage fatigue. We can’t, and I’ve talked to a lot of people, Phil Rush and I had a couple of conversations about this, and he’s a triple English channel swimmer, so he knows about fatigue. He’s a great mentor and he’s got a wealth of information. So we spoke about fatigue in general, and you can’t build up a bank of sleep. So you can’t sleep for two days before and then don’t need to sleep for two days. Anybody who goes out the pump knows that. But you can rest up and make sure you’re as rested. I do some meditation before a swim. If you can chisel at that time and have sometimes very, very quiet, like 24 hours before you swim, that helps a hell of a lot. I’d played for that,

but because of the nature of the window and the rushed logistics right at the end, I didn’t get a chance to do that. And in fact, the pub where we stayed across the road from the marina where I was joining the boat had karaoke night that went until three o’clock in the morning, and I had the room directly above the pub, the karaoke machine. But lucky me, I didn’t get to sleep till probably three o’clock and we were out by 4.30. So that’s just the way things happen. If I, when I do something else, it’ll be very, very deliberate to get a lot of rest beforehand. And of course the effects of constantly getting stung have a mental aspect to them as well, not only physiological. As in, as in now, still having an effect or just throughout the swim you’re talking about? Throughout the swim. So if, if I could swim without jellyfish or getting stung, I think you can preserve the time where you’ll have onset of hallucinations or critical fatigue

if I can do that. Rest up first, try to swim when there’s no jellyfish. So two very important takeaways for me. For me, I had, you know, my neck was really swollen because the jellyfish were sort of gathering there and the skin had really swollen and the skin had worn away, so it was really bare flesh. My tongue had pealed out completely, didn’t sort of peel out of my mouth until I went to sleep the first night. I don’t know what happened to it. I looked suspiciously at my cat, but I’m not going to blame it, but my tongue was like a socket come out and there were, were just stings over my body, but there were any, you know, flesh wounds that weren’t significant. I didn’t hurt any part of my body and I felt great better than I had felt on any of the other big swims.

It’s amazing. It must also be nice finishing at home or close to home, right? Like you just, you’re not overseas, not in hotels. Like you just get to come home, you know, go to sleep in your own bed. You’ve got friends, you’ve got family around you. That’s got to be a good feeling too. Oh, that is the best feeling. That was really easy. You know, there was no packing up and even though it’s been the last couple of hours of that swim, wondering how I’m going to get kikes, you get the boat done, get these people. Of course, I shouldn’t know. Everybody could fix all that up and it was just hitting the car. Here’s some champagne. Here’s some kulebus and let’s go back to, let’s go back to Koji. That was good. But I think, and I’m talking about how well I felt afterwards. Vlad, I don’t think as coach, why no, hasn’t coached anybody to swim over 24 hours before. So he gave me a plan where he called it a swim week and I just took that away between Christmas and New Year.

Four days inside that swim week, I’d be doing 85 kilometers, but broken up into morning swim and afternoon swim. So he made it as tough as he possibly could and then went on holidays in the Pacific Islands and left me with this program to fulfill on my own. So I called it Hell Week, but it was just tough and I’m doing it on my own. A couple of helps in the morning with some local swimmers, but largely on my own. I determined when I’d swim myself, there were pretty rough and shitty conditions over Christmas and New Year in Sydney, but that toughened me right up for that swim. It gave me all the confidence I needed. And I think a lasting physical sort of resistance to the under kilometer swim. I was wondering, just sort of looking at your background as well. Obviously, you’re in the merchant navy, your first sort of role. What sort of impact did that have on you then doing these long distance swims? Aside from, obviously, great contacts and all of that now,

but did that have any impacts if you sort of look back over the last 40 odd years? Did that sort of dig in this love of the ocean and got you into it? Yeah, I’d always loved the ocean. My grandfather jumped ship, he’s an English seafarer, jumped ship in Newcastle, Australia, and to make his family and make a new life for himself, then his sons all went to sea. That’s my dad as well. And then my dad’s sons, my brothers, we all went to sea and my son and daughter went to sea. So it’s in our blood, the maritime industry. And the reason I call the 60 Milo is to celebrate that part of the industry that brought, the maritime industry that brought coal from Newcastle to Sydney over the last 100 years to, in fact, build the Australian economy. So that was a great thing. Australian flagships, Australian registered with Australian workers on them, a bygone era, but it was a shout out to the 60 Milo. They determined 60

nautical miles from the inside of Newcastle Harbour to coal terminals to the inside of several places inside of Sydney to bring that down. So that gave another element to the maritime industry and the sector. I raised money for merchant seafarers now from developing countries who are the most vulnerable workers in the world, cheated and treated terribly, come to Australia and bring us everything we need. So everything was in one way or another connected by only a few points to the maritime industry. So I love the ocean. And when I made a determination 12 years ago, 13 years ago, to get on the straight narrow, not just immersed myself in work, it’s a tough job in tough environments, but I needed something else. And I felt very naturally into a community that respected the ocean that challenged themselves against the ocean that survived in the ocean. It was a beautiful thing. And I never regret one of those swims or anything that I’ve done

in that industry. It’s funny how it plays out like my dad was a swim coach, was a swim coach still. My granddad was also a swim coach. And I never planned to go into swim coaching when I was a kid. I was like, I’m going to be a swim coach. But it just naturally gravitated there. It’s what I really enjoyed. It’s what I think I was. Yeah, it’s in the blood. You just pick up these things from being around your parents and your grandparents. And just you absorb it. And then you find yourself there. And I think a big part of it is just the love of the love of water and the love of the sea. And I recently moved down the coast a couple of years ago. And one thing that I really resonate with people who live down here is that love of the ocean. And just for me, if I’m too far away from it, I feel it. I really just need to be somewhere near the coast, because I just I like to look out at the horizon. I like to get into the water. There’s something that’s really

recharging about it and just feels very natural. You’re exactly right. It’s the family business in the first instance. And we’re kind of doomed unless we consciously break that connection with the family business. But what you say about the swimming community is right. One thing that is curious about the ocean seven or the ocean six, whichever it is now, is that every time you go to another place to swim, there are like-minded people. And there’s a community there. And usually like New Zealand’s the best example. In Wellington, they open their arms to you. They bring you in on the first day, celebrate, support, do whatever you need to help you get a swim across the coast, right? Doves are a little bit cold out. There’s something to do with the English culture, I think. Hawaii, all the other swims have this culture. And even swims where there are, or destinations where there are no big swims, there is a community cold or hot that are on the edge of the water every morning,

having coffee, enjoying it. And you’re right, it’s that love of water that we’re all drawn to, I think. And I’ve described it in a few interviews that being able to swim long distances and understand the ocean and swim with it rather than against it, it’s like having a superpower. And on a crystal clear morning in the ocean, there is nothing like it. It’s like flying above, looking at everything else around you. It’s a beautiful thing. Yeah, absolutely. I did a swim on Saturday because I’ve been mostly swimming in the pool, do some open water races, but I surf, so I’m always in the ocean. But I did a swim on the weekend, just out of Brighton, here in Melbourne in the Bay. It was completely flat. Water was cool, but completely glassy. And I just, God, I miss this. I do remember how much I love this open water swimming, especially training for Rotto. Every Wednesday would go for our long swim at Half Moon Bay there. And I remember getting out of those swims, which might be two hours,

maybe two and a half, three hours for the longer ones, and just feeling so, just so content. You know, you expended that energy. You’ve had two and a half hours of just meditation, you’re here in the stroke, your strokes, the water, and it is such a great feeling. It is. And you come to probably, you’re deprived of hearing, smell, you’re not speaking to anybody, or you shouldn’t be stopping and speaking to anybody. And all you’ve got is the sound of the bubbles and that meditative state, and you can race the bloke next to you or the person next to you. But if you want, you can just, it is just so invigorating. And I wonder if you agree that everywhere around Australia, it’s just so accessible, and it’s beautiful, and it’s swimmable apart from places like in northern Queensland for obvious reasons, north of Western Australia. But everywhere else, it’s swimmable, largely untouched. And some of those places where I swam on Newcastle to Sydney had never been swum before. Certainly 16 kilometers

off Palm Beach has probably never had a swimmer in that water. So it’s exciting. And it’s a sport that’s growing rapidly, especially open water swimming. I think the Europeans call it wild water. It’s not very wild there. But it’s growing so rapidly. And we should be focused more and more on what we’ve got in Australia, as well as to the international stuff for sure.

What do you feel like is going to be next year? So you’ve retired from work, is that right? Mostly retired. I’ve got a couple of other things to do yet, but mostly retired. I’ve got plenty of time. And so I was reading that big thing that you’re sort of looking to do now is work with other people who are mentors, people who are getting into this kind of thing, looking to change themselves with these bigger distances. Is that where you look to head outside of your own swimming? Not deliberately, but that’s information there. I don’t mind talking about it. In fact, I really enjoy talking about it for the reasons we spoke about earlier. It makes me think and focus on some of those points. How do we deal with fatigue? How do you prepare for, you know, you’re going to be fatigued to some stage? How do you delay that nutrition needs to have a lot more work in it over the 24-hour period? The support, how do you actually bring together a team to support you? Because we were reinventing the

wheel in a lot of areas. So that’s where I’m interested in developing, but I’m not going to go and hang a shingle up saying, you know, Dean Summers, you know, I can teach you how to swim for 24 hours because they’re coaches today. I’m never going to be a coach. It’s a great profession and I’ve got admiration for you all. But it’s not something that I do. And that’s why I rely on people like yourself and Vlad. And anything that we’re looking back, what’s been the most surprising thing since finishing the swim? I think, well, first of all, is that everyone’s saying, what’s next? That is the curious thing. What’s next? Where are you going to swim next? But there’s been an enormous amount of analysis of it from my own friends and family. You know, this is a big thing. You know, how can you build on that? What can we learn from that? What can we take away from that? Yes, I had a conversation with my expedition leader who lives in Melbourne and I live in Sydney. And I just rang him up to have a chat

and he said, no, you just interrupted me. I’m going through. I’m writing all the things that we observe through the swim, what we can do better for the next time. So he hasn’t left it as well. So the most surprising thing is that every one of that crew feels like they’re part of an expedition. Everybody’s got something different to take away, but they’re recording it and talking about it and expanding it. So it’s gone into, I think, the record books in more than just one way of saying 95 kilometres. That’s the Australian record. That’s good. But let’s people start to think about, maybe I can do 100 kilometres. You know, if I want that information, people just have to ring me. I’m really happy to share any part of that and share my observations. Yeah. Once you do something and then people who are involved, people who see it, it’s going to take on its own life outside of that. And you’ve got no control over what happens with that. But it’s the great thing about

where it’s going to inspire people to set their own challenges, do some different things, probably do that swim down in a couple of years’ time. So I’m sure that it’s going to spawn some other big adventures and expeditions in other swimmers, particularly Australian swimmers, because, as you said, there’s a lot of unexplored territory out there that we’ve got great places to swim and very accessible. You’re exactly right. You hit the nail on the head, better describe better than I did. It does take on a whole life of its own and goes off in all different directions. So people discuss it in cafes. It’s not about me. It’s about the swim. It’s about the support. And, you know, that inner self is a great satisfaction to me. Absolutely. Well, Dave, this has been great. I’d love to hear about the swim. And I remember meeting at the cafe earlier this year, and someone mentioned that Newcastle was in your

swim. I was like, I mean, that’s a bloody long way. That’s a huge swim. And you just seem very nonchalant about it. So yeah, amazing that you completed it. First person’s ready to complete it. And can’t wait to see what’s next. And just great to hear that story. So thanks for being on the podcast. It’s been wonderful. Thanks, friend. I really appreciate the time to talk. And good luck. I hope to see you one day. Yeah, can’t wait. I don’t think I’ve ever, no, I’ve never, never swum there. I’ve just done the manly to, well, yeah, the manly to Shelly. That’s about it. But I’ve intended to do a few more Sydney swims. So I’ll, I better, better make that happen. Good on you, mate. Love to swim with you. 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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Dan Eisenhardt, CEO and Founder of FORM Swim, shares his journey of creating the world’s first augmented reality swim goggles. Discover how real-time data can enhance your training sessions, the most useful features of the goggles, and the challenges faced during development. If you’re looking to forge your own path in your professional life, Dan also provides valuable insights on getting started and three essential considerations for starting a business. Tune in to this episode for all this and more.

This podcast is brought to you by NanoClear — our own range of anti-fog swim goggles, designed by Effortless Swimming with the anti-fog treatment bonded into the lens itself (not sprayed on, so it doesn’t wear off after a few swims). Check out the NanoClear range here and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off.

We were lucky enough to have a first product that was been in market now for almost five years that people loved and wanted to use and still want to use to this day.

Believing in yourself, of course saying humble and open to input and feedback, but you know, nothing gets done unless you sort of act with conviction. You could just keep overthinking stuff and the best thing to test whether you have a good idea or not is to actually go and do it. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Dan Eisenhardt is the CEO and founder of Form Swim. As a distance swimmer, one of Dan’s biggest challenges was knowing his times and his pace when he was training. So in 2006, he had the idea of creating a pair of goggles that could show your splits while you were swimming. But it wasn’t until 2018 that he had the right team, the experience and the technology that allowed him to create the world’s first augmented reality swim goggles. This is when Form was born. On this episode, we dive into how you can get more out of your sessions by using real time data. What features does Dan use the most in his own swimming? What was the hardest feature to develop in the goggles with the new swim straight feature with the heart rate monitor? Or if you’ve ever wanted to tread your own path in your professional life, what’s the best way to get started? And what three things would you need to consider if you’re going to go out on your own in

business? All that and more in today’s episode. Now if you’re not following our Instagram page yet, head over to Instagram at Effortless Swimming. We’re currently doing a giveaway for a pair of Gen 2 Form Smart Swim goggles. That ends on the 30th of April, so Tuesday, 12 p.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time. So head to our Instagram page to win yourself a pair of Form Smart Swim goggles, the Gen 2 version. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is the founder and CEO of Form Swim, Dan Eisenhart. Welcome to the podcast, Dan. Thanks a lot, Brent. Thanks for having me. It’s a great to be here. Dan, take me back to when you first had the idea of having some sort of augmented reality for swimming where you can see the data in front of you. When was that first idea born? Yeah, the light bulb moment was really doing my MBA, which was in 2006. And I was doing an exchange program.

I was actually living in Melbourne at that time. And then I did an exchange program to Vancouver, Canada. And I picked an entrepreneurship course. And I was asked, we were all asked to come up with an idea and pitch it to class. And we had to be passionate about the idea. And I was like, lifelong swimmer, come from a family of swimmers and engineers. And I thought, okay, well, what’s the biggest pain point in my life as a swimmer where it was really to have real time access to metrics, because I was a 450 hundred meter swimmer. So I would only get updates, you know, when you’re resting at pool and you can’t really see the pool clock and you have to do all this mental math. So I pitched this in class and some people came over, they became my co founders. And we thought we’re going to create this company in 2006. It was too early. We couldn’t pull it off when we ended up pivoting, so to speak, to ski golf. So we ended up creating Recon, which became basically

a company that does the same thing as form. But back then it was for for skiing and later on cycling. And so that’s kind of how the whole thing started. And you say it was too early, was it too early for the technology too early for you with your business acumen, but what was too early about it? Do you know what it seemed too hard at the time to get into such a small form factor inside a pair of swimming goggles that were sold for 20 bucks to get the price point down to get the form factor down and make it waterproof. And then, you know, tackle this opportunity in a market like swimming, it was just we thought it was too hard and we ended up pivoting to skiing because ski goggles were 200 bucks, 250 bucks, lift tickets were 100 bucks a day. So we thought, okay, maybe it’s a better idea to stop there. So yeah, it was a bunch of challenges and many of them are technical challenges.

When I look back at the look back at the clinics that we do, so we started pretty early out using go pros and iPads for analysis at clinics. But in the early days, we had GoPro Hero Threes, and it took 15 minutes to download a video, one video to the iPad, to then be able to look at it. And even with the software, it was very cumbersome to be able to analyze it, record it, and then to send it to people. I used to employ someone for one to two days a week, just to export all of the footage and the analysis that we do at clinics to them to be able to send it out. And now it’s just very simple with the right apps and technology. So it’s now it’s possible to run them the way that we do, but before that we couldn’t. So in terms of the goggles, has the technology evolved quite rapidly in the last couple of years to allay to do some of the things that the goggles are capable of doing or has it always been there? And it’s just now that you’re

figuring out how to use it.

Yeah, I think I mean, the biggest challenge for us to overcome was really making these waveguides, which is how we show the information underwater. So you can just like have these numbers and information float in front of you to have those work underwater. That was a very difficult thing to do, because it’s not the same when you put a waveguide into water. Everything gets distorted. It’s kind of like the raindrop on your iPhone, you know, in the rain, you’re trying to read email. And so that that was a big challenge for us to solve. So I think it just that just required the right team to look at this and have the right vision and work towards it. So that could have been done earlier. I think the machine learning that was required to enable the really accurate tracking that we have, which is the foundation for the entire product without actually tracking off your splits and so forth. It doesn’t really matter. You can’t

build experiences on top of that. So that those things I think for machine learning to really sort of enter the stage that that didn’t happen until the mid 2010s and you had enough people that knew how to how to do this at least at scale and for consumer products. So I think it also came together around 2015 was sort of when that was also when I got the team together and we originally started looking at this. That’s so that that’s where I think that the form factors and the price points for the components and the expertise sort of all came together to enable this this category to finally take off. Was there a moment where you tested the prototype of the goggles like a working prototype where it was giving you your splits coming off the walls that was giving you your times and that sort of thing. Was there a moment there where you had it working and you’re using them and you went, oh, yes, like this is what I’ve wanted for for so

many years. Yes, I remember almost the day of 2018 because I was the guinea pig, you know, going to the pool, not every day, then at least many times a week to to swim with the latest firmware and it took, you know, it took a while to train those machine learning algorithms to deliver a reliable accurate output and it’s just a constant iteration in the pool and and I really wanted to work seamlessly so that it could detect automatically when I was resting, when I was starting, there’s not a big lag. I couldn’t have like sort of force it to create errors and and and that took, you know, a long time to do. But yes, the first time I jumped in the pool, first off, you know, I was like, it’s hard to get used to a new pair of goggles, right? If you swam with the same, I must, I was a Swedish goggles, you know, the ones without, you know, very minimalistic, right? And so I never changed goggles and just to change goggles, right?

It’s a big thing. But as soon as you saw, as I saw the display there, I was like, okay, it doesn’t matter. I can get used to these goggles, but quickly they are two and then I was, I was used to them because the benefits were so huge. Is there anything that said that like looking back, like at the time you thought, man, this is such a challenge. This is so hard. I cannot figure out how we can get this certain thing to work and you look back and go, well, now, now it seems kind of simple and basic, but at the time was a real challenge. Yeah. Well, I guess it was a real channel challenge to make the heart rate work in our newest model smarts from two. So that’s pretty recent. And it’s actually the opposite thing. Yeah. At the time, we thought it was easy to pull off heart rate. How hard could it be? We just, you know, lost the product and we could provide a see-through information on the water. But they turned out

it’s actually very complicated to deliver a sort of low latency heart rate sensing on the water. And then so that, so that’s something that we sort of learned through there’s many years of swimming with the heart rate sensor and going back to the lab and tweaking the algorithms so that the heart rate sensor could fit multiple different face shapes and skin tones and not have too much of a lag because swimming is an interval sport. So you have to be able to immediately see your heart rate as you change your heart rate. And that was a big challenge. So that was sort of the opposite. I mean, I think most things that we did in the early days there where it’s, you know, making just the basics work when you look back, you like, okay, maybe we could have done that faster with current knowledge and the current team. But back then we’re going from zero to one, so to speak, is actually really, really hard because you don’t have any frame of reference. You

don’t have really the resources yet. You know, everything is maybe there’s four or five people. So trying to do a lot with with few people is always very difficult. And that’s much easier later on when you’re a full team is like, oh, we could have done this in two months. But it’s those in two different contexts. But I always say it’s hard to steer a parked car. And when you haven’t got that initial, you know, product there, you don’t have any momentum behind you. It’s just, it’s really hard work and a lot of effort to get things going. But then as it starts rolling, you build that momentum and it’s just, it’s snowballs and then you can just start to change things a lot, a lot quicker, can’t you? And I mean, with the, so with the heart rate, it was, was an issue with like having it to be able to read the heart rate well for all facial shapes, as well as just being able to give that data quick enough for like, what was the, was that the

issue, the connection with? Yeah, that’s good. The biggest issue was actually that in a control setting, because in the lab, go to pool, we got like five people in the pool and we told them exactly what to do and we could put the heart rate, you know, the goggles on them with the right strap tension and placement and and the swim cap over their strap and all that stuff. Worked perfectly, right? And then what you realize when you release it into the field and you have people that haven’t gotten that kind of in-person guidance then, and you may not be able to like just perfectly position the sensor or the goggles so that, you know, you’re reading from, you have family order with here, which is running from your eyeballs here back, back up there, the side of the tent. So really it was, it was then making it more forgiving the technology so that you could afford to not be perfect in the placement of position and strap tension

and still get a reliable signal. So that’s something that takes a long time because you’ll never get perfect, you’ll just get better and better and better. So I think that that was just acknowledging that when you’re on, when you’re wearable, you’re on the face, people’s face shapes and skin tones are very different and so it’s very difficult to get all of them in one go and then so you have to, you have to really constantly tweak both, you know, software but also some of the hardware aspects to get, you know, the just the right tension and the contact surface with the skin to get the best thing. Well using the goggles for the first time and then using the new version of the goggles for the first time with the heart rate, it is, it’s so amazing to have that data right there in front of you and I look back to when I was squad training as a teenager, we count 10 seconds on the clock, count our, count our beats per minute, which seems archaic now but

yeah, it still, you know, still works but it’s, it’s just very, it just seems very archaic now compared to what we’ve got there and it’s just, it’s another another world and the fact that you can actually get your splits in each 25 or 50 is something that as a kid I was like wouldn’t that be awesome to know what, what my time is, we only got it when the coach yelled it out or when we looked up at the stop clock but now it’s just right there in front of us which is, which is such a cool thing and to think it’s only been around, you know, a couple of years, it’s like kids they, kids these days won’t even sort of know how we used to, used to do it, right? Like I’m talking like an old man but like you just don’t know what it was like for us back in the day. Yeah, if you think about it, I’m so funny, right? Because swimming has been completely underserved by technology, I mean look at running and cycling with GPS and my computers and sensors

and all this stuff and so that’s sort of, that didn’t happen in swimming, you know, it’s all, still there’s paddles and pool boys and then of course you’ve got the smartwatches that were really designed for running and then oh by the way you can also use them in the pool by the way you can’t see any of that while you’re swimming. So it was really, it was always frustrating for me because I had this, I really always felt that this was possible and, and the fact that nobody really seemed to be bothered with it and then once you give it to them, to swimmers and they never go back, it’s just essential. I mean our customers are very, it’s a very sticky piece of equipment like whether you’re swimming once a week or twice a day, it just becomes something that’s very hard to live without when you’ve been, you know, when you suddenly can just offload like all that mental math and plus you can get much higher resolution on what you’re doing

and, and then try and focus on, on your weaknesses and, and how to improve them.

How much of what you learned in your previous business at Recon? Were you able to take into form?

A tremendous amount. I don’t think that

I could have, I would say even we, we could have pulled this off because I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of people, my colleagues, ex-colleagues there from Recon come over so, so a lot of that knowledge transferred over, not just my own and I would say just all the learning slash mistakes that we made to those, you know, what, eight years at Recon really helped us hit the ground running because it’s just, you know, it’s, it’s a different, it’s a different tech stack, we use different optics and everything is different, we don’t have GPS and all this stuff but the learnings of, of how you consume this, you know, live information and how to focus your roadmap and, and how to put together that very multidisciplinary team that you need in place because you’re on the face which is the most valued piece of real estate so you really are sort of a piece of, like a fashion item and you’re also a technology device and to merge those

worlds it means you’ve got to, you’ve got to have a really broad range of skills in your team so that, that was those are huge learnings that we couldn’t have been without. When I look at, when people, yeah people who start, start businesses or perhaps, yeah, maybe new careers and that kind of thing, quite often if I look at their, their history and, and the people that do well they’re often taking things that they’ve got experience in or interest in for you swimming, you’ve got that sort of business technology background, obviously eyewear with, with recon, they’re able to, you know, take these, these areas of experience, match them together and just sort of, yeah, do something slightly different, it’s not like it’s, you’re taking this blank slate and you’re going into, I don’t know, something, something completely different, you’re opening a bakery or something, it’s like, yeah, you take areas of interest and you’re able to

do something that’s, that’s different and, you know, when I look back at my, my coaching, I was, I was a swimmer, I really liked the business side of things, I, I was quite early with YouTube and the social media stuff and really enjoyed doing that and so I was able to, to build effortless swimming with what I was interested in and what I had, you know, got a lot of experience in now, looking back sort of 20, 20 years with, with that, so it’s, yeah, just making these slight adjustments to things you’ve, you’ve got experience in, so maybe like teenager or early 20s, what did you picture your life looking like now that you’re in your, in your late 40s? Yes, it’s funny, I don’t really come from a family of entrepreneurs, I don’t mean my family and the most of my engineers and working for big companies and so I always, it always fascinated me, I was always fascinated by people who went off on their own and, and, and but, you know, so it

wasn’t something that it was expected of me and I think I ended up doing consulting after I did engineering and then worked for PWC and IBM implementing SAP ERP systems, which I found, well, I eventually found extremely boring. It was a good learning experience to God, you know, these big companies and learn the how, how to optimize their processes and then so forth and it probably gave me some good tools, but it wasn’t really until I, I did my MBA, I got my eyes up for other things and, and I think just starting a business and, and going through all the different exercises that you have to go through before you’ve validated an idea and then be able to, you know, create the financial model and the strategy and put all that together that those were the tools I didn’t have and that, that opened my eyes and then of course serendipity and you’re in the right place at the right time and meet the right people, right? You can really

always bet on that, but, but so, so I think to answer your question is that, that I, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do to be honest when I was, for example, in my 20s I kind of ended up saying, okay, I can always do engineering. I thought that was, that was exciting, but it wasn’t my calling. So it was, it was, it was really just kind of following my, I guess, my passion for traveling. I ended up in Australia and then ended up going to Vancouver. It was really more trying to, you know, keep an open mind to meeting people and having experiences. I think was, was what ultimately drove me into this, you know, kind of entrepreneurship role. Yeah, fantastic. In terms of where we’re at now with the business, form goggles, I feel like is, it’s a term that’s used. It’s like, it’s like Kleenex for tissues. It’s like people associate form. It’s like, well, that’s, you know, swim goggles. Like that’s, that’s the, the main brand there. Why do you,

why do you think that is? Is it, I don’t know, were you first to market? Like, is that from memory you are? But like, maybe I’m wrong there. Like we, I know there, I saw an additional thing that you could add. This is a long time ago, but didn’t get much traction. So, yeah, were you first to market?

We were definitely first to market. And we were also, you know, we have the IP that protects this underwater see-through information. I realized after recon, which wasn’t see-through, it was more a little monitor at the bottom of the goggles. So you had to change focus to, to consume the information. And then through those years that recon I realized we really do need see-through information so that you don’t have to change your focus or plans. And in order to be able to get more, you know, rich information, you know, metrics are fine, but I always saw as having, you know, guided workouts and coaching as well, then you need to be see-through, right? So you can, you don’t, you don’t have to extend any effort to get the information. So that was, that, that, so we were first there and we now have, you know, have the IP to protect that, that, that space. And in terms of form, you know, that name of course came up with, you

know, through some great discussions with my co-founders and we couldn’t believe that it wasn’t trademarked for our category. And we ended up looking at that, oh, it’s not in the U.S. and we got the whole, most of the, most of the world trademarked with that brand name. So, so it’s a very memorable thing as well. If you talk about Clean Action or Xerox or whatever. So, so people who love our products, you know, they talk about them and this name seems to stick as well. Yeah, yeah, it’s a great one. Four letters, you know, one syllable rolls off, rolls off the tongue. It’s a really good one. And in terms of competition, how do you see your competition? Do you look much at what they’re doing? Do you think much about them or are you a person who likes to stay in their own lane and just do what you think is, is going to be best? Well, I always want to learn from competitors and I think, I think competition is always healthy,

right? So that, so for us, there are alternatives why we don’t have see-through information, apart from some, you know, unnamed Chinese companies that, you know, would always come in and try and copy what you’re doing. But apart from those, I always like to learn from competition or alternatives and see, well, could we do it better or have done it better and be inspired? So I don’t actually spend much time being threatened at all because I am very focused on what we can do and our experience and I have confidence in our team and our ability to create amazing products and experiences and you can do that in several ways and we’ve analyzed our customers and our market and we know what they want and who they are so we just continue, we just execute. So that’s, I think if we were in a space and we spend a lot of money of course getting this point, if we didn’t have the IP as well and what I think is that is the difference maker which is that the

see-through underwater display then I would probably look a little bit more over my shoulders because then suddenly it’s an open playing field but it is very difficult to enter this market with what we’ve built as the first mover which is not an automatic, a lot of markets the first mover doesn’t make it and it can be very difficult to be first mover because you get one shot and then if you can do it in one shot and then you end up getting crowded so we were lucky enough to have a first product that has been in market now for almost five years that people loved and wanted to use and still want to use to this day so that’s always great. Yeah I find myself like a similar sort of thing it’s like I don’t I’ll see what other whether it’s podcasts or swim coaches are doing and I’ll certainly learn from them and take a lot from them but I find if I focus too much on it I feel disempowered it’s like you know for whatever reason you know

like I can’t I kind of impact what they’re doing it’s like I try and just stay in my lane switch pretty much switch everything else off and just do what I think is going to work best and do it my way as well because one thing I’ve learned is that whenever I’ve tried to do something or for me it’s just more coaching right like coaching or delivering something in a way that someone else is doing it at full flat but if I just go you know put my style on things and theme on things and that tends to work out pretty well and it comes across as is more genuine and I enjoy doing it more and even if it’s a little bit different than the norm to me those those things have actually gone really well when an example of that we’ve we’ve got this five-day catch challenge it’s like a five-day course that a lot of people have been through and had good success with like that’s it’s something that I just sort of thought this would work

really well and this is something I want to teach people and so I just I put it together didn’t take me too long but it’s like this is something that’s just been in my mind for a long time so I put it out there and the results have been terrific and so many people have been through it and so many people have come up and said I did this and you know got a lot out of it so what I learned from that is that if you just sort of follow what you what you’ve been it’s been in your mind and you’ve been thinking I just go with that you know just trust your gut instinct there’s a lot to be said for going with your gut I could not agree more and I think it also comes back I mean from a sports background you couldn’t control what your competitors were doing or how they were training or how they were eating or what gifts they had you know genetically or whatever you know you you can only focus on when you control then try and be inspired by

something that you think you know was this training method that will that you can also adopt right maybe it’s weak but yeah I couldn’t agree more I think you know going forward believing in yourself of course staying humble and open to input and feedback but you know nothing gets done unless you sort of act with conviction right you could just keep overthinking stuff and and the best thing to test whether you have a good idea or not is to actually go and do it and then just start humble you know low low ambitions and then you can actually always add onto it with with customer feedback right and when it comes to products of course some some products are hard to get to that minimal viable product level right like our product took years and years to develop but we didn’t go out and launch a product that had all the features that we have today right even though back then we had envisioned most of them and because we knew okay let’s start

with something that we know is easy to communicate and measure and message around and and then we can go from there based on customer feedback

yeah start start simple and a minute it goes with with improving your swimming as well it’s like just keep things simple just start pick one thing pick maybe two things and just start working on on those as soon as you try and do it too much you’re just going to get overwhelmed and so when you start with a product you don’t you don’t want to have all the features where people just go well this is so great but then they just get lost in all the different things you want to start with the the most fundamental things that someone’s going to to want other what what features do you what do you look at when you’re swimming and using the goggles is there a certain thing that you like get most out of and for me it’s really just the splits like I just love seeing myself split and being able to adjust the effort for for that you know it’s especially for those longer sets where I’m maybe progressing in speed and you know to that to

me that’s like just such a fundamental thing and it makes a huge difference for those sessions yeah no it’s I mean the same for me coming from the competitive swimming background the splits are just it’s just a foundation for for a workout and then I think now I’d say my my favorite is actually the guided workouts because I can now instead of having to memorize these workouts I have my you know soggy piece of paper or whatever on the pool deck it’s just like served up right in front of me and keeps me accountable and I motivate by just like okay it the goggles will tell me what to do and you know I don’t have a coach on deck anymore so it’s a really that actually is even surprised me that I would be get so hooked on on swimming with guided workouts I think I think for open water I mean I know one thing as well for headcoast when we launched that one feature that I find using a lot is the the head pitch feature because

it turns out that I don’t know if it’s old school coaching but my my head pitch like I sort of look up a bit too much at higher speeds and that’s not that efficient because then your legs strike a little bit and and so forth so so that was something I didn’t know I was doing until I got the head pitch actual angle in my goggles and the goggles were telling me your average best on this so so that’s one thing that I’m obsessing about at the moment for open water like swim straight is just magic I have to say it’s just having that digital compass and you know if you’re doing triathlons you know it’s just not having to constantly swim with your head above water of course you’re siding for safety but just knowing that you can swim in a straight line is it’s just takes so much anxiety out of open water swimming and knowing you’re saving you know on let’s say an Ironman swim distance you’re probably saving two to three hundred meters just in not six

siding and that’s you know that’s hard to win back if you train that much more to get that back in speed right so that’s kind of a gift for you that’s what Scott from your team was saying he said we’ve had so many people use that feature now in races and just like you know ride in or message on instagram and just be like wow I can’t believe how well I I swam like how straight I swam for these these races so it’s it’s pretty cool to to get that feedback and we can see that right because we can see in the app that you know people that may that you know a bit of testers and I even friends of forums that would be sick sagging they go out and swim the exact same route you know every week or every day in open water and it’s kind of all over the place and then after swim straight it’s just like straight out in back and then so just graphically we already know that it’s making an impact like we are making our swimmers faster in open

water so that’s that’s a great feeling to have with such a you know relatively simple feature but hard to make accurate because of the noises from your head from breathing and calibration yeah so it’s quite difficult actually to get accurate so that that took some time but the team pulls through

I did a session an open water session this morning with a bunch of people here in in Torquay where I live and we did we’re out in the open water and we were probably 150 meters out and we’re facing the shore and I said because I was just teaching them open water skills and a lot of them are fairly new swimmers and we do this exercise where close our eyes we do 50 strokes and we try and swim towards the shore towards a marker and we then we open our eyes after 50 strokes and we just see where we’re at and we had people going

across each other swimming over the top of each other finishing you know a good sort of 30 meters way off to the side so naturally people just tend to view to one side just it’s just how we how we swim and if you’re breathing to one side often we we tend to view so being able to go straight can just save people so much so much time well I’ll tell you my Ironman and Kona in 19 that happened to me and I mean I was used to the black line in the bottom of the pool back in my competitive swim days but I always thought I was actually good at swimming straight to turn out I was horrible because I was picked up by the paddle board is twice on the way out on the way back I was I had no idea that I was constantly varying right and so I don’t know how much I lost on the four kilometers swim just in terms of swimming too much right but it’s a good example it doesn’t really matter if you really experience swimmer you know it’s just like open water

is a whole different game and very few people can just swim straight without any like it’s very difficult

yeah I mean if I switch off 20 or 30 strokes in an open water race I will be off to the side I will evade off to the usually to the left and it’s like it’s just it’s just what it is so you’ve got to pay attention you’ve always got to keep in in mind and it’s not a yeah it’s not an experience it’s not how good you are or how experienced you are it’s just that it’s just what happens so we’ve got to be aware of it and then we’ve got to adjust it but the yeah a lot of people who when these new goggles came out they saw the youtube review I did on them and they like nearly everyone they’re most interested in the swim straight feature and also that the heart rate as well but that’s that’s quite a it’s just a very unique thing and yeah I remember there was something probably I don’t know I’m guessing six years ago I saw where it was something that you know maybe you add to your goggles and this company was like just something that you could add to

your goggles for an open water swim to help you with the direction or maybe it beeped or something I can’t quite remember but it never really got off the ground do you remember that at all was it on course the led based yeah that’s right yeah yeah that’s right it’s hard to do it’s very hard to do it’s always tough with the retrofitters but I can’t believe remember if they were retrofitted where they was came with goggles but yeah it was it’s hard to pull off right yeah you need to spend a lot of time in development and and testing all right and that that feedback loop so it’s quite resource-heavy but is well worth it I think and and now that we’re race approved officially you know this is something I have confident we’ll see out there and in the triathlons around the world that it just doesn’t make sense to not use it in a race if you spend a year training for an event somebody didn’t train as much as you and they’re

faster than you just because they decided to get the phone goggles with the swim straight feature right so it it just seems like if you’re a serious triathlete or open water swimmer you know of course you’d want to get like the the guided between between the buoys right that it doesn’t so I think we’ll see that and and certainly I’ve had a lot of questions from triathlete asking that question so can I really use that in my competition as coming up my whatever is half distance or full distance so I’m like yep you can and I refer them to our website and they can see see the proof right there yeah yeah it’s gonna be interesting to see like people are people are already starting to use it obviously so it’s only going to get more common I think yeah in terms of looking forward to the next couple of years what are the what are the challenges that you face what are you most looking forwards to what what what excites you about

where the business is going what you can contribute to to swimming and triathlon what what really motivates you looking forward to the next couple of years yeah I’m really excited about our premium offering because we spent you know last several years putting value into that and a lot of resources behind building on top of the activity tracking and that was what we lost the goggles with and that comes with the goggles but we were seeing a lot of our customers really get excited about the premium offering and once they start using these premium features they stay in right and and then initially of course it’s always the pushback why should I you know pay extra when I just bought the goggles and we but but I think that’s that I mean it’s always going to be people for whom this is not a stretch for that for for for paying paying for those features but there’s so much so many resources that form go into that experience

and are those experiences that are building on top of activity tracking and so will we continue to invest in that and head coach a good example is there’s some straight feature we just talked about for open water our workouts and and additional features that will just help with the execution of the workout to guide you through it and also help and making you a faster swimmer a better swimmer through through coaching and holding your accountable and giving you metrics so you can objectively see okay my distance to stroke on my form score just went up well this is why or this is why not what’s my top priority keeping you honest so continuing down that path and I think there’s some education as well I think with our customers to show them well this is actually what you what you can get out of that offering so that that’s what I’m excited about we’ve just sort of started I think that part of our journey and and it can keep going

right we can we can we can keep building on top of the features that we have today through listening to our customers and finding out okay well what’s the next sort of swim straight feature for example that could completely revolutionize part of the sport so that’s what I’m excited about just launching firsts all the time and seeing our customers use our product and and enjoying our experiences out in the real world well because you can use the goggles like you can use the general features of the goggles without you know had the premium subscription right like so you still it’s not like the goal is not gonna they’re not gonna stop working if you if you’re not yeah paying the subscription so and when I think of it from a business point of view like there’s if you want to continue to develop the goggles you want to keep improving on them and having the support like you you need to have that sort of subscription background

and to be able to to help progress the goggles and and keep delivering for for customers so it’s yeah it’s the main thing is you can still use the goggles without the subscription so yeah that’s why you say all these new features because you know to support it and to keep having that that good experience you need to be able to find it yeah no and we’ve got a flexible model right so if you only want to use premium features for a couple months then you can off you can just use it for a couple months pay for those months and then stop what we see is most people that end up starting on premium they stay on premium but we did launch this new plan where we’re just charging with less than nine bucks a month right for if you lock in for a year and for that you get all these tools and all these workouts and so it’s a really good offering and I think you know thinking about this with coaches we were really working with coaches this is not in lieu of a coach

this actually makes it way better you know because your coach can focus on all the things that are important to you to improve your technique and get better and all the information you know there’s just a more nuanced information to analyze and then when the coach isn’t there you know then you can hold the swimmer accountable and that’s going to go in the app and the coach can see that afterwards so I think it’s it’s something we’re not realizing that it’s really sort of bringing the coach closer to the swimmer and also holding the swimmer accountable and that that’s sort of empowering I think that empowerment has not existed in the sport of swimming up until now it’s always been you always sort of have to rely on the the moments when your coach had to bandwidth to really give you that feedback or give you the the stop watch time splits right now that’s that’s changed which yeah yeah absolutely and

with that accountability like with knowing what your splits are it surprises me how many people especially if they’re in a squad they’ll be going through hundreds or two hundreds maybe they’re pushing off on feet and they’re just sort of you know touch and go and they’re just doing the session but they don’t know what their their pace paces are they don’t know their splits yeah it’s like you’ve you really need to want to have that idea of what pace you’re swimming so you can actually adjust your effort make sure you’re getting faster if you need to get faster and those sorts of things so this is a good way to do it in the moment get that feedback and adjust accordingly rather than maybe just looking back at your like you get your Garmin data at the end of the session go oh cool I was swimming at 145 paces like look no you really should be knowing what your what your pace is throughout a session if you want to be improving on

things yeah and even in a team environment you’ll remember I mean the first person who starts in the lane they’ll they’ll get accurate times from the coast you know when they’re doing the stopwatch then with two three four and so forth well most of them are starting five or ten seconds after then the previous swimmer so they’ll get times that are you know faster than what they actually did so I think now that that’s not mean our the goggles they just start automatically when you push off right it’s and and when you hit the wall again they stop so you get much more accurate accounting of your out of your splits in a set so even for team environment they know this is something that’s gold for a coach right because you know every single swimmer you know what they swam what their times were and it doesn’t matter when they started

yeah exactly right and to wrap it up here Dan so just sort of off the swimming topic a little bit but more just in terms of business and pursuing your own own path I know a lot of people who listen to this do run their own business or sort of do their own thing or they’re looking to do something different so what what advice would you have for someone who is maybe looking to pursue something that they’ve been thinking about for a while maybe something that lines up more with the things that they’re interested in are there any sort of key lessons that come to mind when you think about that yeah I mean obviously there’s sort of always three things that matter so the first is the customer second is the product and the third is the product market fit a product customer fit right so you’re always going to be negotiating between the customer and your product you know what’s possible and then what’s really important for the customer not just like nice to

have because you can’t do it all and then okay can we do that in the product and then and then think through that from a roadmap perspective but there’s not to be a physical product be a service it can be anything it’s the same thing you know know your customer know that how your product differentiates and delivers those essential things that customers are asking for and then product market fit as many things why it’s of course the features but it’s the price you’re charging for the features as well and customer service and support that you’re providing and the warranties and your brand promise and all those things go into product market fit and I think that’s important a lot of I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs maybe waste time in areas know that do not that pertain to these three areas you know they’ll go to conferences and do all the stuff that has really very little value right of course there’s some conferences that are

value about the right time but when you’re just starting out you have to be so focused on those three things and initially it’s you know you can get over focused on the product before understanding the customer that’s also bad of course if you just over focus on the customer not the product that’s also bad so it’s really looking at those things in tandem and then I think another thing if I look back to the last about 15, 16 years doing this that focus that you need to have and you cannot get distracted once you understand the customer and the product and how they relate to each other you cannot get distracted by shiny objects and they come in many forms they’re going to be thrown at you what if we could do this and what if we could partner over there or all these great opportunities but they don’t matter until you solve the fundamental problem of getting from zero to one you don’t have anything to sell you don’t have anything of value

until you’ve solved the problem and try it out with customers so that’s kind of my monologue on what I’ve learned at least from you know as a simple framework for I think any sort of maybe business is to think longer slides yeah that I think that’s great the way I heard a business sort of coach mentioned to me that like like number one if you’ve got a if you’ve got a good product that in itself is like number one a good product you can have poor marketing but an incredible product as long as it’s out there people are going to refer other people and it’s going to it’s going to start to spread if it’s a if it’s a great book people are reading it they’re going to tell their friends if it’s some swim technology they’re going to tell their friends so like that that it’s got to be a good product or service first of all or else you’re just going to be pushing uphill to try and continue with it and then you’ve got it you’ve got to think about

the customer the person that you’re serving because you know I find a lot of people are they’re too caught up in thinking about what what they would like what would I like as the as the business owner it’s like no you’ve got to think about the person that you you have in front of you and and for me I mean similar for form it’s like I have a lot of triathletes I work with they’re frustrated that they’re that they’re finding the swim uncomfortable it’s hard work they’re fit but they’re just getting tired really quickly and they just cannot get this swim thing figured out so that’s where I have sort of identified hey this is this is where I can really help I can help teach them what they need to do to be able to make it enjoyable it can be a lot of fun and it can be easy it can be something that that isn’t just this real slog and you get to the end of the swim and you’re exhausted and then you’ve got to do the bike and the run so it’s like yeah

just think about the person that you’re serving and what’s what’s their like number one problem that you’re that you’re trying to solve yeah amen I could not agree more so Dan thanks so much for jumping on the call I know form’s been a sponsor of our podcast for for several years and I I made a video a couple years back I don’t know it’s probably three years ago and I got sent a pair of the goggles and I was I was like I’m a low tech swimmer I don’t wear a garment I don’t do anything like that but I’ll give these things a shot and that’s what I said in the email when I can’t remember who it was reached out but they said look we’ll I’d like to you to try the goggles and I was like yeah right this is a situation but I’ll try them and see how I go and I was I was sold I was like okay this is pretty good and so that and I’ve worked with form ever since so thanks for it for sponsoring the podcast this wasn’t a like a paid podcast or anything

I just wanted to get you on to talk about the journey of form and for anyone who’s yeah maybe thinking about starting their own thing I think this has been hopefully really helpful but also just to see where where it all originated from where’s this where’s it all come from and where it’s heading so thank you so much for being on the podcast I’ve really enjoyed talking to you as someone who’s lived in Melbourne as I have recently so yeah thanks so much and I appreciate it thanks Ben and for having me and thanks for your support of form really appreciate it

The post Trust Your Gut Instinct (And Tread Your Own Path) with Dan Eisenhardt appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, I’ll be sharing some of the mistakes I made in coaching and the valuable lessons I learned along the way. I believe these lessons can help you avoid similar pitfalls and succeed in your coaching journey. Additionally, I’m excited to announce the launch of our new course, the Freestyle Coaching Masterclass. Be sure to tune in!

This podcast is brought to you by NanoClear — our own range of anti-fog swim goggles, designed by Effortless Swimming with the anti-fog treatment bonded into the lens itself (not sprayed on, so it doesn’t wear off after a few swims). Check out the NanoClear range here and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off.

I was doing them a huge disservice because I was allowing them to perform something in the way that wasn’t going to help them long term. And this had a profound impact on the way that I chose to live my life from when I was about 18 years of age. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that helped swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

If you’re a swimming or triathlon coach or you’d just like to understand the freestyle stroke better, we’ve just added a new course to our online membership. And it’s the freestyle coaching masterclass. And in this masterclass, the first video is about how I analyze someone’s stroke. The order that I go through in my mind as I’m breaking down their stroke so that you’ve got some structure around how you can start to look at someone’s technique and then start to break it down and know exactly what to focus on. This is something that’s taken me a long time to develop and it’s progressed and changed over the time that I’ve coached. And I feel like the point I’m at right now with my coaching and the amount of swimmers I’ve worked with, that this structure that we currently use and that I cover in this first video works really, really well for helping keep things simple on my end so that I can explain it to people.

And it comes out hopefully very clear for the person that’s getting the coaching. So that’s the first video. The next video that I cover in this masterclass is a common mistakes that I see. So going through that same order that we analyze a stroke in, what are those main mistakes that we often see with swimmers? How do you recognize them? Then how do you go about making changes? What drills should you prescribe for them? And covering those really common things that I see and having looked at more than 6,000 different swimmers, there’s some real key ones that stand out and I’ll show you how to recognize those things. How you can then start to diagnose what to work on first and then what drills you should prescribe to help someone begin to make those changes. We also cover equipment. So what equipment would I recommend for most swimmers and triathletes? What’s worth using? What’s not worth using? And what are some of the main things you might want with that equipment?

As in there’s some types of fins that I think can really do some damage to people’s strokes and to their ankles. And there’s some paddles as well that I find do the same thing. So I talk about equipment, also talk about helpful cues that you can use as a coach with your athletes and cues are basically it’s a it’s a lot of actions condensed into one simple word or phrase. So I love to use coaching cues like reach for the wall or thinking like you’ve got a ladder underneath you in terms of setting your catch and putting your hand on that ladder. Some simple cues that I have had good success with with my coaching. And we also cover misconceptions. What are some of those misconceptions that I’ve heard around the pool that I think don’t necessarily help a lot of adult swimmers? So I cover those as well. So if you remember, you can get that access that in the course. If you’re not a member, you can jump into the course at Effortless Swimming.

You can join our membership there and access the course that way. All right, let’s get into the podcast. I recently had a talk to a group of learned to swim teachers and I was talking about the mistakes that I’ve made as a coach and some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. So I want to share some of those lessons with you here on this podcast, whether or not you’re a coach or a teacher or you’re looking to to progress in your job or even just within your own group or training group. These are some lessons that I learned along the way and had to learn the hard way in many cases. The first lesson was be firm and not their friend. When I was young, I was 15. I started babysitting for someone and I was babysitting for these four girls that lived around the corner from me. So I went around to their house. I’d never babysat before and their parents were going out for dinner and they’re going to be home just after midnight.

Now, these girls were six. There’s two eight year olds who are twins and then an 11 year old who is the oldest one. And I thought the way to get them to listen to me so that they would eat their dinner, go to bed on time was to be nice and to be friendly. Boy was I wrong. I had no respect from them because I wasn’t firm and I was trying to be their friend rather than being firm. So what ended up happening was that they were running rings around me for six hours and by the time their parents got home at just after midnight, none of them were in bed. They’re all hyped up and and were not not at all seeming like they were ready for bed. And so I felt like a bit of a like I hadn’t succeeded in that role. And I remember the parents coming home and I thought, oh, my God, they are going to be so annoyed with me. But I think they understand what happens when you’ve you’ve got kids is that it can be very hard to actually get them to to do things at times.

So they understood and they were fine about it. But what I learned from that was that I was much too. I was trying to be their friends rather than gaining the respect by being firm and setting the expectation of what I required from them. So my the lesson I learned there was that as a coach, your role is to be a coach and that is different than being a friend. Now, I started coaching adults when I was 19. I started coaching at Melbourne University and I was coaching a group of adults there and then continued coaching adults for eight years when I moved to PowerPoints, which is a master’s squad in Melbourne. And then I continued to coach adults when I continued running the clinics and the camps that we do now. And I really I really enjoy coaching adults because you can have that banter between them. Adults are there and they really want to learn. And I just I really enjoy coaching adults. So you can be less firm than you are with kids.

The same thing applies that if you don’t set the expectation of what you as a coach require, then they’re not going to know what to do and what’s expected. And so I’ve had to change my approach a bit. I still want it to be fun. I still want to be nice. I’m still friends with many of the swimmers that I that I coach. But if you want to get the results from someone, if you want to help someone in the best possible way, you have got to be firm with them because and that that’s not always about being nice. Sometimes people have to be challenged. They have to know when they’re not doing things the way that they should be. And sometimes they just don’t know themselves. So you have to have that firmness with them. So that was the first lesson I had to learn. The second thing, and this is kind of follows on from that, is people will rise to the minimum standards that you allow within your squad or your group. So when I first started running clinics

and first started coaching for that matter, I didn’t pull people up when they were doing things incorrectly because I didn’t want to offend them that they were doing things wrong. I didn’t want to have to tell them that they weren’t doing things correctly in multiple times. And I thought, oh, look, that’s that’s the best way to to go about it because that’s going to keep them happy. But I was doing them a huge disservice because I was allowing them to perform something in the way that wasn’t going to help them long term. So when I was running clinics, we’d often see that the way that someone was swimming is how they would perform a drill. Now, for example, if someone was swimming really flat and they weren’t rotating in their freestyle, we would normally see them do a side kicking drill to flat without any rotation onto their side. And for several years, I’d say, I let people do those things without making the correction.

So I wouldn’t stop them, have them correct it and then change it. I would just kind of let them get away with doing the drills incorrectly. So when we look at them from at the end of the session, nothing much would change because we hadn’t changed it within that that session there and they hadn’t changed it within the drills. And so I started to realize that I really need to be on top of things more and I need to be more hands on with the coaching and I need to set the standards of what I’m willing to accept as a coach and what I the standard that I want them to put to perform at. And many times, I just don’t know that they’re not in the right position or doing the right thing. So it’s it’s my job to actually let them know that and let them know how to change it. And when we started to do that, we started to get much better results. And so when when we would have people not see a change in their swimming,

that was disappointing for them and it’s disappointing. It was disappointing for me. So the way that I found I could make my coaching a lot more enjoyable was to have a higher standard of what I was willing for people to to do. And a lot of times that just came down to me having to to interject more or to to to stop people and just get into to correct things and just be more on top of that.

This podcast is proudly sponsored by Form Smart Swim Goggles. Form have recently released their new Gen 2 version of the product, which includes an integrated heart rate monitor, as well as a swim straight digital compass for open water navigation. They’ve also updated the ice seal. So they’ve got a new proprietary ice seal that accommodate a wider variety of facial structures and they ensure for a more comfortable and secure fit. I’ve been testing these new goggles for the last couple of months and I’m a huge fan of the new heart rate monitor. This is the first time that I’ve been able to see my heart rate in real time when I’m swimming and that’s allowed me to adjust my effort and my output based on my training zones. So if you’re a triathlete or someone who wants to make sure that they’re not going too hard or too easy within a session, this is a really good way to do it. You can see your heart rate in the top corner of the goggles.

So it’s always there right in front of you. And that can make sure that you are actually training in the right zone where I find a lot of swimmers do go either too hard or too easy. So this has been a real revelation for me in terms of the effort that I’m actually putting in when I’m going at certain speeds and certain paces. So if you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the new Gen 2 version of the FormSmart swim goggles, go to formswim.com forward slash effortless to get yourself a pair of the new Gen 2 goggles. If you’d like to get the Gen 1 goggles, you can save 10 percent going through that link at formswim.com forward slash effortless. Now, the third lesson I learned was that energy is transferred my baseline energy levels when I’m just day to day, I’d say would be a three out of ten, just in terms of how I talk to people. So the three out of ten. Now, for me to get to a six or a seven, that’s got to feel like a nine or a ten.

I’ve got to I’ve got to feel like I’m going way over the top to get to a six or a seven out of ten. And I sort of learned this when my brother, he’s never been into swim because he had a few medical things as a kid. So he couldn’t he couldn’t swim and he couldn’t swim competitively. So he was always into some more niche sports. He was into table tennis. He was into karate and more recently he’s gotten into disc golf, which is where you throw frisbees into a metal basket, which is like the hole. But it’s the same thing with golf. There’s paths for each each hole. Now, when he first got into disc golf, I went round to his house and goes Brenton, you’ve got to check this out. So it makes me sit down on the couch and we proceed to watch an hour’s worth of everything there is to know about disc golf. The highlights, the players, the different frisbees, there are the different courses, the different holes. And he he spoke with so much enthusiasm about disc golf

that I went into that with absolutely zero interest in disc golf. And I left with a very small interest in disc golf. And what I learned from that is that energy is transferred. So the way that you the way that we speak to people that can rub off on them. So I there’s a legendary coach, Bill Sweetenham. And I remember my dad telling me this story because he learned this from Bill Sweetenham. And that was it. He said that good coaches will will coach in a way where normally the kids will come into a session and they’re tired, they’re half asleep, they’re dragging their feet and they’re mumbling under their breath when they first come into a session. But a good coach will come in with high energy levels. They’ll give everything they can within that session. They’ll have a lot of energy and enthusiasm and encouragement. And they’ll leave that session completely spent and exhausted because they’ve transferred that energy that they had onto the swimmers.

So by the time the swimmers leave, they’re bouncing off the walls. They’re really energetic. They’re they’re pumped up. That’s what a good coach can do is they can raise you up to a higher energy level. And so I’ve tried to take that into my my coaching. And when I started to go from that three out of ten baseline and be very serious about my coaching, which I was when I first started to raise the energy, trying to have more fun with it. That’s when I found that people enjoyed it more. They remember things a lot better and the energy within the group is much higher as well. So energy is transferred. The fourth one was about being memorable. So I used to explain things in way too much detail. So if we’re talking about the the catch, for example, I would talk about all the little things that go into that catch if I’m trying to explain it to someone. And then when I get them to try and do something with it and try and change it, there’s too much confusion that nothing would change.

So I’d explain the 12 steps to setting up your high elbow catch and they can remember none of those steps because it was too much. And so I went and I went and did a course with a guy called Rich Allen who teaches teachers how to teach and he’s actually retired now. And one of the things I learnt from him was that if you can use cues or analogies, it is much easier for people to remember those things. Same with stories. So, for example, if we’re talking about about the catch, yeah, there might be 12 steps to setting up your catch. But if we if we use the the analogy of it’s like you’re rolling your arm over a barrel. Well, that’s just one simple analogy that can explain those 12 steps in one simple idea. And so you can put that idea in someone’s head, have them remember it and have them feel much more at ease at executing that because it’s much simpler. So using cues and analogies have have been really beneficial

for me as a coach to help to help teach and help help convey a point. And when you can show someone what they’re doing or what they need to do, that’s usually better than telling them. So I try and use visuals as much as possible. That’s why we we have our iPads at clinics and we we try and show a lot of the drills that we want them to do. Or we we’re analyzing their stroke and showing them what they’re doing and comparing that to elites. So I think showing is is more important than telling. And then also, as I mentioned earlier, just using using stories as well. A lot of the times where I’ve changed the way that I do something or change the way I approach something or it like change the way I live. It’s come from when a story has impacted me. Now, I remember reading this story about a Mexican fisherman in this book called The Four Hour Workweek. And this had a profound impact on the way that I chose to live my life

from when I was about 18 years of age. Now, it’s a fairly short story. So I’ll read it here because to me, this really set my life in a different path. So the story goes like this. An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked inside the small boat with several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, only a little while. The American then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish. The Mexican said he had had enough to support his family’s needs. The American then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time? The Mexican fisherman said, I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children. Takes the esters with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my meagos.

I have a full and busy life. The American scoffed, I’m a Harvard MBA and I could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds by a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middle man, you would sell directly to the processor, eventually your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York, where you would run your expanding enterprise. The fisherman asked, but how long will all this take? To which the American replied, 15 to 20 years. But what then asked the Mexican? The American laughed and said, that’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich.

You would make millions, millions, then what? The American said, then you would retire, move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids. Takes yeses with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos. I remember reading that story back when I was maybe 18 and thinking, yeah, like that’s that had a really big impact on me. That story, I think stories can have a huge impact. So how I’ve sort of taken that into my coaching is that I try to use examples and use stories as much as possible in the way that I that I coach, because I feel like that is much more memorable, and that’s something that that goes back thousands of years is storytelling. I think people tend to take lessons on board a lot better when they take it from a story rather than being told to do something. Now, it doesn’t take away the fact that we need to be, you know,

direct in the way that we talk to people so that they can actually make a change. But I think stories can help convince people to take a different approach. So if they’re making a certain change in their stroke that they’re maybe not convinced about, I try and come up with an example of someone who was maybe where they were swimming, how they were. And then they’ve they’ve made that change and showing them an example of someone who’s been able to improve as a result of making that change in their stroke. So some of the lessons I talked about to this loan to swim group. So I hope that’s helped. I hope that’s been a useful, useful podcast. Let me know, send me an email at Brent at EffortlessSwimming.com, whether that was something that you want to hear more of, hear less of. I’d love to know. And if you do listen to this podcast and you do enjoy it, it would mean a lot to me if you leave a review on Spotify or Apple iTunes.

That helps us get discovered by more people. So if you have listened to this podcast for a while and you haven’t left a review, that would mean a lot to me if you’re willing to do that. So thanks again for listening. We’ll be back next week with another episode. See you then.

The post The 4 Biggest Mistakes I Made In Coaching (And How To Get More From Your Coach) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, we sit down with Jarrod Briffa, an Australian freediving athlete, instructor, and online coach trained in the Oxygen Advantage. Jarrod’s expertise lies in the power of breath and how it can enhance performance, reduce stress, and aid in recovery. As the founder of Drifters Freediving, he offers courses and private coaching to help individuals improve their breathing techniques. He has been the Australian Men’s Champion at The Pool Freediving National Championships and has represented Australia in pool freediving at international competitions. Join us as we explore the importance of proper breathing in sports and everyday life.

00:00 Introduction

Visit Drifters Freediving on their Website and Instagram

Change your technique and swim a smoother, easier freestyle with the Effortless Swimming membership:

Do you want to work with me personally to improve your technique? Join my swim technique coaching here:

Get 15% off our 8-week Faster Freestyle course by using the code 8week15

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doing things like this really helped to increase my CO2 tolerance and improve my scores in those basic assessments. How you breathe during a 24 hour period dictates how you breathe for the next 24 hour period. So if I was hyperventilating all night during sleep, I’ll probably breathe more and be more breathless during the day. 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. Beyond poor technique and general fatigue, what causes breathlessness in swimmers? And what is the main driver of fear and panic when it comes to swimming in the pool or open water? Could it be as simple as the way that we breathe? On today’s podcast episode, I’m joined by Jared Briffer, who is a free diver, an instructor and a coach. And Jared’s professional and sporting life is based around the way that

people breathe. And on this episode, we’re exploring how you can improve the way that you breathe so that you can keep calm in high pressure situations so that you can improve the results that you’re getting in the pool and in the open water and so that you can recover faster. Jared has studied in the oxygen advantage method and he’s put his knowledge to the test, having represented Australia in multiple international competitions in pool free diving, as well as holding the Australian record for dynamic apnea, having swum 235 meters underwater on a single breath using a monofin. So let’s get into today’s episode with Jared Briffer. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I guess today is Jared Briffer and Jared, we go back a very long way now. I think we go back probably 18 years. And it’s funny how our paths have crossed recently. So we’ve sort of met at the pool swimming at the squad with a mutual friend, Jenny. And then I know over the last couple of years, you’ve been doing a lot

of free diving. And today, I want to get you on the podcast to talk about how we can use our breathing better, how we can breathe better, because I had a guest on the podcast a few weeks back, Frank Sol, and he talked about oxygen advantage and he talked about how he was taking some of his swimmers through a few exercises just to help them relax more, to breathe more effectively. And I had a lot of emails and Instagram messages just where I piqued their curiosity. People are really interested in this stuff. So I thought it’d be great to get you on to talk about something that you’re an expert in, because I know a little bit about it, but not much at all. So I’m really excited to chat to you today to dig into this topic. Yeah, awesome. Brent, there’s a massive passion of mine. So I love sharing and talking about it. So let’s jump into it just in terms of the relationship between CO2 tolerance and why CO2 gets a bad rap. And I think in my early coaching days, before I started to

learn more about how to breathe properly, I had an idea that CO2 is this necessary thing that we need to breathe effectively, you know? Yeah, well, I think like it often gets a bad rap, you know, like CO2, like people talk about it as a waste product. But it’s really an essential gas for oxygen exchange in the body. So I suppose it’s important to understand first like what’s happening when we’re breathing. So when we breathe, we breathe air in, it’s a mixture of gases, but the important one for us is oxygen. Inflates our lungs. And in inflates our lungs, we have different parts of the airway. So it goes down in a trachea, branches off into the bronchi, bronchi oils, which are more like the branches. If you think of the lungs as like an upside down tree, trachea would be the trunk, the bronchi oils would be the branches. And then at the end of them, we have the LBOLite, which are these little air sacs that inflate when we breathe. So every time they inflate, they’re full of oxygen, that

oxygen can be diffused in our blood. And then it gets transported around our body bonded to hemoglobin, which is a protein in our red blood cells. The reason why carbon dioxide is important in this relationship is that we have the oxygen traveling around our blood, but the strength of the bond between the oxygen and the hemoglobin is determined by the presence of carbon dioxide. So if we don’t have much carbon dioxide, the bond between the oxygen and the hemoglobin becomes really strong. And the hemoglobin wants to hold on to the oxygen. So we can have heaps of oxygen in our system, but we can’t use it. So we generally want to have like a higher or like a neutral or higher level of carbon dioxide so that the bond becomes weaker. And then we can use the the oxygen that our body is transporting around. And then like just to finish out that system, so we have the oxygen traveling around in our red blood cells. When oxygen is

delivered to the cells, then often CO2 is delivered back to the blood plasma, which comes back to our lungs. And then we exhale the CO2. And so our bodies are throughout the day, managing what they consider to be a neutral level of CO2. So we’re always sort of managing a neutral level and we do that through our breath. So how would someone not have a low level of CO2? Like what are some of those causes where yeah, where that wouldn’t be where we want it to be? Yeah, well, it’s actually like it’s probably more common than not these days. Like most people have some sort of dysfunctional poor breathing patterns. When we’re breathing more than our body’s metabolic needs, we will breathe off too much carbon dioxide. And so any mouth breathing is generally unless you’re at like 100% intensity is generally over breathing. And so we will be breathing off too much carbon dioxide, which is like changing that relationship between the

oxygen hemoglobin, but also generally will make us feel breathless quicker. So we should be breathing through our nose all the time. When we’re not in the water, it’s a bit hard when we’re swimming. And like understanding like or being aware of how we are breathing is something that’s quite challenging to do. So we spend a lot of our day like not really aware of how we’re taking those breaths. So in order to improve your CO2 tolerance, you really want to start by first building up a big awareness of how you breathe. Personally, like I had, when I started, I did oxygen advantage training, like probably five or six years ago now. And when I first started, I was already a freediver, I could already hold my breath for over five minutes. I thought, cool, my CO2 tolerance is going to be really good. And then I did some of the basic assessments for oxygen advantage. And I realized that I had what would be considered signs of

dysfunctional breathing. And that was like a bit of a shock for me because like breathing is like so important in everything that I do. So to like be like, you know, thinking that I’ve got dysfunction, it was I really wanted to know how to change it. And so the big thing that I noticed first was like how I was breathing during sleep. And I was often waking up with like a dry mouth, maybe a bit of drool on the pillow and I snored occasionally. And so this would indicate that I was breathing through my mouth during sleep. So that eight hours a day that I’m in bed, I’m always breathing too much. And I’m over breathing, so hyperventilating during sleep. And then what what happens with the breath is how you breathe during a 24 hour period dictates how you breathe for the next 24 hour period. So if I was hyperventilating all night during sleep, I’ll probably breathe more and be more breathless during the day. So like

even like doing something like climbing a flight of stairs, I would transition from nose breathing to mouth breathing. So yeah, like in terms of improving my journey, I’ve started with building the awareness. So first it was about how I would breathe during sleep. And, you know, probably many of the viewers as well probably seem like we’re taping their mouths like it’s been like something that’s become like very popular. So that’s something that I started doing a lot of. It’s like, it’s a simple thing like it’s just some like 3M micropore tape, just fold both ends and then just a little bit over you. And it’s just it just enough to while you’re sleeping. Yeah, while I sleep. So yeah. And so like that was a big one for me, I changed that first. And then after that, it was just getting aware of like the breathing throughout the day and trying to keep it nasal as much as possible. Most of us have these habits where we transition to poor breathing or we have like poor breathing habits throughout

the day. One of them like could be for instance, like even like you just like cleared your throat, right? Okay. So like anything like this, like clearing your throat, sighing, yawning, it was the one that I used to do a lot as well. We’re taking like we’re blowing off a lot of CO2 when we have these breathes. And so if we just go back to normal breathing after that, what happens is we have the neutral level of CO2, we do the big yawn, we drop the CO2 down. And if we continue normal breathing at this point, we start to establish a new baseline of what is normal. Okay. So if we’re like yawning all the way through the day or sighing throughout the day, and we’re not recalibrating after that, we basically set a new normal. And so our body gets used to having less CO2. And as soon as CO2 increases from there, we start to feel breathless and like we need to breathe more. So one of the things that I would do would be

after that big exhale, I would just hold the breath until I felt like the urge to breathe start to come. And then I would try to manage the breathing again at that upper level. And doing things like this really helped to increase my CO2 tolerance and improve my scores in those basic assessments. What are those assessments? So how did you, how did you realize that you weren’t as good as you thought with it? Yeah. So with the opposite advantage, the main assessment that we do with everyone when they start, it’s called a bolt score. And what it is, is basically breathing like you are now. So you’ve just got your tidal breathing where you’re inhaling and exhaling just softly through the nose. And it’s not a full inhale, because you know, you could breathe a lot more in and you could exhale a lot more out as well. It’s just this tidal breathing in this middle range here. And then when you get to the bottom of an exhale

in that tidal range, you hold the breath. And you see how long you can hold the breath for before you get a distinct urge to breathe. Now a distinct urge to breathe, it could be like an involuntary movement of the breathing muscles, it could be tightness in the throat, could be a need to swallow, something like this. When you get a distinct urge to, I need to breathe now, not just the, I’ve remembered that I’m holding my breath, but like, I’ve actually, I’ve got a distinct urge to breathe now. And then we would record what that time is. And so generally anything under 25 seconds would indicate that there is probably some dysfunction in the breathing. Over 25 seconds, we start to be in like more healthy breathing patterns. And then 40 seconds plus is optimal. So with athletes, especially, we try to get them like to 40 seconds plus with this bolt score.

Where were you when you started and where are you now with that score? So I was at like, I think like between 18 and 21 seconds when I started. And now I’d be like, well over a minute, I think. So yeah, and like, so much of that is through that awareness training and like just being really familiar with how I’m breathing. And like, when I do slip up, because we all will, like, there’s certain habits that like, you know, I’ve been doing for a lifetime, I can’t just like, switch them off overnight. But I’m trying to correct the breathing once I do make those habits. And for someone listening, so a really common thing that I hear in my coaching is that I’m like, I’m really fatigued in the pool. I get really tired. Now, outside of just the typical technical things that someone might be doing to cause them to, to, you know, to run out of breath pretty quickly in terms of like, their legs are sinking. They’re not breathing regularly enough. And just just those sorts of things outside of

that. To you, what do you think would be some of the causes of someone feeling more fatigued than they really, really should be? Yeah, one or two things, it’s going to be like beyond poor technique which you talked about, it’s going to be the poor breathing mechanics or it’s going to be poor CO2 tolerance. So we could probably talk about the mechanics first. So I’m going to just step back a bit so you can see. So when we breathe, our most efficient muscle for breathing is our diaphragm. So a diaphragm is like a parachute shaped muscle sits underneath our rib cage here. And when it contracts, it pushes the lower two ribs out. So we’ll inflate low into lower lobes of the lungs. We have a lateral expansion of these lower two ribs. And then when we exit, when we exhale, the diaphragm comes back into its resting position here. A lot of people don’t have good coordination of their breathing muscles. And especially with swimming, we see like a lot of

new swimmers, they sort of gasp when they take their breath. And what happens with that, they’re not using the diaphragm. They end up using the chest and the intercostal muscles. And so generally, when they take a breath like that, they’re only putting air in the top third of their lungs. Now they’re still getting air in. But I think it’s important to understand this concept that we have of dead space, right? So we have with each breath, we have about 150 mils of what we call dead space. So the air in your mouth, the air in your trachea and the air in your bronchies, that’s dead space. That’s not involved in ventilation. So that’s 150 mils of air that comes in and goes out and does nothing. So if you’re taking like short, shallow breaths, like you would when you gasping, let’s say someone’s like maybe getting 500 mils of air in, 50 mils of that air is in dead space. So there’s only really 350 mils of air that

is involved in ventilation at that point. And if they’re breathing like every two strokes or something like that, there’s not much time for that air to actually be diffused, like the oxygen from that air to be diffused into the blood or for CO2 to be diffused into the lungs to come out again. And so they’re going to feel breathless very quickly. Whereas someone who’s breathing well with their diaphragm, they’re going to have like, they’re going to pull air low to the lower lobes of lungs. They’re probably going to get a deeper breath as well. So they might like breathe in a liter. But there’s not the difference between those two breaths of air, the one breathing through the chest and the one breathing through their diaphragm. It’s not 500 mils versus one liter. It’s actually like 350 mils versus 850 mils, because the dead space is the same whether you take in a liter or you’re taking 500 mils. So the person breathing in the diaphragm is

actually going to get a lot more air to the lower lobes of the lungs. They’re going to have a lot more oxygen that’s involved in ventilation and being diffused into the bloodstream. And then they’re also going to get more CO2 out. Generally, when they’re taking those deeper breaths, there’s going to be more time between the breath. So there’s more time for diffusion as well. We would have like, when we’re training people, we have like a basic measurement that we sort of use to like see that people have good movement of the diaphragm. So what we would do is we put a ruler around the lower two ribs and we’re like there. So for me, I’m at about like 88 centimetres on that. And so you’d exhale first and then take a full inhale. And we want to get at least a 5% change in the measurement. Okay, it should increase by at least five centimetres. So yeah, went from 88 to 96 on this one. So like that would be more than sufficient.

And so when we say that like people are not getting such a big measurement, like they’re not getting the five centimetres, there’s usually coordination issues with the breathing. And these are generally pretty easy to fix. You see a lot of people that like breathe with the chest during the day. So you shouldn’t ever see movement of the chest just through your normal breathing. So usually what we can do is we can start to like assess like how people are breathing, training some like diaphragmatic awareness with the breath. And then that will improve that. And then we can take this into the water. Once people are more familiar with how the breath, how the diaphragm works, they can, they can bring it into their swimming as well.

Yeah, so training it, training it outside the pool, just getting those muscles working and just learning how to breathe that way. And then it’s much easier to breathe that way in the pool. Kind of like with some of the things that we like to teach in terms of the catch, for example, it’s like, if you can’t get it right out of the pool, you’re probably not going to get it right in the pool. It’s a harder environment to learn it. So yeah, learning it outside is the best way to begin. And you can obviously, like once you do have the awareness, you can start to, you can feel this on your stroke. Like when you take your, take your breath, you can feel that you’re feeling into lower lobes of your lungs. And you’re getting a full breath as opposed to that chest breathing. But then so yeah, the second, the second one would be around CO2 tolerance. So there’s like a few different ways that we sort of look at this. Like the

first one is sort of as I talked about, like, you know, it always starts with awareness with CO2 tolerance. Your CO2 tolerance is determined by how you breathe during a 24 hour period. So just doing like an hour of training at the pool where you’re doing like high CO2 stuff, that’s not necessarily going to improve your overall CO2 tolerance. And that’s sort of where I was at. You know, I was doing a lot of really hard freedive training and I had a good breath hold, but I was breathing poorly during the other 23 hours of the day. And so that was offsetting all that work. So like improving the CO2 tolerance is going to start with building that awareness first. And then we have like a couple of like assessments that we would work with. One is the bolt score, which we’ve talked about. So we assess where the bolt score is at. And then as people build up the awareness, we will see improvements in that bolt score. So if that’s

something that you like measure regularly, like you might do it like it’s good to do the same time each day, right? Maybe like first thing when you wake up in the morning, you could do it just before you go to bed at night, but do it at a similar time each day because you might notice differences throughout the day. And so you’d be trying to improve that. I like to do like with my freediving background as well, like do a maximum breath hold test with the people that I train because often with that, we can change people’s confidence with their breath. Like a lot of like extending the breath with the swimming or like holding the breath longer. Often it’s very foreign for people, right? Immediately you’re breaking a habit, right? Your body gives you signals that you’d normally breathe now. Why not breathe? Okay. And this can be really stressful. So on all our basic freediving courses, we work through like the physiology

and understanding like what’s happening in the body when we hold our breath and teaching the body that it’s safe to do this. Like the body is giving you signals that carbon dioxide has risen. Carbon dioxide is a primary trigger to breathe. We’re not getting signals that we’re low on oxygen. They generally don’t come until we’re like at like a saturation of like 50%, which is a long way away. Like most people couldn’t get there. So yeah, we want to like build the confidence of what we’re doing safe. And then the body will trust us. So yeah, for most of the people I work, we will do those tests. And it’s often quite profound experience for a lot of people. Like I had a woman the other week, she came to the course and she said, I can only hold my breath for eight seconds. And then she said, I’ve tried so many times I can’t get past eight seconds. And like, right, because I was like, okay, this is definitely

got a winner. Yeah, yeah, we can definitely help you. And so then on the course, I’m pretty sure she held her breath for like two minutes. And that was in the course of like, you know, a couple of hours of like understanding like physiology and then some basic exercises that did in the water. And having that experience, right of going from eight seconds to two minutes in such a short amount of time, it just really opens up your potential of what might be possible with this. So then like doing these exercises that you might do to like improve your, you know, number of strokes that you do between breaths in swimming or whatever else, you know that you’ve held your breath for two minutes now. So the confidence is there that you can start to explore these things and it is safe. Yeah, so they’re like, they’re probably the like the main things that I would start with with someone. And but then also like with swimmers,

one thing that I find is really important is their ability to recover with nasal breathing at the end of a swim. So when they’re at the ends of the pool, can they recover with nasal breathing and how quickly are they able to do that? So they might need like one or two, like big breaths to offload some CO2, but can they revert to nasal breathing quickly? And yeah, these are some of the assessments that I would do with people to sort of see what level they’re at and then how we can work on improving it from there. And the reason that they’d be better to recover with nasal breathing is in terms of those CO2 levels, is that right? Like can you explain that? It’s going to work on a few things, right? So recovering nasal is going to, it’s going to help to build your CO2 tolerance, right? Because you obviously, you’ve built up a lot of CO2 during the swim. And then the nasal is a smaller airway than the mouth. So you’re going to be able to breathe about a third of the volume of air in the same

manner of times through the nose as you can through the mouth. So you’re not going to be able to offload the CO2 from the swim as quickly. So that’s going to, you’re going to, you’re going to feel that and you’re going to have like a bit more urge to breathe at the start. But you will probably notice that your oxygen delivery is much better if you can manage that nasal breathing. And so you will recover quicker. I’ve been doing some counterintuitive in a way, right? Like it’s very counterintuitive until you feel it. And then you go, okay, this actually works, right? We’ve been doing a lot of stuff at the gym that I train at with the clients there. And it’s funny, like the first couple of weeks, they’re like, oh, this is terrible. I hate it. I can’t do it. Like, but within a month, everyone’s noticing that they’re recovering from really high intensity stuff much quicker with nasal breathing than they were when they were mouth breathing. And yeah, a lot of it’s just about changing

like those neural pathways in the brain that like, you know, this is the best way for me to cover, recover, and then, then they’re recovering quite quickly. So yeah, I love that. The the thing that that clicked for me there was that the the oxygen delivery was a lot is a lot better with the nasal breathing. Like to me, okay, that that kind of makes makes sense. Now, why, why it’s a preferred method to, to breathe. And I’ve been trying to do this for the last couple of years, ever since I became aware of it nasal breathing is better. That’s kind of all I knew, right? Like, but it’s, but yeah, I’ve been trying to do that. I never sort of knew knew why. So that’s, that’s a great way of explaining it. And to me, that makes it really clear on what the benefits of it are. I just want to dig into a couple of things you mentioned earlier. In terms of a maximum breath hold, how, how do you perform that test? Is there a certain way that you should breathe in the lead up to it? Are you doing

it sitting down? How do you normally perform it? Yeah, so it’s like, with any of this stuff, don’t do it in the water unless you’re with like a trained plate coach or anything like that. So like, if people are doing like a free diving course or something like that, that’s a really good way to do it if you want to do it in the water. But otherwise, you just do a try. The breathing that you do before the maximum breath hold should just be your normal tidal breathing. You’re not manipulating the breath at all. Okay. So you breathe as if you’re going to sleep at night. And the reason for that is like, like we talked about before, we want to have that neutral level of CO2 when we start the breath hold so that we’ve got that the bond between the oxygen and the hemoglobin is neutral, right? That’s they’ll release the oxygen, right? If we hyperventilate before, we will, we will delay the urge to breathe, right? Because if we hyperventilate, we’re going to drop our CO2

levels down. And CO2 is the primary trigger to breathe, not low oxygen, right? So then during the breath hold, it’s going to take some time before the CO2 gets back up to neutral levels. We don’t get any triggers to breathe that neutral. We’re not going to get triggers until it gets above neutral. So hyperventilating or breathing more than our metabolic needs will delay the urge to breathe. But it’s also going to mean that the oxygen and the hemoglobin are going to hold on to each other. So they got less oxygen. And so we are at risk of like blacking out if we hyperventilate before a breath hold. So we want to avoid hyperventilation at all costs. So any breath holding that you do, it should just be normal tidal breathing. You breathe as if you’re going to sleep, and then you take your full inhale in. It’s good to do a two-part breath, right? So use your diaphragm first, fill up, like it feels like you’re feeling the belly, fill up the belly first,

then you fill up the chest with the intercostal muscles. That’ll be your full breath, and then hold the breath. And then you’re just trying to relax as much as possible, right? So notice if you’ve formed any tension in the body, can relax it down, relax the shoulders, relax the neck, make sure that the front of the body is nice and soft. And then with any of the breath holding, it becomes very much a mind game. So it’s about finding some sort of process that works for you to stay in that mind game. And people are different. Some people are very analytical. They like to have like a task to do. Some people are really creative. They like to just go off, you know, imagine themselves flying through space or wherever they want to go. So yeah, about finding the right thing for you to stay in that situation. And then, yeah, obviously taking a breath down when you need to. I remember hearing Ross Clark-Jones talk, Big Wave Surfer, he said when he gets wiped out and you know he’s

going to be under for a while, he imagines that he’s in his disco underneath the water. He’s just enjoying the, enjoying the ride there. But I think I went to a course with Nam Baldwin. Do you know who Nam is? And I think it was there that I heard him mention that like if you are held underwater, you know, you feel like you’re running out of air and you need to breathe. But you at that point, you’re only about 50% of the way there. It’s when you start to get that, you know, that need to sort of gulp or that’s, that’s the trigger of when you’re starting to get low on oxygen. Is it like that’s the, that’s the point at when your body’s long enough to do it? Yeah. So it’s like, it’s different for like different people. And cause like I’ve obviously like I’ve trained a lot of people in this over the years. And so I’ve seen like a lot of different bodily responses that people get. Some people are not as sensitive to carbon dioxide as others. So some people are really sensitive to carbon

dioxide. I probably would have put myself in that category when I started free diving. And I would have got, I would get a physical urge to breathe quite early and it would be noticeable. You would see it in my body. Whereas now it’s like much softer and it’s later, but it’s still strong. Whereas like there’s some freedivers that I’ve trained and on a first course, they barely get any, you don’t know noticeable sign to take a breath and they’ve held the breath for like four or five minutes. So it can differ from person to person. But like a general rule that you could sort of say is like for a lot of people when they get that first distinct urge to breathe, which could be like movement of the breathing muscles, real tightness in the chest that need to swallow and stuff like that. Yeah, you’re generally at about like a third to one half of your maximum potential for that breath hold. I like at the world championships

a couple of years ago, I did my static breath hold and the guy that won was in like the heat before me. So I got to see, got to see him. And after my breath hold, I had a chat with him. And because I had for me on that day, got my first urge to breathe, what was pretty early for me around two and a half minutes. And I managed to hold my breath a bit over six minutes. And then he held his breath for nearly nine minutes. And I had a chat to him after and I said, you know, how was the breath hold for you? And he said, Oh, I got my first urge to breathe at about two and a half minutes. And then like his experience was basically exactly the same as mine. But then he managed to stay in that zone of like real urge to breathe for a lot longer. So yeah, it does differ from person to person. And I think it’s going to be careful with like breath holding and like just having like rules like this, where it’s like halfway when you get that like, because you do

want the body to feel safe. So like, CO2 has this like profound driver to induce panic. Have you, have you been with James Nester’s book, breaths at all? I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t read it yet. Okay, there’s a, there’s a great like part at the back of it, where he’s talking about this, this girl, and there’s a couple other people that they’ve found as well that they, they’ve got some disorder where they basically they’re amygdala doesn’t work, right? So they don’t have any fear response. And they tried like all these things to induce fear in them, and they couldn’t, they couldn’t induce a fear response. And then the scientists were like, well, let’s just try this one thing, we don’t think it’s going to work, but we’ll give them a mouthful of pure CO2. So they inhale a mouthful of pure CO2. And this, this woman, like there was like countless stories of things they’ve done to her to try to induce fear, nothing

worked. One mouthful of pure CO2. And within moments, she’s like grasping at the table, her eyes are like this, and she’s like terrified. And CO2 does can induce like quite a primal response in people. And it goes beyond just that like rational, rational response of like, okay, I need to take a breath. There’s something deeper happening that we probably don’t really understand yet. For that reason, it’s important that like with any breath holding work that you take it slowly, and at a pace that feels comfortable, you might feel challenged, but you still feel safe. Okay, so you’re not getting to a point where you feel like, you know, that something bad could happen or anything like that, you don’t want to be like pushing for results. You want to be like just comfortably exploring into what I what I like to call comfortable discomfort. Okay, so there will be a stage with like any hard CO2 training, or any long breath holding where it becomes uncomfortable, but you want it to be comfortable

discomfort. So we talked about a couple of things just in terms of like your daily breathing, how you’re breathing at night. And, and that’s those 23 hours outside of the hour that we’ve got in the pool, probably more important than anything else right in terms of just our yeah, how we our relationship with breathing in the in the water. Now, what about some exercises either on dry land or exercises in the pool that would help swimmers feel like they can breathe more more effectively, whether that’s not needing to breathe as as much or just feeling like they’re more relaxed and more comfortable in the water. What are some of those things that that we can do as swimmers? Yeah, I think I think at first like it depends on your level, right? So like if you’re starting at a level like, let’s say like that beginner level with CO2 tolerance, where maybe the bolt score is like 15 seconds or less. Okay, so do the bolt test. What did you get? Okay, 15 seconds

or less. Someone in this range, they’re going to become breathless very quickly. So I would start off with like awareness of the breath. So trying to make sure that when they are breathing, they’re getting a full breath in and also they’re getting a full breath out. And just being aware of how often they’re breathing. Okay, so trying to like make it more rhythmic and getting more familiar with like, you know, are they breathing every two strokes, are they breathing every three strokes, that sort of stuff. And then definitely like trying to focus on nasal breathing when they’re at the wall. So whenever they come to the wall, trying to focus on nasal breathing for the recovery is a really good one for beginners and people that are having trouble with this stuff. This is going to like during the swim, you will have increased the CO2. And if you breathe through your nose at the wall, you’re going to maintain that higher level of CO2 for longer. And this is going to help to

build up your tolerance to it. And then like any sort of kicking drills that they do, do that with your face in the water. So have a face in the water, you’ll be on breath of for a bit and then take breaths when you need to take breaths. But try not to do your kicking drills with the face out of the water. So that would be a really good way to incorporate those into beginners. Then as you start to become like more that intermediate level, that would be as people where like the bolt score is probably between like 15 to 30 seconds. Okay, so they’ve got generally a little bit better tolerance to carbon dioxide. You still would be doing like the nasal breathing at the wall. One exercise that I love that is quite challenging. So on dry land, and you might have seen this sort of thing before, like the I’ve nearly done do it because it’s a bit tight. Yeah, these training mask.

So these are really great like on dry land, but obviously can’t wear something like that in the water. But in the pool, what I do with my center snorkel is a tape at the end of it. So it’s got a small hole. I wouldn’t have two thirds of that tape. Yeah, there’s not much of a gap there. Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend people starting as small as I’ve got it here by like just even say if you did like half of the half of the snorkel to start with, what are you going to do with that? You’re going to create a lot more resistance for the breathing muscles. So the breathing muscles are going to have to work like a lot. It’s like doing weights for the breathing muscles. And you’ve also got a lot more dead space, right? You can’t get rid of as much CO2 because there’s so much resistance. And you’ve got the snorkel, which is an extension of this 150 mils already. Okay. So then you’ve got your 150 mils here. I don’t know. You’ve probably got

another 100 or so 150 mils in the snorkel as well. So you’re going to need to do longer, deeper breaths to get that gas exchange. So yeah, this is definitely one I recommend for that. So that’s going to train both the breathing mechanics and also the CO2 tolerance because you end up with like inhaling a lot of your exhaled CO2 basically. So it’s very good CO2 training like that. With those sort of exercises though, like I think it’s important to do them in a way like I wouldn’t go into doing like sprints or something with that. For me, like I generally do that sort of stuff at like maybe the end of a training session. So say I’ve just done a couple of K swim session and then I’m going to like have like 500 meters of like cool down. I’ll do that with the center snorkel in and I’ll just like try to manage like nice slow inhale and exhale for the whole 500 meters. And then like beyond that hypercapnic swimming. So high CO2 swimming is something that

is a really good way to do that to improve CO2 tolerance. So that’s just basically like increasing stroke count and you can continue increasing the stroke count as you get more advanced with the exercises. So like someone breathing every three strokes normally, they might increase the stroke count up to like five strokes and see if they can manage that. As they get more advanced, they might even go up to seven, nine or 11 strokes. You’ll, you generally find that at some point as you’re increasing the stroke count, you will need to slow down the swim a bit. Like you won’t be able to maintain the same intensity with that high stroke count. You will feel lactic as well. You’ll get because you’re not exhaling as much, you’ll get a bigger lactic build up. But this as well can be like good training to help improve your lactic buffering systems and so that you can manage lactic acid better. And is that something you do within a session or at the start or at the end like you

do with the snorkel? Or does it matter? Yeah, I think like if I was like, if I was training with like swimmers who were like focused on sprinting, I would probably do the snorkel stuff at like the end of the session. You could do it at the start of the session, but a lot of people find that if they’re not warmed up properly, it can be, can be quite hard on the breathing muscles to start with that tape snorkel breathing. So it’s generally better once the lungs are nice and warmed up. The hypercapnic stuff you can do at the start of a session, like it’s quite good to do at the start of the session. It sort of starts to prime you for like prime your breathing muscles, prime your CO2 for like just not needing to breathe as much. So like I generally find if I’ll start the session, maybe with like, you know, like 400 meters, 500 meters, 600 meters of like warm up where I might be breathing every like, you know, between seven to 11 breaths

per stroke. Once I start the actual like the meaty part of the main set, I’m not feeling like that urge to breathe as quickly, right? Because I’ve trained, I’ve warmed that up and I’ve trained that during that warm up period. So yeah, that’s what we on our one on Wednesday, we do sprint sessions. And usually at the end of the warm up or at the start of the main set, we’ll have some breath control, usually something like eight fifties off a minute or a 105 going starting with every three, then we go five, seven, nine. And then we go back down and start again. And it’s, I like as well, even like the mental aspect of it, where it’s, it’s counterintuitive, you know, you think that in order to get you some people want to get through those strokes faster so they can take their next breath sooner. But then you actually, you start to panic more and you start to get more fatigue, because you’re using more energy, you’ve got to be able to

keep yourself calm, cool and collected to do that. What in terms of the going through that sort of breath control work mentally, how could some, how can someone improve their ability to increase the length between breaths there? Because I know people have that, there’s that panic and that thought like a crap, I’ve really got to breathe here. And I’m not comfortable. So mentally, what can people do there? Yeah, well, I think like a lot of like the mental part is about building up that confidence prior. But I think you can do a lot of stuff with your breathing during that that’s going to help a lot, right? So for instance, like making sure that you’re getting a full exhale. So like when I do those long hypocatonic swims, I would be making sure that maybe like, you know, say if you were doing like nine, maybe at like the end of the fifth stroke, I’ll start exhaling a little bit through my nose. And then as I get to like seven or eight, I’ll dump the rest of it through my mouth, right?

And so making sure that like when I am at the end of that exhale, that I’ve fully exhaled and there’s room for another full breath in. Now, this is going to help you to offload more CO2 and make sure you’re getting all the CO2 out. But it’s also going to give you the confidence that you like, you’ve had that full exchange of gas, right? You’ve got rid of as much CO2 as you could, and you’ve got a full breath of oxygen in again. And so once you can create like a rhythm with that, so maybe you know that like every fifth breath, or you know, if people are less like every third breath, I’m going to start exhaling through my nose for a bit, and then by the seventh breath, I’ve exhaled everything. Once you’ve got a rhythm with that, your body just follows the rhythm. So like a lot of your success of being able to do that is about getting into rhythm with it. So yeah, like really trying to work on like having that rhythm

of you take your breath. There’s a few strokes where you’re just holding it. And then it starts to release slowly through the nose. This can like, you know, help with a bit more parasympathetic activation. That sort of nasal exhale is like more linked to parasympathetic, that slow exhale, more linked to parasympathetic. I think on a lot of swimming though, like, you know, that you’re never going to be in full parasympathetic, you’re working hard. So but it will help to keep the heart rate low. Breathing like that. And you’re just going to make sure that you get the full air out so you can get more every so.

And in terms of, I want to jump into breathing during a race because the mistake that I’ve made when I’ve explained breathing in the past is that people think that like they have to breathe every three strokes because then you’re breathing to both sides. And that’s the right thing to do, which is it’s a great skill to have. And it’s, I think it’s an important thing for most of us to develop. But sometimes people just need more air and they prefer and they’re better off breathing every two within a race. So can you talk a little bit about what to do on a race day in terms of the the breathing? Because I don’t want something to listen to this and go, yeah, I need it. I’m going to breathe every seven in my 400 freestyle. You’re going to be toast.

Yeah. So I think like it’s important like in terms of using the breath like this for swimming, like improving your CO2 tolerance, you’re trying to build up a good base, right? So you’re trying to create like more effectiveness and efficiency with the breathing muscle. So you can take that big breath and you can exhale properly, but also building up your CO2 tolerance. So you’re not feeling breathless during your swims. That’s going to help your lactic tolerance as well, right? Like as you, as you build up more CO2 tolerance, you naturally are building up better lactic tolerance as well. And those buffer systems work really well together. But once you get to race day, you don’t want to be thinking about the breath, right? So once you get to race day, you want to do that, you want to, you know, focus on your stroke, your form, like doing, doing all the things that are going to help you to feel as strong as you can in the water.

If you’ve been doing this training prior, you won’t feel as breathless on race day. But if you need to take that extra breath off the turn or whatever it is on race day, you take the breath, right? Whatever you need to do to swim at your fastest for the swim. The idea with this training is that if you’ve done it, if you’ve trained it regularly, um, your breath won’t be one of the things that’s holding you back on race day. Okay. Maybe your body or your technique or your form is, but your breath won’t be. And that’s what you’re trying to do with it. Yeah. That’s how I sort of like to approach your technique as well. It’s like, do the things in training to set yourself up and develop those, those habits. So by the time it comes to, to your race, it’s like, yeah, okay, have it in the back of your mind. You don’t want to, you want to make sure things don’t fall apart in the race. But the, the work’s been done or it should have been done.

And it’s really just about managing your, your effort and executing good skills and that sort of thing. It’s like, yeah, you got to do the work in, in the training, which is 99% of your time spent. And it’s that 1% that you spend racing where you just want to be able to forget those things because you’ve, you’ve made them automatic. You’ve made them a habit. Now in terms of lactic tolerance. So, um, you were talking prior to the podcast, you hold the national record for the eight fifties at me. Can you talk a bit about what that, what that is? And then just what you experienced throughout that and, and that relationship between the CO2 tolerance and, and lactic tolerance, because firstly, like this, this eight fifties at me is, it’s, it’s a crazy event. And that, that scares the hell out of me thinking about doing that. So I’d love for you to just talk a bit to that if you could. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. It’s pretty random event. So it’s eight 50 meter swims.

I do it in a mono fin. So I’ve got like the mermaid tail sort of thing. The, the 50 meters has to be underwater on breath hold. And then you’re basically trying to get the minimal time that you can for the eight fifties. So your, your recoveries are as, as small as you can. I think the last few times I’ve done it, and I’ve done my best times have been around sort of eight to 10 seconds recovery at the end of the pool. And then go on up here again. Yeah. I think like we were sort of talking about before the podcast, like the interesting thing I’ve noticed with that sort of training is that I usually, my years usually are broken up into two parts. So I have sort of half the year where I’m doing pool training. And then half the year I’m sort of doing depth training or I’m on holiday overseas sort of thing. And during that depth training period, I usually lose quite a lot of my CO2 conditioning because I’m not doing as hard CO2 training during that time.

And when I come back, when I start doing these drills, usually I get very lactic very quickly, like within a few laps, I can start to feel the lactic acid building up and I can feel it like it’s very hard to finish the laps without the legs starting to deteriorate. But as I train it throughout the season, and I’m doing like lots of, lots of hard CO2 training, lots of, lots of lactic training as well, lots of sprints and stuff like that. As I get to the competition part end of the season, the, the lactic is barely noticeable. Like I feel like in that sort of eight seconds or 10 seconds that I’m recovering at the end of the pool, I can start to sort of recalibrate the system and I’m ready to go for another 50 meters sprint again. So yeah, I don’t know, like obviously I’ve like learnt lots about that stuff through the oxygen advantage training, but it’s great to see like, you know, when you, you’re the guinea pig, and that

you can see the difference that it’s making because of the training that you’re doing. And yeah, the, the, the difference has been quite profound for me in the training. And so to be able to train that lactic tolerance for you, it’s just been, been just doing more, more training where your body’s

producing that lactate and then it gets, it has the ability to just clear it, clear it faster. Is that, that kind of where you’re heading with it? Yeah. And so, and on breath hold as well. So like by training, especially like we do some exercises dry. So one of the exercises that I do with people dry is it’s similar to the bolt test that we talked about, but we call it like paces and you’re walking when you do it. And so we do this like, so you’ll, you do a passive exhale, you hold the breath and then you start walking. And we generally aim for like people to get up to like 80 plus paces. But like with the freedivers that I train, they can get to a lot more than that. They might get to 160 paces or more. What’s really interesting, when people go like beyond that sort of 80 paces mark, they generally notice that at some point it’s like the legs just get like concrete, like it’s so heavy. And all they’re doing is walking, right? So they haven’t done

anything strenuous. They’re literally having a stroll in the park, but they’re, they’re on that passive exhale and they’ve disrupted the blood acid base. And so the lactic builds up very strong. And when they stop, like, you know, one of my coach, my gym coach, you know, she’s been on Ninja Warrior and stuff like she’s insanely fit. When we started doing this sort of training together, I don’t think her legs had ever been as heavy as they had been after this training. And quite the sound to be added have that response just from like going for a walk. So yeah, so you can do similar stuff in the pool with like, like short sprints, like 25s on breath hold or kick only like 25s or 15 to 25 on breath hold, where yeah, you build up this, you build up that lactic very quickly and very strong. So doing sort of repeat work like that. But again, it’s got to be in a safe way. Gotta make sure you’ve got people that can rescue and stuff. If you’re doing it, you will build up lactic

tolerance very quickly. That’s cool. So typically they’re breathing out and they’re walking and then breathing out, holding the breath from there. And the aim is initially to get up to around that 80 paces is a pretty good marker for people in the beginning. Yeah, 80 paces would indicate it’s like similar to getting like a score of like 40 on the bolt score, right? Your breathing is probably optimal. You’ve got pretty good CO2 tolerance. And then beyond that, yeah, obviously, there’s levels of, you know, beyond optimal. But then it becomes more of a sort of like athletic thing. Like once you start to go beyond that, you start to train other systems and you definitely train lactic training with that as well. Yeah, we’ve been through quite a few things here, which I’ve found so interesting. And it’s the way you’ve explained it has been really clear just on why certain things happen. So I think that like for me, that’s helped a lot. And I’m sure for the people listening,

that’s going to help a lot as well. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think we should talk about or anything over your years of free diving and coaching that you think would be helpful for the general population to know? Obviously, the sleep thing is a major one in the nose breathing. Is there anything else that comes to mind for you there? Yeah, I think like what I try to encourage everyone that I talk to about breath is just to become more aware of how you’re breathing. So like understanding a bit better like the muscles that you’re using to breathe. And like we should always be like at rest or unless we’re at like very high intensity, we should just be using the diaphragm to breathe. We shouldn’t have much movement in the upper chest and the breath should be light, slow and deep. So I think like once you start to build up a bit of awareness around your breath, you can you see like countless impacts throughout your life. Like once I

started breathing better during sleep, like I couldn’t believe how well I was recovering from like hard exercise. Like I used to because I used to sleep poorly, like I’d train hard, but I was sleeping poorly. And like I would feel tired for days after hard exercise. And then yeah, once you started doing the mouth taping, like the recovery is just so much better. I’m ready to go again the next day. And so it just allows you to do so much more with life. And like not getting as breathless. You know, like I used to get breathless. I used to work on the third floor and I’d always take the stairs. And I would always be huffing and puffing when I go up. And you’re the guy too. Like you’re not tired. Yeah. And I was like, what’s going on here? Hey, so to get to a point where you can walk up those stairs and you’re not feeling like that, you can still breathe through your nose. You can have a conversation with someone

without feeling like you have to constantly catch your breath. It’s quite empowering. And yeah,

for me, it’s been life-changing. So yeah, like I encourage everyone just to get familiar with your breath. And like the breath, this does amazing stuff like in terms of like regulating your nervous system. So once you are familiar with it, you can use the breath as this anchor point that can help you to like calm down, to rest, digest like all that sort of stuff. So I definitely like we talked about like some hard sort of CO2 training and stuff like that. At the end of all my sessions, I try to encourage people to have some nice relaxed breathing where they’re not thinking about the breath as much. They’re just like, it’s nice, soft breath that’s just like in and out with diaphragm. It’s not meant to be like hard or challenging. Just some time for the breath to reset and for your nervous system to settle down again. And yeah, just doing some nice slow breathing at the end of a session is a great way to have

that reset so that you don’t take the stress of the session into your day with you. Yeah, so don’t get out before the cooldown like I sometimes do after a max effort 50 and rush off to, yeah, rush off somewhere. So I know you run courses kind of similar to what we do in terms of we run our half day clinics. You do a similar sort of thing in terms of like freediving and breathing. Would they be like suitable for swimmers to come along to learn more about their breathing or is it more specific to freediving? Yeah, definitely. I run individual coaching as well that can be specific for swimmers or surfers or anything else that people are sort of, you know, whether we’re using the breath in their activity, even just people that are wanting to get gains in the gym with their breath. Like I do some of that as well. But the introductory freediving course, whilst it is a freediving course, I think it’s great for like anyone who’s wanting to explore

more about the breath. Like freedivers obviously have like a very intimate relationship with the breath because we spend so much time like breathing and holding our breath. It’s a great way to learn like the foundational knowledge that you need to do it in a safe way. And then also progress your confidence so that you’re more confident to do the stuff that you might want to do in the pool with your swimming. So yeah, the introductory freediving course is a great way or just finding a breath work coach. Yeah, like myself or someone else that you can work with individually to explore more specific to your situation. Yeah, fantastic. Well, Jared, we’ll put all the links to where people can get in touch with you and find out about the coaching and the courses, Drifter’s freediving. So this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you sharing this stuff with me. And we plan to hopefully get together and go through some of this stuff in person because I’d like to

put together like a YouTube video to sort of show people some of this stuff and to try it out myself. It’s more of a selfish thing than anything else. But yeah, that’d be really cool. So hopefully we can we can see that up soon. Jared, anything else you want to add before we wrap up here? No, it’s been great chatting to you, mate. And yeah, I really love all the stuff that you’re doing and wish you all the best with it in the future as well. Yeah, no, thank you. I appreciate that. And this has made me really, really want to just be more conscious of my breath again, because it’s looked into it quite a bit a couple of years ago, started to become a lot more aware. And then, you know what, what it’s like, you just get, you know, sidetracked by other things. But this has given me a lot to try in the pool. So I’m excited to do that. So thanks again. I’ll catch up with you soon. And thanks for being on the podcast.

Cool, man. I can’t wait to hear how it all goes. 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 We Get Breathless (And What To Do About It) with Jarrod Briffa appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this episode, I’ll share ten ways to increase your swim speed and become a better swimmer. So, let’s dive in and explore these effective strategies.

00:29 Train Another Stroke

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