Effortless Swimming

Hollie Buerckner, an osteopath and swimmer, shares tips on preventing and rehabilitating shoulder injuries in a podcast episode. She suggests specific exercises to address shoulder issues and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a balance between strength and mobility. Tune in to learn more.

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So there was four kind of main topics. So it was a bit of like overuse, misuse, abuse, and then disuse. So you can kind of dive into all four of those and everyone kind of can fit into one category if they’ve got shoulder pain. And then that’s when a lot of injuries can start to occur because you start to compromise instead of using your muscles, you kind of start to use the joint. 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.

Holly Birkner is a swimmer and qualified osteopath who recently completed her master’s degree on shoulder injuries in swimmers. On today’s episode, I wanted to ask Holly about what surprised her in her research, what are some of the leading causes of injuries in swimmers and how do we go about either preventing or rehabbing and fixing shoulder injuries that we might be experiencing at the moment. We also talk about what you can do if you’re a time poor swimmer or triathlete and you don’t have a lot of additional time within your week to be able to include any strength or mobility work. What’s an easy way to include this in your normal routine? I also asked her about the balance between strength and mobility and how important is each aspect and which one should we really focus on. And she also mentioned some specific exercises that everyone can do to help overcome any sort of niggles that they’re having within their shoulders.

Now, Holly was recently featured on the podcast a few years ago on episode number 174. After I brought her on to talk about her 100 kilometer swim in five days in the Bay in Melbourne. So we’ve got a slightly different topic today. Let’s get into it. This is Holly Björkner talking about her research into shoulder injuries in swimmers.

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is someone who I had on the podcast a couple of years ago because Holly, you completed a 100 kilometer swim across five days. You swam pretty much around the Bay in Melbourne or along one side of it anyway. So I had you on to chat about that swim which was an amazing effort. And we’ve got you on to talk about something a little bit different today because you’ve recently completed your masters and you looked into what causes shoulder injuries in swimmers and how can people avoid it and what can we do to preemptively get ourselves in a position where we can swim a lot without experiencing some of those shoulder pains that a lot of swimmers tend to get. So I’ve brought you on to the podcast today to talk about that because when you’re talking about a few things that you found in your research I found it quite interesting that it was different to what I expected.

And I’m always open to new ideas and to see how people can improve these things because I come across a lot of swimmers who experience shoulder pain. Even if they’re swimming twice a week it can be a real issue for people. So that’s what we’re gonna dig into on today’s episode. So firstly, welcome to the podcast. I don’t think so of having me. So tell me about this masters that you did and why you chose that topic. Yeah, so I started my osteo studies in 2019 and in my last two years I was swimming quite full-time about six, seven sessions a week and I started getting a lot of shoulder pain kind of myself and it was in like a period of time when we can kind of start choosing what we wanted to research at uni. And I just thought it was a perfect time to kind of look into why swimmers end up with so much shoulder pain, why there’s a lot of swimmers who when they retire need shoulder reconstructions why people have to miss training sessions,

time out of the pool just to put their shoulders in the wingman and it ranged from yeah, everyone’s from just the recreational swimmers all the way through to the elite. So I just wanted to kind of figure out what exactly was causing that. And in terms of what was causing it, did it come across as was it more overload? Was it that particular movements that they were doing? Were they just not strong enough or flexible? What were some of the themes that came out in your research? Yeah, so there was four kind of main topics. There was a bit of like overuse, misuse, abuse and then disuse. So you can kind of dive into all four of those and everyone kind of can fit into one category if they’ve got shoulder pain. So overuse was looking at those people who are just performing a really high frequency and then not giving themselves enough time to recover after they’ve done start exercise. Misuse is using faulty swimming mechanics.

So if you’ve got that excessive body roll through your stroke, then you’ve kind of got that more adduction to the shoulder just pinching into that shoulder kind of joint and then looking at abuse. So people who swim excessively with paddles, they kind of got more pressure going through that shoulder because there’s more surface area in the hand. Or even if you do a lot of kick sets, your shoulders sitting at that kind of elevation and internal rotation for a very long time and you’re not kind of using it as much. And then also looking at disuse. So swimmers who have maybe been out of the pool for a little while and then have gone back into it and come to get back to that 5K set when they haven’t done it for a little while. And then the muscles, the tendons, everything in that shoulder is just not used to that excessive kind of high elevation in the shoulder, internal rotation and different things like that. I think I’ve been guilty of all of those

at some point in my personal career, especially coming back and going too hard without enough buildup. And we were just talking about that prior to the call, right? It’s like you want to go back to what you used to be able to do, but you have to have that patience to be able to just like, hang on, let’s slowly build this thing up. Yeah, absolutely. Kills you as well. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the lead causes, what were some of the most common causes of shoulder injuries that you found? Yeah, so one of the most common, I think 70% of it kind of made up was tendon properties. So that’s just when there’s like the damage to the tendon. So if we’re looking at the shoulder joint itself at that ball and socket joint, however, the ball’s too big for the socket so that all the tendons around it have to make up to stabilize the joint. So when you’re going through a lot of that movement. So that can cause a lot of impingements

through the shoulder and a lot of wear and tear on those tendons. If there’s not enough stability to support the joint, not enough kind of strength for surrounding muscles to help support it as you’re swimming. And then that tendonopathy also can occur if there’s not enough kind of scapula movement. So the shoulder blades, if they’re not contributing to the super stroke, then the shoulders kind of doing all the work. So it’s amazing. Swimmers have got a really great range of motion through their shoulder joints. You just look at like all the top swimmers before they start their race and they do these incredible movements with their shoulders and it just shows how well that they’ve got, how much movement they got through their shoulders. So yeah, looking at that, I was like, okay, so they’ve got all this range of motion in their shoulders. What is it causing their pain or is it helping them not have injuries? What kind of thing goes to that?

And it kind of goes hand in hand. They need that really high range of motion in the shoulders but they need their scapula to make sure that it’s getting involved as well. So a lot of shoulder injuries start to happen when the shoulder blades are contracting and rotating forward and then the space within the shoulder stops being able to keep the space. So then the shoulder starts to enclose on itself because the shoulder blades are not rotating around but you still want that high internal rotation. So either like a coach or yourself, you’ll push yourself into that increased range of motion in the shoulder but because your scapulas won’t help you, you just start pinching and tearing up those tendons over and over again.

So in order to get that movement through the shoulder, because the swimmers that you will have worked with primarily at like reasonably high level swimmers in the squad you were swimming with, the ones that I tend to work with often, they’ve learned since as an adult, they’re very stiff through the shoulders. So how could athletes like that start to improve that range that they’ve got through the shoulders and start to get the shoulder blades moving a little bit better because I said just years of built up, being on the bike and running and just stiffness through there. So they don’t move much at all. So how do we start to improve on that? Yeah, so like it’s like you said, there’s a lot of built up stiffness. So it can kind of come from, and this is what osteo does, we look at so many different areas of where the pain could become from and why it’s led to that shoulder impingement. So it might not have been coming from the shoulder,

it can come from the shoulder blade or even the thoracic. So a lot of people are sitting at this all day, they’re riding, their body’s very straight, there’s not a lot of rotation through the thoracic anymore, or they’ve got that kind of curved over posture like that kind of lazy teenagers that slump forward and their head’s coming forward. And they’ve got all these tight muscles at the front, weak muscles at the back, and then they can’t bring themselves back up into that right position. So it’s looking at, do they not have them right amount, like right range of motion through the shoulder blades and the thoracic or are they lacking the strength that they’ve got? So if it’s a range of motion, you wanna look at just kind of stretching and increasing mobility through that area. If it’s lack of strength that they’ve got, then you wanna look at strengthening exercises to bring it back. So then there’s all these different,

because that’s kind of what you wanna figure out with all these swimmers, and then you wanna figure out the best kind of routine for them to be able to kind of improve both sides of it.

And I’d assume that there’s probably an element of both required, right? Like you need to have obviously the strength and the mobility, but often having, sometimes having the strength can help with that mobility bit too, right? Like they go hand in hand a bit. They do, they go hand in hand, but then they sometimes also counteract each other. So someone can be really strong and have no mobility. And then someone can be have heaps of mobility, but no strength to keep the shoulder joint and the scapulas in the place. It’s just moving around kind of freelance and it’s not really, doesn’t have any muscles to hold in place. And then it goes the opposite way. People have the strength to hold in place, but it can’t now move in and out of the position it needs to. So whenever anybody gets kind of given an exercise routine, you wanna make sure that it’s got strength and mobility kind of put together in one. You don’t wanna do one without the other

because then you end up with an imbalance again and then more injuries occur from that. Let’s talk about some specific exercises that you’ve found to be generally good for the general sort of athlete in the summer. And perhaps some that, cause I know you’ve had some shoulder pain in the past as well. And maybe some that have worked well for you and anything that you figured out through your own personal experience as well. Yeah, so there’s so many different types of kind of range, like things that you can do with the shoulder and there’s a lot that you can find online and all are very helpful. There’s two main ones that I kind of used to really help me push further into no shoulder pain cause I was doing all the resistance bands and stretches and all the peck stretches, everything like that. And nothing was kind of pushing me away from the shoulder pain, it was still in there. So we had a look at kind of the swimming environment

and when you swim, you’re in a very unstable environment compared to running and riding. You’ve got contact with the ground every time you take a step. So that’s a very stable environment whereas in water you’ve got forces coming from all directions and it can kind of throw you off balance and you need extra stabilizers in your joints and to be able to kind of counteract that. So it went into looking then, okay, what’s a way that we can bring stability into like an unstable environment into like a kind of controlled environment. So when you’re swimming and you’re kind of trying to get the times, you’ve got someone yelling at you cause you’re not going fast enough or you think you’re not going fast enough, you’re out of breath, you can’t concentrate on that mind-muscle connection as easily, you’re constantly thinking about other stuff. So you want to bring that unstable environment to train those muscles when you’re in a kind of calm state.

So we looked at like using a swiss ball, it’s very unstable. If you’ve ever tried to balance someone, it’s near impossible. So we used that, we tried to balance on the swiss balls. So four point kneeling on your hands and then on your knees and then that’s kind of what you work up to. Sometimes you can only just hold your hands on the swiss ball, but eventually you go into all fours. And during that, you can see a lot of swimmers bring their shoulders up to their ears, they round forward, all their hands and arms are shaking. They can’t, they don’t really have the stability through their back and shoulders to hold them. And the people that have that are the ones that have got the injuries. Whereas when you’ve got more stability through there, they’re the ones who don’t have the injuries. So they could kind of keep the shoulders away from the ears, scapulas together, arms straight, and they didn’t fall off the ball as easily.

Yeah, so I was one of them. I kept moving to the side and it was really cool because like the side that I kept falling towards was my bad side. I didn’t have the strength to hold myself up. So I’d kind of collapse into that shoulder and collapse into that elbow and fall towards the right. So yeah, we looked at doing that every day to increase the, we looked at it, it was proprioception in the tendons that I needed to increase. So it’s that the tendons awareness of where it is in space when you’re swimming, controlling the movements. And then when you control movement, you enhance the stability. And then this leads to kind of the proper load distribution throughout the shoulder. So I’m not gonna distribute into my other shoulder or into the back or different things like that. It really helps you, yeah, kind of get that my muscle connection that the next time I’m in the pool, I’m like, okay, this is a familiar kind of feeling.

And I’m stable and the force is coming from the left from the right from the front and everything like that. I know kind of how to hold that shoulder in a steady position. Yeah, it’s really, it’s interesting to hear that because I, when I used to coach at Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Center, they’d be Mac Horton would train there with, with Vic Center and usually as part of their warmup, they do like a, almost like a prone hold, but they’ve got their knees on the ground, got their hands there. And then they’re just raising like left arm, right leg. So just alternating and trying to keep the body still like a tabletop. So they’re not arching through their back and they’re not, when they’re not bringing their shoulders forwards, just trying to keep everything still when they extend their arms and their legs out in front and behind them. And it seems like a pretty basic exercise. It’s very slow. It’s not working on a lot of strength,

but it’s the control. And if you can control your body in the water, which is that unstable environment, like those types of exercises can have a huge impact on the technique that you can have when you swim. And even I can feel like you’re not doing much when you’re on that Swiss ball, when you’re on the ground doing the same exercises Mac. It’s like, it actually helps a lot when it comes to swim form and swim technique, which is one of the main things that’s going to help you be a better swimmer. So it’s not necessarily just about getting stronger with it, but just that control and stability like you talked about. So how long would you do that exercise for each day? So I’d probably do it. I ended up doing it kind of a couple of minutes before swim training until I kind of got a bit too frustrated that I just kept falling off it. So I just got it until I could balance for a few seconds, maybe 30 seconds to a minute.

If I could hold that nice and controlled after I fell off a couple of times, sometimes I would get a bit annoyed and walk out the door and just head off to swim training. But yeah, you want to hold it for at least 30 seconds to a minute to just kind of wake up those muscles and get them firing ready to hop in the pool. And yeah, like it’s interesting you said about like that kind of lifting up the opposite arm and leg. If you look at swimmer’s now like Olympic swimmer’s they’re ripped, like their core is incredible. And it’s because they’ve got that stability through the water, like the rotation through their thoracic but their hips kind of going with them. And it’s cause they can hold that stability when they’re swimming and everything like that. So yeah, that was an huge thing as well just like looking at core strength. And if you don’t have core strength you start to compromise. You’ve got that excessive body roll.

And then as soon as you have that your shoulder comes into more adduction. It comes across the body trying to get that force through. And then that’s pinching all those tendons that are running through that area. So yeah, a lot of the time it looks way back to like even before you fix the shoulder how it’s swimming or fixing how kind of giving cause it’s like always like if you treat the person to get their shoulder feeling better but then they hop back in the water and they’re doing the exact same technique over and over again. You’re kind of just playing like catch up with them. You’re never gonna get ahead of it. You’re just trying to treat them constantly. So you wanna go back all the way to okay what’s the thing that’s causing the pain the most? Is it because you’re adducting your arm a lot? Is it cause you’ve got like a very low kind of recovery that you’re pinching the shoulder as you come over the water?

Do you have a huge internal rotation but then the scapula is not working? So you’re kind of always trying to think about what do you have to strengthen out of the pool so that when you get back in the water you’re kind of good to go.

Yeah, it’s always like what comes first is chicken or egg for each person. And I’ve had a lot of people come to our swim clinics who have said my left shoulder’s been giving me grief for the last six months. Is there anything you can see in the video? And when we film it a lot of times I’d say like four out of five times it’s very obvious what is causing their shoulder pain. They’re doing 3,000 repetitions of coming over maybe crossing the centerline a lot and then they’ve got their hand way above their head. Like yeah, just a really sort of awkward entry where they just up with their hand and then they’re trying to push down on the water really hard. It’s like it’s no wonder that you’re having shoulder pain because of that movement. Or like you said that recovery which might be coming through almost like thumb first and very low and just like that again can just cause a lot of shoulder pain. And then sometimes with the catch.

So when someone’s going from not having a very good catch to then trying to work on that high elbow position it’s very common to see them just let that shoulder roll too far forwards. Like almost too much internal rotation and they just load up through the front. They’re trying to get the catch but they haven’t got the shoulder in that strong and stable position. And like pretty quickly they go, oh, this does not feel good. And I don’t know if I can hold that for the next six weeks. So we just have to go right, hang on. You’re probably just rounding that shoulder a little bit too much. What other kinds of exercises would you often prescribe people just to develop that control through those different shoulder movements? Yeah, so we’ve got another one and it’s called like the YTA. So you’re laying in a prone position. So laying straight down, face like face and ground. And then you’ve got your thumbs like this and you’re gonna go up until Y like that

and you lift. So it’s kind of squeezing the scapulas together and you’re lifting your arms up into the air about 10 reps. And you go into the same thing with your thumbs out and you go into a T position and you lift up and you’re squeezing your scapulas together. And then you go down into an A. So your arms are beside you maybe this far away from or about this far away from like the middle of you and you’re doing that same kind of pulse and you do it 10 times. So you’re gonna go in and out. Yeah, a fair few times just to really strengthen those scaps and they get them kind of moving in the right position. So that’s another gray one that you can do before you then hop in the pool so that you’ve got that kind of my muscle connection to those scapulas. Cause a lot of the time we’re swimming it’s when you become a lazy swimmer that your shoulder starts to hurt. You kind of stop thinking about how your arms moving stop thinking about if you’re pulling your scapulas together

maybe you’re hunching over in the water or you’re just throwing the arms into the water instead of kind of placing them in the water. And then that’s where a lot of injuries can start to occur cause you start to compromise instead of using your muscles and you kind of start to use the joints.

And with that exercise, is it like chin on the ground? Is it chin off the ground? How would you normally do it? Forehead on the ground, yeah. Yeah, so you’re laying like your forehead on the ground you’ve got a long neck you don’t wanna kind of have yourself picking up. You wanna be like in that nice swimmer’s position. So you head down, got a tight like you always kind of suck your belly button into your spine just to activate that core. The legs are nice and long and then it’s really, yeah concentrating on lifting those shoulders up and keeping again like you don’t wanna hunt yourself into your shoulders you wanna keep the shoulders long, neck long and yeah, do about 10 reps of each.

Excellent. And in terms of your research what were some things that surprised you? So you probably had a bit of an idea going into it and going, okay I think this is probably, you know some of the main causes and so on but when you look into things often there’s some surprises there and you go, okay that’s actually the opposite of what I thought. So did you come across anything like that? Yeah, it was funny because when I was doing the research and I was swimming so much I’d be then swimming and being like, is this the best thing for my shoulder right now? Like my research is saying something else and I was like, no I can’t mention that though but yeah, I looked at kind of the recovery and intensity of shoulders because I definitely think I fell into the overuse category and a lot of the swimmer’s where we’re falling into more of the overuse category than the other ones. So there was a study I came across and I was looking at high intensity

versus high volume training and it found that after a high intensity some session it takes a tendon about 24 hours to recover so to decrease in thickness because the supraspinatus tendon which is a major one that’s connecting into our rotator cuff which is most of the time what being damaged in shoulder pain so shoulder injuries and swimmers so that tendon would increase in thickness and then it would take about 24 hours for it to come back down whereas with the high volume training it takes six hours for the tendon to return to normal size so then it was looking at okay with kind of how you structure sessions should you be doing high intensity floor by high volume and a lace waiting another 24 hours until you go back into a high intensity session? Sharon Van Rivendale was on the podcast a few episodes back and she said her shoulder injury which I think was maybe 2015 or 16 that was caused primarily by just doing a heap of volume

at high intensity like the intensity was just too much so now she’s doing same similar sort of volume but a larger portion of that is at a lower intensity more just sort of a aerobic effort that sort of zone two and she’s able to get through it no shoulder pain and she feels like she was just going just that too hard for too long and that was one of the main causes of it and like it makes a lot of sense especially if you’re doing 60 to 80 and that’s 100 kilometers a week like you just cannot do that at that sort of upper range there and that’s yeah it’s interesting to hear that it’s the intensity that causes the yeah it takes longer to recover for the tendons there what would you have someone like consider or maybe change let’s say someone sort of training through training through a little bit of shoulder pain what’s that level where you go okay I might need to rest I might need to go and see someone what sort of threshold

should we put up with in terms of shoulder pain because I know like I have niggles here and there but usually they’re gone after that session sometimes they’ll go two or three sessions but like what would a trigger point be for someone to go okay let’s look at this a bit more seriously yeah so there’s a lot of different kind of categories someone who’s a really high irritability they’re looking at they’re at about a seven out of 10 pain when they’re holding their arm like a 90 degrees of abduction or elevation if they’re holding it there and it’s kind of that seven out of 10 pain that means that you kind of need to really seek some treatment you may even need to take time out of the pool you don’t want to get to that higher or to like the high level you want to at least get treated and looked at at a medium level so that you don’t have to take time out of the pool so it’s better even if you’re in low if you’ve got like a two out of 10 pain

holding your arm up you want to start you know looking at some treatment or some ways to stop it from progressing because as soon as it starts to progress that’s when you’ll seek treatment and then they go okay you kind of gonna need to take you know maybe a week or two out of the pool just to let it kind of calm down a bit and that’s kind of the worst thing you don’t want to take time out of the pool especially you know we were even talking about how as soon as you take two weeks out of the pool your time’s dropped so much like it’s just so hard to get back to that level so yeah we kind of as soon as it gets to that seven out of 10 you’re in that high range and it’s also if you’re hopped out of the pool and you’ve got shoulder pain that’s lasting the rest of the day like if you’ve got a morning session and you’re still feeling shoulder pain like at nighttime and you’re laying on your side at night with your shoulder kind of compressed

and it’s hurting that means you kind of got to yeah seek that treatment Now a lot of the athletes like coach quite busy in terms of they’ve got jobs they’ve got family they’re training for other sports so they look at anything to do with mobility or strength and they go I haven’t got that much time how can I either do this easily and just make it a part of my routine or I’m just not going to do it so what I try and do if I’m working with someone one-on-one is I’ll try and get them to include some like drill workers part of their warm-up so they’re not having to do additional stuff outside of their normal swimming or if it is anything to do with mobility or strength it’s like all right can we tie this in for five, 10 minutes before the start of the session maybe if you’re sitting down recovering and watching TV at night can we include it there how many times a week and how long should someone do some some things that will help them

either not get injured or to help reduce the pain that they’re experiencing so what’s a good sort of weekly schedule look like in terms of this kind of strength and mobility work

yeah so I would always turn up to the pool at least five to 10 minutes early to activate you want to again do those activations like what my court is doing when you kind of create instability and a stable environment just to wake up those muscles get them and you never want to just throw yourself into the pool start a warm-up and then start some drills and then go on to a main set you want to get them awake when you’re still on land same goes for core activation lay down on the pool deck lay a towel out kind of get some activation even if you’re at the house you wake up five minutes earlier than what you’d normally it’s only about a five minute activation that’s all you kind of need even just to start that happening and then same with the opposite side the recovery of what you need to do it’s sometimes stretching and even for me stretching is the most annoying thing like I need all distraction while I’m stretching because I’m so bored during it

so I often do it in front of the TV if we’ve got TV on or got some TV show that I’ve been wanting to watch I’ll lay down in front of the TV and do it and like even growing up in our house like TV was on Dad would always be down on the floor with the foam roller doing his stretches doing all these recovery and then he’d come up and hop on the couch like it was always just a kind of a thing that he’d have his floor time just to make sure that everything would keep progressing in the same way and he was the same he’d do maybe three sessions a week of swimming but at least if it’s the night before each session he’d do it if he’s a bit sore after that session he’d also do it and then yeah that just keeps that kind of kind of keeps you a bit safe with the shoulders and I was the same I would do it every night I think I just got it from my parents just watching them do it every night lay down on the ground while everyone else is watching TV

and that’s when I stretch but yeah even if you can just activate before you head into the pool that’s always like a big plus

Yeah definitely it’s and that’s usually the most down time people have in the day and it’s just an easy way to include that that sort of stuff because yeah I’m like you I need all distraction I need like I need to be watching something on my phone while I’m stretching I just can’t do it in silence but yeah that’s just how it is and yeah so after going through this through the study and working with people who are having issues with their shoulders whether they’re swimmers or surfers or just general population what have been some like key learnings that you’ve taken out of it that you feel like may not be general knowledge for a lot of people like what are some of those standout things that you’ve that have come out of what you’ve focused on for the last couple of years? Yeah so main thing especially with swimmers I don’t know if it was maybe just because of the squad I was in is that people are very stubborn when they get in pain

they don’t want to seek treatment they don’t want to be told that they have to stop swimming they’re very used to swimming through pain and just kind of working through it and being like a signel they’ll work itself out in a couple of weeks and then that couple of weeks goes by and then it turns into a couple of months and then that’s when they seek treatment and then that’s when they come to training and they’re like oh physios told me I have to be out of the pool for two three weeks or I can only do kick sets or only be on the black and then that’s kind of gets disheartening and there’s even a fair few swimmers and stuff like that that especially when they’re in that younger age group when they get at the shoulder injury lower back pain, different things like that like we all hear the famous thing like oh I would have made the AFL but I didn’t do my knee like it’s literally like that with swimming as well like you either kind of push through the pain

or you’re just 18 and you’re like it’s not really worth it anymore I’m just gonna count my losses here I’ve had a bad shoulder I’m gonna get out of swimming so instead of getting to that point you really wanna kind of take care of your body take care of your shoulders and then same goes for when you’re older like you just don’t wanna if you’re doing this three days a week and it’s causing you pain you start to lose the joy and the love for it there’s never any pain there’s never any fun when you’re in a bit of kind of shoulder pain some sessions just become a bit annoying irritable you have to sit out, sit, sit out you have to maybe not use paddles or different things like that and you’re just not gonna get that quality session that you wanna

So yeah, and we’ve all been guilty of it right like we’ve all pushed through the pain when we shouldn’t have and it’s just good to be aware of what’s the psychology around this sort of stuff and if we can see I know that I’m starting to push more than I should through it then yeah, it’s a good sign to do something about it. There’s where I surf, there’s a guy who I see out occasionally and he hasn’t been surfing for a couple of months and I saw him the other day and he asked I asked why I hadn’t sent him out because I had shoulder injury and like if you wait till you’re my age like you’ll get exactly the same thing and that to me is like motivation that’s like, all right I don’t wanna be like this cranky old guy just like, and he’s a pretty negative guy like he’s just someone I see out in the water I’m like, all right, that’s good motivation for me to just like keep my shoulders my body healthy, mobile, yeah so sometimes I want something to like

motivate you by moving away from it you know, not something that’s like driving you towards it but something to move away from and to me like this cranky guy is good motivation to go, yeah I don’t wanna be like that when I’m at that point so yeah, and it’s nothing worse than being out of the water for several weeks when I came off the mountain bike probably a couple of years ago I couldn’t swim, couldn’t surf it was maybe five or six weeks and it was horrible I couldn’t do much at all and it’s like, if I can’t get in the water then it’s really hard to, yeah it’s like two of the things I enjoy the most is swimming and surfing so just do whatever it takes now to be able to do those things rather than maybe trying to excel at them it’s like, no, just be able to do it is my number one priority so I’m always like usually willing to take that step back and just not push through the pain now because of that but in my earlier years

like for sure I was, yeah wasn’t gonna stop, you know so yeah, it changes a bit when you get out of that teenage mindset I think yeah, and you can really see it like it was, I think that’s why I found it so interesting is that people were not being stopped in sessions because they’re exhausted and they can’t keep up it was that their body was literally failing like their shoulders were failing them and yeah, it’s just so interesting to see that it causes so much frustration and annoyance in them and then as soon as you start to employ those recovery strategies it’s like, oh, I can keep up oh, there goes five seconds on my time oh, there goes this and everything just becomes that bit more enjoyable and you kind of see the fire come back in and you’re like, oh, this is so much more fun now like I’m not in pain when I’m swimming and like that goes for everything but yeah, I think with swimming because everything kind of hurts

it’s that full body sport sometimes it does take maybe a week or two to kind of be like, oh, this is not a good pain in my shoulder, this is kind of a bad pain because you’re focusing on breathing properly you can’t get air into your lungs, you know, yeah legs start to hurt, everything’s hurting and then you’re like, oh, I’ve been swimming for three weeks with this bad shoulder pain so instead of going, oh, I’ll just let it wait it’s just, there’s never any harm in seeking treatment straight away just so you can even professional look at it and be like, oh, okay, we need to strengthen this area it’s pretty hard when you don’t have a coach when you have a coach, it’s easy they’re watching you the whole time they’re looking at your stroke they can tell when you’ve got a lazy arm competitor, good arm they can tell if you’re kind of cheating stroke and pulling out of the water early whereas when you’re by yourself

it is quite difficult because no one’s watching that and it kind of, you know you’ve been swimming like that for a little while and then you’ve got that shoulder injury and you’re like, okay this is what’s been happening like I’ve been compromising my stroke for a fair few weeks yeah, yeah, and you just that speed comes back when you’ve got the strength and this ability there it’s yeah, those times just happen a lot a lot easier and you’re based up in the Sunshine Coast in Queensland so for anyone listening how can they either get in touch with you see you for treatment or assessments if they’re up in Queensland anyway so what’s the best way to get in contact yeah, I work at Osteos on Sunshine so that’s based in Majimba so it’s pretty good halfway in between the coast so I’ve always happened to travel to pools either north or south so you can find that just by googling Osteos on Sunshine or we also have an Instagram

which is just Osteos on Sunshine as well so yeah, looking at being able to get into pools with people so that I can kind of have a look to see like why their shoulders pinching or what point and then have a feel through that joint itself and why it’s kind of causing that bit of pain, yeah so if there’s any sort of squads in whether it be tri-squads or swim squads or anything like that just being able to work with those sort of groups up there yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah, yeah I wanna reach out to a couple of squads for kind of that teenage age group at the moment just to kind of make sure that they’re not gonna again quit swimming just because they’re in all this pain and give them kind of strategies to recover but then again, yeah, I wanna like every couple of weeks I’ll talk to Doug about his shoulders give him some advice just to help him as well so yeah, I love working with triathletes as well

yeah, yeah, fantastic well, I appreciate you talking on the podcast again, second time round and it’s been great getting a download from you on what you’ve been researching because for me as a coach just knowing what those additional things are outside the technique because the technique stuff I know I think understand really well but there’s a lot more that goes into it and so it’s great to get someone like yourself on so we’ll put all those links to how to get in contact with you in our show notes and I appreciate you being on the podcast again I think thanks so much for that 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 Swimmers Get Shoulder Injuries (And What To Do About It) with Hollie Buerckner appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In this podcast episode, we hear from Jay Mueller, an emergency doctor who started swimming 16 months ago after injuries led him to take up the sport, as he could no longer run or ride. When Jay first started, he was averaging 2:15-2:30/100m and finding he was exhausted after a few hundred meters. Fast forward to today, where he is consistently swimming between 1:20-1:30 in training, with a personal best of 1:06 in the 100m freestyle. Tune in to learn about his transformation and the lessons he has learned along the way.

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.

And as soon as I stopped doing that stuff, both in the pool, the technique stuff that you showed me and the stuff outside of the pool, you regress. So it was 100% worth it because it all worked out correctly.

And that I thought was good advice because when you’re in there, you’re like, I’m not rotating my head far enough. I’m not rotating my head far enough. But if you just visualize what you want to do and stop thinking verbally, then you have to feel it instead of think it with words. 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. When Jay Muehler started swimming 16 months ago, he came from a running and cycling background, but had no swimming background. So he learned as an adult. He came to one of our clinics 12 months ago. And prior to that, he was around 215 to 230 per 100. And when he came and saw us, he was just under that two minute mark. Now, fast forward to today. Jay is now able to swim consistently in the 120s. His fastest 50 is a sub 30 and his fastest 100 is a 106.

We don’t often see this kind of improvement this quickly. So I wanted to get Jay on the podcast to talk about how he was able to see such a big improvement in a short space of time. What drills and exercises did he do in the water to develop his stroke? And what sort of strength training has he been doing to avoid shoulder injuries and to develop the strength that’s needed to be a good swimmer? So let’s get into today’s episode with Jay Muehler. My guest today is Jay Muehler. Jay, you attended a clinic about a year ago now and you sent through a message just about how much you’ve improved since then. So I want to really get you on the podcast to talk about how you went from where you were to where you are now and what it took to get there. Because I love having just average swimmers on the podcast, not your Olympic swimmers to see how they’ve made big jumps in their speed, in their efficiency and technique.

Because I think that makes it a lot more real for people and it feels a lot more achievable as opposed to hearing it from Olympic or world-class athletes. So welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. Nice to see you again. Yeah, so yeah, I’m relatively new to swimming. Like I started swimming for my fitness initially in December, just December a year ago. So, you know, a year and some months and then a bunch of months off actually when I made a trip back to the States in Australian winter, but U.S. summer. So I’ve got just about a year of swimming under my belt now. And I started swimming because I’m a little circuitous. I’ve been exercising my whole life and I’ve raced bicycles since I was a kid. I was never a professional, but I was, you know, a reasonably good amateur in the U.S. and raised at a reasonably high level. And that’s my sort of my first love. But then the pandemic with my job, I’m a doctor.

I’ve made things tight for time. And then I started running and got sick running and got tendinopathy. And then I couldn’t run, then I couldn’t ride. And someone said, you might as well swim. And I was like, I don’t want to go swimming. I just want to get on my bike, but I couldn’t do it and I had to do something. So I started swimming and yeah, fell in love with it. And also because it’s such a tough nut to crack. So when I started off, it was just like anybody else, even though I had a big aerobic background. I was, you know, I diluted myself because I could swim back and forth in my backyard pool. I was like, I’m naturally talented. And then of course I went to a 50 meter pool and like was tough at 100 meters. And the first thing that happened was my partner had a friend in her yoga class who was a swim coach. And she said, you should meet with her. And I did. And she’s a great swim coach and she was lovely.

And she saw me swim and I thought I was God’s gift to the world. And she went like this and she said, come back to me later when you’ve dealt with some posture and other stuff. And that’s when I realized that it’s just totally different to any other sport. And I like to teach myself things, but I’m also well aware that once you get into the social media, YouTube realm, you can get overwhelmed with what’s out there. But I saw your videos and they made sense to me intuitively because I have sort of a background in anatomy and interest sort of in sports medicine and it related best to your stuff and started following them and trying to practice some of it and started to improve with that. And then met with you at a swim clinic in Brisbane and it’s just been continuous improvement since then. And when you first started, once you could swim more than 100 meters without stopping, where were you at in terms of your pace?

And where are you now for those that are listening? Yeah. So my pace when I first started, I think if I was once I started swimming continuously comfortably was in like the 230 to 215 range. And that was like if I was swimming continuously, I could probably get under two minutes if I was going hard. But one of the big things that happened was I came, I was here at work and I went to do a swim before work and I did a very easy 500 meter warm up. And then I was at like two minutes per 100 and I’m like, now I’m going to do a really hard 500 and I did and I went really hard and was still at two minutes per 100. And so that was before I saw you. I actually started to get a little quicker, but I started to have big time shoulder issues too. So I just finally I was like, man, I just got to see Britain in person and help sort it out. So I got to the end of last year and did NUSA as my first triathlon and I did a minute 40 per 100 by that point for the 1500 meters.

And I actually think my straight line speeds a bit better. But like, just like you have to make all the mistakes in the pool, I had to make all the mistakes in the open water too. And that was not, not being good at sighting at all and swimming way off course. So there was tons of like stopping, looking around for 25 seconds, finding the buoys and stuff. So it was a bit of a mess, but still quick enough to make me happy. I did that same speed in another triathlon and then things started to click in the pool. And yeah, now I think my fastest 100 I did was sort of this and it’s not with a diving start. It’s just with an easy push off off the wall and a tumble turn. It got down to 106 and then I can blast out a 50 free pretty well now. I’ve gotten below 30 seconds, which is good for me. That’s flying, especially in the 250 to 230 when you first started. Yeah, so I mean, I’m a sugar burner. I like to in bike racing, you know, you have all of these very, each of them love the VM2 efforts and effects.

But that’s, you know, that’s not my focus. My focus is to do some triathlon. So big, big, big change. But then just the like, if I go and do a swim that has a bunch of sculling and drills now. And then add back the stuff that’s at sort of a moderate pace, because, you know, when you’re sculling, you don’t carry a lot of stuff like that. I still end up, you know, pretty frequently under a buck 40 for the, for the entirety of the swim and pretty often in the 130s. And I’m starting to put together like, you know, continuous pieces in the in the 120s. It’s cool. Yeah. Huge improvement. So yeah, it’s like you’re making early on once you could swim continuously. What did what did you see in the in the clinic when we did the filming? It’s funny because I think I’d improved from your videos a fair bit by the time I saw you. And, and so the things that you, you changed at the time, I was like, these are very minor changes, but they were really big in the pool for my comfort.

So the biggest problem I had is this is a rebuilt shoulder here because it was a chronic dislocator. And this one should be rebuilt, but it’s held together with metal and all sorts of other stuff. And I was on my return because I was under rotating and under reaching. I was not giving myself enough room when I would come out on my return. And so I was just essentially impinging for the first part of the return, my recovery. So getting up on my side and letting the elbow open it up rather than trying to pull pull everything up and into my shoulder and decreasing the amount of space. That, that made a huge difference to the sort of sustainability of it. So it immediately like my best laps, which at that point were, I’d actually slowed down when I saw you because I had done some really fast swims, but it destroyed my shoulders. So then I had to rebuild my stroke. And my best laps then were like, you know, I started to just knock them down like I was continuously in the 150s, then 145, then 140.

And then it just, and that made those same laps, sustainable lap after lap after lap. Instead of just doing 100, having to rest 30 seconds, you can do the 500 at that speed before your shoulders tire out. And then adding a lot of the out of the pool stuff that we talk about. And some of which you told me about and some of which I found on my own has also made a massive difference. And as soon as I stopped doing that stuff, both in the pool, the technique stuff that you showed me and the stuff outside of the pool, you regress. So it’s, it was 100% worth it because it all worked out correctly. And what’s that look like out of the pool for you? What are you doing on a regular basis? Yeah, so the thing that made a big difference right away was doing static hangs. And so just it, and you know, it doesn’t sound like much. And I, I thought, you know, how can it make that much of a difference, but just a pull up bar and initially not even using my body weight.

And it’s amazing how little I could tolerate at first. I had to work up to using my full body weight for the static hanging by doing like five times 15 seconds with support underneath. And now I’ll do like five times three minutes of my body weight just hanging. Wow, that’s huge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that just, that opens, that opens up the shoulder space. And there’s a bit of research that, you know, shows that your supraspinatus tendon pulls on that coricoclavicular ligament. And so what that is, that’s sort of the boundary of the space you have for your rotator cuff to move around underneath there. And it opens that up maybe the same way that braces change the way that your teeth are, it changes, changes the structure. And so that gave me a little bit of space. And then cuff exercises, particularly external rotation on this side, because swimming is a very front, you know, anterior front activity.

You know, you’re pulling down with your lats and your pecs and you’re down there. And if you don’t, if you don’t work this stuff on the backside, your scapula doesn’t stick and glide to your back. And, and then you get the extra, your internal rotation ends up fairly strong from the swimming. And people still like to do that too. But then they forget to do appropriate and dynamic external rotation in the same position that you would do your swimming stroke. And if I do those things, the shoulder pain just goes away. But like anyone, you know, like I’m pressed for kids in a job and stuff like that. Yeah. Stay on top of it. The, the static hangs is an interesting one. I’ve, I’ve started doing those for the last couple of months. And like it’s, I can do probably a minute, I could do about a minute 30. Yes. Holding on. And it’s like, it’s really the grip strength that, that gives out the quickest, but I’ve built up to, to that.

And I can do like two, two by one minute, yeah, in a row with about 30 seconds rest. So five by three minutes is, is massive, but you’re, are you just doing it with one arm? No, not both. Oh, okay. Both arms. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I have almost unlimited ability to just hang there. No, but it took a while to work up to it. It, you know, it took, it took a few months, months and months. But yeah, it’s, I, when I first went to do it, I mean, I couldn’t, I couldn’t hold my own body weight like at all. And I’m not, you know, not, it wasn’t a big strong guy, but I was not, you know, totally deconditioned, but it was just too painful, you know. And, and are you letting your, like you haven’t been in the shoulders come up just hanging like completely there? What’s the, or are you, are you keeping a little bit of sort of keeping it switched on a little bit or just letting it hang completely? No, I just, I, I get, I sink into it as much as I can and let the, and let the soft tissues and not the muscles stretch out as much as I can to just get, it’s, you know,

essentially you’re, you’re pulling up on that quark ocular ligament and that’s what’s causing a bit of the bone to remodel and stretching it out a bit. So yeah, I just, I, I really relax into it and literally hang out, you know, have a whatever’s on Netflix with the pull-up bar in my house here at work. What I, what I noticed as I started to, to do it is that at the point where I intern, I was reaching forwards and then rolling into that first part of the, the catch. That just felt so much stronger and more controlled compared to previously before I was doing it. Like it was a very noticeable difference between like the before and after with it. So for anyone listening, it’s like start slowly build up to it because you can, like if you just go too hard and you don’t, you know, you just try and overdo it. You, you might injure yourself even though you’re not moving much, but I know at the start, like I just, I was probably sinking into it a little bit too much.

And then I’d sort of come off a little bit sore. So like, yeah, start slow and build up. But yeah, yeah, yeah, simple exercise that can make, make a world of difference. I found, I found that super, super helpful. And I, like you said, it’s get it like, I find it super helpful on the recovery, but also just, you know, in getting, and you know, the catch is such a, like a conceptually fascinating thing. Like I didn’t understand what it was probably not until the last couple of months to really understand like kind of what it should feel like and what it is. But that idea that you’re get trying to get over the water. Like you’re not, it’s like you’re trying to get your arm around and over like a mass that you can feel. And it’s like you’re, you’re holding the whole thing from under your shoulder all the way out to that forearm that should be straight down. Then you want to get that mass behind you and getting the, getting the out in front, you know, elevating the pectoral girdle up right there is easier once you’ve done the hang.

That’s, that’s really interesting. So it was a matter of the recovery just being more what I’d consider open with it rather than trying to keep that hands to be close to the body. So that, that just frees things up a lot. Some, some strength work as well, especially for, as you said, external rotation, those static hangs. And then was there anything else that you’d worked on as well? Yeah. So the things that you had mentioned when I saw you were that I was under rotating. And I know that when I started and I first, I first, I was over rotating. She said, you’re rotating way too much. I was going to 90 degrees. They almost passed it. And then I had gone to basically being flat. So I corrected it way too much. And so just keeping, keeping that, you know, rotation in the upper body and deciding how much of it, like you said, to transmit to the hips, because the hips should probably be rotating a little less than the shoulders.

But you have to be careful because otherwise you start thinking too much in there. And so the thing that I worked on with you was how much I was rotating and how far I was reaching. And I’m like, initially, I thought, well, that’s two things to work on. But in fact, it’s, in fact, it’s just one because your rotation is your reach. Like you can, you effectively do both of them at the same time. And then you get up over the top of that catch with it. And the other thing that you worked on with me was how that’s transmitted and, you know, sort of through the core. And I will say that I, there are a couple of people here where I work who I met with and had a couple of light bulb moments. And you had talked to me about doing sort of fiddle faddle to make that connection. And so I would do that. I would do, you know, like one, one paddle and then the opposite flipper, opposite fin to sort of connect that core.

And I was like, great, that trains my core. And then I would just go back to swimming the way I did before. And, and I was swimming with one of those physiotherapists here and she’s like, so how much do you engage your core when you’re swimming? I’m like, oh, well, I do this drill. She’s like, right, but after you do the drill, do you keep doing it? And I was like, I guess not. And so then just connect, you know, you’re really sending the effort across your body with a connection in your core. And once I realized that, I actually realized that thing that swimming seems the most like to me and you’re going to say I’m crazy is actually Nordic skiing. And the reason for that is you’re constantly pushing yourself back into a glide because you want to maximize the amount of time you’re in that low drag position. And so you also went through with me increasing the amount of front quadrant time I have.

And so I’m really cognizant of keeping the arms in that front quadrant. So when I begin my catch here, I’m pushing myself into streamline, pushing myself into streamline. So you’re constantly pushing yourself into the lowest drag position. And once you start to feel the water, you can feel where you’re creating drag. And it all comes together with time and strength. And is there any mistakes that you made along the way where you look back and go, okay, I can see where I maybe went wrong here or focus on something I didn’t need to focus on? Or anything that you look back at and go, like in hindsight, this was the wrong thing to do or something I could have done better? That’s a good question. Actually, I have to think about it like any sort of like rabbit holes I went down that I probably didn’t need to. Yeah. Yeah. I think you said to me when I met with you, I was asking about breathing. I was definitely overthinking the breathing and you’re like, first of all, make sure you’re getting enough air because otherwise you can’t swim.

And I was like, no, that’s true. But then I, and then, and then I went back and I was thinking about it. And I’m like, actually, you know, I’m a doctor and thinking about respiratory physiology. Actually, what you’re doing is making sure you’re getting rid of enough air because what you’re really doing is, you know, your reserve of oxygen is pretty much always going to be okay. It’s very hard for people to drop their blood oxygen level, but you’re blowing off the CO2. And so the way I make sure I get enough air is by blowing enough off before I take the breath. And that’s the big thing was that I felt like I wasn’t, you do, you feel like you’re not getting enough air, but you can’t get enough air if you’re not emptying enough out to take, to take it back in. What I do is try to maintain that buoyancy and maybe just let a little out of the nose. And when it’s time for it to go, I’m still breathing from the top of my lung capacity.

I’m not breathing from halfway down. I haven’t let half of it out when it’s time to let it out before I breathe it, you know, and then back in. And in that way, I don’t oscillate in the water. I maintain the same buoyancy and momentum. That’s a good one. That’s interesting because the way I, the way I would, you know, often explain it. And I can’t think, I can’t remember that conversation, conversation precisely, but, you know, people always, people often are thinking, well, I need to breathe every three or every four because that way like maybe they feel better when they’re swimming and they can maintain a better stroke. And like bilateral breathing is certainly a good skill to have. But yeah, they’re doing it to the detriment of like, they just, they just can’t get enough enough air in. Especially if they’re going hard, they might need to breathe every, every two. But the point, the point you made there is, is a really good one that you’ve got to make sure that you are exhaling enough.

Otherwise, it’s just like, yeah, you just kind of topping up and topping up. And then you just never really get that, you know, that sort of clear that full, full, a lungful of air that’s this fresh air. So yeah, I haven’t sort of thought too much about it. But we, like what we want to try and do is make sure we have that little bit of exhalation from the start. And then just as you’re turning your head to breathe, have that bigger exhalation where you, you don’t completely clear the lungs, but you get rid of most of it at that point. So that’s the, that’s the way to do it. And I think it’s easy to overthink all these different parts of the stroke. But if you can have that very gradual exhalation with a bigger exhale just before you get your next breath, that’s, that’s the way to go about it. Before we dive into the rest of today’s podcast episode, this episode is proudly brought to you by Form Smart Swim Goggles.

They’ve been a long time sponsor of the podcast and they are my go-to goggles when it comes to tracking my training sessions and being able to see what’s happening in real time through the goggles. And we know swimming is a highly technical sport, but without the guidance of a coach on deck, identifying and addressing technique flaws can be a challenge. They’ve recently added a new feature to the goggles, Head Coach. And this addresses that problem head on. It gives swimmers improved access to their technique awareness, focused skill development and in-app education and analysis. Head Coach provides real-time visual coaching via the Form Smart Swim Goggles augmented reality display. During and after a swim, Head Coach provides swimmers with technique feedback using two types of metrics, Form Score and Head Coach Skills. Form Score is a measurement of overall swim efficiency ranging from 0 to 100, defined by your pace and your stroke length.

Head Coach Skills encompasses five key areas that will help you identify where to focus on improving with your efficiency. Head Roll, Head Pitch, Set Pacing, Interval Pacing and Breathing Time to Neutral. And after completing a session, you can check back in on the Form App to track your progress. And Head Coach provides swimmers from beginner to expert with an unprecedented level of data-driven guidance and understanding, enabling you to boost your performance and your speed. Get your pair of Form Smart Swim Goggles today. Click the link in our podcast description or use the code Effortless on Checkout to get 15% off your Form Smart Swim Goggles. Now, one of the things you mentioned at the clinic, because you’ve come from a riding background, and I think you’ve done a little bit of sort of teaching and coaching with it. And with your background as a doctor, you mentioned something about what happens when you’re learning a new skill.

I’d love for you to share that with those that are listening because I’ve actually said this at quite a few clinics because I found it really interesting and a great way to describe what people go through as they’re changing their technique. Yeah, so it kind of transcends each sport. Anything that is requires significant technique and neuromuscular coordination, which is a lot of different sports that you’re doing repetitively. So, like, gate retraining for running, changing the geometry on your bicycle, and especially with swimming because swimming is so much different. You can’t hide mistakes in swimming like you can with the other two. Initially, the best, the most efficient you will be is whatever you’ve been doing for a long time, even if it’s wrong. So, if I go, like when I started running, I ran cross country in high school, but mostly to stay in shape for riding bikes. And I didn’t, you never know anything about running. You run the way you run as a kid.

And then I did some work on technique and absolutely when I first started doing it, I felt less efficient and weird and wrong. Like, and the hard part is, is putting your faith in the person in front of you and trusting the process that you’ll arrive at a better place. And the reason that’s hard and it is because you feel strange and less efficient and you are. So, if you were to, you know, take a swimmer or a runner and, you know, measure their, their oxygen uptake and then have them change their technique fundamentally. Initially, their efficiency will drop and they’ll take, they’ll require more oxygen to do what they’ve been doing. And that’s because you’re using all sorts of accessory muscles just to make that little tweak because it’s not, it’s not like set it and forget it in your muscle memory. So with running, you know, when, when you start to shorten up your stride, increase your cadence and make sure that the contact point is underneath your center of mass.

Initially, that requires a lot of concentration, brain power, you’re moving your pelvis all over the place. You’re trying to keep your core straight so that the contact point is just underneath there and then you’re pulling too hard with your hip flexors and your efficiency initially drops. But if you, if you keep in mind that the goal is to dispense with all the extra motion ultimately and just stick with that one technique and do it slowly over time, you do, you do retrain. And then when that becomes your new way of doing it, if the technique is better, you will be more efficient. And with swimming, you’re always in the marginal gains part compared to the other two. So when I ride, you know, I’ve been riding time trials on a bicycle since I was a kid. And you get really comfortable feeling the wind and knowing you, you know, if you get really, if you’re really comfortable doing it, you can feel like, you know, being down like this and tweak things and feel where the wind is sticking to you and going over you.

But you have to be going really fast to feel it. And in running, you know, yeah, running doesn’t have a lot of that because you’re going slower the whole time. But when you get going fast enough, aerodynamics do come into it. Then you get into the water and the water is, you know, it’s viscous and dense. So you’re always in the marginal gains point in swimming. So there is almost no instance in which you’ll make a bigger gain by applying more power if your technique’s not there. Because you’re always in the drag limited portion of the sport from the second you get in the water. So, you know, you can ride your bike, you can ride at five, you know, five k an hour, you can ride at 10 k an hour, you can ride 15 k an hour. And you don’t have to think too much about what you’re doing with the winds. You can just ride for fitness. And if you’re riding uphill, you’ll get, you know, you’ll get some resistance and you’ll get fitter.

And then when you start going out, you know, with a group on a group ride and you hit the front with a bunch of people, your position has to be good. And you have to know, you know, where your actuation is and everything like that. And you have to be low in fairness. And that’s the, that’s the marginal gains part where the aerodynamics matter at 45 kilometers an hour. With swimming, whether you’re swimming at two 30, two minutes, one 30, one 15 or your, or your, you know, Michael Phelps, you’re in the drag limited part of it the whole time. And, and that’s the big difference with swimming. So that’s why, you know, you can do whatever you want with swimming. But if the technique is bad, you will never realize the gains and strengths you have. You’ll just, you’ll just work harder and, and make minimal changes in speed. That is a great point. And something that I’ve tried to instill in the athletes that I’m coaching, especially recently is just that body awareness, feeling like feeling where your hips are, where your legs, where’s your head when you’re turning to breathe, just building that body awareness and always keeping in mind that we want to first and foremost have good body position.

Because your fitness and strength does not really matter too much if you’re swimming like this. So we’ve got to, we’ve just got to work towards having great, great body position. Yeah. First of all, it’s so much different to, like as, you know, your proprioceptive system is a system that gives you feedback on position. And we’re so used to gravity doing that for us when we run or we ride a bike or you hit a jump on a mountain bike. And with swimming, the proprioceptive system isn’t getting gravity to do it the same way. It’s interacting with itself, right? Like, are my hips higher than my shoulders? Are they too low? But it’s not, you’re not getting it through your skeleton and up and traveling vertically upwards. It’s, it’s much different. You’re horizontal and there’s no ground underneath you. And so it’s, it’s much more subtle and a lot of it’s just time. Like it just takes time to build that awareness.

And I thought, I will say that there is one thing I’m going to say it. It’s from another YouTube channel. But where the guy said, it’s all out. Yeah. Where the, where the, where the guy said, stopped thinking with words and think with your body. And that I thought was good advice because when you’re in there, you’re like, I’m not rotating my head far enough. I’m not rotating my head far enough. But if you just visualize what you want to do and stop thinking verbally, then you have to feel it instead of think it with words. And that, that connects your neuromuscular system much better than thinking with words. You can think words all day long. But in the end, you’re going to, you’re trying to get into that flow state where you don’t have words and, and you’re sort of doing it automatically. And that, that’s the goal. So start by just feeling, you know, where you are in the water and can you feel the differences?

I do planks, but in the water. So, you know, we all, people do planks from their core and stuff like that. But I all go in my backyard pool and sometimes I’ll even take a picture of it to make sure like, you know, stick the iPhone there or stick the GoPro in the water to see if I’m doing it well. And I just float, hold a big breath in, make myself as buoyant as I can with my arms out and streamline and my feet out and see how close I can keep my feet to breaking the surface of the water and high without causing anything up front to sink. And when you practice it, you like over time, you get that posture correct and pretty soon your bones out of the water and your heels are out of the water too. And then you’re really using your back muscles to do that. And then you go to swim and you just stay really high and, you know, everything’s in one line and you go faster. Yeah. It’s like just going back to the like basics of like floating, right?

It goes a very long, long way. Yeah. Like that’s, that’s a great quote about thinking with your, with your body. It reminds me of is. So if you think of like music, for example. If you think of the, like the lyrics to like your favorite song, you could recite it word for word. Now, if you had just a written, if you just read that without any rhythm to it, without any beat to it, if you just read that, it’s unlikely you could remember like several hundred, hundred words. Yeah, that’s right. But if you put the rhythm and the beat and the tune to it, you’re going, you can remember it quite easily. And you can do that with like dozens, if not hundreds of songs, at least like part of it. And so I find it’s the same thing with, with swimming is if we can get out of like that, that overthinking brain where we’re thinking about all these like, yeah, okay, my rotation was my head. It’s like, okay, yeah, keep that in the back of mind, but really feel for it.

Can you feel for those, those things? And what does it feel like when you get it right? Because we can, we can do those things so much better if we are feeling for them rather than just thinking to try it. It’s, it’s, it’s huge. And, you know, when you were telling me, you know, when do you feel the water and where are you, where are you beginning to apply pressure? When I met you at the clinic, I was like, I don’t know. You tell me, I have no idea. And then, you know, with time and just sort of turning down that internal dialogue, you do feel it like you feel, you know, you start to feel the catch and you get your arm over that massive water. And you understand, you start, you start to understand why it’s called the catch. And it’s because you really, it almost feels like, you know, it feels like you’re almost like sliding your hand into the sleeve of a jacket, you know, like you can feel the massive water that you want to get around.

And then as you put pressure on it, if you put too much pressure, you’ll create turbulent flow and slip. But if you don’t create enough, you don’t maintain momentum. And so it’s, it’s a very fine line and more subtle and controlled than it is, you know, with bikes. Bikes are easy. Have a little harder. They go faster. Yeah. With swimming, swimming, you pull too hard. You slip in the water and create turbulent flow. And then you’re not moving that massive water anymore. You’ve actually pulled through the mass that you’re trying to move back. And that’s the problem. Were there any particular drills that you did over your time that you found were helpful for changing some of those things? Oh, yeah. Tons. You know, you had a podcast with Joe Freel on, right? And he’s like a hero. And he said, I think he was saying, like, you know, you could just do drills for your first year or something like that. And you’ve probably, and you might improve the same amount.

And I don’t know if I would only do drills and not swim, but I do tons and tons and tons of them. Lots of long dog when I was starting out, lots of long dog. And, you know, the stuff on the side and YMCA, tons and tons and tons of it for after I met you. Just to get the position in and also to make sure my entry was wide enough and that I wasn’t crossing over. I and really tried to get that down. And now I still do some of that, but sculling is huge. I find sculling really helps. And I think if I like what I this morning I was swimming with a friend and I was like, you can change the way your freestyle feels in 200 meters. And you do good. Do the fist drill going up for 50 meters skull coming back. Do the a okay drill going down and then swim your freestyle. So do 200 freestyle now and then 200 freestyle that way. And it feels totally different. You feel the entire catch. You feel the mass of the water.

You get a hold of it. You know where you want your hand, how far to keep the fingers apart and you shove that water behind you. And you, you drop, you know, six seconds off your previous lap. Yeah. As I said, it doesn’t take much at all. Just some, yeah, just just a good drill progression goes a very long way. And one of the drill progressions I’ve given a number of summers that I that I coach is I’ll give them. Just scaling to start with some front scale. Yeah. Then we’ll go into doggy scoop, then into long dog and then maybe into some single arm drill as well. Like that kind of covers all your, all your bases. And yeah, you can just get you feeling the water and feel that propulsion when you set yourself up well with it. So like it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter too much what the drills are. If it progresses and it builds on something that you need to improve on, that’s going to go a long way. And within 200 meters, a couple of minutes of swimming, you’re probably set up pretty well for the rest of the.

Yeah. So it’s worth doing each session, something along those lines. I mean, I think you have to. And to be honest, the best sessions I have are the ones where the percentage of the, of the swim is a bit more on, you know, focused on drills. And, and then, you know, drills into the piece back into drills into the piece. And, you know, it’s, I think there’s a video you said, if you don’t know what part the drill is emphasizing and what the result is, like, you know, the result you’re trying to achieve with it. The drill doesn’t do a whole lot for you. And so I think that’s part of the reason, like, you know, you go to the pool and there are some people that aren’t progressing. They’re like, I’ve done long dog a okay, and I’ve done this. And I don’t feel like I’m progressing. And it’s like, but when you do, when you do that fist drill, are you feeling the mass of water and then catching that mass of water behind the forearm?

You should start to feel like you’re, you know, sliding it over a ball and you can feel the ball. And then you have to decide how hard you want to push the ball, not too hard, not too easy, enough to keep momentum. And, you know, and it’s fascinating. It’s like, it’s, it’s been really a fascinating thing to start swimming because it’s just been so different than anything I’ve ever done. Yeah, that’s, I mean, to see you, to the fact that you’ve gone sub 30 and a 106 for 100 coming from just over 12 months of swimming is pretty ridiculous too. And it’s like, that’s, that’s a huge, like a huge improvement in a very short space of time, which I have rarely seen. So I think you’re, you’ve done a lot there where just probably really focusing on the technique and doing it the right way. And it sounds like the, your background as a doctor and knowing what to expect when it comes to those changes in the stroke and how long it can take and those sorts of things.

I feel like that’s probably helped you in fast track that, but the thing is like that’s, that’s knowledge that everyone can have and they can have that same approach. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s out there for, for everyone. Is there any advice that you’d give to someone who was, you know, maybe three to six months into their swimming and maybe around that two minutes to 230 mark where you were, what advice would you give to them? Yeah, a couple of things and that it’s, it’s not like technical stuff. It’s just the approaches. I think a lot of people, if you’re worried about your pace at all, it means you’ve got a little bit of that sort of type a in you. Cause some people are swimming and you ask, what pace do you do? I don’t know. I just swim. Fantastic. I mean, and good for them, they’re enjoying it. But if you’re worried about your pace at all, it means that you’re probably someone who’s invested a bit in their own performance.

And that’s the kind of person that often runs the risk of not being kind to themselves and patient with themselves. And I’ve probably, I’ve probably been that person to my own self a lot in my life. And it’s not helpful with swimming because when you get frustrated, you, you move out of the flow state and into your own head and then your performance will decline. And remember that you’re, you know, you’re doing it because it’s an enjoyable thing to, you know, we come from water to connect with the water is actually really an enjoyable thing. And your speed is a byproduct of the time you spend in the water acquiring that feeling and strength. And so, you know, my, my best swims, to be honest, where I are, where I start to swim and I don’t use the watch or the form goggles for the first part of it. I just let myself connect to the water and relax so that I’m not like goal oriented from the second I’m in there.

And just feel what I’m doing and then just relax and be, you know, be kind to yourself. And then it’s much easier to not overdo the things that make you less efficient. You end up faster that way. And all of it takes time. There’s no other sport where you basically are pulling, pulling things down from overhead hard. And so if you don’t have that strength from something else you’ve done, it, you know, that takes a long time. And I’m built way differently now actually than I was, you know, a year ago. I was racing, when I race bicycles, I’d be racing at 66 kilos and I’m like a 180 centimeter guy. So I was real light, you know, the widest part of my arm was the elbow. And now, you know, I’m fueling the efforts and eating an adequate dose of protein three times a day, especially on either side of my swim so that I can soak that up afterwards. And I’m almost 80 kilos now. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s like, it’s a, it’s a very big difference if you look at pictures of me doing stage races on the mountain like a few years ago.

And then what, what I’m like swimming now, it’s, it’s two different physique. And but that, you know, that takes time and food and effort in the pool. And maybe I did it a little quicker than some people, but that’s just cause I, I think it’s, I had a little extra knowledge base and some nutrition that I stuff that I transferred over from other sports. And I don’t take no for an answer maybe, but I think you’ll get there eventually it just might take a while. And in the interim, you know, you feel great. You get like, once you get over the, I can get enough air, you get out of the pool. Like I just went swimming with a doctor buddy of mine, who by the way is probably on track to make faster progress than me watching your videos, FYI. And we both came into work and he’s like, don’t you feel so he’s Brazilian? Don’t you feel so great that we swam this morning? I said, yes, I do. So it’s fun, you know, make sure you’re having fun.

That’s love. That is great, great advice for anyone who’s, who’s in that early phase, no matter where you are really, but in that early phase of your, your swimming journey. And I think if you’ve got that willingness just to be, to be patient and not worry about what the times are, just, just be diligent with what you do, then the, the results are going to come. So yeah, it happens. Yeah, it does happen. So Jay, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you sharing how you got to the point where you are and just being willing to stick to the process and it’s fantastic. So thanks so much for sharing that and I can’t wait to see where you’re at in the next. Yeah, thanks Brenton. I’m sure we’ll be in touch. Yeah, it’s been fun and I really appreciate everything you’ve done. My pleasure. Thanks, Jay. All right, dude. Be good. Take care. Thank you.

The post How I Slashed My 100m Freestyle Time to 1:06 with Jay Mueller appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, we dive into a conversation with Frank Sole, the author of ‘The Five “B” Method to a Successful Triathlon Swim.’ We discuss Frank’s evolution as a coach since writing the book, his key lessons for new athletes, and the importance of terminology in training and team dynamics. Frank also shares insights on leveraging breathing techniques for improved performance in the water, drawing from his training with a world-renowned expert. Tune in now!

1: 01:11 Lessons Learned from Coaching Older Athletes

Related content: The Five ‘B’ Method To A Succesful Triathlon Swim with Frank Sole

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’m a true believer in breathing and breathing right outside of the water will prep you for a better swim in the water. I jumped in the water at Alcatraz 54 degrees and you come up after you jump off that boat and you just, I mean, it just you feel like your lungs are being crushed. So what are you going to do there? That is brilliantly stated and it was something I learned quite a while ago and I tell athletes, they said, you know, my confidence is low. And I said, here’s the thing, you have to get in the pool and show yourself you can do it. Then your confidence comes. You don’t get confidence first, you get in, do and start to build that confidence. 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. Frank Soul is the author of the 5B Method to a Successful Triathlon Swim.

We talked about that on a previous episode with Frank and on today’s episode I asked what would you add or change to that book now that you’ve had a few more years of coaching since writing it. I asked him what would be one lesson that he would instill in new athletes who joined his squad. I also asked him about the difference between training and workouts and squad versus team because Frank believes that the terminology that you use can have a big impact on the way that people approach their swimming. We also talk about how people can use their breathing to their advantage as opposed to struggling with their breathing and feel like it’s something that lets them down because over the last couple of years, Frank has done some training with the world’s leading expert in breathing and he’s used that with his athletes to help them become more comfortable, more controlled in the water. So we talk about that as well.

Let’s jump into today’s episode with Frank Soul. Frank, I want to welcome you back to the podcast and I know you’ve had a lot going on in the last two and a half years. Yeah, Brenton, it’s good to be back with you, but I’ve been a big fan of your of you and effortless swimming and it’s been a busy two years. The last time you and I talked, I was living in Scottsdale, Arizona, a master swim coach, triathlon coach, and we have, my wife and I have relocated to Florida, the great state of Florida, a place called the villages. And I am now the head master coach of a large squad here, about 110 athletes. Uniquely, they’re all over 55 years old because it is a retirement village, but don’t don’t challenge them with that. These guys and these gals are there to work. So it’s been a busy two years, my friend. Good to see you again. Yeah, I can imagine it’s the good thing about that is you can be very specific with the workouts that you’re doing because you’ve got a group who

sounds like they’re all fairly, fairly similar. You’re not working with 20 year olds and 60 year olds. You can be pretty targeted with it. And I think back to when I used to coach a master squad, what I loved about that was you’re almost like this chess, this, you know, you’ve got this chess board and you’re playing these different pieces and you’re making these, these moves as you go. And I really love the, I loved having that, that team that scored together where you’re working towards states and nationals and you’ve, you’ve got these athletes and you can see them improving their times and their technique and just that day in, day out working with them. It’s, I’ve got a lot of lifelong friends through that, that my time as a coach there and it was, it was a lot of fun. So I can only imagine what you’re, what you’re going through now being back on deck with a master’s group. Yeah, it’s, it’s fun. And we just got done doing a meet a couple of weeks ago in Clearwater.

And in April, we have the senior games. And again, you know, our, our vision is the senior games, a bunch of these old people running around, but I challenge a man, you got to go see a seniors game. I mean, from everything from archery to softball to pickle ball to you, David, and, but swimming is really the premier highlight of the senior games and we get athletes who are senior masters from all over the state and from out of state, who will come to swim at the villages because we put on such a high quality meet there representing the senior game. So you’re right. It’s writing these workouts. It’s, it’s funny. I’m constantly writing, I have my work out and I’ll have a second piece of paper and I’m constantly making notes because what I’m working on with the workout we did to this morning, for example, I want to make sure I’m building for next week in preparation for the senior game. So we’re going away.

We’re kind of matriculating now from kind of LSD swimming because we’ve just been lengthening it out a little bit. Now we’re getting very specific, right? A little bit more sprint stuff, a little bit more rest. And I’m writing notes and starting to write workouts. So they’re going, oh, he’s thinking, you know, so that is the fun part working with these, these incredibly gifted eight type athletes who are retired, but don’t let them know that as athletes. They are there to compete, my friend. Yeah. That just means they’ve got more time to train and more time to work out and everything. So it’s, it’s, I still hope, you know, yeah.

I still three, four, I’m still in the water three, four days a week. I go, and I guess I’m going to have to get in one of these beats with these guys and compete with them. You know, I mean, they’re, you know, they’re pushing me to do that. So it’s fun. It’s fun. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great, I got an email early this week from someone who’s over in Doha doing the masters, the masters events over there. And he said, I wanted to thank you because he’s come to a camp and I’ve done some analysis with him. I want to thanks for your help over the last couple of years. He won the three K in the 80 to 84 age group. And I swam with him on this camp that we did here in Australia. He’s motoring along like, I, unbelievable. And looking at his technique improvement over the last 18 months, where he’s just, we’ve worked on two or three main things is improved that, you know, in his 80s, there’s no, there’s no stopping when it comes to this sport.

Like swimming is such a great sport that you can do forever. And I want to be swing till the day I die. That’s wouldn’t mind to go out that way. I think that’s a good idea. It’s funny. That’s kind of like a joke. A couple, a couple of the athletes going, not a bad way to go. I got a 81 year old gentleman on the team. He swam collegially in college, right? Swam collegial and some of the smoothest technique you ever seen in your life. It is, he looks just pardoned upon. He looks effortless. He just moves and slides through the water and replaced hip, has some hard issues. So he doesn’t do the entire workout. But the point is the band shows up. He gets involved. He’s actively involved. And when I need to take a video of that kind of stroke, he’s the video I take, said, look at the way he, look, look at his spear in the water. Look at that anchored hand right there. Look at the snap of that hip. That’s what you want to emulate right there.

Oh, he makes it look so effortless. Yeah, that’s the idea, right? That’s my philosophy. Anyhow, I know there are a lot of coaches who don’t care about effortless and all that there. It’s all about production, but I truly believe that, like, I think that you and I have talked before on this is that balance, buoyancy, body position are critical. I mean, you want to swim like a speedboat and you’re a tugboat and you’re big and strong, you’re just a tugboat with a big engine and you could wish all you want to be a speedboat. But until you start acting and putting your body in a hydrodynamic position, it’s going to be a struggle for you. And I think your last email that you just sent out like that, doing 100 yards, the things that were for the body mechanic, biomechanics with the arm, lifting your head to breathe, all those, those innocuous details will, will either make you a great swimmer or will hold you back.

And as I wrote in my book, I believe, and I opened up the first chapter is I truly believe if you want to swim, everybody has the ability to become great at this. I’m not talking Olympic Michael Phelps grade, but we all have the ability to become really, really good at this and take our swimming to the next level. If we are willing to be diligent, mindful and deliberate in our swimming. And that’s what I’ve shared with you before. That’s why I don’t like to call workouts, workouts. I call them training sessions. I’ll go to an athlete. What’s your focus today? Well, you told me about my hip rotation. Okay. So what are we going to work on? I need to rotate to my non-breathing side. Shouldn’t I be breathing to the other side? We’re not going to get into that right now. You could still get that hip around, right? We deal with the topic at hand and then I could get an athlete to think that way. I’ll even tell them sometimes, man, I want you to get out of

the water more mentally tired than physically tired today. I want you to think about what you’re doing, not overthinking it, but I want you to be aware that your swimming flat or your kick is way too wide or your feet are in dorsiflexion versus planter flexion. So those are the things that I absolutely still love to do. I love and study technique every day, my friend, whether I’m watching a video from you or some other competitor coach that you and I probably know about or going to a book, an article, whatever. I can learn each and every day to make me a better coach because I believe I owe that to my athletes value, value, value, because that’s why they come to people like you and I, my friend. And I think swimmers can tell whether or not you’re in that state of continuing to want to get better and learn and you’re interested in continuing to pick up different ways to coach in different cues compared to if you’re just, you’re on your way out and you’re just not

interested anymore. I’ve, I’ve seen coaches, I’ve, I’ve swam under coaches like that. And you can just tell, they’re just not, they’re not mentally there where they just don’t really care for the athletes. And one of the things that I picked up last week. So I had Sharon Van Rivendale on the podcast who won the five and 10k at the world champs recently talking to her. It’s, it was so interesting to hear about what she’s doing in, in training. So they do big miles. They do 70 to 80 kilometers on average, but they’ve gone up to 110 kilometers a few weeks out from, from world champs. So they’re doing these, these big distances. And I was asking her, like, how do you get through those kinds of Ks without being injured with, you know, without being completely stuffed. And like a lot of it’s just zone two swimming. It’s just very sort of comfortable swimming. But she said, when I’m doing that, I’m working on like big, big

distance per stroke. I’m really highly focused on my technique. And I’ve got a lot of body awareness, every single stroke that I’m taking. So it’s, it’s about like for her, she said, even though it’s zone two, I’m, I’m pretty fatigued from that because, you know, I’m holding a lot of water. I’m mentally concentrating, but physically can get through it. But it’s just, yeah, mentally it’s a, it’s a bit of a strain to think about it. Yeah. And that’s what I, I try to convey to whether it’s any of my triathletes or I’m coaching any of my master swimmers and I’ve got some endurance swimmers. I’ve got an athlete right now. We are getting ready for Catalina Island, August 19th. Last summer, 29 mile. Oh, excuse me. Last summer was the 21 miles in Lake Tahoe. The summer before that was the Manhattan Island swim, 29 miles. He’s done swimming around the keys three times. This was a guy five years, six years ago, I got him in the water.

He swam across the pool. I was doing an assessment on it. He swam across the pool, swam to the other side, grabbed on the wall and was holding church and you know what holding church means. Oh my God, sweet Lord Jesus. He just, you know, so I let him hold church for a minute. And, but this is a guy who was determined, determined to become an open water swimmer. And the goal is Catalina Island is obviously a cold water swim to get him ready for the English Channel. And he told me in somebody words, you know, he’s going to feel like a failure if he doesn’t get to the English Channel. I said, Anthony, my friend, you got to resume second to none as a open water swimmer, CEO of a company, father of two children, a wife and all other responsibilities and you’re still getting it done. So it is a mindset. If you say you can do this, you can do this. If you say you can’t, you can’t and you’re right. Sometimes I find zone two swimming to be more taxing than, you know,

just letting it fly at zone three, zone four, banging out 25s, 50s, 75s, 125s. You have to think about what you’re doing. Am I driving my hips? Am I staying staying focused on my two beat kick? What’s my hand position like? Am I staying long and anchored? Because as an open water swimmer, it’s so completely different than my sprinters. I don’t even like them in swimming in the same length to lanes next to each other because they’re going to affect each other. You know, I got gals getting ready for the 500 knees are getting ready for 50s, I don’t want them next to each other because guess what? The 500 people want to do. They want to swim like the 50s, right? And it’s a different animal, right? Swimming, but apples and oranges in many cases. I’ll explain to an athlete because I’m trying to get you ready for something different than 50 freestyle. I am getting you ready for the 500. Can we hold our pace through the first 100?

Can you hold the pace through the second 100, 300, 400, and then at the last 100, can we push and really start to make some headway for that last 100? So bottom line is it really is, like you said, it’s chess pieces moving your athletes, me moving your thinking around as a coach and moving your training around. And yes, it’s okay for coaches to go on deck and saying, you know what? I’m going to change this workout on the fly because I know I wrote it out in a certain way, but I’m seeing things today that makes me want to change this up and it’s okay to do that. So I tell young coaches, don’t beat yourself up when you do that. Because that coach going, Oh my God, I did that. And does that make me a bad coach? No, that makes you a an inspired coach. You saw something they weren’t getting. So you want to do some drill work and then start to build off of that. And then just went back and got what you can get done for that particular session.

So to me, I think as a coach, you’ve got to be flexible. You better be reading and studying this stuff every day because there’s all kinds of nuances that are coming out again, looking into people like yourselves and some great coaches out there. And then take that expertise on the deck and let athletes know you’re my best interest. I am here to serve you and give you the value you deserve. And I think at that point, you’re going to have a lot of people who are more than happy and willing to listen to what you are trying to convey to them. And it’s also important that it’s coaches. It’s OK to say, I don’t know right now how to handle this. Give me a day, we’re going to see how to fix this all by shoulder coach. Well, you know, I’m not a physio and I’m not a P.T. as we call him here in the States, right? But let me do some research and see we, you know, maybe your recovery is off a little bit and you’re pinching that nerve, whatever.

Maybe we can come out a little wider and that recover. We don’t have to have that classic high elbow recovery that looks like in the book. It’s a great guideline, but maybe not serving your best interest because of mobility, flexibility, stability, agility, all of those things. So as coaches, we’re put in that position to have to make those decisions on the fly and answer that question directly is to give that value to these athletes and know that we are engaged with them and we’re not checked out. They see us, they know we’re there and they’re going to feel our energy for the day, whether you’re working one on one, doing a zoom call. And in my case, I had 27 athletes and part of my squad in the water today and probably have 35 for another pool tomorrow. So it’s all good stuff. Yeah, good stuff. And that’s that’s all part of the the science and art that we’re talking about prior to the podcast. So there’s there’s a science behind it in terms of your physiology

and we’ve got to change it, train these energy systems. And we’ve got to do a certain amount of repetitions to make these things a habit. But then everyone is human. And so the outside of it is how do we how do we get ourselves or get another person to to do the work that’s required or to mentally develop that strength to be able to finish a race strong or not question themselves halfway through a session or or through a through a race. And one of the things that Sharon mentioned was that she like battles battles with that that mental side of things, because in the past she had gotten second by point one of a second just on the touch at the end. And so yeah, it’s easy to to doubt yourself. And yeah, apparently the best open water swimmer in the world. She’s has those doubts. But then what she what she did was did the work that was required to give her the confidence going into race day thinking, yeah, I’m like, I’m feeling like I’m going to win.

I’m not going to tell people that, but I’m feeling like I’m going to win because I know that 110 kilometer week that I did like no one else is doing that. And I knew that I got through that really well. And I felt felt really strong. I’ve got this confidence from it. So oftentimes and one thing that a guy, Alex Samozzi, it mentions is like, if you just if you just do the work, if you do what’s required, you’re going to get the confidence. Yeah, you’re going to you’re going to have that motivation because you’ve you’ve seen you’ve proved to yourself that you can get it through that through doing the work through doing the thing that is brilliantly stated. And it was something I learned quite a while ago. And I tell athletes, they said, you know, my confidence is low. And I said, here’s the thing. You have to get in the pool and show yourself you can do it. Then your confidence comes. You don’t get confidence first.

You get in, do and start to build that confidence, teaching an adult how to do flip turns that was tough enough with an agile young kid. And now you’re teaching an adult who may have, you know, some agility problems or mobility problems. And I will always tell athletes, get in the water and do the work. Okay, you are holding two minutes per hundred for 25 yards. We have a base. We know where we know where you’re at right now. We know where you’re at. We know what we need to do. Here’s what I need you to do. Stay focused on the process, trust the process, show up each workout and embrace the process. And if the laws of fixes really do apply, well, you’re going to be down to 145. You’re going to be down to 143, 142.5, 139, back up to 142. And I’ve seen that happen with so many of my athletes, average triathletes swimming 135s who are now banging out one 10s, one 12s per hundred. But it took time to get them there, right?

It didn’t happen overnight, right? It’s not like a TV show that we used to have here in the States called I dream a genie and snap your fingers and it happens. You got to show up, embrace the process, trust the process. And again, physics will do what it’s designed to do. It will reward you accordingly for your hard work. You still may come in second like Sharon did, right? And your point is well taken there. You got one of the world’s best, one of the female world best. She is, in my opinion, one of the best in the world who’s ever done it. And she still has doubts about her ability because she came in second. So what does that say for people like you and myself? We’re going to struggle with that. You’ve got to find a way. Surround yourself with a squad that believes you knew. Find coaching staff that believes you in you. Stay away from all the negative people. Oh, why? Why are you doing this? You shouldn’t be doing.

Yes, you should be doing it. You’re in the pool and you’re showing up four days a week to do your workouts. You know what? I’m just simply saying God is stamped on your heart, your purpose and your passion. Get your butt in the water and swim. And I will. I will tell brand new swimmers like that. And they look at me like overwhelmed, going, I believe in you. Now, just get in the water and just do what you can do today. And don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about the. You know, what’s that old saying? Focus on your lane, man. Just focus on your lane. Just don’t get it done. So I think those those elements are the the necessary pillars to become a really good triathlon swimmer, a US master swimmer and an open water swimmer. You’ve got to have those pillars. You’ve got to build your confidence through the hard work, believe in the process, paying attention to nutrition, paying attention to your height, hydration,

your mobility work, your if I didn’t say that, your nutritionals, all of those things are absolutely critical. Do we slip? Do we go out and have pizza and cheesecake and a beer? Of course, we’re all human. But how do we respond the very next day? I missed the workout. How do I respond? My butt is in the water for warm up. The next warm up even earlier, I will tell you with my squad right now, we won’t start till the top of the hour. I will walk on deck 15 minutes before technically we start to work out. And virtually every swimmer who’s going to show up for the day is already swimming back and forth. I won’t give them the workout so they’re swimming the work and all what they needed to do about five minutes before I hand out the workouts. Time out. Here’s what we’re going to work on. Any instructions are necessary, and then we get right into the workout. And that is rewarding as a coach to see that. And that’s how you build confidence.

You want to build confidence? Get there early. Do the necessary work. Believe in yourself. Others can do it. I can do this at whatever level, man, whatever level. Yeah, you can’t you can’t steer a parked car. You’ve got to be doing something. You can’t just be there reading or studying about how do I do a flip turn? You just can’t study that for six months. Just getting there. Try it and let’s see what you let’s see what you’re doing. Then we’ll start to refine it. Like I’ve I’ve had a few people want help with flip turns and like, all right, let’s just let’s just see what you’re currently doing. They’re like, oh, no, like, no, just show me what you’re doing. And then we can work from work from there. So you just get moving. And the other thing about it, too, is like many things in life, there’s so many things that go into it, whether it be parenting, whether it be running a business or your work or swimming.

So swimming, we’ve got we’ve got the technical side of things. We’ve got the workouts. We’ve got our recovery, mobility, strength. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it. And I think the best way to try and do all those things that keep it simple so you’re not feeling like you’re not doing enough or you’re not finding that you’re slipping with some of the things. It’s like, just develop develop good habits. And for me, it’s like, well, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they’re the mornings that I swim five, 30 to seven o’clock. I’m I’m in with the squad that I’m setting the programs for. Jim, all right, I do that on the same days. And I’ve got my set workout food for after the training session every time. It’s the same thing. I’ve got this protein bar that I throw in my bag. And that keeps it nice and simple. Bags by the front door, got my towel, got my bathers there. And it’s all just packed the the night before.

So developing these habits that you can just get into a groove. It’s like a river. It just you develop these these pathways where it just it just flows and you don’t have to think about it. It’s the same thing with those habits. If you can get into some really good habits, you’ll look back in six months, 12 months time and you’ll go, wow, I’ve come a long way and you haven’t had to think too much about it because you’ve just become this person who does all these different things. And that’s what’s helped you to to improve. So I think it’s really just about trying to automate some of those things where it’s just in the calendar, you do it week in, week out. And then you just got to stick with it. And so means one of those things that if you don’t quit, if you just keep working at it, you’re more than likely going to improve. Absolutely. And the term I use is a term called stacking habits. You just you you identified it absolutely perfect there.

Stacking habits, a habit I swim three days a week. My bag is packed the night before I’ve got a bar or a protein drink in my water bottle. That’s all ready to go. There’s my towels there. My goggles are there. I don’t have to worry about that. All my swim caps, anything and everything I need. So all those habits are stacked and we know I don’t care if it’s 20. They say 21 days, 66 days, 120 days. If you are mindful, saying tomorrow’s swim day, I am not going to bed until I put my stuff in the car. It took me a whole lot of times of missing stuff, but I do not forget anything anymore because it’s always in the car of the night before and we use golf carts down here. Like I said, you go Google the village, everybody’s got a golf cart. And I’m just going up to pull the pole in my golf cart. But stacking habits, that’s half the paddle right there. You just need like Woody Allen said what 90 percent of it’s just shown up

10 percent, man, get in the water and do what you need to do. And it again, if laws of physics are really 100 absolute, you have no other recourse to get better. We’re not talking about, you know, breaking double zero. But man, if you’re swimming two minutes and you always wanted to break 130, you just keep showing up. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. It has to happen. So, you know, I’m an optimist. I truly am. I really believe in in my athletes. Again, you see the ones who are there and they’re putting in the effort, it could take some time. But the bottom line is what we’re looking for is the athlete to show up and the improvement will start to gradually happen. So I agree with you. And thinking back to the book that you wrote a couple of years back, is there anything you change or add or, you know, tweak a bit from that book having had experience over the last couple of years since writing?

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’m sure any writer who’s written a book would say, I would change this or change that. One of the things that I’ve done since the last time you’ve talked, I’ve got certified as a breath coach and you may be aware of the group Oxygen Advantage Patrick Patrick. You know, yeah, I got certified through him. And I’m working with these these athletes on deck because as I wrote in the book, if you cannot demonstrate good breathing practices on deck, there’s a strong probability. You’re not going to be able to do it in the water because I’m sure you hear it all the time is, oh, my God, I can’t breathe. Well, tell me what you’re doing. Or if I go underwater with a camera and do a video stroke analysis. And what I undoubtedly what I’ll see is they’re holding the breath, right? And the simple rule is I’m inhaling or exhaling, you know, and I’m not one. I don’t care if you breathe exhaling out of your nose out of your mouth.

I just need you to get that carbon dioxide out so you could take some oxygen in and especially up on water swimmers, right? Breathing every stroke. Why? Because the only source of fuel while you’re swimming is oxygen. So if I’m not getting into a steady breath, so I give a lot of my athletes dry land exercises to do, not Wim Hof, you know, like, you know, breathing in, sitting in a vat of ice cold water, nothing wrong with that. I have, I have a cold plunge in my own backyard. But the fact of the matter is, is that I get them to the point where they can train the body to tolerate higher levels of carbon dioxide. You and I both know watching the Olympics no less than 20 years so ago, they would jump in all they would off the blocks, 50 free style, maybe one, two, three breaths. There’s no breast now. These these athletes are being taught and trained to be able to tolerate that carbon dioxide level, not necessarily working with less oxygen,

higher levels of carbon dioxide and still overcome the amygdala in the brain saying, you need to breathe. That’s what I’m working with athletes. Now that’s one thing that I would change the, I think everything else balance, buoyancy, body position. I am nutsy about it. If you are not me maintaining a balanced body and you are not swimming on top of that water and you’ve got drop tips, you’re over kicking. It’s over, man. It’s over. You’re going to use so much energy. So I get people to slow down to speed up, right? The old Navy, Navy SEAL term, slow, smooth, smooth becomes fast. Slow, smooth, smooth becomes fast. Slow, smooth, smooth becomes fast. Slow it down. Let’s get the let’s get the length down. Let’s get the stroke length down. Then we’ll worry about the stroke rate. So many newer swimmers, they want to swim fast. There they got the stroke rate going up, but they got no stroke length. They’re not going anywhere.

It’s like like a old Charlie Chaplin movie. He’s running into mud and he’s not going anywhere. So the reality is I work on stroke length early on, then slowly start to increase their stroke rate. And that’s where we start to see the magic happen. All of a sudden, their time start to drop, but I need them to buy into the process, believe in the process. So the only thing I get in the change in that book is the whole thing on breathing. I’m a true believer in breathing and breathing right outside of the water. We’ll prep you for a better swim in the water. Jumping, I don’t know. I guess that same year that you and I did our last one, I jumped in the water at Alcatraz 54 degrees and you come up after you jump off that boat and you just

I mean, it just you feel like your lungs are being crushed. So what are you going to do there? You better learn to control that breathing and get that carbon dioxide out. And I was having a conversation with myself stroking. Nope, you’re not exhaling. Get it out. Nope, exhale, man. Get off. That was good. Do that again. Nope, that was not good enough. Exhale stronger, take a nice strong, strong breath of air in. You got yourself into rhythm. Next thing you know, you’re moving through the water. So those are the things that I’m really, really focusing on. Early on with new swimmers is the breathing piece, body position, biomechanics, I’ll do with less. I know you and I talk specifically head position. I want that head down. I want that temple leaning into the water. If I could tell them to lean that temple in the water, create that natural trough, all of a sudden it comes together. They have to have a little bit of trust that that air is going to be there.

It’s not always there, but they got to trust that, right? I tell new swimmers, you’re not baptized unless you gulp some water every once in a while. So I’m sure you I’m sure you know what that’s all about, right? Yeah, that’s right. And look, worst thing, worst case, if you take some water in, you can stand up, get rid of it. Let’s go again. You know, just just have the confidence to breathe low and we’ll just start to we’ll start to get used to it. Absolutely. Yeah, I know someone listening to this who’s who’s struggling with their breathing is going to be thinking, well, what how do you increase your ability to tolerate a higher level of shield and dioxide? Yeah, how do you start to do that?

Before we dive into the rest of today’s podcast episode, this episode is proudly brought to you by Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’ve been a long time sponsor of the podcast and they are my go to goggles when it comes to tracking my training sessions and being able to see what’s happening in real time through the goggles. And we know swimming is a highly technical sport, but without the guidance of a coach on deck, identifying and addressing technique flaws can be a challenge. They’ve recently added a new feature to the goggles, head coach. And this addresses that problem head on. It gives them as improved access to their technique awareness, focus skill development and in app education and analysis. Head coach provides real time visual coaching via the Form Smart Swim Goggles augmented reality display. During and after a swim, head coach provides swimmers with technique feedback using two types of metrics,

form score and head coach skills. Form score is a measurement of overall swim efficiency ranging from zero to 100 defined by your pace and your stroke length. Head coach skills encompasses five key areas that will help you identify where to focus on improving with your efficiency. Head roll, head pitch, set pacing, interval pacing and breathing time to neutral. And after completing a session, you can check back in on the form app to track your progress and head coach provides swimmers from beginner to expert with an unprecedented level of data driven guidance and understanding, enabling you to boost your performance and your speed. Get your pair of Form Smart Swim Goggles today. Click the link in our podcast description or use the code Effortless on Checkout to get 15% off your Form Smart Swim Goggles. Well, one of the exercises I will do is I will have the athlete lay down on their bed or on the floor, preferably laying down

because I don’t want anybody sitting or standing and they feel like they’re dizzy or whatever. But I’ll lay them down and I will have them breathe in and out of their nose for 20 times. So one cycle in and out, in and out. And at the end of the 20th cycle, they will exhale out and pinch off their nose and hold it as long as they can on the exhale, not on the inhale. So they’ll take their breath. I’ll do it out of my mouth as you demonstrate. So they will take that breath of air in, pinch off their nose, hold it as long as you possibly can. I’ve had people say to me, I’m going to pass out. You will let go of your nose before you pass out. It doesn’t happen. I have an athlete. She’s 51, 52, three time Ironman athlete. She now can hold her breath on her exhale for two minutes and 45 seconds. Two minutes of 45 seconds. First time through and I’ll have them cycle through that three times. So the first time may only be a few seconds.

Second time considerably longer. Third time should always be the longest, 99 out of 100 times. It will be. And I will ask them to do that. I will include that right in their workouts for the week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we’re going to do this breath work. Also, what I will ask them to do is the classic bobbing drill. Right, you know where I’m going with that bob up and down in the water. Uncharacteristic, what I’ve seen other coaches do, I always want them to do it in the shallow end because I want about three, four feet of water. They go down their butt, hits the bottom of the pool. They’re exhaling out the entire time. A very quick, decisive breath of air in. I want to see masses of amounts of bubbles the entire time they go underwater till the time they break the surface. I want them exhaling out. So what we’re also doing is working and expanding their lungs. And let’s see this little device, expand the lung.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these. It’s called an expanded lung. A lot of my athletes will use this. You simply put it in your mouth. You can dial it off where it’s a little tough to breathe through. And what it will start to do is open up the lung capacity. Your lungs have 11 muscles, 12 muscles on each one. And those let muscles go into therapy like anything else. If we don’t force those muscles to move because we’ve had not asked them to, now it’s going to be very restrictive. So we use one of these little devices like this. And yeah, they have ones now with apps. And, you know, it can give you all the bells and whistles. But I’m like you used keep it simple, right? The kiss principle by one of these, I will use this before I get into the water from time to time. I will do the bobbing drill, do the breath hole drill. OK, I’m averaging about two minutes and change at 69 years old. I can do that.

So I’ve gotten to my best was, I think at 221. So and I’ve kind of leveled out at two minutes. But I still do that every two or three days, just for my lunch. That would be the one thing I would change is working their ability to breathe in and out of the water. The average adult, we breathe anywhere from 13 to 15 breaths per minute. According to some of the top breathing experts in the world, we should be anywhere from five to eight breaths per minute. So I worked I worked real hard at that to be somewhere between five to seven breaths per minute, because I check it from time to time. I don’t walk around all the time thinking about it. But it is something that I’m quite aware of. And it has helped me in so many respects as an athlete, just remaining calm and keeping my heart rate low. And it will affect your HRV, your heart rate variability. Also, another aspect of what I will work with some of my triathletes.

I’m a big believer in heart rate variability as good feedback. It’s another tool in the toolbox, right? That’s all I said. So you had Joe Friel on the podcast a couple of episodes back and he talked about HRV and how he started to integrate that with his coaching as well. And he said the same thing. It’s like it’s not the bail and end all, but it’s certainly something just to help guide us in the right direction. What I like about that breathing side of things is it’s very fundamental, very basic, it’s very essential. And it’s always good to go back to those fundamentals. I took my kids to a new swimming swim lessons program because basically the local swim club here, they’ve got a learner swim school and just talking to the president of that club, he said, look, we set up this learner swim school to just be really on top of their technique and make sure they progress the right way. And I wasn’t stoked with what they’re currently getting at their

old learn to swim stuff. And so they had their first lesson last night and I go there and I’m watching it for the first couple of minutes. And they’ve kind of gone like kids have gone down a level compared to where they were in the other one because they had an assessment and the teacher looked at them and said, I look free. They’re free styles, good. They’re backstrikes, good. But they’re still making like these couple of mistakes. So we want to get that right first. And as they’re going through their lesson, they’re going through some really basic stuff to start with, like my young ones in there kind of blowing bubbles and all this sort of sort of thing. And inside of me, I’m going, they’re better than this. They’re more advanced than this. Like, come on, like, all right, this I’m already thinking, all right, I’ve got to take them out of here. And I was like, hang on a minute. All right, let the let the lesson progress, let them go through the whole thing.

They’ve eventually built up to full freestyle and everything. And but I’m thinking, OK, well, if I like me with coaching, right, I take my summers through breathing exercises, making sure they’re breathing low and all these really simple things. And these are maybe people who have swum for years. These are these are adults. And maybe they want some some really cutting edge stuff. But it’s like, no, it all comes down to basics. And if they don’t do that well, then they’re going to be stuck at a certain point. So I let the lesson play out, really pleased with the progression. Already saw some improvement in my in my kids, they’re five and seven. And but I just had to remind myself, it’s OK to go back to the basics. But I can see it from a like a parent’s perspective, who may not have the same experience with this kind of thing, where they might look at their kids and go, like, this is ridiculous. Like he was further along before that.

But yeah, it’s always just no matter where you’re at, it’s always just about fundamentals. Like I can’t stress us enough, it’s basics. We go back to the basics, a couple of my athletes had not the best swims at Clearwater, so we simply go back to the basics. We know what we need to work on. Let’s just go back to it, right? We really have two options. What I’m going to do, quit, but I didn’t do well. So I’m going to quit, right? I’m going to take my basketball, I’m going to go home. I didn’t make the foul shot. So nobody gets to play. Bottom line is you just got to go back. And that’s where I do believe where the uniqueness of an athlete who can learn to let go of their ego, right? Because we all have an ego and it’s there to protect us. But if we can just humble ourselves and if the coach simply says, I want you to do breathing drills, he or she’s the coach, I’m going to do breathing drills. And believe it or not, before the last two years,

I was very blessed to be doing Jiu Jitsu at 67, 68, 69 years old in Arizona. And unfortunately, where I’m living right now, there is no place local. It’s very disappointing because I learned a lot. But I will tell you, I watched brown belts, black belts, do some of the most basic mundane wax on, wax off things. And they stress that in Jiu Jitsu. The their claim of fame is the difference between a white belt and black belt.

One word time, that’s all it is time. You’ll get there if you stay focused on the fundamentals and they would always take us through the same basic fundamentals. And your mind can get a hold of you, say, oh, come on, man, we’re doing the, you know, the catch up drill or three touch or fingertip drag drill. We’ve done these drills. I know how to do these drills. Good, then you shouldn’t have any problem getting them done, should you? You know, although we say to an athlete, you know, I’d like to do the 12 by 12. We’ll do the 12 by 12 switch with three strokes in between. But those drills, in many cases, because you and I work with a lot of adult swimmers, those drills, I tell athletes by design are to show you where your imbalances are. We all have asymmetrical imbalances. You may have better rotation to the left to the right. You have flexibility in your, your left shoulder. You don’t have it in the right.

At least we now know what we need to work on. So I will always use this term, just entertain me and do the flipping drills. Will you please just entertain me? So your point is well taken. We got to always go back to basics because if we don’t master the basics, how in the world are you going to master the, the fine art of butterfly, freestyle, backstroke or breaststroke, right? Any one of those four strokes, you got the basics. You understand the basics. You embrace the basics. Man, you’ve got the foundation for great swimming there. So I’ve always seen people who are not afraid to step back three steps. They’re the ones who seem to progress more equally and quicker up the, up the scale than the ones who were trying to fight it. Right. You get into water and bang out fifties and you wonder why you can’t swim a 500 under 10 minutes. Well, you’re swimming fifties. That’s not the basics. We need to build the basics for it.

If I can get an athlete to understand that it’s up to me also as a coach to make sure I’m trying to convey the message. Whether they embrace the message is going to be ultimately up to the athlete, but it’s us as coaches to make sure we’re articulating what we want to get them to understand and to give them the arena to expand and become better at. If that makes sense. So, yeah, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, I’m going to be, I’m going to be watching the, the Olympic trials for the team. Australia and your kids are going to be there and you’re going to, you and I are going to laugh at this, going, it all started with blowing, learning how to blow bubbles again, you know what I mean? So I think it was, I had the privilege of having a wonderful conversation with Gary Hall senior at an ASCA conference one time, American Swim Coaches Association. And I remember him mentioning one thing that the kids who came from

that environment, who played sharks and minnows, Marco Polo, who dove underwater for the rings and for the quarters. Those were the ones who went on to become really good, great swimmers, even up to the Olympic levels, because they had a real feel, a real kind of static awareness of what their body was doing in an environment. And if I can get an adult to understand and feel that environment, right? I mean, you know, feeling that water on the forearm, right? I mean, years ago before meets, I don’t know what you guys did in Australia, but I remember doing a master meet years ago. And we all used to carry a small piece of fine grit sandpaper that we would just rub our, you know, you would see athletes do this to heat their hands up, but we would just rub our fingertips a little bit. What did that do? It excited the nerves. You felt the water better, right? You see athletes working their hands all over the starting blocks is to create

feel the creating their exciting their nerves. So they’re feeling the water better. So, you know, little tricks we used to do, right? I mean, you know, so whether it worked or not, I’m not so sure, but we all used to carry a little piece of same paper around with us. I’d love to hear from some of your listeners and if any anybody’s ever heard of that before or has done that before. So, you know, yeah. It’s the first time I’ve heard of it, but I like it. I don’t know if I’ll be carrying sandpaper with me, but it’s, you know, and we all have these little things that we do prior to a race.

Like I asked my parents if they taught us to swim and they and my dad said, not really like we just went to the pool a lot because he played water polo and he swam and you guys just kind of played and and figured it out. I don’t know when I started squad training. I think it was probably well, maybe seven, eight, nine, somewhere in that sort of age bracket. But it was, you know, we just were at the pool all the time. And so I’ve taken that on board with my kids thinking, all right, well, yeah, we’ll get him in some lessons. We want them doing that. But more than anything, I want them to love the water. I want them to see it as an environment where they can have fun and they can play. And we’re always at the, we’re always at the beach or in the pool and they’re diving under, they’re ducking under waves. And like just, just having fun with it. And I think as adults, we forget to play sometimes. Like I, I play, I feel like my playtime is out in the surf

and at the beach for me, I get a lot of enjoyment from that. And then I went to the pool yesterday for the first time in forever where I didn’t swim with the squad. I just went by myself during the middle of the day because it was sunny and I’m like, yeah, all right, I want to get some, get some sun. And I think I did about 800 or 900 metres, but it was just a bit of play, like long, easy swimming, breaststroke, one pool, two kicks, just like the stuff that if I didn’t want to work hard, but I just wanted to enjoy that feeling of being in the water. It’s that stuff I do. And it’s, and for me, like as a swimmer, primarily a pool swimmer, I, I’ve sort of feared away from that a bit because I’m mostly doing open water these days. So it’s just more about getting the workout done and getting that fitness up. But especially when it comes to pool swimmer, I think just loving that feeling of being in the water, building up the feeling on your hands and forearms

and just playing a bit, you know, slowing things down and not being in a rush to get from one side to the other. I think that is where you can really excel, especially as a, especially as a pool swimmer. Yeah. And one of the things I will do with a lot of my triathletes from time to time, I will challenge them to do a swim. Let’s say, okay, we’re going to knock out four by four hundreds. I want you to do this workout without a, without a watch on, without a watch. Maybe your wife can come and just, I don’t want you to know your times, right? Because we’re, we’re, we’re literally, my garments are, I’ve got my garment here somewhere, but we’re literally dictated by the garment, right? Or the time X or whatever, whatever piece you’re wearing, we’re dictated by that. I want you to swim by feel. I want you to feel the water on your forearms. I remember years ago, we talked about the, the, the concept of, you know, you,

as your hand goes in, you trap the, you, you trap the water under your armpit, you wrap the water and you unwrap it. Now that, those are terms 40, 50 years ago, we used to use, right? The old term was purchasing water. We use catch water, right? I’m going to catch water now. The catch phase, their early vertical form, we used to call it purchasing. It was called purchasing water. You would purchase the water. Then they’d said, let’s wrap, trap the water under your armpit. Do I feel it? Wrap the water and unwrap it in the back end. To me that has a more of a fluidity to versus reach, catch, pull and push. Cause guess what they want to do? Reach, catch, they want to pull like the ripping a bandaid off. One, two, two, pull and push. And you will know that as we start to pull harder than we’re capable, we’re elevating our dragon resistance, exponentially dragon resistance goes up. You, me, Michael Phelps, anybody else,

your resistance goes up. So if your body’s not in line properly, you’re pulling too hard, you’re using a whole lot more oxygen. Hence you’re going to be exhausted going, I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Well, you know, my job is saying, well, where do we start? You know, let me tell you what you’re doing wrong. Let’s slow it down. Let’s just go swim. Don’t care what your times are. And triathletes, you know, if it isn’t, if it isn’t documented, you didn’t do it, you know? But what am I going to tell my coach? Tell you coach, you’re working with a technique coach. And we’re working on techniques, specifically those type of things. So when I can get an athlete to get in the water and swim without a watch and swim by feel and just awareness of what the body is doing in an environment like water, they’re going to feel and learn a lot more about what they’re capable of doing. How long do you feel in the water?

Do you feel like you’re, if I’m six, one, do I feel like I’m swimming six, three, six, four? I have an athlete, an Ironman athlete, two years ago, the guy was six, four, six, five. He swam like he was five, 11. Maybe it’s just, you know, short stroke. He was coming out short. The arms are coming out way too far.

Learning to feel what the body should do, right? I mean, there’s that old Luke Skywalker when Obi-Wan puts the mask over him and puts the shield over him. And he’s got to block the lightning bolts or whatever that’s coming on him. So trust your feelings. Swimming is no different, man. Trust how your body’s moving through the medium of water. Then let’s put the watch back on and start worrying about what your times are. I understand. I want my athletes to do that, but I’ll throw that at them every once in a while and ask them at that point. That’s where the breathing comes in. Take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay. Slow down to breathing. You’re going to be fine. No watch on, okay? People are going to actually think you’re a real swimmer because you don’t have a watch on. And that’s the fun part about it, is be able to joke with them and say things like that without being insulting, but make them just have a little fun with it.

But again, if you can get somebody who can really feel the water, every part of it, and sometimes there’s days I get out of the water and it felt magnificent. I could feel like every hair on my forearm was engaged as I was wrapping the water. Thumb off the thigh. I can feel the snap of the hip. I could feel the water between my toes as I’m snapping down. And other times it’s elusive like Bigfoot. You know it’s out there, but you just don’t know where it’s at. But those days, you just got to let those days go because you know if you had good days, the good days will start to outnumber the bad days. But are you willing to stay at it long enough to have the good days outnumber the bad days? That’s the critical thing as a lot of triathletes, adult swimmers. Are they patient enough through the process? We keep going back to that concept of process and being impatient through it, my friends. You’re going to suck at anything that you are new to.

There’s no stopping it. You’re going to suck for a period of time. And then the amount of times that you suck at that thing is going to become less the more you do it. So just be prepared for that sucking because it’s going to happen. Well, you know, we use the term in the States. Embrace the suck. Embrace the suck. You know you’re going to suck at it. Embrace it. Just accept it. It’s going to happen. God, I suck at this. I’ve never done butterfly. Well, embrace it, man. So we start to do the drills. We start to do the one arm drill. We do the oscillating drills and putting a mono fin on them or oversize the swim fins on them. But just embrace the suck. If you can get past the suck and don’t worry, don’t care what people think of it. Nobody’s looking at it. They’re so worried what you’re thinking about them. They’re nobody’s looking at you. They’re all in their other lanes struggling to just to get from one end to the other end.

Just do what you need to do. You’re going to be fine. So because I can get a lot of the brand new master swimmers who are coming into our program, they have to try out. They have to be able to swim 250 yards and at least demonstrate one alternate stroke that they can at least do it marginally well. After that, I can do whatever I need to do. And they’ll show up that first day going, you’re just going to put me in the slowest lane, right? And nobody’s going to, you’re going to be fine. Just again, deep breath if they’re in, exhale out. Now get into water and swim. Have some fun. And that’s the first thing I’ll tell them. Just have fun at this. My God, if you wanted another job, you can go get a second job. This is not a job. This should be a sense of enjoyment and passion. Clearly you’re here because somewhere along the line, you said to yourself, I’ve got to get this done in my life. I want to learn how to swim.

And we have a lot of adult learn how to swim programs. So a lot of them will go do that first before they come try out for the masters. And they feel better prepared to be able to come and do that swim test and then show up. And then I said six months from now, you and I’ll be laughing at this. Don’t remember, you were the newbie on deck, you know? And now you’re just getting the workouts done and just getting better and better and better at this. So, and Brenton, you know, as well as I do, there is no destination in swimming. You don’t meet, you don’t reach a final destination. It’s a journey. It’s a journey. Every time you get into water, hopefully you’re learning something and you’re feeling something. You have a great swim. You have a crappy swim. I just didn’t know this, blah, blah, my hands, my fingers. I didn’t realize I was swimming my fingers this wide. I shouldn’t be like this, but I should be more neutral.

I did know that. So you embrace the journey. We embrace the suck, embrace the journey and know that each and every time you’re just working on this. I got a, one of my gals, 81 years old genie is we spent easily 15 minutes at the end of practice today working on her, on her turns off the wall. You know, just get around quicker, get around quicker, get around on the walls. I tell all my athletes on the walls, on the walls, on the walls, on the walls, starts, turns and finishes between the flags. You swim head to head. Who comes in and off that wall is going to, you master those walls on the walls, on the walls, on the walls. I cannot convey that. Every workout of government, some distance off these walls, you’re more than capable to do that. So, you know, those are the things I try to convey. It’s not like I, we’ve gone over a lot here, probably an hour plus. I don’t feed them with a fire hose, but I go there and I’ll just say,

here’s a focus today. I send out a newsletter every Sunday night to my squad. I let them know what we’re going to be working on the next week. Make sure you got your fins, because we are going to do a whole lot of kicking. No, you won’t need a kickboard, but you will need your fins. We’re going to be working some long distance swims, some 400s, 200s. Then we’re going to break down into some 50 fast and then back up to 400, because I’m going to ask them to transition that feel of swimming fast into the 400. Right. I just, again, feeling going into the 400. So they know what’s going on and they’re prepared. So I don’t need to stay much about it on deck. So I’m not feeding on a fire hose. We’re talking about this and that. They know what we’re working on. And I hold true to that because I want them to know when they’re showing up Monday morning to swim that they know exactly. They don’t know the workout yet, but they have a pretty good idea.

This is going to be a little bit of a suffer fest today, because we’re going to be doing a lot of kicking. So, and I try not to disappoint them that respect, you know.

But it is the ability to communicate to your athlete, excuse me, specifically what you’re trying to convey to them. And if it isn’t getting around, you just, as an ex-high school teacher, you got to find a different way of saying it. Okay. I’ve tried to three-touch drill. He’s just not getting it. He’s still win-milling. How about if I put a piece of PVC in his hands? Oh, we could try that. Okay. Now we got to get the hands a little deeper. Good. Let’s spend about 15, 20 minutes working on that. You know, I had an athlete. We did that like a 50. She did it one under the pool. The other ended a pool. I haven’t swung a PVC getting that, that wide track entry. I want those fingertips down, hands a little lower than the elbow. And she went back and forth a couple of times. She goes, oh my God, this is so good. What are we going to work on now? Work on, I’ll see you in about 30 minutes. You’re going to do that for about 30 minutes, you know,

because I’m trying to convey that I’m trying to, I want them to reestablish new neural muscular memory, right? Habits are habits. It’s just neurons firing. You’re going to find out, as the kids get older, we had our daughter who was a swimmer, swim right through college. And you would tell her every day, honey, you can’t leave your book bag by the front door, put it in your room. Well, she did exactly what we asked her to do. She would drop it over to the threshold of her bedroom and there it was. But after a while, it became habit for her. That’s a habit, right? I’m going to put it actually in the room. But habits take time. So you’re building new neural muscular memory and it could take, what’s that, the book, the thought, the 10,000 hour rule. We hope it happens in sooner than that, but you’re going to understand it takes that, it could take that much time of deliberate practice. As you said, Sharon did, she get in swim zone two,

but very, very deliberate about what she was doing in the water. That’s how you make a change. Yeah, absolutely. That reminds me of when I was coaching a master’s squad, whenever we’re going through a hard set where they’re getting times, one of the questions I had the most success with when I was coaching them was, what can you do to find a second in this hundred? What can you, like, where can you get faster? Can it be off the start? Maybe you need to, you know, take an extra kick. Maybe you need to go in and out of the wall faster off the turn. Maybe you just work on holding that, you know, the catch a little bit longer at the front. Like, what can you, where can you find that time? And that gets some thinking. And I know when, because I think my dad was,

like, posed a question like that when we were training, because he was my coach. And I remember always thinking, like, thinking through, I’m on the wall, you know, there’s 10 seconds to go, thinking, all right, where can I find an extra half second or a second here? And when I thought about it, you know, usually I’d work the underwater a bit better, I’d hit the turn a bit better, and maybe just not breathe five meters out from the flags. And that way, you know, telling them what to do there, they have to figure it out on their own and come up with their own solutions. And I think it’s, you know, that’s, that’s when they really take the ownership of those changes or those things that they need to make. And I just wrote that down. And every Sunday in my newsletter, I addressed something and you’re going to be, I’m going to have to probably email it to you because I’m going to write a small, where can I find a second?

Because they’re all, you know, as adult swimmers, I would, one of the, about three weeks ago I stood and I took a chair and I put it right to the left of the flags, you know, far end wall. So I’m past the flags and I’m going to sit here and watch. And out of probably 15 swimmers, not one of them made it to the flags before they took a breath. And I’m just sitting there rubbing my temples in my head like this going, oh, sweet Lord, we got to get, we got to get some distance off the wall. Yesterday at practice, I put the chair there again and I sat there and I was like, wow, what a difference. What a difference. Half a body length past the wall, a body length past the wall, under the flags, not one athlete took a breath in that five, five yard zone, not one athlete. And it took three weeks to get it. But I had to get up off the chair, walk all the way to the other pole ground. Guys, I need, I need, you cannot push off top of the water

and you’re going to create all the strength. You need to get down and oh, by the way, you need to kick the legs a little bit too. You know, so conveying these messages, but I like your concept is they now, as coaches, if we’ve done our job, they have the ability to self coach themselves. And I asked them to do that. You hear me in the back of your head. You’ve had enough coaches. You know what to do. How do I get distance off that wall? Stream line, fast turns. We used to call it dynamite off a mountain, right? Or if I take a tennis ball, and I would throw it easy off the wall, it comes off easy. I throw it hard, it comes off hard. I need you to be the fast tennis ball off the wall. And I sat there yesterday at practice and I was just blown away how well the walls have gotten. And I made a point at the end of practice, I said, I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of you, right? At least 55, 65, 71-year-old women and men

and telling them a 69-year-old guy is proud of him. And I think it would be, I think it would be sad if I didn’t share this one last story with you. The biggest challenge, I had an athlete of mine back in Arizona call me and go, how’s it going? I said, it’s going fantastic. What’s the difference between coaching athletes there and coaching athletes here? I said there’s two big challenges because everybody’s over 55 years old. The two suggestions that were made to me was, I write the workouts, I put them in a plastic sleeve so they’re in front of each lane. Can I make the font of the workouts bigger from say 12 up to 60 to 18? Because nobody’s got their glasses on. And number two, can you talk a little bit louder down at this end of the lane? And I still laugh so hard at that.

Once they hear and know what they need to do, they will kick some butt, man, and it’s funny. So I increased the font from 12 to 16 and I make sure that I walk back and forth a little bit and we do have a headset that comes over to PA. But I have a very loud voice. But it was just, we know we have one athlete who down here wears hearing aids. So I could hear one of the athletes going, he just said.

But it’s funny, I’m not making fun of him, but it’s something I’m proud of that despite the idea they can’t see and the hearing may not be like it was in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. They’re still crushing it. So it’s been fun, my friend. So it’s been fun. I love it. That is classic. Frank, on that note, thank you so much for being on the podcast again. Where’s the best place for people to purchase your book? Or, yeah, I know you’ve got a new book coming out, hopefully at the end of the year. But where’s the best place for people to get your book? Right on Amazon, Amazon.com. And Amazon and purchase the book right there. And they type in Frank Saul, the book will come up. And as you said, I appreciate that the 5B method to a successful triathlon swim. It’s a long, lengthy title, but I felt compelled to use that. And my website is SoulSwimSolutions. If anybody ever has any questions, I would love to be able to help people

and answer any questions that I can. So I would like to say this has been a real joy to be back with you again after two and a half years. And when I see you on Instagram, I feel like I’m looking at a friend and communicating with a comrade and fellow coach. So I appreciate that. Likewise. Thanks so much, Frank. Yeah, you too, Brent. Good to stay well. And hopefully we’ll do this again real soon, my friend. Yeah, that’d be good. You take care. Bye-bye. 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 Breathing, Body Position & Balance with Frank Sole appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Join us in today’s episode as we interview one of the best open water swimmers in the world, Sharon van Rouwendaal. We will delve into her recent double win at the world championships, her intense training regimen, and the mental fortitude that drives her success. She will be sharing insights on her transition from pool to open water swimming, managing injuries, and the importance of technique and kick in her training. Uncover Sharon’s unwavering commitment to greatness, and her relentless pursuit of improvement. Tune in now!

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 swimming goggles here and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off.

I want to kind of go back to something that you mentioned earlier because I was going to ask you about this. It’s that 110 kilometer week that you did. Tell me in a bit more detail about that week. How many sessions? How do you recover in between? How do you feel after it? Because I saw that number and I think you had it written on the whiteboard. And I was like, wow, that is insane. Even if I’m world champ or Olympic champ. Yeah, that’s just something I would recommend because I can’t change it. It took me 16 years and still it’s very hard to do it in the race. Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. In 2016, Sharon Van Roovendale clinched Olympic Gold in the 10 kilometer open water event at Rio. Despite this, she felt like she was still learning how to race properly in open water. Fast forward to the Paris Olympics

preparation, Sharon still on a learning curve has recently dominated the world championships, securing gold in both the five and 10 kilometer events. Beyond her victories, Sharon’s shattered a personal record by swimming 110 kilometers in a week during a training camp just weeks out from the world champs, eclipsing her previous best of 109 kilometers. In this episode, we delve into Sharon’s relentless pursuit of excellence, exploring how she’s overcome a serious shoulder injury, how she manages recovery and nutrition during intense training and how finishing second in multiple races has paradoxically been one of the best things for her sculpting her mental resilience under the stringent mentorship of her former coach and her search for knowledge and improvement with her new coach. We get into that and more on today’s podcast episode with Olympic gold medalist Sharon Van Roovendale. Hello and welcome to

the effortless swimming podcast. My guest today is someone who I’ve done several analysis videos on for our YouTube channel and I’ve really watched from the outside for the last couple of years. One of the best open water summers in the world at the moment and doubling up on the 5k and 10 kilometer gold at world championships, but Sharon Van Roovendale, thank you so much for joining me. No, no problem. I’m happy to join. So tell me about the two recent wins. How long had you been wanting to do the double with the five and the 10 kilometer to win gold in both of those? Yeah, so I’ve done this a very long time and first, maybe you think like double is not possible, but I’ve seen Florian Welbrok doing it last summer in Fukuoka, my training partner, and even Leonie Beck did it. And then so you start to think, well, it is actually possible if you get a good recovery out of it. And of course, lately, world aquatics have planned

their world championships a little bit different with more rest in between the races. So it is possible. But because I’ve been through a lot since Fukuoka, I was very hungry for Dota. So I missed the touch in Fukuoka. So the podium was 0.1 second. I came in fourth. And of course, I knew I did a very great race and I was in top four. I was disappointed because I was like, this is not where I trained for. And then I did a medal on the 5K. It was great. I proved that I was in top form. And then I wanted to win the overall World Cup in December. And on 0.1 second, I came in eighth and Leonie Beck, who was the tight leader with me, came in seventh. So she won the overall. And after that, I just went to my parents a few days and I was like, in Dota, this is not going to happen to me again. Or I wouldn’t have been with 0.1 second. Or yeah. So I came in back from Christmas and we had this camp in Pretoria in the sun in altitude and I felt really good and really

happy and wanted to do extra. So I asked my coach like, hey, what is our record? Did we do before Tokyo with the kilometers in the week? How much did we do? And he said, oh, 109. I said, let’s go in 110. So I was just playing a little bit. But when I play like that, I get a lot of confidence. And so somehow I went into this focus tunnel and yeah, when I went to Dota, I was like, hey, I swim a world record in the pool once here on the floor times 200. I got some medals here. So let’s crush it in Dota. But of course, this is all stuff in my head that I make up. Like I say, oh, Dota, I’m always good in Dota. So I have to be good in Dota. And I knew somehow I was going to win it or would win it. Didn’t know how. Even if there were people in the way, I was never giving up. But to win a double, I wasn’t thinking about the 5k. I was only thinking about the 10. So yeah, when I went into the 10k, of course, the day itself, you shake your pants.

I mean, you’re like, oh, I was so confident the days before. Now I have to show people what I said to that coach. I said I could win it. And I said to maybe to my parents, but I don’t, I don’t like to say it. I hate it. So I would always say I could make a medal or I’m in good form, but I wouldn’t say it on camera. I was going to win it. And then the day itself, you’re like, why am I doing this? I want to, I don’t want to do this anymore. I get sick. I almost vomit at breakfast. That type of sickness, but I need to have it. Yeah. And then during the race, there’s so much stuff happening, right? And but then you win it and it’s the best feeling ever also because you wanted to prove that point that also the downs, you got the way to it. So to shukouka and I know everything with a one 10th and then winning by one 10th made it for me like, fuck yeah. Yeah, it’s, I want to kind of go back to something that you mentioned earlier,

because I was going to ask you about this. It’s that 110 kilometer week that you did.

How many, tell me a bit more detail about that week, how many sessions, how do you recover in between? How do you feel after it? Because I saw that number and I think you had it written on the whiteboard and I was like, wow, that is insane. Like, I don’t know many people doing wakes as big as that. Yeah. So it was actually where we’re doing nine K, eight and a half, nine K, eight and a half. So Monday, Tuesday, twice, Wednesday, once, Thursday, Friday, twice, Saturday, twice, and Sunday, once. So it’s 12 sessions. So I’m correct. Yeah. And on Wednesday, I was like, hey, if we’re going to do like last week, but we have two sessions more, it’s could be like 106, 107. And I realized this on Wednesday, we were, and then I was calculating all, but then I need nine K, nine K, at least nine K everywhere. And on Sunday, I need 10.

And now, so I talked to my coach and I said, let’s check. And I was convinced it was only 107, my record. And he said it’s 109. And that was before Tokyo. And we did three sessions a day there. So on a Monday and on a Friday before Tokyo at the altitude camp, we did three sessions. So we’d be like eight K, eight K, no, no, eight K, nine K, and four K, like a sprint session or something. And so, yeah, so, so on, so on. And then I said, let’s do it. And I started to feed it really on Friday was like what am I getting running myself into now? And, and I was running morning at the last session at 10.7 and I felt great actually. And then my friend and teammate, Jisha Johnson, she said, let’s write it on the board, you need to mark this down. And then I could say at the age of 30, I did my, my max kilometers. And my coach was like, yeah, but we can do it before Paris. And I said, no, if we can do it now, we do it now. And we do it again for Paris. But I want to for my self

confidence and for just, well, there’s been some talk about with my age in the group, I’m much older than the rest. So I just wanted to prove a point that I could do it.

Do you feel like that was part of the confidence going into world championships? Yeah, for sure. With me, I have to play these type of games, I guess.

Like that type of stuff really gives me confidence. And then I would be on the starting position and be like, well, I did 110k that week. So the week after we went for 70. And that felt like taper. And so my me and my coach were like, we’re not going to taper too much for this one. I said, no, no, I could do it right now. Like in, in Pretoria, I felt so good that I said I could do it right now. So, but so in between those sessions, I also did so 12 swims and the swims around about two hour 20, of course, when you have 10k, it’s longer to hour 45. But there you have, you stop, you drink, you talk, that kind of stuff. And then in between, I also had like weights or we call it band work or core work, that kind of stuff. And it was like 45 minutes after the morning session. And then in the evening, I would be done around 5 36. And I would eat, have physio and then do like recovery boots or something like that. So I could sleep really

early because I was done early. And I sometimes I struggle when we swim late, you’re done late, and I don’t sleep good. So my overnight recovery was good there.

How long does it take you to fall asleep after? Oh, I, no, I’m a trouble sleeper. You wouldn’t, my nights are like six hours and I take like sometimes one hour to fall asleep with melatonin. So, but there I had like 30% more sleep than the other camps, because the other camps were trained late. So it was, it was overnight, the recovery was super good.

Wow. And you, so you said you came out of that feeling, feeling good, like you didn’t, you didn’t pay the price for that a week or two weeks later, where you just couldn’t train very well, or you had to recover from that big week, you just made you feel stronger. Yeah, I think you’re dead in that meant I’m then in that mental state that I’m like, don’t even, probably I’m not even the head makes it like you don’t feel that you’re tired because I’m not allowed to be tired, or I’m in my taper or I have 70 K that’s taper compared to 110. So I’m going to make my feel my body feel that’s taper or so I think I’m in that mindset then that’s full of confidence that I’m making myself also like say that I’m in top form, which I was, but my head’s even making it better than that it was. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I had a guest on last week, his name’s James Lawrence, and he he did a hundred Ironmans in a hundred days, which was world record. And he said his,

the gift that he was given was to suffer. What would you say your gift is? Yeah, I think I’ve learned something in France with my old coach. He’s a very, very tough coach, and he would talk to us at first really badly. And then in the competitions, he would say we’re the best. He would lift us up with a great speech.

But there I had to be very tough. And there were these mental games and like stuff I had to prove to him that I’m Sharon. I’m the gold medal winner. And sometimes you wouldn’t even talk to me and like say, you there. And then I would say you there, I’ll prove to him tomorrow who I am, you know, and that’s where I got the toughness from. So when I came here with my coach, Ben Beckham, he’s very calm and a very like a good person. Of course, he can be like sometimes maybe not angry, but it’s a coach. So sometimes it doesn’t always work out good, but he’s a very good and stable coach. And so I think I’ve learned a lot with Nip and then now with Bernd, I learned a lot too. And I got that mental state. I learned that in France, I think to be very tough. And you’ve been able to and now having that toughness, you feel has helped you where you’ve now got a coach where it sounds like it’s maybe a more enjoyable training environment or just a different culture that you’re a part of now.

I think, well, in France, there were like a lot of jokes around the pool and there was stuff happening and that athlete was fighting with that one and that one was like throwing pedals to the other one and the other one partied and she was like, what’s this? And so there was entertainment. And I think in Germany, we’re just all good people and very focused on what they do. So they’re very, very focused and they know the goal they want and they’re going to do it. But it’s just every day like the same. So it makes it sometimes you missed entertainment when you swim sometimes. So it’s very different, but I think it’s a very professional environment to train.

So you really need to, if you want to train here, you need to train here with your goal and then you’ll make the goal. But if you’re just, if you’re searching for motivation or something, then it’s better to go somewhere else in a fun group who’s not as professional as this one. I remember you mentioning, I think I read it somewhere that you won the gold medal in Rio in 2016 in the 10K, but you look back and you feel like you didn’t understand open water racing. It wasn’t until only four or five years ago that you feel like you started to understand it. What did you learn and what have you changed the result of that learning open water swimming and the strategy behind it? So when I became Olympic champion, I only did open water for two years and I just thought you could just swim away and break the pack, just swim. Like there’s nothing that you have to follow people or be in the group or that it would help. So in Rio,

I just had this feeling, oh, you have to go now and just swim. And then I actually did that and I won by 18 seconds. But then the years after you start to notice like, hmm, it’s not really working one, one time I’m 16, one time I’m first, one time I’m eight, like it was all my results were a little bit all over the place because it’s sometimes I got very tired because people swimming on me or in me and I was like, well, what is this sport? So I did a few world cups to learn and I tried to stay in the pack and took a long time actually to feel what I know right now how it works. So yeah, that’s the drifting. So if you swim behind a person like this, that’s like two seconds easier for the person who’s swimming in the feet than the person who’s swimming in front. And yeah, if you go next to that person, it’s extra heavy for this person. That’s all types of stuff. Yeah, how you take the voice, of course, how you finish it, which I

don’t still, I’m not a pro in finishing my touches. But I do practice it. It’s just there’s yeah, and then also now there’s this part where you think you have to look at your competitors, which one do you know it’s going to be there at the end, which one do you don’t know you don’t want next to on the sprint, which one is this heavy? Sometimes you feel people are very heavy. So what I say, like when they come next to you, you don’t want that once you try to avoid. So there’s a lot of this stuff that I know now that I didn’t know in 2020. So 2019.

Yeah, because in 2015, you got I think second at world champs in the 400 and then started to take a more, more open water swing. What are those? How have you changed your stroke or your training to go from that pool based competitor to the open water? So I switched at some point, I was even a backstroke and then I switched to freestyle again because I did freestyle in my younger years when I was 14, 15. And so I switched to France with Philippe Bupin, September 2013. And he was giving me 2100s backstroke fast. I’m like, man, I can only do one or two. Like that’s not max holding. I can only hold max holding two times in backstroke with the legs. And I said, yeah, let’s do freestyle. And so he wanted to put me on the 400 free. And I love the 400 free because he had Pellegrini, he had Normana doing all these women who made Olympic medals or Olympic gold. And so at some point a year lady said, let’s try open water. So I went from 411 to 403 in one year on the 400 freestyle. And I don’t know

the other times. Yeah, I did to fly to back everything. And so he wanted to switch to open water and at some point the 10 times wanted free on 445 or five minutes work 20 times 100. So he just doubled the sessions from a 400 meter swimmer to a 10 K. So at some point we’re just always training 10 K sessions or 9 K sessions to do also good 400. But I lost speed. I must say I lost speed for the 400. And I got shoulder injuries. And yeah, and then it’s very hard to swim 400 if you have to go all out the first 100 because you don’t have to speed. Yeah, do you talk to me about the the shoulder injury that you that you had a couple of years back. So what what do you feel like caused it? And how have you managed your shoulder health since then? Because I’m sure someone listened to this going, how on earth is she doing 110 Ks? I’m doing 10 Ks a week and I pull up a little bit stiff after that. So what are you? So yeah, I started

with she deep in 2013. And I got my problems two years after roundabout because I was like in the kitchen and everything like the elbows starting to hurt and then this part and was like just like little knives. Yeah, like was like maybe it’s just soreness. So I waited also and he just did at some point first he didn’t believe me. And then we stopped for a month and we started again. And I was always swimming with a certain of pain. So always the biceps always was like hurting or and then we did some backstroke because backstroke puts the shoulders back. And so when I started with him, my I was always sitting like this, like, like this, everything to the front. Yeah, hunched over. Yeah. And at some point when I switched coaches, of course, we started training a lot for the back because in the in the water, we did a lot. Everything for freestyle was the front, the way I swim it. So I learned a lot also with my new team coach in Germany.

And I already tried to change a little bit the shoulder position in front. So what I did was that I would swim freestyle on and take the hand and then put this shoulder to the front and this would pull a lot here. So now I’m just trying to get that shoulder back and focus with the back the back muscles actually. So there’s a lot of stuff I changed in the gym, because there we did pull ups and bench press and everything that that made this sore. And I think I learned that in Germany, and everything in France was at a certain pace, you go in and you just swim and he’s there with the timing and you’re very confronted on times all the time. And in Germany, we start with technique and we focus on how to put the shoulders and how to put the neck and just like more healthy. And that’s why I could swim 110k because maybe 90% of it was on an extensive easy level just focusing on very long strokes. So you do sort of weights in the water when you do those

long strokes. So you get the power. And then there were some really like sprints and you have to go really fast on the sprints. And sometimes there’s a bill because in a race, there’s a bill too. But never do we do 110k all out. And in France, I did 80k, but it was almost all out

all the time. Yeah, and that’s a big difference. So yeah, it’s not like I left France, I said, well, we did seven years, I’m not learning anymore. I’m not getting those steps anymore. I’m just here and it’s up and down. I want to learn something new. And I need to learn because otherwise I’m not going to improve. So I need to work on the sprints, I need to work on all the different levels in France. I had this, yeah, this level, but I couldn’t do a sprint.

And so because we were sort of going back and forth on Instagram, when you posted a video with your like six-speed kick and then your normal just more longer distance aerobic technique where it’s a bit of a crossover kick. And so is that developing that the six-speed kick, one of the things that’s helped you be able to change your speed and have those different gears available? Is that one of the things that’s really helped you just finish so strong? Yeah, I think so sometimes in a race, I have not, I don’t have the guts to put the six kick beat in because if you didn’t use them a lot, sometimes they’re stiff and then just my feeling says you’re going to lactate so much. So I’m training on it. I’m like, so I switched to Germany and I have a very good kick because I’ve also kicked in France with the shoulder injuries. I did kick sets and kick sets and other kick sets. So my kick is really good. And I have still those

sort of backstroke legs that are really strong. And so we’re like, wow, are you not using it? And I said, yeah, but when I learned swimming, it was like this dance. I went to crossover kick. It’s my, it’s my dance. It’s my momentum. How do you want to do like a normal six kick? So when I do the normal six kick, I’m like in slow motion and I still don’t have the rhythm. I can’t find the momentum. It’s just something I can’t find. But when I do the speed now, there’s this sort of, it feels like a sort of motor behind that really kicks. So I’m super fast in sprints. And also when I build it, I can do the crossover and I build it to a six kick. But in the race, still after long distance, because I can lactate on it, it’s still very hard to put the six kick. But I have a very strong kick. Even in Doha now, you can see that there is a strong kick in it. Just sometimes there is a six kick, sometimes not. But I think I’ve worked a lot

on my speed and I mean, and on that kick. So that made me very strong. On the 5k, you can see that there’s very long strokes and it almost looks like straight arms. But there is a lot of power there in the last 200 meters of that race. And that’s where I worked on for the last three years to get that also momentum with the kick and the power in the arms and then passing the competitors. Are there any other things that you’ve learned with your new coach in terms of technique or anything that you’ve you’ve worked on?

Oh, yeah, I think I learned every day from him. So that’s also when I think I wanted to start coaching myself later, because there are these problems that I didn’t know that created the shoulder problems that just if you stand up like this is much better than standing up like this or just a little thing. So he’s just looking at my position or we’re also now trying to have that easier rotation in my body. So on dry land, we do a lot of new stuff now to get that rotation in the water going and it also prevents the shoulders. But there’s so much with the technique I’ve learned. So if I would teach little kids, I would say kick like this, not like this, even if I’m world champ or Olympic champ. Yeah, that’s just something I would recommend, because I can’t change it. It took me 16 years and still it’s very hard to do it in the race. Yeah, you mentioned the coaching there. So I know you’ve got some camps coming up in

October, September or October? September, yeah, start September. And is that have you organized those camps as kind of part of that thinking like you enjoy the coaching side of things and being able to teach what you’ve learned over your time as a professional swimmer? Yeah, so it started actually, I think one and a half year ago, I think I was on a camp. And I saw this boy doing this bend forward exercise where he pulls the cable and pulls it with his back, not straight. And so in France, I thought, that’s all fine, you know, but now I’m like, no, he has to straighten otherwise you’re going to have your problems. That’s what I was like, actually know so much now about swimming. I’ve trained with Jaco for her and then I’ve trained with Philippe Lucca and Bert Berckhan. So I know so much about it. So why not wanting to share my experience? And then, yeah, with the swimming and with the change of technique, I feel

stuff. So also in my races, I swim on feeling how I feel, how the rest is doing that thing. And then I search the momentum to go or not to go and to change it to a sprint. So everything I do is on a sort of feeling. And there’s so much you can feel in your body, and you can change it just by doing it on the dry land or and then you feel it in the water. And that’s where I decided I want to, I want to build this. So I started the online coaching, I have like seven athletes now. I think half of it is from France because, well, that old coach for me was very famous and then you know me. So he was like, quite famous together in France. And so they look up to you and they want to be coached by you. And I can also see their progression because they’re used to just swimming fast. And but I asked them to swim very slow and just I give them some of my videos of where I do the technique exercises. So there’s like, you know,

like catch up or, well, there’s like eight or 10 exercises I give them. And I show them how I do it and I try to explain how they should do it. And the amount of like progression they made in six months is really impressive. I mean, I didn’t I at first I thought, let’s see if I can do it or if I can be a good coach, let’s try. But they are really excited also just these little exercises or the dry land, they get a like with the Terrebonne, they do the exercises to feel the stuff to straighten the shoulders. And they can really like feel it. So it’s not just that I’m making it up. It’s just that it’s working. So what’s working for me is working for other people. Before we dive into the rest of today’s podcast episode, this episode is proudly brought to you by form smart swim goggles. They’ve been a long time sponsor of the podcast and they are my go to goggles when it comes to tracking my training sessions and being able to

see what’s happening in real time through the goggles. And we know swimming is a highly technical sport, but without the guidance of a coach on deck, identifying and addressing technique flaws can be a challenge. They’ve recently added a new feature to the goggles, head coach. And this addresses that problem head on. It gives them as improved access to their technique awareness, focus skill development and in app education and analysis. Head coach provides real time visual coaching via the form smart swim goggles augmented reality display. During and after a swim head coach provides them as with technique feedback using two types of metrics, form score and head coach skills. Form score is a measurement of overall swim efficiency ranging from zero to 100 defined by your pace and your stroke length head coach skills encompasses five key areas that will help you identify where to focus on improving with your efficiency head roll head pitch

set pacing interval pacing and breathing time to neutral and after completing a session you can check back in on the form app to track your progress and head coach provides swimmers from beginner to expert with an unprecedented level of data driven guidance and understanding enabling you to boost your performance and your speed. Get your pair of form smart swim goggles today. Click the link in our podcast description or use the code effortless on check out to get 15% off your form smart swim goggles. You’ve been the sport for quite a while and probably gone through a lot of ups and downs and had to learn some things the hard way and just having that body awareness and awareness around what’s involved in in the racing with the strategy and then what you need to do in training like you’ve got a huge depth huge depth of knowledge there and I mean I’ve found that is as a coach going from a swimmer up until I was 18 and then mostly starting coaching from there

it’s a it’s a different way of thinking about things and actually I think it makes you a better swimmer because you’ve got to figure out how to explain these things to to people that first you you can just do but then you’ve got to think about well how can I actually explain this to someone else. Yeah so like last time there was this question how do you put your what do you mean with putting my shoulder like this so I was like how can I explain it then I was like well I’m just going to make a video now like this and said well you do this so here you’re going to have shoulder problems just keep it in keep it in with your back muscles and then there’s so much you can explain already on dry land you don’t even have to explain it in in the water and then of course I sent them other videos but sometimes you’re like oh how can I explain it so you’re just a simple way and it works the best and and that’s what I like

and then when they say oh I felt it so once in in France in September was it now August I’ve coached this triathlete and his hips were down and I said well you’re also swimming like this so just put the chin in and then the hips went up just by itself just because he wasn’t lifting the upper body up and then he said I feel it and that’s what made me so happy that I decided this is what I want to do is show it stop swimming. Yeah yeah that’s awesome it’s it’s great to see that you’re going to be able to you know go into that field and help a lot of swimmers one of the things you mentioned there was the swimmers were doing too much fast and hard swimming so you get you’ve given them some slower stuff you mentioned at the start of the call you’ve got five levels that you or five different sort of speeds that you’d normally train at you talk me through those those different levels and maybe what pace or speed you’d be doing in those

different levels so yeah in in France he said fast and I think fast was never fast well fast fast because I think that was always like 75 percent but we so if I’m asking you to jog at some point you not gonna or know how to walk very slow or know how to run very fast you’re just gonna be at your speedy and like I can’t go out of this speed and that’s what happened in France I think and in Germany it was to learn how to swim very slow but sometimes the slow

is hard because you’re just yeah it’s difficult to explain but you’re just like if you’re going to walk very slow at some point you’re going to get yourself tired and that’s the same with the swimming and so we call that so I learned it’s from my coach and we call that level one so zone one and that’s the heart rate zone as well so we swim with a heart rate monitor now we have level two and this is where we actually mostly swim on and that’s like well some people it’s I think yes well let’s say 70 to 80 around 70 percent 75 percent

and then you have level three level four and level five and level five is really really fast that’s like best let’s say best average and of course when you do little sprints it’s called our eight while he puts it in as an eight but that’s because it’s on the short and it’s very explosive and so most of the stuff we do is sometimes we just have to do 10 times 400 on a level two and now I’m seeing that this level two was almost my fast in German because I’ve learned all the because I have this stronger stroke an easy technique it costs me way less energy than when I was swimming in France because the technique is better the heart rate is lower yeah and then you can get to that level three four five but before I couldn’t

the 110 kilometer week was it do you say a lot of that was level one or level two level two yeah most two yeah yeah so it was mostly the heart rate so for me I never knew I had a really high heart rate so I went to Germany and we did a 5k in altitude most my first camp with them and they said level two uh-huh level two okay so I had a monitor up here and a monitor on the chest just to check and the average was 203 and they were standing there I’m like like well what’s this you know this is not not this is her first camp with us what’s this so yeah well I don’t know and then like lactate three whatever they wanted it to be was it was the good lactate and then we were like is this your heart rate I say you’re probably well once I had my with running I had it on and it sets to 20 and then she the blue cassette throw it out because it doesn’t work but now I’m thinking it worked so apparently I have this very high heart rate so if I did my my health test

like the biking test with the mask on I get on the bike I go up to 200 without moving the legs so they say like my max is 215 but holding on a 10k up would probably hold 198 to 202 as an average wow and then we didn’t know that so my when I put in the polar system you have these levels we put it up because my red zone is not going to be the red zone of Florian Velbrook we’re two different people he has a very low heart rate and I’m very high and that makes it very interesting for the coaches as well to see both Olympic champion but totally different that’s so interesting that you’re and you’ve got to back it up with the lactate test don’t you like to show that you can sustain a 200 heart rate for 5k and still be it’s a three millimoles so that’s that’s incredible and so with around that sort of level two what would you typically be holding in those okay so when they sometimes they take our time sometimes they don’t so in the in the morning

I don’t even check my times but I know it’s a very slow it’s just like I’m trying to do it slower than he wants because he wants a good technique and he always wants me to be careful because I need to be careful with like just the shoulders and sometimes I can go crazy pop a time out but that’s where I’m a little bit older than the rest and if you pop a time out then you don’t make it through the whole week so I’m just trying to control everything I would hold like if he says 10 times 400 we did it this week I would hold 452 but that’s not that’s not fast I mean that’s just so I would I think Michael is always to hold a 112 half something like that or like even if it’s a 113 and he says oh stroke rate 34 35 I know I have these long strokes in and and the heart rate but my heart rate would be

almost 180 for my level two but now it dropped since a few months that I’m very relaxed in the rotation I think also because I’m fit it dropped to 165 so I’m learning how to learn to swim those levels it took very took at least six months when I got into this group to learn how to swim those levels because I couldn’t go to level five I don’t know what level one is so I was swimming everything in orange but in the morning sessions the level two was like in green zone maybe 150 max heart rate so yeah so those are the times mostly when they take the time okay 224 on 200 448 to 452 but when we drop fast a lot before doa we had in in suit we had 12 400 and you had to build 123 so let’s say level one level two level three level two level three level four level three level four level five and then let’s say four five to almost six so the best every best you can do at the end and there I was swimming between

so like 110 1817 so like I think it was 440 and I descended to 416 in the in the training that’s where I knew okay this this is pretty good 460 on a 400 at 12 400 didn’t do that for a very long time so there was this other said we did was a 2k level three he said level three and that turned out to be one six half average 170 and six half in suit and then 15 100 in the same so you had to descent I hold like five times one three two one two and then one two two to one one and then I went three times one zero in total at 10 and that was for me like if I can swim in calculating 403 on the last four 100s of a 15 100 said I know I’m good that that I knew like okay I’m ready for this this is like cool times again so I’m ready so is that a like that is that a typical set that you might do where if you’re hitting your times it gives you that confidence going into the races yeah so also what’s good with my coach we have a meeting before we do the taper

and I always mark down what we also have it online like on a document what we did before Tokyo what we did before Budapest what we did before Fukuoka I said I like that set now this set was too hard I had too much muscle pain we need to change that one into that one and I want more back free here so that the shoulders are free so I put a lot of input myself because I am older but I also know what I want and what I need so I think it’s actually quite easy at the end in the taper to yeah I’m not one say easy to coach me but I give him feedback so I think he would learn for me too and those are some sets that I said oh I want to want to test that gel that I have or something can we do this this set and he said okay let’s do it like this and that was the 2000 plus 15 100 so was one set the week before I raised action so you’re looking back at the at the what you did in lead up to those championships and you’re looking at the sets and

are you making notes after each session saying oh this is how I felt this is how I felt the next day and then using that as your guide for the next time that you do it yeah so most notes I know it up here but I also get sent the times that I did in Fukuoka for example one of our sets two days before the race is 15 100 just on 130 but then two on the level two and then one on he said three to four but in Fukuoka I did it level five two days before your race and so because everybody’s there in the warming up pool you want to kind of show off or like show that you’re good and I did really good there I mean it was quite fast and now what I listen to him as well I’m going to do the three to four I’m going to hold back sit back and relax and wait for the for the competition day to show what I can do so I was doing three seconds or four seconds slower than in three seconds roundabout but very controlled and he was like okay she’s finally listening that she’s just controlling and and and so I didn’t panic

at all that I was slower because I had that confidence that I built yeah like the last month the last month yeah it’s interesting how you how you change over time and with years of experience and knowing what works and then just not having to prove yourself in the warm up in there you know in the preparation for it it’s like now let’s leave it to race day that’s really it’s really interesting I’ve got a couple of listener questions here so I’m I’ll go through them you can you can answer them as fast or as long as you want and I’m going to pull up a few more as well if we’ve had any come in at the the last minute so I’m going to start here so and I think we’ve covered a couple of these already because people a lot of people are wondering how do you manage your training load how much do you sleep all that sort of stuff it’s a lot of people just wonder how you do what you do by the look of it yes so the sleep is at night it’s six and a half to

seven during the week but Saturday night to Sunday it will be nine and a half so I yeah I take the sleep sometimes up front on a Saturday and then I can’t fall asleep on a Sunday night but I take naps one hour to two hours a day so like almost two hour nap wow what time do your training sessions start in the morning what time are you waking up at home so at home in Germany like 645 I wake up so that’s actually quite good and go at the warm-up we have to do the warm-up at 7 30 and then swim from 8 to 10 15 then I do my gym around about one hour sometimes have physio and in the afternoon 16 30 dry land again or warming up and then five to seven seven something

also Saturday twice as well so at home we always have the 11 session cycle

that’s yeah and the and have you always napped throughout the day like I I used to feel guilty when I would nap throughout the day if I was training but I’m like no hang on a second like I deserve this nap is this something is done no I also have this feeling like I need to nap because otherwise I’m not a professional or so I have this bad thinking that if I don’t nap I will not swim good this afternoon so that’s what I had in France because I had to do those sets all the time I’m like I have to nap otherwise I’m not so I yeah I have to and that’s something I would not miss I think when I would be a not an athlete anymore it’s like when I go to do groceries there’s a time limit because I need to look at my my nap time and then I need to cook still and then

everything I do has a time limit because of being an athlete so if we go eat sushi but it’s already 8 30 normally I almost lying down and cooling down so I have to so that’s something yeah would be weird that not to have a time limit anymore

that’s what that’s what you need to do as a professional though isn’t it like have you always had that mentality in that attitude or is it something that you’ve developed over time I’ve always had it so also those naps I think I was little and then my mother had naps with me and then when I went just yeah then later when I was 14 I already had the naps I had to wake up very early that’s I think that’s why my sleeping isn’t that good because I have those longer naps but in total that makes it eight hours a day what what they say that you have to have you have to have eight hours a day of sleep but I think since I’m little I didn’t want to go to those girly parties when I was six or hang out with girls I just wanted to run on the field with my brother and do those competitions that I would run him

yet it’s something that was already inside of me or like my one of my first swimming sessions I ask my mom did I did I do a better time than last time and she said we can do times but I saw my brother and sister are six to five years older and I saw them always running up to my mother at competitions and ask about their time so my first lessons were like did I improve my time so it’s something that was already inside of me when I was younger to have that yeah sort of big schedule and everything for the sport and want to improve

there must be really interesting for your for your mother to see that same traits and characteristic play out now because I’ve got I’ve got two young kids they’re seven and five and already there’s some differences between them but you I’m looking forward to seeing that over the next couple of years those those same traits hopefully play out and hopefully it’s the the good ones but we’ll we’ll wait and see yeah the another question I’ve got here is if you if you couldn’t swim or couldn’t coach what do you think you’d be doing I would have also done sports but I would have been a runner because I at the age of 14 I had to choose and I was a really good runner like I did the what is it cross country run and also on the in the stadium the thousand meters was my favorite you know it’s really good at it back then I would have been a runner I think yeah do you still run now so at some point of course when your body changed the first my legs was really those I really had

like two skinny legs just running legs but then I started to swim so you get the shoulders so the whole body changed when I started to swim more and more and then I got more sort of like those strong stronger legs but I think that’s something I want to do after my career because running always when I run I can clear my mind when I swim I have to focus on my technique and running is something that clears my mind when I when I had off I would run but now lately you get or a little bit of back pain or a little bit of knee pain or so you have to really build it slowly so it’s really hard for a swimmer now to go and run if you don’t do it every day and and outside of sport what are your hobbies what are the things that you’re interested in we like to do well I really like food of course I have to eat a lot but and so I would say I would like to go to restaurants movies to the beach while they’re in the Netherlands we have one but

what’s not as nice as yours of course but I would want to learn how to serve yeah there’s always stuff I want to learn I would like to have a little parachute jump or something I would like the danger stuff like it’s doing stuff like that but of course well when I’m here in Germany I must say I’m very boring well also because I have this goal I think but and you don’t have energy so sometimes you just at home on Saturday night oh let’s go to sleep at nine and then get those hours of sleep so that’s yeah I will sometimes go out for dinner but I must say that’s it here and when I’m in the Netherlands I do some stuff with my parents like well I would also like to walk the dogs or cycle because we cycle a lot in the Netherlands since I do totally different stuff when I’m at my parents which I want to do when I’m not swimming anymore hmm yeah but I wonder if you’ll be able to just think back to the running and the swimming

I wonder if you’ll be able to when you do eventually retire if you can swim and just clear the mind and clear your head or if you’ll still be focused on every single stroke yeah I think I would prefer to swim in open water because you don’t know the pace there and you’re assuming I think I couldn’t handle swimming in the pool and just feeling weird and not and then so when you have holidays you already have that feeling that you’re like oh those times are terrible I’m not gonna look anymore but I think I couldn’t handle it to swim all the time in a pool and see those times change and change is too slower yeah yeah it makes makes a lot of sense well when you if you do learn to surf you’ll have the paddling aspect under control that will be fine it’ll just be the wave catching and the and the balance but I’m sure it won’t take you won’t take you too long so Sharon you’re leading up to the Olympics now that’s that’s gonna be the

number one number one priority after you’ve done back to back at world champs so aside from leading into the Olympics what else have you got coming up and how can people find out about the camps that you’re running and those sorts of things so I have a new I think a new project coming up but I’m still working on it so I know about it more about it in one or two weeks but so the first camp is going to be the camp in September in my your camp people can still subscribe I have the the info on my Instagram so if people want to join it’s a one-week camp one September to 15 September while you they can choose the first week on a second week and then after that I’m going to have a little bit of camps but that’s still yeah that’s still not sure at the moment or we’re going to fix where to hold the camps and I’ll open up the online online coaching more because now I have like I’m putting like nine hours a week in and it’s the max I can do so

it’s like I have these seven people but I want to focus on these seven people and give them the attention they need but in September I’ll open up much more spots so if people want to be coast online by me that’s that’s would be really great and then after Paris so after Paris I take four to five months I’m going to say okay let’s see if I still want to be a professional athlete or not and then I’m going to make my decision but I want to build my career next to it or that’s what I’m doing already last year but building it more yeah strongly and want to coach already in September so I have something to do while I have this time off and I’m going to go skiing in December so that’s something I wow something you couldn’t do I went and did it two three years ago after Tokyo but it’s something I just wanted to do as well because I’m not swimming in the pond yeah well you will have definitely earned that and and

deserve that to that break and what will include links to your your camps and Instagram and all that sort of stuff so people can find out about it and we’ll yeah get out in front of the people who listen to this podcast and who follow us online as well so Shane I’ve really enjoyed this thank you so much for being on the podcast and big congratulations on your back-to-back world champs and yeah wishing you nothing but the best for the Olympics we’re looking forward to Paris and can’t wait to watch you there thank 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

The post Olympic Gold, 110km In A Week & Why You Should Never Stop Learning with Sharon Van Rouwendaal appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

James ‘Iron Cowboy’ Lawrence is best known for his world record attempts at completing multiple Ironman events over consecutive days. Firstly, in 2015, he successfully completed 50 Ironmans in 50 days in 50 US states. Then in 2021, he decided to double this and complete 100 Ironmans in 100 days, going on to do this and one more to finish 101. The documentary on this challenge is coming out in March 2024. James is also a public speaker who was given the gift to ‘suffer’ and now helps provide hope to others and teach mental toughness through voluntary suffering. This episode is not to be missed.

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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’ve established myself as this like mental giant. I can do these really hard, long challenges. In fact, it’s my gift. I’ve been given the gift to suffer. And for years, I was like, this is the worst gift anybody’s ever been given from God. It is so damn freeing to show up on your life and and live your life without a care about what anybody else thinks. Now, that doesn’t mean about like, don’t care about people and don’t care about things, but like stop caring so much what anybody else’s opinion is of 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.

I’m incredibly excited about today’s episode. Firstly, because while I was recording this and having the conversation with our guest, I left incredibly inspired, motivated and just driven to do more and do better. And we have none other than the iron cowboy himself, James Lawrence on today’s episode. You might know James from his 50, 50, 50 back in 2015. James decided to set out and attempt 50 ironman’s in 50 days in the 50 States in the US and that involved all of the travel, the logistics as well as doing those events, which on average took about 14 hours every day and then trying to work in the the nutrition, the recovery, the travel, everything in between. He managed to break a world record doing those 50 ironman events back then. I remember watching that and thinking, this guy is absolutely nuts. I don’t know how he’s getting through this. And then he obviously was successful with it. Then in 2021, James decided to step it up.

He wanted to prove that it wasn’t just a fluke and that some of the criticism that he caught in 2015, he wanted to prove that he could legitimately do this and just prove all of the doubt is wrong. So he decided to set a challenge to do 100 ironman events in 100 consecutive days. And he not only did that, but he did one extra. He went 101 consecutive ironman events in 101 days, which smashed the world, his own world record. And I can’t really see this being broken. Now on today’s episode, I talked to James a bit about those two events, but also what motivates him? How does he push through those hard times? And just coming away from this conversation, he’s an incredibly generous giving person and someone who just wants the best for people. And it’s something that I really took away from this conversation was that sometimes we limit ourselves and we don’t set challenging enough goals. We don’t push ourselves and we are capable of much,

much more. So this is an episode I’m going to listen back to on multiple occasions just because of the way that I left after this podcast. I thought, wow, this I can do a lot more than what I’m currently doing. So let’s get into the episode. Hope you enjoy this one. I know I certainly did while I was recording it. Here is our episode with the iron cowboy James Lawrence. Welcome to the effortless swim podcast. My guest today is someone who I planted the seed on recording a podcast with several years ago and we finally managed to organize it. It’s the one name the iron cowboy James Lawrence. James, welcome to the podcast, mate. Yeah, thanks, Brendan. That’s totally my fault. It was funny. I was going through some like old messages on Facebook and you and I had been going back and forth and trying to arrange it and literally we’d set it up. You’re like, I’ll call you in an hour and then something happened and three years later I reached out and I was like,

Hey man, you ready to do that podcast? And one week later we’re here. And so I think I think over time we’ve just become more efficient. Yeah, exactly right. And look over that time you’ve achieved just a little bit. So we’ve got even more to talk about them. We would have a couple of years back. So I’m looking forward to getting into it. So just to start things off in a little bit more light and harder manner. Is there any memorable or funny moments during any of your endurance challenges that you remember or that stand out to you? Oh man. In terms of swimming, in terms of swing side of things as well, which I want to get to. Oh, swimming. I was in this wasn’t memorable. It was actually my worst moment ever swimming. I I’ve been doing endurance racing for 20 years and we’ll dive into a little bit of my career and what happened. But I’ve established myself as this like mental giant. I can do these really hard long challenges.

In fact, it’s my it’s my gift. I’ve been given the gift to suffer and for years I was like this is the worst gift anybody’s ever been given from God. But but I recognize that our our teams willing to suffer intentionally gives hope to other people that that are dealing with stuff that they didn’t ask for. So my careers had really high peaks where I do these massively big projects and then it just like wrecks me and then I recover and I come back and I do it again. And the last one there was a big gap between when I did it the huge event in 2015 and then 2021 I did it again and that was the biggest challenge I’ve ever done in my career is called the conquer 100 and I know we’re going to talk about that. But then it really destroyed me physically but more importantly it wrecked me mentally and I crashed violently on day 59 had multiple concussions over my career but my brain actually got stuck in hyperdrive fighter

flight and I couldn’t get back to parasympathetic and so it took me over two years to recover from this and when I came out of it. I thought I was ready to get back to racing and I was just going to use my past experience to and my mental toughness to get me through some of these races and I got invited to go do the world championships in Sweden for the swim run which is a race called Otillo and it’s actually pronounced to do which stands for Island Island and it’s a race where you swim in your shoes and you run in your wetsuit and you run across the island jump of the water swim to the next island and repeat that process and so it’s a 40 it ends up being 40 miles of running and and 6 miles 10 K of swimming and I I’ve been swimming my entire not my entire life but for 1520 years and I’m proficient I’m not great but I’m proficient and I was just really relying on my experience and I’ve never DNF to race in my life and

because I prepare really hard I’m super mentally tough I’m physically dominant and it’s a partner race too so as me and Carly who is my partner in this race tethered together in the swim and the gun goes off of this race it’s about a 400 meter run and then you jump into the first swim which is about a little over 1000 meters or 1200 meters of swimming and it was dead into a current and it was pretty choppy waves well I started to get sick and started to throw up in the water and then started to have a panic attack and I’ve never experienced this before and so I was just like really going through my mental practices and calming myself down I kept looking around and I’m like holy shit we’re dead last like we’re the last people in this because it’s a world championships right and I was just like I was taking for granted like preparation and all this just total rookie mistakes 20 years into my career and we get out of

the water we clear a couple more sections run across a few islands do a couple more swim sets and we get to the point and there’s a guy standing there like this and he’s like sorry guys you didn’t make the cut off I was like what I was just so so embarrassed and then just completely devastated that I let my partner down because I’m telling you 20 years in racing I’ve never done that and so that was one of the worst experiences that I’ve had in the water and I’m going to share one more really quick 2012 it was the one it was our second world record I was doing the most Ironman’s in a year that anybody had ever done all official races we did 30 Ironman’s 11 countries and it was the year the St. George Ironman they had microburst winds come in and it was it was part of the world record and one of the races was one of the races that’s in my home state and my wife was preparing to do it while we had five little kids and I was out on

the road trying to break this world record and so she we show up at the race and the conditions were perfect like it was a great start and the gun goes off and everybody takes off and it was this chaotic like swim and I love I love that I hate that they’ve gone away from the mass start but I loved it and I’m just swimming there with my wife or just cruising and she’s not a great swimmer and so I’m like just you watch me site off of me I’ll let I’ll nail the line and we’ll get there and all of a sudden the water starts to get choppy and moving and I can hear a like a speedboat and I’m like why the hell is that boat so close to us and turning the water upside down and all of a sudden I pick up and it is pandemonium around us like a microburst storm system came in and turn this reservoir upside down and all of a sudden we’ve got six eight ten foot waves around us and you keep like one of the the course was you had to swim around

this island and I’m like okay I can see the island I can see people getting on boats and abandoning the course and and one of the one of the boats came up to us and is like hey guys the swims canceled and I’m like bullshit it’s canceled I have to swim point four miles and for this to count and so I look at my wife and I’m like are you okay she’s like I’m great I just keep swimming and I’m like okay I’ll be right here with you site off me and so she is swimming as hard as she can and I figured out like I’m just going to dolphin dive underneath these big waves and I can be more efficient well it gets to the point where I look at my watch and I’m like oh shit the cutoffs to 20 and I’m not going to make it if I stay with my wife and so I’m like sweetheart are you okay I got to go and she’s like yeah yeah fine go go go go make the cutoff and so I turn myself inside out and I try to make this swim cutoff while an Ironman

swim cutoff is about as to 20 and my my my normal swim times about 105 not great but I’m like not out of the conversation yet I got out of the water an hour 51 and I’m just standing on the shore waiting for my my bride to come out of the water my come on make it make it make it all of a sudden I see her and she’s coming and she pops out of the water at two hours and 21 minutes and this cutoff and so kind of it was kind of a heartbreaking so those are my two worst swim moments I’ve ever had and I got a few more because but we’ll move on from from that but that was a long answer to a simple question nah man I love it the amount of the amount of swims you’ve done in in the endurance events that you’ve done like it I can only imagine what has what has gone wrong and maybe what’s gone right at some point as well in terms of the 5050 50 or the Conquer 100 what lessons did you learn just in terms of getting through the swim

to stop chave to make sure that you you know went the right pace what was some of those things that stood out to you after going through that day in Daya yeah it was interesting that the 15 the hundreds were so different in terms of logistics and preparation and where my where my body was where my mind was there was about five years difference between the 50 Ironman’s 50 days 50 states and excuse me and then the Conquer 100 which we did in one remote location and every single day we were in a new state new environment some of them are open water some of them were pool well on day number five in Santa Cruz California I tore my shoulder on the swim and I was a wrestler and I had some shoulder problems and just like just the volume of leading up to that race because I put in a ton of preparation and so the 50 just became pain management because it hurt so bad in fact I did two days in a row the day six and day seven where I swam it with just one

arm and I was figuring out how to adjust to the limitations that I was having and then I quickly realized in terms of pain pain reaches a certain certain threshold and then it just doesn’t get any worse and if you can learn to manage that level of pain you’ll be okay and so I just I reintroduced the other arm back into the swim technique and it was the most painful you know our 10 hour 15 in my day in terms of like pain management but it really really helped me develop that mental toughness and recognizing okay I get to choose how I navigate this this pain and then it was interesting I had the complete opposite experience in during the hundred where we were doing a hundred consecutive 2.4 mile swims it was all in a pool we started in March it was every weather system we could have imagined went through this amazing footage in the documentary that’s coming out next month of just like this cool snowstorm happening and

there’s tons of athletes in the pool just this really cool contrast but the 50 was was was pain and torture and and I hated the swim part the hundred became it was my comfort and it was the the the time of the day during that that that 140 miles where I knew the exact conditions the water temperature was the same I had my own I had my lane and it was a moment where I could actually just like exhale and relax I was totally safe. I knew we actually structured the swim in the 100 very differently because we because of the shoulder problems I’ve had in the past we knew it had to be very controlled and so we and people started going they we went live every single day but some people didn’t have time to watch that obviously and they were like man you are a metronome in the water like your swim times are almost to the second every single day how are you doing and what we were doing is we were doing 100 meter repeats and so we would

do 100 meter repeats 4200 I mean yeah 42 times and we did it on the two minute and so if I came in at 150 I had 10 seconds break and so you know your first 40 what is it 4400 yards. Yes your first 43 were the exact same time and only time difference I had every single day was how fast I did that last 100

but it was but it was the reason it was so different because I wanted to really be in control. I didn’t want to have a shoulder blow out again and the water became my safe haven it became where I had those conversations about how yesterday went how’s today going to go how am I feeling do I need to walk myself through mentally like through every single body part and like give my ankle encouragement or talk to my knee or you know I would I would really process every single day and so I really enjoyed the swim part of the conquer 100 because I felt very safe and controlled in the water. And in the 50 did you feel like you’re going to do irreparable damage to the shoulder or you just knew what the issue was and you thought I can get through it and I’ll be able to fix it later. Yeah that my mindset at the time was I know this is only a seven week challenge and I know whatever damage you do in seven weeks science is amazing and there’s

surgeons and I’ll just fix whatever the problem was and actually never ended up getting it fixed and it’s totally my fault because I get I accomplished the one thing my perception changes as to what’s possible and and then I always move on to what’s next and then I go right into training phase and then execution phase and but there was a big gap between the 50 and the 100 and you’re like well why didn’t you fix it then and I just I just love racing so much and it’s so hard to take time off to fix it because then the mind goes well I’m going to lose lose fitness and I’m going to lose momentum and I’m going to lose all these things when I probably that was would have been the perfect time to get it fixed in the recovery phase and now you know I’m getting close to 50 and I have a couple big challenges coming up over the next couple years and I did I promised my wife that after after these these next couple big races and challenges

that I’ll get it fixed but but it’s just I’ve just learned that I can manage I can manage that level of pain and it’s probably hurting my performance to some degree but you it’s rare that you win an Ironman or these endurance events in the water you can lose it on the water but you just have to be good enough to stay in touch you know what I mean yeah absolutely one of my favorite books is atomic habits by James clear and one of the things that I love about that book the things that he he talks about is having identity based habits so you see yourself as a certain person or a certain way and that makes you do the certain things that are going to be required of you to be that person and few it’s the mentally physically tough person when did you start to identify as that’s me I’m someone who was born to suffer is that something that you were as a kid you realize would it take a while to to work that out yeah I didn’t realize it

in the moment but now looking back on it I can isolate some very specific times when that became my identity I grew up in you know I have three sisters no brothers both my parents are zero interest in athletics and so I found my outlet through team sports and in school and I played every single sport whatever season it was I was playing that and and then as I got into high school I really started to gravitate towards wrestling and if you want to win at a high level you have to specialize and so I quit all sports except for wrestling and that was really when I started to develop some some grit and some mental toughness and and kind of be defined as that person and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard me or heard the story of when I sat on a Ferris wheel at a carnival for 10 days so so I grew up in Calgary Canada and Calgary’s world famous for what’s called the Calgary Stamp eat and it’s one of the largest rodeo stops in the world and it is it’s

10 days long and the city shuts down and it’s a huge party and it’s it’s food it’s ride it’s check wagon races it’s concerts and they do they set up this giant fair and and there was a radio show contest and they said we want to find out who can ride the giant Ferris wheel for the entire 10 days of the Stamp eat and the winner gets 10 grand and I was like and that seems easy I’m like I grew up a wrestler manly tough I can do that and I got on the damn ride and and I was I was shocked when I saw people like quitting and getting off the ride and and I didn’t piece it together then but now after having a lot of knowledge experience and maturity happened in my life I recognize that they were simply losing the conversation they were having with themselves and they weren’t comfortable sitting there with their thoughts and to me that’s that’s true mental toughness is being able to just sit there stewing your thoughts forgive yourself for

your past dream and imagine what the future can look like or just sit there in the present and these people just couldn’t do it and long story short I ended up sitting on the Ferris wheel for 10 days and I won the contest and that’s how I came down to the United States because I had one friend here and I got fired for my job on the ride and and so I had some time and some money and I came down to visit visit my friend in the States and I never went home but I think that looking back though you know really digging into being a wrestler and being it and getting that identity and then I really start recognize that I had control over my mind when I sat on the Ferris wheel for 10 days and it completely changed the direction of my life and so those those kind of key moments and then my entire career has been building upon that mental toughness and it’s now what I’m what I’m most recognized for is is that mental ability.

Is there different stages in a process that you go through when you’re sitting on a Ferris wheel for 10 days or when you’re going through a 50 or the hundred like is it you know like the five stages of grief is there a similar sort of thing when it comes to just being okay with your thoughts. Yeah, yeah for sure and and I think that’s one of the biggest problems with the distractions of social media. It’s just drawing all of our attention and it’s funny. I saw it’s a hilarious thing online the other day where someone was like mindfulness. We we’re now in a society and a time where we have to intentionally seek out and be mindfulness, meaning like inside of our own thoughts and and contemplate and meditation and you think like I don’t know how you older how old you are but I’m turning 48 and the person doing the video is about the same age and they were like back in our day that was like going to the bathroom like you were mindfulness.

It was like walking outside. It was like I had to get from point A to point B like there wasn’t anything to really distract us. And so we were mindfulness all the time and the word didn’t even exist back then is because normal life and society by as a byproduct of it you you had to become mindfulness. There was so many opportunities and moments where you’re just like sitting by yourself in your thoughts. Being mindful of of who you are what you’re doing dreaming like I talk about this from stage like as a society we have forgotten how to dream because we’re so busy fixated on what other people are doing and and we’re experiencing life through them that like we don’t we’ve we’ve we’ve stopped dreaming and that that’s paralyzing society right now because we’re so involved and connected through through these devices that we’re no longer dreaming we’re no longer being mindfulness to the point where there’s now ways and opportunities for us to intentionally

become mindfulness like it’s so crazy to me. Yeah, it makes me think of Jesse it’s like he he’s got these big ass calendar and I if you’ve seen that that we’re good friends. Yeah, so he so I ended up buying a big 2024 calendar and I have it on the wall. Big it’s like and just that alone to think 12 months in advance what are the what are the big challenges? What are the big things I want to do and let’s put those on the calendar. Let’s just take that time and then you can feel life in around that like that alone for me was just like it’s like clearing the whiteboard it’s like all right we can actually just sit here and be much more intentional with the things that that I want to do for the year. It’s that you’re right it’s just so easy to get caught into this into this trap of having the phone there and then we just don’t go and live our own lives or make plans or have big dreams and think about the next couple of challenges so is that we’re real quick

in fact it’s why I think swimming is so powerful for the Mike

because you you you can’t really bring technology into the water with you. Now we’re starting to see more of these finally headphones that work in the water and stuff but they’re a little bit gimmicky from time to time and sometimes they work and it’s muffled sound and so like I just like forget it I’m just going to swim but swimming is really an opportunity for us to be mindful and just in our thoughts and I think that’s one of the reasons why swimming is very challenging for people too because it’s like wait a second I have to disconnect in order to do this activity right and so it’s very challenging because you literally have to be in your own thoughts in the water like you almost don’t have another choice. Yeah that’s that’s exactly right and it’s that’s like why I think I feel so good coming out of the water coming out from a like from a surf it’s like if I get a good hour in the in the pool maybe two or three hours in the surf it’s like I just feel like

that like my day is much more more complete and then I can get everything else down a whole lot easier when that’s the case it’s it’s just that’s the beauty of the sport it is that that physical meditation and something that’s I’m sure you’re very good at just doing the things that you’ve done how do you get that outside of I mean you train a lot right like is that how you kind of get that get that fix and just you’re training day in day out or is there because I’m thinking of like Alexander Valkanovsky like I love UFC I love watching that and I remember hearing him when he said I don’t have a when I didn’t have a fight on the cars when I didn’t have something to work towards he got in his own head too much and became a bit depressed and hit a real low and he needed something to work towards is that do you find you have a similar sort of thing when you you just need to have the next thing ahead of you to train towards yeah and it’s not even the next thing to train towards

it’s just being intentional about doing the training or some type of activity

physical activity and getting outdoors is I’m going to cancel for this but it’s secured to depression it straight up is like you spiral in depression the more you sit at home in isolation in darkness and seriously when you distract yourself when you do physical activity when you get outside it clears your mind in fact the other night I just kind of had a rough day at a lot of my plate and my I’m just doing a ton and I love it and it’s my own fault but I just headless like the biggest thing is we’re switching a lot of our marketing the way that we’re doing we’re we’re on boarding with a new team we’re off boarding from another offloading from another one lot going on a lot of stresses a lot of different directions we’re going and I just like I was at the end of my day and I was just like feeling that anxious like I’d like like short of breath almost and I just looked at my wife sunny and I said I got to go for a run and she’s like it’s it’s like 930 at night you’ve already worked

out to them I got to get outside like I’m I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight or if I if I do it’s not going to be quality and I just one hour one hour and I I didn’t run fast I just no headphones just got outside could hear the pounding on my feet could hear my breath and was just in my thoughts and when I came home guess what I had zero anxiety I had processed a bunch of the things that that was that I was worrying about and all I did was get outside and move and it was incredible to shift I love the saying that a motion creates emotion or I’ll even say motion shifts emotions and so when you’re feeling something the worst thing to do is to sit still with no distractions because that’s just an opportunity for us to hyper focus on the problem at hand which now magnifies because in life what what we choose to focus on magnifies and so if you’re focusing on the problems the anxiety the depression guess what gets worse the problems the anxiety the depression

so get outside move your bodies jump in some water swim do all these things unplug and poof it all clears up it’s makes such a difference doesn’t it and once once throughout the door a lot of those problems seem to seem to go away I I know you’ve been running well you’ve run two retreats so far that you get people in and they and you basically like mindset weekends talk to me about what’s the inspiration behind those and then what are some of the takeaways that you’ve had from running those two retreats yeah incredible experience both for us coaches and attendees I didn’t realize how life-changing it was going to be for us and them and and we have about 25 people at each one of our retreats so it’s a little bit more intimate and you know we’re talking offline how I’ve been professionally speaking for 10 years now I’ve spoken in over 50 countries around the world it’s just been incredible like I never thought that this is what I would be doing and I mean there’s a whole lesson

in that too just like just living life and all of a sudden your passion will present itself to you and you end up doing something that’s so purposeful which is these retreats for us now but every time I got off stage people are like wow how do I become more mentally tough and I’m like oh it’s super easy just show up in your life and and have experiences and you you’ll gain that knowledge and you just here’s this here’s a secret intentionally hard things and your mind will expand and you’ll become more mentally tough it’s like one plus one is too that’s like super easy and they were like oh okay great and then they would write me back and they’re like I can’t do it on my own I just keep quitting on myself and so I’m like okay people can’t conjure up their own experiences to become more mentally tough I’ll put one on I’ll invite people to go through an experience with me and so we did the first one and every single attendee every single one man that was that was incredible

that was life-changing I could have never done that on my own and I was like whoa maybe we’re onto something let’s do it again and we did it again every single attendee man that was incredible that was life-changing and as his coaches we were learning it was just so incredible and so now we’ve got some more on the calendar we’ve got one in May in San Diego, California and I’m just like super pumped we’re actually bringing in Mike Riley the voice of Iron Man he lives right there he’s going to come speak and I haven’t asked him yet and he might listen to this he might not but I’m friends with you you’re right Faber and he lives he lives in California and so I’m going I’m going to invite him to come out because part of every one of our iron grid experiences is we do some type of combat and so in the first one we had a boxing in the second one we did Mu Tai fighting and and if I I’ve said this before on podcasts but if I had like a magic wand

and I could make a universal law for everybody it would be that every every single person has to do two years of mixed martial arts combat training

because to me it it instills confidence it it instills discipline respect body control strength agility like there’s so many things that that come from that I mean in fact in fact my son he’s 14 and from 14 to 16 every week he has to do mixed martial arts and so we have a coach that comes to our house she’s she’s a she’s a badass fighter name’s her name’s Tandy she she had a great career she she kind of pioneered the female division she was actually scheduled to fight Ronda Rousey and then got injured and then got injured and then it never happened and she was forced into retirement so she’s she’s a badass for sure and so these angry experiences have just been just been a gift for us as coaches and the attendees we learn a ton because it’s all walks of life show up to these things like we that’s one thing we can’t control who shows up and who registers and every single time we’ve had like from 22 to 65 show up and a good split between men and women

of all walks of life and we’ve just I’ve just really learned that people don’t want to do life by themselves and they’re losing the conversations that they’re having with themselves and they’re getting them their own way and so once you once you put community in place and then challenge people inside that community all of a sudden we start to see people loving leveling up in a big way and so it’s just been a lot of fun and I see it as being a big part of our business model and the direction we’re going because man what a what a better way to impact people’s lives is is through connection and activity and experiences

before we dive into the rest of today’s podcast episode this episode is proudly brought to you by form smart swim goggles they’ve been a long time sponsor of the podcast and they are my go-to goggles when it comes to tracking my training sessions and being able to see what’s happening in real time through the goggles and we know swimming is a highly technical sport but without the guidance of a coach on deck identifying and addressing technique flaws can be a challenge they’ve recently added a new feature to the goggles head coach and this addresses that problem head on it gives them as improved access to their technique awareness focus skill development and in app education and analysis head coach provides real time visual coaching via the form smart swim goggles augmented reality display during and after a swim head coach provides them as with technique feedback using two types of metrics form score and head coach skills form score is a measurement

of overall swim efficiency ranging from zero to one hundred defined by your pace and your stroke length head coach skills encompasses five key areas that will help you identify where to focus on improving with your efficiency head roll head pitch set pacing interval pacing and breathing time to neutral and after completing a session you can check back in on the form app to track your progress and head coach provides swimmers from beginner to expert with an unprecedented level of data driven guidance and understanding enabling you to boost your performance and your speed get your pair of form smart swim goggles today click the link in our podcast description or use the code effortless on check out to get 15% off your form smart swim goggles absolutely and even more so these days with social media and ai all those sorts of things like people are craving for something in real life something with other people and we run four or four or five camps overseas camps that are

this mean based and it’s like every single time it’s like you need those 20 people to come together to go through this challenging five days or seven days and then they come out of it the other side a different person they’ve made new friends they’ve suffered together with other people and that gives you such a a bigger connection than anything else you can do with someone it’s that suffering together and and going through those shared experiences that a later to make new friends quickly and I think when people do that kind of thing they often tend to know more about the other people a lot more than they would with some of their their own friends back home because they’re just they’re not isolated together but they’re just spending really sort of quality time together where they’re not distracted by work or phone or family it’s just yeah getting that kind of environment and you can have some really special things happen and I went to blink like to last week they’re here

in here in Melbourne unreal and I was just thinking like yeah 100,000 people seeing together all there for one purpose that like it creates something special and we’ve got Taylor Swift here as well 100,000 people at the MCG I didn’t get tickets I was trying to get tickets but like I just see the videos that some friends are posting it’s like that that is something special when you get people together all for the same cause yeah it’s this immersive experience that you can’t duplicate and it was interesting the first retreat that we did it was in CNAB Utah which is fairly remote and it’s just like Red Rock beautiful

and so nobody was on their phones and then we started this like message board group with all the attendees afterwards and the connection and the communication and the the followups and everything like in three days this group of 20 plus people was just like so connected and so bonded and it’s it’s created these like lifetime friendships already it’s just been so fun and really fulfilling to to facilitate these and put it together I I had no idea that I was going to benefit so much just like emotionally and and spiritually and just all of it from from putting on these like selfishly I’m like how do how do I do these every single month like it’s just like benefits me so much to watch the the community aspect of it happen I’ve just I’ve just just really been drawn to it that’s awesome I want to read a quote I’m sure you’ve heard but it’s by by Jim Rowan when I was thinking about the podcast I’m I’m planning the podcast and I’m I’m thinking about the questions and then this

this quote just popped into my mind because I’ve heard it a lot and it’s Jim Rowan’s quote of don’t wish it were easier wish you were better don’t wish for less problems wish for more skills don’t wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom how does that relate how do you what do you think about when when you hear that quote and how that relates to what you’ve gone through over the last decade yeah I was actually on Jim Rowan’s podcast a couple of years ago really enjoyed my time with them but but I love that quote too and in fact I say from stage all the time like life’s not going to get easier you just get better and and it’s because we’re having this experience during the 50 where every single day was chaos and confusion and and I also say the quote that like

oh my gosh I’m forgetting the quote persistence and resilience only come from having been given a chance to work through difficult problems and and if you’re dealing with things in your life right now that are that are like making you pause and think and problem-solve like that’s one of the greatest gifts because as you get better again through experiences that you have to have as you get better you become more knowledgeable and can handle more things and and

in life you need to do things that challenge you every single day so that when something happens in normal life that’s a challenge or difficult to most you’re like oh this is easy I can navigate this in fact real quick story I was on a I was on a TV show called the world’s toughest race and it was a Mark Burnett production Bear Grills was the host it was on it it’s on animals on prime it’s 10 episodes mapping compass through the back back part of Fiji like we’re doing activities like a thousand foot ascend up a waterfall and jungle trekking with machetes and and there was five major camps and every time we’d come into a camp where teams of four and every time we’d come into camp like we were laughing and smiling and they were like why are you guys having such a good time? This is the hardest thing you’ve ever done and they kept wanting me to say on camera like this is the hardest race on the planet but the reality was is me and the wingman

had done a 50 day challenge and this was an eight day challenge and so for us we were like oh we have to we just have to do something hard for eight days where all the other teams were like suffering and complaining and sitting in their misery and is this ever going to end and all these other things and we were just like and this is a blast like we were having such a good time because our our baseline for what was hard was so dramatically different from everybody else I was racing and again that’s the challenge to put out there to the audience today is like do really hard things so that when hard life happens it’s like this is no big deal I what I did last weekend with my bros was way harder than this right because because look at I mean I mean rent and look at look at the look at the pandemic like when the pandemic happened everyone was so riddled with fear and chaos and confusion and the unknown and I guarantee you every single every single one of you

can look around at your peers and your friends and your coworkers and go and they’re a pile of mush on the ground and this person is thriving what’s the difference the circumstances the same it’s how they’re handling it it’s how they’re navigated it’s the experiences they’ve had in the past to deal with their current reality right so I love that called by Jim Rom and it truly it truly resonates with me because you have to do those things intentional so that everybody else is difficult becomes normal and simplistic to you

I was thinking about this the other week when I think of my I’ve got two young boys they’re five and seven and in terms of you know like upbringing I didn’t have it like a super hard you know upbringing my parents were amazing and all of that and but like physically it was very tough because we’re swimming eight nine times a week and so if I want them to have that kind of grit and determination you know that they’ve got a good upbringing as well so I’ve got a challenge they’ve got to be challenged physically give it to them in in that in that kind of way so and I and that’s something that you can voluntarily choose to do you have to choose some kind of suffering or else it’s going to it’s going to be chosen for you and that that physical one and nothing nothing better than that I love that you said it’s going to be chosen for you because I’m a massive advocate of this and and I believe if we continually choose discomfort

we’re going to have options our entire life meaning we can be comfortable or discomfort if we only choose the path of least resistance and comfort now eventually our only option will be discomfort because all luxuries of life and we we will not have become strong enough physically or mentally because we’re so complacent and lazy and and seeking that path of least resistance you’re going to wake up one day and your only option will be discomfort and the problem is is you’re not going to be ready to handle that discomfort

and you’re going to have a really hard time

I remember hearing you talk about the motivation for the for the 50 was very different than the than the hundred that and for the 50 I think I remember hearing you say it was about like you have to do this in order to be able to take that next step with your with your career and like to do it for your family and like was a very different drive and motivator can you talk to me a bit about about that and then how it shifted for the hundred yeah you know when you’re doing something that is like really big or when the public is like ruthlessly telling you it’s impossible right because that’s that’s what happened with both these projects first and foremost we tied a charitable component to it something kind of bigger than who we are because that’s always a good reason to kind of get up when when things get tough and so the first one we did childhood obesity and we it’s a terrible statistic that I share is where the first generation ever where the parents are slated to outlive

the kids and at the time of the 50 my kids were

and I was in the the school system a ton and in the elementary schools and the epidemic of obesity was just in your face and so I was like okay we’re going to do something to raise money and awareness for this and then in 08 we I own a mortgage company and things were going great and then the economic crash happened and we lost everything and we we had to kind of hit the reset button and start to rebuild and that’s when I kind of really got big into racing I was dominating the local space I started doing some coaching and then I was like okay how can I separate myself from other people in the coaching space I need I need so because I wasn’t the fastest right so I need to kind of a gimmick and so I’m like well I’ll just break some world records that’ll be a great gimmick and and went went down that route to separate myself from others but during the 50 because we’d lost everything I was like my life has potential to be different if I complete this if I don’t quit on

myself enough reasons why to get through this then then my life could be different and and I wasn’t wrong it completely changed after we completed that task because it opened 10 different doors that I was able to walk through and and create the the multi-million dollar brand that we have now and then the hundred was very different to now I have four teenage girls and a teenage son and in our faces sex trafficking and the reality of that with

we’re like okay what can we do to double what everybody said was impossible to go defy logic let’s do a hundred let’s go to 14,000 consecutive miles with no days off and let’s go do it to raise money to eradicate sex trafficking and over that campaign we raised over a million dollars which has gone on to free so many lives of that we’re living a tragic existence and for me personally the reason of the why changed because I was financially stable now

well documented something we’ve never run for never hid from we made some mistakes during the 50 we were doing something that nobody else had ever done it’s in the book it’s in the documentary it’s on every friggin thread in the triathlon world and blogs and success magazine and runners were I mean you name it we they talked about it and so part of the 100 became very personal for me and I wanted to reset my own history I I wanted to prove that I am who I said I was and my team is who they said they they

50 days and then just took that momentum and and doubled it and so it’s a very personal journey for me on the second one but in both journeys you have to you have to tie an emotional component to whatever you’re doing or when it gets real and you’re back into a corner and it’s dark and depression and anxiety setting in and you feel alone and you’re starting to really lose the conversations you’re having with yourself and that doubt creeps in

and maybe they are you know you start having all these conversations that bully in your head gets really louder and obnoxious and luck and then you’re going to choose to win that conversation or not and so the hundred became very personal the back half of it to just really cement who we are as a team and showcase what’s possible and I am so friggin excited for this new documentary to come out next I don’t know when this is going to drop but March 27 is the the premier showing here in Utah at Sundance and then it’ll hit all the streaming platforms that will go up on our social media and then shortly thereafter our new book Iron Hope will come out because that’s truly what our purpose and passion is now is to give people hope on the journey that they’re on. In fact my favorite book and you told me yours but my favorite book and James Clear Tom McCabbits is in my list but my favorite book is Man’s Search Remini by Victor Franco and it’s a story about a guy who was a a psychologist

who was in the Nazi concentration camps and he happened to be one of the rare survivors and

that book is about hope and he could tell the moment that somebody lost hope because they died and if that’s true then hope is life and that’s really what we’re trying to help people do now is give them hope on their journey because as I’ve traveled around the world I’ve just recognized that there’s not a lot of hope people are are just like walking around wondering why why they’re here what their purpose is do they have worth all these conversations are having to themselves and so our family’s mission has now become to to help people like I said win those conversations and give them hope on the journey and and help them understand that they are enough and and just keep showing up and and ultimately that’s how you win is by keep showing up

Yeah to I’ve spoke about this on the last couple of podcasts but I love the thought of finite games versus infinite games where like the infinite games are ones that you can’t win so as long as you don’t quit as long as long as you just keep at it you’re going to you’re going to to win that game like there’s there’s no end point but it’s something that you’ve just got to you got to keep doing and sounds like I’ll just share real quick story about that concept back to that race in Fiji there was 67 countries participating in this race and because the race was in Fiji the the host country kind of like the Olympics they were given a spot into the race now this Fijian team had the worst equipment they had no training they they had zero experience and nobody gave these Fijians a chance of clearing the course super challenging right and I’ll be damned they were the last team but they cleared the course and they beat every single team that quit and they understood without understanding it

that if you just keep chipping away at a task and you don’t quit eventually you’re going to get there and in life sometimes it’s not in the timeframe that we wanted to but that just means we haven’t learned the lessons we need to learn along the way fast enough and the same crap’s going to keep happening to us until we learn those lessons but these dang Fijians man I’m telling you the worst bikes on the planet zero coaching no terrible equipment no money biggest smile on their faces and just like kept chipping away at the tasks and I’ll be damned to beat every single team that quit I was it was so cool to be there at the finish line when they when they finally crossed and we were there to welcome them welcome them home ah how good that is there any other any other standout lessons that you’ve had over the last decade or so that you wish you could pass on to your kids or pass on to anyone who comes to see you speak or who watch the documentary what what are some of those other

key lessons that have yeah come your way I’ll give you two more and and one of them is you know it people think the hardest thing to do is is is the thing and so they never start and and they just keep building up the enormity of it and Alex Ramosi has a great quote that fear is a mile wide but an inch deep and people would recognize that they could walk and navigate on their feet through this fear but it takes showing up and taking action and once you get started you recognize oh man that wasn’t as bad as I thought like like Brandon have you ever had a task or something that you’re totally dreading doing and then you keep putting it off and it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then you finally have the guts to do that task and you’re like damn it that was six minutes and it’s been been plaguing me for two weeks you know what I mean and that’s that’s so the case with everything we we build it up so big in our heads and it becomes bigger bigger and bigger so challenge

number one just start like if you’ve got an idea intuition intuitions a whole huge thing like just start the other gift the other gift that I’ve given my kids is to not give a shit about what anybody thinks and anybody that’s navigating life right now and like trust me this is going to sound harsh nobody cares everybody’s

how they look and my all this other nonsense like nobody cares in fact a great book that if you want to put it on your list is the subtle art of not giving an F by Mark Manson phenomenal rate I would put it up there in my top five just because that concept is so powerful and and in fact society is being paralyzed by fear right now fear of judgment about what other people are thinking and it’s stopping you it’s derailing you and freezing you in your tracks the greatest gift you can give anybody and especially yourself is to not care what anybody else thinks it is so damn freeing to show up in your life and and live your life without a care about what anybody else thinks now that doesn’t mean about like don’t care about people and don’t care about things but like stop caring so much what anybody else’s opinion is of you and like if you if you’re good dude and if what if whatever it is man of Pokemon your thing hell yeah nail it like just be the best dang Pokemon player

you can be I got to care what your passion is anymore like just go do it I’m not going to make any I’m not going to make fun of anybody for like showing up and just doing whatever makes them happy and that’s the key is stop listening to people and if whatever you’re doing makes you happy to just keep doing it man because that’s the purpose of this life is to be happy and to find joy and if that’s what makes you happy great do it all day every day and just don’t care what I don’t I love it I feel like when I be becoming a dad like in my 20 I became a dad when I was 20 how old was I 28 I think but prior to that I I cared a lot more about what people thought and as you’re making your way you know like I was building effortless swimming I was working my way up as a coach and that sort of thing like you you kind of feel like you need to prove something to to people but then as you get a little bit older maybe get some wins on the board and

life and it’s my kids I don’t care about what other people think and it’s it is just such a different way of living and I can see like as when I was a teenager now you might look at your your parents and stuff and go like they do some embarrassing things and I can’t leave like my friends think what what they might think if you know if they see this but I can see now you’re being a dad it’s just like I’m going to embarrass the hell out of my kids because I just don’t care what their mates are going to think and I find a lot I find a lot of joy in embarrassing my kids now my kids are now four three one actually my oldest daughter just got married we’re just in such a cool space of life right now but I’m turning 48 this year and and every years I get older like my my not given F meter just keeps going up and so I mean it probably can’t get higher than it is right now but maybe it can but I just think it’s a gift to people to not care what anybody thinks do you and just show up on life and do you

like

that you got to show with honesty and integrity if you if you if you’re showing up with honesty and integrity and you’re not hurting anybody else then do do whatever you want to do like but but if it’s like impacting someone in a negative way that’s where I’m like I need to reevaluate that’s right but but don’t don’t care don’t care everybody’s things but keep showing up with honesty and integrity

James this has been fantastic I’ve really enjoyed this this conversation with you three years in the making and

stuff coming out and that a lot happening obviously where can people find find you and just let us know what what you’ve got coming up yeah please follow us on Instagram iron cowboy James that’s where we post all of our races we’re doing all the retreats that we put on the masterminds that we have the new documentary that’s coming out about the Conquer 100 I promise you it’ll be a treat you’re going to want to watch it and then our new book called iron hope coming out in January 2025 so going to be a lot of incredible things coming out and it’ll help fulfill our mission of giving people hope and then our website is just iron cowboy dot com and it links to everything there so thank you for having us on the show and allowing me to share a little bit of my journey with your audience you’re phenomenal at what you do like if I could if I could just like like hone in and just like absorb some of your swimming prowess it would be amazing

I appreciate it very much and I mean I remember watching your your 50 journey and just going this guy’s crazy I don’t know how he’s doing it getting up every morning so it’s it’s really cool to see this this come around to have you on the podcast so thanks James I appreciate it we’ll link to all those website Instagram in the show notes and go and check out documentary thanks James awesome man cheers 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 Choosing Your Suffering: How Anyone Can Become Mentally Tough with James ‘Iron Cowboy’ Lawrence appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s podcast episode, professional triathlete and coach Mitch Kibby shares his journey from having little swimming background as a child to becoming a front pack swimmer in the pro field. He is the head coach and founder of i4 Coaching and has worked with Effortless Swimming at our clinics and camps. Mitch discusses his strategies for improving swimming performance and offers valuable insights and tips for swimmers and triathletes looking to improve their skills. Tune in now!

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.

You’d always sort of been more of like a second pack sort of swimmer in triathlon. Typically, yeah, did like second pack, not quite making the front pack, but you made a change that that I found was really, really interesting. And without doing those sets that expose you, you’re really, you’re only going to find out on race day and often the answer is not what you want. So yeah, I think that was really good value. 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.

On today’s episode, we have professional triathlete, Mitch Kibbey. He’s coached our camps and our clinics, and he’s one of the best coaches when it comes to describing how things should feel and cues that swimmers can use to help those changes stick in their stroke. He’s a terrific coach and more than that, he’s an excellent athlete. He’s gone from essentially being a non swimmer as a kid to being able to compete at the top level in the front pack at a world championship level. So on today’s podcast episode, I asked Mitch, what did he do to get to that level? What would he recommend other swimmers and triathletes do to improve their swimming? And what are some of those things that you’ve used as a coach to help people improve their swimming? Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is someone who I’ve tried to get on the podcast for years and years and years and he’s finally given in.

I’ve twisted his arm enough to get him on the podcast. It’s a good friend and fellow coach, I was about to call you Mitch Patterson. Mitch Kibbey, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Brenton. Yeah, just a couple of feet tall and Mitch Patterson. But yeah, hopefully the same presence when you’re when you’re with me. Well, I love to tell the story of how we first met because it’s we’re all down at Elwood Beach with a what became a mutual friend. And we were down there going for an open water swim. And here we are thinking we decent swimmers. And then this young kid rocks up and he says, I would love to mind if I go for a swim with you guys. And here we are thinking, yeah, good luck keeping up with us, mate. And we go out for a swim and what do you know? We can’t drop you and we’re trying our hardest and we ended up swimming together. And from that, that day, it formed a friendship that’s lasted all the way up until today.

And that was probably that was probably a good 12 years ago. Do you reckon? Yeah. From that, we spent a bit of time coaching next to each other, your coaching power points. And I think I was filling in for tribal triathlon club at the time at MSAC. So after that swim, I was seeing you sort of once a week for a month period. And yeah, I think it’s about the really strong friendship since then. And you’ve been a pro triathlete for quite a while now. And I want to dig into that. Talk about your swimming background and what you’ve done to get your swim to the point where you’re able to mix it with the best triathletes in the world. So I want to talk about that, but also bring on your coaching experience because you’ve come along to a lot of the camps that we effortlessly have run. And you’ve run a lot of clinics as well for us, because when I saw you coaching next to me, what I’d noticed was that you had a really good way

of conveying your ideas and explaining some of the points, getting people to know what they need to feel for and what they should be aiming for. And that sort of coaching, I thought was like, this guy’s really good and he knows his stuff and he genuinely cares about the person that he’s talking to. So that’s, I think, what made me want to start to bring you into the stuff that we were doing, and it’s been a lot of fun having you on those camps and on those clinics and being able to coach together. So I want to draw on some of your coaching experience as well on today’s call. So just to kind of kick it off, what was your swimming background prior to doing triathlon? So I guess I’d classify myself as a footy club swimmer. So growing up, I played Australian rules, football and cricket. And I was as passionate about both those sports as anyone else. And I did very little swimming. And in fact, I only thought triathlon existed on TV at the Olympics.

And I used to love it when it’d come around. It’d be the marquee sport of my two week Olympic campaign. I just couldn’t wait to watch it. But I had very little to no exposure to it in Australia at home because I spent all my weekends in summer on the cricket field. So basically I did some swimming at school. I never had formal lessons or did any squad swimming outside. So I was very much just relied on my fitness as a as a runner to translate in the pool. And as many people know, it doesn’t cross over particularly well. I did a few sort of school carnivals and relays and things like that. But I would swim, yeah, probably at best three to four times a year. And it wasn’t until I finished school and I moved up to Noosa with a good friend of mine. The Noosa triathlon actually came past our doorstep and I went down and got talking to a guy who competed in it. I’d never know his name and probably, yeah, never going to see him again.

But thanks to him, he really lit a spark and showed me that triathlon is accessible to everyone. And, yeah, from from there, I went down to Rebelsport in Brisbane and I bought a triathlon suit and I was actually quite lucky because that day I remember I was tossing up between this old discounted eyeliner triathlon suit or a pair of skins, compression shorts and a compression t-shirt that was white. And I was going to go the white skins and the white t-shirt. But I reckon if I had bought that, not the eyeliner suit, I would have been one and done in the triathlon scene because it would have come across too well. But, yeah, anyway, I bought that suit. I bought a bike out of the trading post and I went down and did a couple of the Queensland triathlon series, the old Gatorade series up there. And, yeah, I was sort of instantly hooked on the sport. I loved it. I was side by side in life’s position out of the water

with another guy. But, yeah, my first race was a fairly traumatic swim. I looked up at the course. It was only 400 meters swim and I just thought I’d be able to give it a bit of energy and sort of come out with anyone else.

Mostly just because I felt like I wanted it more than anyone else, but I got sort of 50 to 100 meters in and realized that things were starting to get heavy and 400 meters was starting to feel like a long way around. So, yeah, I was pretty happy to get back on land that day and then really loved the rest of my first race, but found out I had quite a bit of work to do in the water after that. And basically my early years of swimming started just going down to the public pool. I think I’d get through about 1,000 to 1,200 meters. Give myself a bit of a pat on the back when I walked out and, yeah, sort of tried to do that about three times a week. It really wasn’t until I moved back to Melbourne to start university at the end of that year, so that was 2008, 2007, sorry, no, 2008. And I linked up with Andy Sleiman at Triathlon Club and he was really the first person that sort of showed me the way in swimming, taught me the sort of fundamental etiquette

and, yes, I spent the next couple of years training with that group and really putting a lot of time into learning swimming as I would have if I had have started in the squads when I was sort of 12 or 13. So probably always felt like I was a decade behind where I needed to be, but as a 19, 20 year old, I was pretty keen to make up that time as quickly as possible. Don’t you love how naive you were going into that first race? You look at, like, just, yeah, find a meters easy. I’m gonna, as long as I give a good effort, I’ll be coming out really well. And of course, you just, you absolutely smoke yourself and then you end up feeling with lactic acid and having a traumatic experience that could put you out of the water for a long time. But yeah, what I love about that is that you see someone like you where you are now, people just think, oh, they’ve always been a good swimmer. You know, they haven’t had to, like,

work that much for it. Where, matter of fact, it’s the complete opposite. Like, you’ve got, you started from hardly being able to swim at all to now where you are. And I know the amount of time and dedication and thought and effort that you’ve put into get where you are. So just nothing comes easier or comes quickly. It’s a long, long process. Looking back, how did you think at the time that it would take this long to kind of get to this point? No, not really. Like, I guess my asking my 20-year-old self how long it would take. And I think particularly at that time we had so many successful Australian athletes on the world stage. Like Emma Snowsill was winning gold medals. Brad Carterfout and Courtney Actonson were just always podium or top five at the World Triathlon races. And then of course, Greg Alexander and Chris McCormack what they had done in the Ironman races. So I guess as an Aussie I felt like that was gonna be my path too.

And it was just a matter of, yeah, a couple of years down the track I’d win a national title and then probably being conservative two or three years after that I should win my first world title. And then it’s just gonna be downhill with the wind from there. But I think I was always aware and willing to put the work in. And I think I always had a longer term view that for me I might develop a little slower than what some others had. And it might be a 10 or 15 year journey to where I wanted to go. And now I am 15 years down the track. And yeah, I feel like, yeah, there’s still plenty of years ahead of me to keep going down that path. But I guess my early experiences with swimming were really my biggest asset as a coach because when people do walk into an effort or swimming clinic or an offer coaching swim sessions, I can sort of look at them and get a read on how they’re feeling and sort of what their sort of mental

and emotional state is coming to the pool. And it’s one of the first things that I look for when I meet a new swimmer and having been there myself and have to sort of learn the hard way and manufacture the right thoughts to have around your swimming. I think it’s just helped me create a bit of a dialogue with that swimmer to soften the challenge for the day and just, first and foremost, get them enjoying what they’re doing and feeling like they can start to build some confidence from a pretty early, early part of their swim journey. What were some of those early things that you did to be able to get over that first hump or that first hurdle where it means a bit of a chore, it’s hard work and you don’t have much rhythm? What were some of those things that Andy worked on with you in the early days because I had another pro triathlete, Matthew McElroy on recently and when he was talking about the things that he did in the early days,

it’s quite different to what he’s doing now. He did a lot of swimming with double pool boy, band around the ankles, just working on that core control. And like these days, he doesn’t really do that at all but he had to do some different things initially to kind of get over that initial learning period. So I was curious what it is for you. Yeah, well, I guess back a step for that before I sort of really started going down that’s like the squad swimming path, I’ll actually give a shout out to one of my good mates, David Bardol. His dad, Albie had actually swum the English Channel and at the time that I was coming into it, they set up a little ice burgers group down in Melbourne. And one of my very first day from water swims in Melbourne, we met on Black Rock Beach at six AM and it was pitch black and I went down as Dave’s mate and sort of a guest of the group and they had a little circuit that they’d do a couple of times a week.

But when I was standing on the sand there, went to put my goggles on, my goggles snapped and Dave handed me his goggles and said, look, you take these, I don’t need them. I know this loop, I know where we’re going. And anyway, he took me out and he was a far better swimmer than I was. I’ll say at the time because I think I’ve got him covered now but I’ll never forget how patient he was with me. He waited with me while we went around the loop and basically just was just the perfect sort of introduction to open water swimming and made me love the sport because my first experience there was really positive. I got to hang out with my mate. It was, we got to watch the sunrise come up over the bay and you step out of the water and you’ve just had the day off to such a great start. So I think, yeah, that really lit a spark and gave me some passion for swimming. And I think I’ve never really lost it since then. A lot of people say that swimming’s just

their biggest chore in the week. But I’ve always looked at it like, it’s just such a luxury to be able to go to the pool and have a swim and understand what it is you’re doing and to be quite competent at it. So yeah, but it is difficult to remind yourself that sometimes when you’re tired and you just need to get it done. But I think I’ve always loved swimming and that’s been such a fortunate mindset to have. But then going through my sort of more formal swimming development, I think Andy really taught me that etiquette about sort of reading the pace clock and connecting a swim warmup, a maidset and a cool down and just sort of installing some gears in your swimming. And then I went on and swam with Mentone Grammar, Mentone Aquatic for probably three or four years. And that was when I was racing ITU triathlon and the swimmers at that squad were at a really good level. They trained really hard and we had a bunch of triathletes that came in.

And I would say that we just worked really hard in the pool for those few years. And there wasn’t many times where I walked away with petrol in the tank, but I think I learned how to suffer in those swims. And particularly with things like doing kick, I wasn’t a natural kicker and connecting the sort of top half and the bottom half of my stroke was really difficult. And if you threw me a kickboard, I’d pretty much go on the spot. But I think as a discipline thing for the swim squad, at one point we had to do 20, 50s of kick on the minute to start every session for the week. And I was basically getting to the point where I was touching on 59 or 60 seconds and going. So the first 20 minutes of the swim was pretty much all out kick for me. But in a short period after, I started to get competent and improve with the kick. And then when I would be swimming freestyle, I’d sort of be able to connect the top and bottom.

And that really just took the breaks off from my swim strike. And then, yeah, I guess that’s where just started to get an understanding of how different swim sets and intervals can impact your swimming level. So doing some overspeed stuff with long rests versus doing some threshold stuff with short rest and just getting a sense of the interplay and how to basically build an effective swim program. So yeah, that was probably through my early 20s that I started to grasp that. And then probably the biggest step in my swimming journey was when I had the opportunity to train with Darren Smith and his squad. I spent two years with Darren and that was really a swimming revolution for me. He pretty much stripped back everything I knew and he did. He gave me double pool boy and I spent a lot of time swimming with double pool boy and basically tried to… He treated me as a non-swimmer even though at that time I felt like I’d done

three or four years and I could be the sort of being thought pretty looking freestyle swimmer. But Darren said, no, Mitch, you’re never gonna be that swimmer. Let’s teach you about stroke rate and rating up and let’s get you fitter and getting you sitting on top of the water and learning how to basically create an effective catch and pull. So I think at that time, yeah, it really sort of transformed my learning on the swim. But again, one of the great assets for me as a coach from that time was I had to really think my way through and Darren really challenged me to think about what I was doing and to be able to actually make the changes that he wanted to see from pool deck. And I found it really hard. I found that really difficult to be able to do that. And in that time, that’s when I came up with a lot of these little cues or little sayings, I guess, that would basically just stop me from going mad in the water.

But I think that’s the dialogue that I can help share with some other swimmers. And I think I’ve been able to refine them to a way that I can make swimming make sense to many more people. Yeah, I find a lot of it comes from that personal experience, whether it be from your own swimming or you start working with people and then you start to develop these ideas. And in terms of where you’re at now, if you don’t mind sharing the story of a couple of months ago when you were training with a very good triathlon swimmer and what it sort of made you realize in terms of your ability in the water, because you’d always sort of been more of like a second pack sort of swimmer in triathlon. Typically, yeah, like second pack, not quite making the front pack, but you made a change that I found was really, really interesting. We talked about this on our Thailand cap. But if you don’t mind sharing that story because I found it super helpful and interesting.

Yeah, so just a couple of months before we were in Thailand, I spent a few days training with Josh Amberger. And I think that was sort of a bit of a second wind with the way that I was looking at swimming. And I’d been training up in Andorra at about 2,100 meters altitude in a pool up there. And it was pretty hard work. So swimming was, it was starting to become like every time you go to the pool, you’re sort of, yes, you’re not swimming on your terms and there weren’t many days where I was really able to sort of get out ahead. But I think that time gave me a little bit of fitness. But then during that trip, I went down and swam with Josh where he lives and trains with his wife Ash through the European summer. But I think it was really important to actually see the way that he approached swimming. And I probably in my mind, I’d always thought that these guys who had always been leading out the swims, it was because they were such good swimmers

when they were younger. And they didn’t need to, they no longer needed to train hard on their swim. So I guess even though for many years, I’ve been like a very good local swimmer, I guess on the start line, I always felt like I was at a bit of a disadvantage because the guys I was up against could just sort of condense their challenge during the training week to only two sports. But during that time, I actually saw how hard Josh worked in the water. And I was really impressed by the set that he was getting through and just the way he approached it. And probably one of the things I noticed is that it was really no fast swimming. Like he wouldn’t have long rest intervals and stand on the wall for a good portion of time. And I think at the time, he was a week and a bit away from an Ironman race. And just as I’d be thinking that, well, he’ll be sort of starting to rest up and really look after himself, but it was quite the opposite.

He was doing some really solid swim sets. And even on the bike and the run, he was sort of continuing to work really hard. So I was really impressed by the way he was training and just his sort of endeavor to keep his swimming as an asset. And I sort of sat down and reflected on the back of that. And just sort of compared some of the sets that I’ve been doing in my own swim program. And some of the things that I felt had created a quite an immediate difference for me on the back of that. And there was a lot more mixed pace swimming, a lot more short arrest. And it was probably just a fair bit more specific to an actual race day swim. Whereas for a number of years, I’d sort of felt like I could show myself in training that my swimming was at the top level or at my top level. And I’d get through sets that I felt would be, would be the requirement to swim in the front pack. But it was always just a little different.

And I’d just never feel quite settled in the group. And I probably found myself in that position where I was either the mid or back half of the lead group or I’d be behind the split and be effectively towing the chase group. And I always felt like I was probably swimming at a better level or if I was swimming with the same guys in the pool, typically I’d be the one leading the lane and or sort of feeling like I was well controlled in the set that we’d come to the open water. And it just, I felt like it just didn’t suit me. But yeah, since then I had made a few changes and I started to be a little more sort of polarized with my speeds during longer continuous reps and I would reduce the rest time. And I think I just got a really good response from it. And it really allowed me to sort of bridge that gap from what was typically happening around the three or 400 meter mark in the swim where I’d be really bubbling up with lactate

and starting to feel like my pace would be decaying from the get out speed. And it would be that moment that I’d be coming under pressure in the race. And I think I was just able to start to condition myself a little more to be able to absorb that first 300 meters and then settle at a pace that I felt like was more the pace that I could just roll out time after time in the pool, but not able to do it after an aggressive start in a race, which ultimately means it doesn’t matter what you do in the pool. It’s what you do on race day that counts. And so yeah, that was just a really valuable few days that just triggered some thinking. And yeah, since then, I’ve had really some of the best swims of my career. And yeah, been able to put myself in a position where I’ve actually had a little bit of get out speed. And it just creates a totally different experience in a big pack when you’re not getting sort of stuck in the mallet a little bit further back.

And what’s an example set that you would do now just to help train that front end speed? So it could be something like doing 200 reps, but rather than just doing them at a sort of even pace and coming in, just say I’m in the pool, maybe it’s five, 200s on three minutes. I’d probably swim, swim them between 235, 238,

and I’d just typically roll through. My first split would be almost identical to the second split, but instead I’d sort of flipped out a little bit and I’d go 25 fast, 25 easy for that rep. And perhaps the time might be even slightly slower, but it would give me that change of pace. So you’re sort of injecting a little bit of lactate into the system. You’re absorbing it without falling off completely. And then you’re just repeating that. And it actually, it’s a fairly different stimulus to the rep, but I think it just, it gives you that sense of gears and control. And it probably just, importantly, it shows you when too much is too much. So if your aggressive pace is unsustainable, you’re really gonna feel it, particularly in the last sort of 50 or 100 of that 200 rep. So it’s sort of giving you a really good hold on what your top end change of pace should be. Yeah, gotcha. And there’s another set that I remember you talked about,

maybe one that you did with Josh that I thought was quite good was something like 150, quite strong, almost like front end speed of a race. And then maybe 350, just moderate. And then another 150 strong and then 250 recovery and like keep working your way down. Is that, was that another set that you were doing? Yeah, we did a set that day. It was effectively like VO2 efforts in the pool, but rather than take your long rest recovery and let the lactate accumulate or clear while you’re standing on the wall, it was pretty much instant rolling straight into the aerobic recovery. And again, just swimming with that lactate in your system, which is probably a set for many years that I would avoid just because of how awful they feel. But I was probably doing variations of that, but I’d always probably crafted in a way that was more favorable to how you’d prefer to feel rather than actually the reality of how you do feel.

So yeah, a set like that, maybe for a bit of context, the pool that Josh and Ash swim in when they’re in Adora, it’s a little bit cross between, to me, it feels like a two lane snippet of the ocean in perhaps the middle of Ash Strait in the disco with it’s got this sort of neon blue light. And it’s quite unsettling the first time you jump in. And I remember Josh saying that he struggles to comprehend the times that some of the other pros swim because he never seems to be rewarded with those times in the pool that he swims in. And it didn’t take me long to realize why because it just felt like fairly tough going in there. But yeah, once I’d been in there for a couple of swims, I sort of got to enjoy it. I was probably pretty keen to head up the mountain and go back to my 2100 meters for an easier swim. But yeah, I think doing sets like that in a pool like that were really like, we’d sort of roar up to full intensity pretty quickly.

And that day I was definitely creating a bit of lactate in the system. And then it was probably another thing that I noticed that the gap between myself and Josh wasn’t necessarily in that first 150 meters when we’re swimming hard. It was in that 350 or 450 that we’re swimming off that his aerobic level or his ability to clear the lactate was far better than what mine was. And that was also just another great opportunity to sort of swim with someone who’s really the benchmark of the sport and just to see how you compare. And without doing those sets that expose you, you’re only gonna find out on race day and often the answer’s not what you want. So yeah, I think that was really good value. It makes you appreciate being in a good pool like yeah. There’s, you can become a world champion in almost any environment, any pool you swim in, you can still mix it with the best even if it’s maybe a hot pool, it’s humid, but it does, it’s a lot easier in a nice outdoor

50 meter pool if you’ve got the option. But we grew up swimming in a 25 meter pool, a four lane 25 meter pool, right next to a railway track. It was, couldn’t be more than five meters away from where the pool was. And if a train ever came through, you’d feel the whole thing shaking. And it was a good 29, 30 degrees in the water and we’d be doing like our sprint sets there like just back end speed, back end speed. And we would come out just so, well, sweating, but like you’re in the pool but it was, we were just exhausted after those sessions. But my dad who was my coach would always drill it into us. He’s like, none of the other kids are doing this. Like, this makes you guys tough. Like, this is what’s gonna help on race day. And it’s like, if you can just drill that into your mindset that the harder it is right now, the easier it’s gonna be on race day, the better off you’re going to be. And just going back to some of those.

Oh, sorry, I was just gonna say that must explain why you ripped my arms off in Thailand when we were doing some swim sets over there and the heat you were born for. It’s easy when you’ve got one sport to train with. Yeah, that’s for fun. Just go back to some sets that are good to just help kind of clear the lactate and be able to keep your composure when you’ve got some of that fatigue and that lactate. We’ve been doing a few sets like on our Wednesdays we do speed work and we’ll often do like some all out fast 50s straight into some breath control. So I think we did from memory it was maybe like two 50s fast on the minute. And then we’re going like, I think it’s six 50s on the minute breathing every three on the first lap. And then we go five, seven, nine, 11. So that might be five. So yeah, and just as you get towards that nine, that 11 it becomes really hard. Even if you’re going easy it becomes really hard to hit that breath control.

But if you can just learn to relax, keep your length and to be able to hold your breath for that long. I find that that helps immensely when it comes to those threshold sets and those other sets. Like it’s just that combining the like the aerobic capacity of being able to do it and being able to keep your stroke under control keep your composure. Like that’s a really powerful combination to have those two, but it’s really uncomfortable even though you’re not going hard. And we did a set in Thailand that Sam ran where it was like 25 and a 50 sprint. Then we had to do, I think it was either stroke count in the recovery or trying to hold the stroke count. And it was so hard even though it wasn’t a long set but you can really get a lot out of those shorter sets if you do them, how they meant to be done.

Before we dive into the rest of today’s podcast episode this episode is proudly brought to you by Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’ve been a long time sponsor of the podcast and they are my go-to goggles when it comes to tracking my training sessions and being able to see what’s happening in real time through the goggles. And we know swimming is a highly technical sport but without the guidance of a coach on deck identifying and addressing technique flaws can be a challenge. They’ve recently added a new feature to the goggles, Head Coach, and this addresses that problem head on. It gives swimmers improved access to their technique awareness, focus skill development, and in-app education and analysis. Head Coach provides real-time visual coaching via the Form Smart Swim Goggles augmented reality display. During and after a swim, Head Coach provides swimmers with technique feedback using two types of metrics, Form Score and Head Coach skills.

Form Score is a measurement of overall swim efficiency ranging from zero to 100 defined by your pace and your stroke length. Head Coach skills encompasses five key areas that will help you identify where to focus on improving with your efficiency. Head roll, head pitch, set pacing, interval pacing, and breathing time to neutral. And after completing a session you can check back in on the Form app to track your progress. And Head Coach provides swimmers from beginner to expert with an unprecedented level of data-driven guidance and understanding, enabling you to boost your performance and your speed. Get your pair of Form Smart Swim Goggles today. Click the link in our podcast description or use the code effortless on checkout to get 15% off your Form Smart Swim Goggles. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s probably another potential trap that I’ve had swimming a lot in the public lanes by myself over the years is I would,

my tendency is to look at the job for the swimming is to just accumulate volume and I’d look to do a sort of 4K set and towards the back end put full-boy paddles on and just feel good about getting through some distance and often a set like that where you’d be doing some really challenging and then combining it with some more stuff that has the sort of skill, the breath challenge to it that, yeah, you just, you tend not to do that short of harder stuff because when you go back and look at your sort of swim volumes for the week, it’s gonna look better to do an hour worth of swimming and get through 4K than to do 40 minutes worth of swimming and get through 2K. And yeah, I think if you can really identify those things that you need for your swimming and get yourself to the pool, I think that’s when you can really start to see some improvement that comes and it’s what gets anyone back to the pool when you can start to see your times come down

or you sort of handle on what the objective is improve, then yeah, you’re gonna be keen to get back and that’s probably above all, swimming’s gotta be something that is sustainable over a long period of time to keep getting the results and so yeah, it’s well worth identifying those things that it’s like a gap analysis for your own swimming. Yeah, the things that have stood out to me, just doing this podcast really when I’ve had guests on like yourself is that what you do in training should be specific to the events that you’re training for. So if you’re a pool swimmer doing 400 meters, well that training should be specific to that. If you’re a triathlete, your training’s gonna be fairly, fairly different. It’s a different thing that you’re trying to achieve and you’ve got the open water skills and all of that as well. So the thing I’ve noticed there is the best athletes in their sport are very specific with their training

and the other thing is too is that things don’t come quickly or easily and usually the athletes that are happy to just put the work in without being too worried when they see those results, they’re just chipping away, chipping away and just doing the work. Well, they’re the ones who look up and might be 12 months later, might be 18 months later, maybe five years later and now they’re at that point that they would have liked to have been at when they, if they’re setting their goals, but they just put their head down and just day in, day out, they practice the things that they had to practice and they weren’t looking to get results quickly. And because basically it’s not gonna change what you’re actually doing. It’s like as long as you do the day in, day out stuff, well, you’re probably gonna get to that target that you set yourself because it really just comes down to the habits that you get yourself into and that consistency over a very long period of time.

And there’s ways to fast track it by working on your technique and making sure you’re doing the right things. But ultimately there’s no short cutting the time it takes to get really good at something. And I think it’s all about just being able to see those improvements at least eventually or feel those improvements and just see that light at the end of the tunnel because when you first start swimming, you’re gonna suck at it, but the good thing there as well, the improvement is gonna be quite large initially. And then if you can get, if you can really just enjoy that part of it, then you’re going to probably enjoy the swimming because you’re enjoying seeing that improvement over time. Yeah, and that’s really the luxury that a lot of swim clubs have, isn’t it? With swim squads, it’s you get a group of young kids or even for the adult amateur swimmers, you get a group together and that friendship that is formed for the swimmers

standing at the wall, waiting for the next traumatic set to be served up, it’s such a strong bond. And yeah, I think there’s just so much value in having some mates that you can link up with at the pool. And yeah, like a great example is, I’ve spent a number of years training with Callie Stubbins at Haleabree Aquatic, which is now a Cheltenham Amner Swimming Club, but she’s done such a great job with that squad. And over the last five years, I’ve really noticed some of those kids just come on and really find their best swimming. But I think that the best thing was the culture, while Callie was building that culture, just among the group, it was okay to fail some days. And I think it was just a credit to the people that were in the water, that they supported each other well enough and you could always recognize when someone was not on a good day. And that’s something that being in the lane with these guys, I always really appreciated

because I’m someone who always wants to see a good day. And if I’d have a bad day at training, I’m always really hard on myself. But just through these training with these guys who are half my age, I realized that it was okay to have a good day and it really changes the pressure that you put on yourself going to the pool. So yeah, I can’t sort of speak highly enough for the value of either having a squad or a partner that can keep you accountable. And it’s certainly not all the time. I think it’s well worth spending a good amount of time at the pool by yourself. But if you can have someone to help get you through those more challenging days, then it’s just gonna make you enjoy your time in the water a hell of a lot more. Yeah, definitely. I think there’s power to having both, especially as a triathlete where you get the hard work of a squad and that camaraderie and you push harder and then also just the peace and quiet,

the calmer waters of maybe a lane to yourself or just doing a session on your own where you can just relax and enjoy being in the water. I’ve talked about that quite a bit on this podcast having both can really help. And I know we’ve done some good sessions when we used to live closer to each other than we do now, but that was a lot of fun training together, especially in the open water. It is much more enjoyable going out with a group if you can in the open water. I don’t know if I’ve ever done an open water swim by myself, not a proper one anyway. Yeah, well, we’re not gonna recommend it, but yeah, sometimes it needs to be done. Yeah, that’s right. Now just shifting gears a little bit. What would you say is the hardest thing about being a pro triathlete and the best thing about it? I think the hardest thing is really just enduring the years that it takes to get good basically. And I think some people have a much faster trajectory

than others, but certainly my path has been about finding a way to stay in the sport. And yeah, I really can’t tell you the amount of life lessons that I’ve learned just as a byproduct purely of trying to sustain a life as a pro athlete. And I guess it’s going through the roller coaster of sort of health and injury, the sort of financial side of being able to stay in the sport and then also just the competition side of things where you’re sort of having some really great days that show you that your goals and aspirations are right on the horizon. And then some other days where you feel like you’re just right back at square one. But I think just sort of having the sort of resilience to stay in the sport, it’s certainly the hardest thing. And I don’t think it gets that much easier over the years because there’s always another thing that comes out that makes that that is an equally sort of challenging moment in your career.

But I think the thing that allows you to get through them better than what you did in the past is purely just the experience that you’ve had. You’ve faced a similar situation before and that’s given you the tools to be able to move on to the next moment and perhaps just flatten out that roller coaster. And I think for me, particularly, I look at my career now and it’s just, it’s a much smoother ride than what it was when I was first starting out. And yeah, probably got to know myself a lot better over those years and realizing that having a rest day or a couple of rest days in a row is exactly what I need to bounce back. And I’m actually seeing, I really respond well to those couple of days off where initially I’d be so reluctant to take a day off and I dragged myself out at 8 p.m. at night to get a session done just so I didn’t have to say it was a rest day. And there was no question it was the wrong thing to do.

But yeah, I just felt like I owed it to myself. It’s like, come on, you want to be in this sport, you want to say you’re a pro triathlete, we’ll go and go and get it done.

But yeah, just being able to be a little bit more responsible with that has certainly helped. But no, it’s a huge credit to the athletes who have built a career for themselves. And yeah, it’s something that when you stand on the start line, you just can’t help but respect the guys who you don’t know what they’ve gone through since the last time that you saw them on the beach at the last event, which could have been three months ago, but everyone has their own way of getting through to the next race. And yeah, I think that’s where it’s just nice to respect whatever one’s had to do to be standing there competing again on the day. But the best thing, and it’s probably something that we’ve spoken about in the past is really it’s having control of your own lifestyle. And fortunately, my work as a coach with our four coaching, I am able to manage my workload in a way that allows me to get my training done. And yeah, it’s being able to wake up

and choose the time the alarm goes off and choose what I’m having for breakfast and where I’m eating that is quite precious to me. And yeah, fortunately, I’ve been able to escape the non-defied lifestyle for most of my life so far. And yeah, I think that’s something that I really treasure. So yeah, hopefully things keep going well and I can keep living this lifestyle for a few years more yet. So you can choose whether it’s the Nutri-Grain or the Rice Bubbles in the morning. That’s it.

Yeah, I’ve probably had to go a bit steady on the Nutri-Grain. I think I hit it pretty hard for my teenage years. So yeah, I’m trying not to relapse on that. Sounds like me and Weepix with Honey on top go through half a jar of honey in the morning and about a dozen Weepix. But I know we’ve sort of spoken about that quite a lot. And I think in terms of being able to be a pro triathlete, it’d be very hard to do with a typical nine to five job. And just having that ability to build the coaching business, work with a great bunch of people. And I know you’re really close with a lot of the people that you coach. They’ve been with you for years and years and years. And for good reason, you keep a really small group of people that you coach. Yeah, and you build that relationship because you want to get the best out of them. And it’s been great to watch your journey over the last dozen years or so that I’ve known you.

And it’s not done yet as well. And I know that’s why you’re holding off on coming on the podcast, because you said, look, my journey is not done. But I wanted to get you on just to share your experience up to now and to talk about what’s worked for you and what’s worked for people that you’ve coached, because I think you’re a great asset to other triathletes who want to not only improve their swing, but become better athletes. What about in terms of the mental side of things? You’ve got a really, I think you tend to, you really sort of skew in that area when you’re looking at helping someone. It’s not just about you need to do more of this type of training or whatever. It’s very much the mental side of things. What makes you so interested in that side of someone’s racing and training? Yeah, I guess I have sort of somewhat specialized in that personality profiling aspect of an athlete. And I think it’s because I’ve just seen how valuable

and how necessary it has been for me. I think the voices inside for me speak very loudly and just getting to know the messages that they’re sort of sharing and how to sort of manicure them. So they’re sending the right messages at the right times. I think he’s really important. And it’s just such a fundamental part of foot for any athlete and any person for that matter is just to be able to sort of control your mindset. And I just really had some great breakthroughs working with the mentor of mine, Aaron Montague, who he was able to sort of explain to me that the voices that I’m sharing with myself, that they’re not necessarily speaking in the way that I thought they were. And I guess an example of that is I would always think that your ego, which is the voice inside as it would talk to me, I would say it’s my best friend. It’s the thing that’s gonna take me to the next level. It’s the thing that’s gonna sort of sustain me in the sport

and it’s sort of me and the little voice inside. And as long as I listen to it, it’ll be fine. But through my time with Aaron, I guess we really uncovered the tone of some of those messages and often they would be negative things and they would be coming from a place of responsibility and discipline. And it would really change the way that I looked at what I was trying to do. So I wouldn’t be going for a swim because I wanted to or I’d be going for a swim because I had to and it was the right thing to do. And that’s something that I could pick up a lot in athletes that I meet. And yeah, just being able to sort of change the messages or the way that you approach that, it means you’re still gonna arrive at the pool, but you can arrive at the pool on your terms and sort of do something with freedom versus do something with sort of the stress and the negative tension that so often we carry around with us from day to day.

And yeah, I think that was certainly a real breakthrough moment for me. And I think it also came at a time where I was learning that that was really necessary for myself as a person. And that was around the time that both of us lost one of our closest mates, Ryan Burke, who I actually set up I Thought Coaching with. He unfortunately passed away in 2017 and it was just a few months prior that I was exposed to this stuff for the first time. And I always feel that having that at the time, it really helped me sort of navigate that path and to be able to sort of sustain the business that we had and stay in the role as a coach, I needed to be able to help myself first. The lessons that I got from there have been really significant. And yeah, in the more recent years, I’ve sort of been able to start to use them as an asset rather than on a more defensive side. But yeah, I think it’s so significant for athletes to be aware of the tendencies they have

and the sort of changes in their behavior and their moods and how that can impact their lead up to a race and their sort of sustainability as an athlete because we see a lot of people that come in and they wanna really take it on and do everything in the first three months. And if it doesn’t happen, they disappear and we lose them to the sport. So I guess a lot of my work when we’re starting with a new athlete is to try and identify where they fit on the continuum and to be able to sort of set goals for them and be able to identify a little bit of a timeline that’s more appropriate to where they’re coming from. And then I guess it’s really just become a sort of passion and a whole way of mind to be able to drip feed that through the programs that are right and the training that we do and try and encourage someone to be in the middle of a session and just having an awareness of where their thoughts go or where there may be opportunities for them

to continually improve. And yeah, I think it’s something that I’d love to pursue maybe on another level when I’m not racing anymore, but yeah, for now I really enjoy just continuing to learn about myself. I actually hosted a mindset talk a few years ago and one of the questions that I had at the end of it was along the lines of, so now that you know all this, you don’t have any problems yourself or you’ve sort of got it solved and like, how does that happen? And I guess it sort of shocked me because yeah, you can come across as an expert, but it is really so difficult to, it’s just not possible to always be in a good place. And even when you know the best response to a situation, it’s still really difficult to actually walk those steps through that path to be able to get back to level playing field. So it was sort of, yeah, it was a bit of a moment where it sort of shocked me and it really reminded me that, yeah, no one’s invincible.

And I think it’s definitely to the whole coaching community, it’s something that a lot of coaches have trouble with is just keeping their own sort of emotional stability. And yeah, I think part on the back to all the coaches out there who absorb so much for their athletes and are able to continually turn up day after day. It’s like being a swimming technique coach. Like people might think, well, like my technique must be perfect because I do all this content and I’ve done it like all this coaching for a very long time, but it’s just as much of a challenge for me as it is for the other person to refine their technique and swim well every time. And it still requires the work. If I’m swimming two or three times a week, I’m just not gonna be swimming as well as if I’m swimming four or five times a week and doing the right sessions for the right event and that kind of thing. So it’s anyone who says that they’re happy all the time

or whatever, like perfect all the time, they’re lying and it doesn’t mean you’re going to master it every single time. So it’s, but it is like, that’s what I’m certainly what I’ve noticed even watching you coaching at our camps and things like that. You’re just able to develop those relationships and see where people are coming from and then maybe helps steer them in a better direction. So yeah, I find it a real asset to the way that you coach, which I haven’t seen in a lot of other coaches that I’ve come across. So that’s why I think it’s quite a unique part of your own coaching. That’s just been such a great part of being involved in the effort of swimming clinics and camps over the years as well as that we just get to meet so many new people that come through the doors. And it’s always fascinated me that someone else turns up to the clinic they’ve been in swimming and triathlon for three or four years and yet you’ve never met them.

Yeah, sort of feel like after a number of years you would know everyone and have met everyone. But yeah, as a coach doing the work that we do we’re just so fortunate to come across so many different people, which gives us that experience of being able to learn from each of those people as well. Yeah, absolutely. And just to wrap things up in what’s exciting you for the next sort of six to 12 months what are you most looking forward to? So on the back of Ironman 70.3 Tasmania last weekend I qualified for the 70.3 World Champs in Taupo, New Zealand in December this year. So that was sort of part one of the season goals ticked off which was a great relief.

And initially I wasn’t super motivated to get back to the 70.3 World Champs but I had such a good experience at the Worlds last year and I performed well on that big stage and I felt like I was close to a huge performance but I sort of settled for a strong performance and yeah, going back to 70.3 Worlds this year I think you get a thirst for racing on the big days and yeah, I feel like I’m really looking forward to that opportunity but the next couple of months I’m gonna turn the focus to the Ironman distance I’ll most likely be at Ironman Australia in May and Cairns Ironman in June as two opportunities to qualify for Hawaii in October which it’s still in my eyes the holy grail of the sport and I’ve never put foot on the big island even though I have coached a bunch of athletes to race there but yeah, I’m pretty motivated to try and get to Hawaii this year particularly now that it’s just on alternating years

so I still feel I haven’t quite cracked the code over the Ironman distance so yeah, I’m motivated to learn some lessons in the next couple of months and be able to turn up to Port Macquarie and deliver a really good day. Sounds good, well I’m looking forward there to watching you race it and it’s great to see you get the spot for the half Ironman Worlds especially being so close to home as well and yeah, it’s been great just watching your journey over the last that decade or so and it’s just been a pleasure having you on our camps and running our clinics and like we hadn’t seen each other for a long time when we caught up in Thailand hadn’t seen each other for ages but it was like I only saw you yesterday so yeah, wishing you all the best for the next couple of months with the racing and thanks for finally giving in and jumping on a podcast and sharing some of your story, it’s not finished yet but yeah, thank you very much for that.

Thanks very much, cheers Falcon. 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 today’s episode, triathlon coach and author Joe Friel returns to discuss swimming and open water techniques, as well as his latest edition of The Triathlete’s Training Bible. Joe addresses common challenges triathletes face when transitioning from pool to open water. He emphasizes the importance of patience in making lasting improvements and offers tips for pool training to enhance open water swimming skills. Tune in now!

The Triathlete’s Training Bible (5th Edition)

Related Podcast: Unlocking Speed: Mastering the PDLC Method for Triathlon Swimming with Joe Friel

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 swimming goggles here and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off.

once it was 25 swimmers out of 25, something like 20 of them did exactly the same thing, which is the biggest problem, biggest mistake you can make. And that’s what I call the death move now, because once you do it, you’re dead in the water, you’re not going to a place. Watch them swim, it’s something dawned on me that I’ve never dawned on me before. I don’t know why I caught it that day, but all of a sudden I saw that almost over did exactly the same thing, which is something I never talked to anybody. 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. Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is none other than triathlon coach, author and legend of the sport, Joe Frill. He featured on an episode a couple of months ago where he talked about his PDLC method

to developing technique, and this was one of our most listened to episodes. So I wanted to get Joe back to talk about more about swimming and open water and triathlon, but also to talk a little bit about what he’s been studying over the last couple of years. He’s just released the latest edition of his triathlon training Bible and that came out less than a month ago, but it was originally written in 1997 and it’s been around the whole time because the information is still relevant but he’s updated it for the time. So we’re going to talk a bit about the changes and adjustments that he’s made to that book, plus we’re going to talk about the one thing that he’s seen triathletes do in the open water when it comes to changing their stroke from the pool to the open water and what he teaches his athletes. We also talk about what it takes to actually make changes stick and how patients can be one of the cornerstones of becoming a better triathlete and swimmer.

Plus we talk about what you can do in training to become a better open water swimmer as well. If you’ve only got access to the pool, what can you do in the pool to make yourself a better open water swimmer? So we talk about that and more on today’s episode. Now the audio cuts in and out at times. So if the audio is a little bit unclear, it comes back within 10 seconds or so. So apologies for that. I think the internet was a little bit slow on Joe’s side but it does come back pretty quick and I know you’re going to enjoy this episode. I really enjoyed talking to Joe. He’s a wealth of knowledge and I’ve learned a lot from listening to him and seeing what he teaches and how he approaches his coaching. So I’m sure you’re going to get a lot out of today’s episode. Let’s get stuck into it. Here’s the episode with triathlon legend, Joe Frill. My guest today is a returning guest, someone who we had on quite recently. It is Joe Frill.

Joe, welcome to the podcast. Hi Brenton, glad to be here. Thank you for asking me. I was talking to you before the podcast saying that your episode that you’re on before was our second most listened to episode because I think the HEDLC method that we talked about on that podcast really resonated with people. Got a lot of triathletes and open water students who listen and they really resonated with that. And obviously your experience and background in the sport has, you’ve got a vast depth of knowledge. So I think it was really popular among our listeners. So thank you for being on the podcast previously and if you haven’t listened to that, go back to that episode and listen because I think there are some really good technique tips amongst the other things that we talked about. I want to talk about some slightly different things on today’s episode because you’ve just recently updated a book that you wrote in originally in 1996 or 1997.

You said? That’s 1997, yeah. That’s it. On its fifth edition, I just want to jump into some of the updates that you’ve made with that book. So what is it that you’ve been studying the last couple of years that you’ve updated for this edition? Oh, I suppose the biggest change that made this book was to really open up more about ways to establish intensity zones. I left swimming the same. I’ve always felt that pretty well nailed down but it’s never really quite confident that I really had exactly what I wanted for running bike, for example, the other two sports in triathlon. And so I gave that a lot of thought and tried to make it more personalized so the athlete can pick a system they want to use like max heart rate or functional threshold heart rate or the same power sort of things. So this is kind of the way I tried to do it was to spend a little bit more allowing the athletes to choose what they want to do rather than tell them there’s only one way to do this

because quite honestly, the most variables, the most poorly-blind and hard-working you’ve coached enough isn’t as bad as far or the most new. And it’s not 100% right for everybody all the time.

I wouldn’t swear now that what I’ve just now written this book isn’t gonna be right for everybody but it’s a good starting place for people who want to figure it out themselves. They can have at least some place to begin the quest for what should my zones be when I’m working out. And what would factor into someone’s decision on which method that they choose? I’ll meet back up and give you an example. When I first came out with this zone system I used, I never got any complaints at all about swimming, matter of fact, which is interesting. That one, that’s yes been since the, like you mentioned in the late 90s, sometime when I wrote that came up with that system that has never heard anybody question it or ask about why, but running and cycling in intensity zones, especially heart rate, I’ve had a lot of, I wouldn’t call it pushback, a lot of questions on why. And one of the most common responses I got, it was common comments I got from people

was in heart rate. And it just seemed like the upper end of zone one was too hard. I heard that, I can’t tell you how many times, but I heard it many, many times from athletes that seemed like the upper end of zone one was just a little bit too hard. And so when they didn’t say that to me, I would always go back with, well, if you think that’s the case and change your zone, we’re not all built exactly the same way. So if it doesn’t fit you in that way, try something different, lower it, see what happens. I don’t know if anybody ever did it because they never get back to me and say, yeah, I figured it out. They never say that, but at least I tried to get them to do what they should do is to figure out a zone that works for them, a zone system that works for them. So that was the most common complaint I got. So what I tried to do with the most recent book, which just came out, is to give the athletes some options

on how to set their zones. For example, they could use max heart rate and then they could use percentages of max heart rate to come up with their zones. Or they could use functional threshold heart rate, which is involved in doing a test. For example, in cyclones or running 20-minute tests in which you find your average heart rate and the mathematics, which won’t go into you right now, but that’s another way of doing it. I can slowly do the book. And I’m not saying that those are perfect either because this is not perfection. This is simply trying to get as close as we can to what the athlete should be doing. And there are other ways too that I mentioned the book like using lactate analysis to determine your zones. That’s one that’s becoming quite popular right now, especially because of the Norwegian training methods that have been going around now for a couple of years. There’s a lot of people who are using lactate threshold

as a way of determining this. That’s another option I mentioned in the book. So you can use lactate to determine this. What I found though is that most people don’t want to get involved in fluctuating the finger frequently throughout the day to find out what their zones are. So most people don’t do it. They may have one test done and then they kind of accept that as being the gospel. But it probably needs to be rethought many, many times going forward because it’s unlikely that they’ll stay exactly the same over time. And there’s obviously a room for error to do the test like that. So I try to make it available to the athlete to find different ways of doing this. And I’ll find out when people start writing emails and telling me, hey, it doesn’t work because of this, that, or the other thing. They’re never afraid to tell me why.

It’s, part of it is like there’s, it’s kind of like swimming technique. There’s so many different ways you can get from one end of the pool to the other. And for each person, it’s going to be, it’s going to be different. You think of like a straight arm technique over the water, more bent over recovery. It’s like, there’s no right or wrong. It just depends on maybe the event you’re training for. It depends on what suits you best. So sometimes people get caught up in all the different things and then they end up not making a decision and then they’re just kind of in no man’s land. So I think half the battle is just pick one, go with it. And that’s going to get you probably 90, 95% of the way there on your journey to becoming a better triathlete or a better swimmer. Like just, just pick something, go for it, start the training and then you’re going to be well on your way as opposed to, you know, debating it for the next six months

and not doing, not doing anything. I mentioned in the book that turning zones are not, are not magic. You know, if you, you can go over, if you go over your turning zone by one or two beats per minute, for example, let’s talk about heart rate. Is that a problem? Probably not. You go eight or 10 beats over. Yeah, it’s probably a problem then. But you know, it’s like, this is, this is something that we’re doing is it’s clear cut. It’s got a lot of room for variation, a lot of room for individuality. So the effort needs to kind of be aware of what they’re experiencing when they’re using a heart rate monitor or a power meter or whatever it may be. And another thing that you cover in the book is heart rate variability. Can you share a practical example of how an athlete would use HRV in their daily training decisions? Yeah, I do. This is something, this has been around for a long time actually, but it’s only like, I suppose popular is the right word in athletics.

Is how do I know when to rest and how do I know when I’m ready to start turning again? To ease the answer to that question, which is what I’ve always used in the past, is that when it feels like it’s time to do it, it feels like it’s time to rest, rest. Feels like it’s time to start again, start again. But the problem athletes run into is they’re so highly motivated that they kind of second-guess themselves. Athletes sell them versus somebody and will sell them, sell themselves. I think I need to rest. That is extremely rare for an athlete to say that to themselves. Same thing with, I think I think I should rest longer. That’s one thing athlete will almost never say to themselves, I need to start running away and I’m losing too much fitness to get back and turning again. And so athletes tend to lose perspective on the importance of rest and recovery and performance. That’s critical to success in sport. And yet we don’t give it nearly enough attention

as athletes’ coaches do. Coaches seem to give it a lot more thought, a lot more determination. So in the first book I came up with a method I would help the athlete try to figure out when to take a rest break, ask questions. Let’s measure your heart rate first thing in the morning and see what it’s telling us. How does that heart rate compare with your normal range of resting heart rates? Is it high, for example? If it’s high, that’s a marker that says maybe you should take a rest day. Then there’s markers such as, how did you sleep last night? Well, I didn’t sleep very well. I lost, I was up, I was awake for a couple of hours. Okay, maybe that’s another marker that you should take from recovery time. As we start looking at, so I put together a list of markers like that, the idea being that the athlete could ask themselves these questions early in the morning, take measurements like HRV, like heart rate, like how they slept, their appetite,

how they feel, all kinds of things. And so that draw conclusion about if they should take a break from training, if it’s time to do that, or if they’re on the other end of the distance that they’ve been recovering for a few days and now it’s time to start back, get my rate to start again. So that’s what I was doing. And HRV kind of simplifies a lot of that. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect. I find with myself that there are times when it doesn’t blend in, doesn’t match what I’m feeling and what I discovered that day when I work out. But I think it’s a really good way of forcing you to think about it. If you get that marker up on HRV that says train easy today, don’t go hard or whatever it may be but based on the app you’re using, take it easy. That forces you to say to yourself, do I need to really take it easy? And hopefully you’re going to say to yourself, well, I need to think about that a little bit or let’s think about a few other things

to have to do with my recovery where I am right now. So that’s what HRV is all about, I think. I’d rather see you use that for that purpose than to make hardcore decisions just based on HRV. Good tool but not perfect.

Excellent. So the technology’s there, the data’s there but you’ve also just got to be aware of how you’re feeling, ask those other questions and not just rely on the tech side of things, right? Right, that’s exactly it. Now I want to shift gears a little bit here. What’s one swimming myth that you’ve encountered that you’d like to debunk once and for all? What’s something you hear regularly? If you can stop at one, there’s probably a few, right?

I’d say the one that screws up most triathletes. This was one that I was kind of suspected back in the early days in triathlon but I forgot what to hear, it was put it on a camp and I forgot where it was now. But at that camp we used the local pool which is an excellent pool and they happen to have an underwater observatory where coaches could go down and observe in the pool in the pool above, which was a, it wasn’t actually the open water pool itself. This was just a chamber within the pool so you can see with a, what do you call it? A stream of water coming at the swimmer. What’s the word for that? And the endless pool, we may not like the swims bar. Yeah, like an endless pool sort of thing. Yeah. And so the idea was you could have the athlete swim in that chamber, I’d call it, and you could observe what they were doing. And I had a group of campers, they’re triathletes. I don’t know how I had, how many 25 or 30 athletes, something like that.

So I went down in the first and second days I watched every athlete swim, let’s say it was 25 swimmers. Out of 25, something like 20 of them did exactly the same thing which is the biggest problem, biggest mistake you can make. And that’s what I call the death move now because once you do it, you’re dead in the water, you’re not going to a place. And that’s to reach out in front of you with your elbow below your hand. Soon as you get your elbow below your hand, there’s nothing you can absolutely do to push straight down the water, which doesn’t propel you forward whatsoever. And you don’t get a catch, what we typically call a catch, your hands about under your belly someplace. You wind up with a catch, which is about this long as a catch, instead of a catch, as long as your arm is. That’s the biggest mistake I see with triathletes. And so that’s the one I had to focus on the most. And that was the start of this whole process

I use in coaching athletes, which I referred to as PDLC. That was one of the things I had to really drill into athletes was you can’t, you cannot do that. Once you do that, you’re just not going to go forward. You’re just going to be still, you’re going to slow down the water until you finally get a catch. It’d be kind of like running with the stride. It’s about, you know, about that long. And that’s, that’s same idea. You wouldn’t go anyplace. You’d just be going really slow forward, but it’d be this tiny little step you’re taking and the same thing in swimming. You’ve got a short stroke. You’re not going forward. You’re just simply standing still until your hand is finally put to the place for you to catch. So you get me started, Joe, because that’s one of my favorite topics to talk about. Yeah. Get me catch. We had a guy, Lee Nugent. He’s a legendary Aussie swim coach and done a lot of work with some of the top swimmers

in Australia. And one of the things he mentioned on the podcast was that if your hand is higher than your elbow, you just cannot prepare yourself forwards. You’ve got no ability to catch. So, yeah, when you’re reaching forwards, that hand has got to get either to the same depth at the beginning of your elbow, but then you’ve eventually just got to get it down. And what a really common thing that I see with filming is that when you film someone from above, if they are crossing the sense line when they’re extending, it’s fairly common to see that elbow drop because I think it’s a more comfortable position for the shoulder to be in when they’re out in front and crossed over. So the elbow drops a bit there. And sometimes we just have to start with direction. You know, we call it swimming on train tracks just in that reach phase, but got to get that right first for a lot of people. And then it’s much easier to set the catch.

And I had a guy on Sunday just gone to the clinic who we just had to focus on the direction, get him straight, and then pretty quickly his catch began to improve because he had a good sense of the movement, but he was just crossing over and making it really hard for himself. So it’s such a big one. And when you look at the underwater footage from the side, if someone is either going in really deep as well, they’re not extending out. And you see their catches might be 15 centimetres of water that they’re sort of holding there. It’s like, you could triple that. You could quadruple that if you just get the right length and everything. So there’s so many little things that people can improve. And I was talking about this before we started the podcast. I think that’s why I’ve got a job is that swimming is a really hard thing to do. And there’s no end in sight to improvement. You can always improve with these little 1%ers.

And that’s what makes it fun. That’s what I love about coaching. It’s solving a puzzle. And to me, that’s a really enjoyable part of what I do.

Is there, can you share a moment or an experience in your career that’s really tested your resolve or your beliefs about swimming training?

Before we dive into the rest of today’s podcast episode, this episode is proudly brought to you by Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’ve been a long time sponsor of the podcast and they are my go-to goggles when it comes to tracking my training sessions and being able to see what’s happening in real time through the goggles. And we know swimming is a highly technical sport, but without the guidance of a coach on deck, identifying and addressing technique flaws can be a challenge. They’ve recently added a new feature to the goggles, Head Coach, and this addresses that problem head on. It gives them as improved access to their technique awareness, focus skill development, and in-app education and analysis. Head Coach provides real-time visual coaching via the Form Smart Swim Goggles augmented reality display. During and after a swim, Head Coach provides swimmers with technique feedback using two types of metrics, Form Score and Head Coach skills.

Form Score is a measurement of overall swim efficiency ranging from zero to 100, defined by your pace and your stroke length. Head Coach skills encompasses five key areas that will help you identify where to focus on improving with your efficiency. Head roll, head pitch, set pacing, interval pacing, and breathing time to neutral. And after completing a session, you can check back in on the Form app to track your progress. And Head Coach provides swimmers from beginner to expert with an unprecedented level of data-driven guidance and understanding, enabling you to boost your performance and your speed. Get your pair of Form Smart Swim Goggles today. Click the link in our podcast description or use the code effortless on checkout to get 15% off your Form Smart Swim Goggles. Oh yeah. Yeah, this goes back to the 90s. And I like to go to races. When I wasn’t racing, I would try to go watch races just to see what people are doing,

especially, I want to see what the pros were doing, the best in the sport. I want to see what they were doing, for example, the swim. So one year, there was an Ironman in Phoenix, which wasn’t too far away from where I lived at the time. It was only about a 30-minute drive from where I lived. And the race was in a canal. The swim was in a canal. So you could walk along the edge of the canal and you could stay right with the swimmers while they were swimming. And so I was very started and I watched the pros take off and so I’m walking around along the canal, watched them swim and something dawned on me that I’d never dawned on me before. I don’t know why I caught it that day, but all of a sudden I saw that almost all were doing exactly the same thing, which is something I never taught to anybody, which is to have their hand way above their, way above the water as they were reaching forward, as opposed to putting the hand in the water

somewhat close to their heads. They’re putting, their fingers were entering the water until the arm was fully extended. And so that kind of struck me. And so I went back and started toying around with it myself to see what was going on there. And I began to realize what they were doing, but what you really should be doing in open water swimming, which is to reach over the water, because the water is not smooth, it can be very, very rough. And so if you get your hand up high, that puts you in a position where you can grab more water and therefore have as what we talked about before, a catch because you grab more water by doing this. It also gets your hand in the right position. It gets your fingers below your elbow. When you do that, when you reach out with your arm fully extended above the water and it’s like one of the things I teach athletes to do is one of the girls I have them do when we’re learning this technique.

So I call it just a splash drill. It’s what they do is they reach out as far as they can as they’re swimming freestyle, they reach out as far as they can in the front and splash their hand down as hard as they can on the water so they can really feel the power of their hand hitting the water. And I want that to be as far away from their body as they can so they can even pull their head up if they want you to see where it is. So when they come into the water with their hands like that real hard. And so I chastise them. They don’t make it hard enough. They make it too pretty. They make it too smooth. I should really reach out and really smack that water so we know where your hand is at all times. I want to hear the water splashing. So I keep taking them through this over and over and over and over and finally they get the idea that they’ve got to really reach out there when they’re making this move. And so that was the first one.

The first things I ever learned was from watching pro triathletes and it caused me to think about what I was teaching them to my triathletes. So and there’s been many, many other events like that in my life also that was one of the first I recall which is really important.

And why do you think that the best of them is the pro triathletes? Why do you think they make that change compared to in the pool?

Yeah, well for one thing they don’t have rough water. The waters is obviously in a pool the water is not nearly as rough as it’s going to be if you’re swapping open the water like in the ocean especially that canal is pretty calm. So that wasn’t going to be an issue there but they were all still doing it anyway. They were all still reaching above their heads with a straight elbow basically almost a straight elbow and then reaching far out before they made contact with the water with their hand. And they all do that by the way still today when I watch the pro triathlon start I always watch for that and immediately you see it. In fact you look at pictures of the start of a pro race you’ll see the hands up high in the air you won’t see elbows high in the air you’ll see hands high in the air because they learn to do that in open water. You’re swimming in the ocean and there’s waves that you know really deep waves.

You know that’s the sort of thing that’s going to really mess you up if you’re trying to reach into it you get your hand above it you don’t have the water pushing back against you your hands in the air the air is not nearly as dense as the water is so you can reach over that wave and grab the water and pull yourself forward which is what we’re trying to do. And so I think that’s the reason why pro-traffice got into doing it. If it wasn’t for the open water swimming I don’t think it would be nearly as popular as it is if it was all pools I mean seeing there was many people doing that. And I think as well like that’s because when I look at most swimmers I think of myself as well doing this when I go from the pool to the open water my stroke rate comes up quite a bit especially if I’ve got a wet suit on. And I think part of that is you’re sitting higher so you can kind of get your stroke rate up higher as well but it’s that reach over the water

where you kind of throw the hand out there you get this momentum over the top and then there’s obviously less glide so you’re going to start the catch sooner and you can get the stroke rate up a bit quicker that way. I do find that people going from the pool to the open water they find that their times do suffer they do find that open water swimming a bit of a challenge. So I really like that tip is reach out further throw that hand forwards and then get a bigger catch get a bigger paddle and play around with that. One of the kind of got these three words that I use with people and I’m teaching them into swim open water it’s higher so sort of higher with the hand over the top faster and sometimes wider because people are trying to have this hand close to the body so higher, faster, wider and it’s interesting to hear you talk about what you noticed there because yeah that was my interpretation of it when I started teaching open water

or coaching open water swimming it was higher, wider, faster with the hand over the top so yeah I like that it’s nice to see it kind of come together there. I think you’re right I’ve seen athletes do also which is one of the things I had to try to correct is exactly what you mentioned which is to bring the hand up in this position before they put it in the water so it’s very close to the head I’ve always found that to be an ineffective way of getting a catch so that’s where I started going this idea of getting a little bit higher in the water over the water to reach out to grab the water as opposed to trying to do the next year head but I still see coaches teaching that it blows me away I’ll see somebody on YouTube or something on how to coach open water swimming and they’re teaching this movement of getting your elbow really high with your hand next to your head and then reach out under the water like you’re putting your hand into a sleeve

or reaching into the mailbox or something they typically call it and I find that to be a tremendous weight and energy to do it that way and you wind up with a very poor position also to grab the water as we’ve been talking about here and in terms of your sort of like coaching career has there been a specific instance where you’ve found that you’ve had to go against what you sort of mentioned one but go against what other people are teaching or just like you had something in mind where you thought, no, I think this is like this is how it needs to be done I’m going to teach or coach this way even though there was other people coaching in a different way

Yeah, there’s an endless list of things I honestly don’t know where to begin I just stick with swimming when I came up, you know when I started, I decided how I was gonna swim teach coaches, train the swimmers for triathlon one of the things I decided was that most athletes, most triathletes don’t need to be doing intervals in the pool it’s really a waste of time to do that they mostly just create a lot of bubbles around themselves and don’t go any place it’s they’re still slow and so I started working with the athlete to the idea that until they got to a fairly decent time in the pool all we were gonna work on was technique we’re just gonna work on, as I think I did in your last podcast, I talked about PDLC we’re just gonna work on those four things which if there’s probably one or two of these things that the athletes really weak on we’re gonna focus on that and it’s all we’re gonna work on in fact, I had them do the exactly the same

workouts all the time I’m sure that people get really tired of it but that’s part of the thing of trying to become good at something is to repeat it until you become so integrated to who you are as a swimmer as you don’t have to think about it anymore just as what you do and so I would have them

at your pool

and stay there for as long as they want don’t time it don’t say, I gotta go again in 10 seconds no, no stay there until you feel like you’re ready to go again in the meantime, take your mind off and let me think about something else I’m told to think about what I’m gonna do for supper tonight or what they’re doing at the job today or somebody to lay next to them and how they look swimming and whatever you wanna think about but for quite a long time several seconds, 20, 30, 40 seconds think about something else then begin to bring your mind back to stroking again the thing you’re working on begin to focus your memory on that and swim another 25 moderately fast working on just that one thing let’s do that until it becomes a habit then we’ll go to something else and work on it

athletes are all the same they all wanna go immediately to the end if I tell athletes in running the hardest workouts you could do would be to do five times three minutes with 90 second recoveries all done at your early capacity pace if I tell an athlete that that’s what they’ll do tomorrow they’ll go out and do five times 90 five times three minutes and so forth because the point is you don’t start out by doing the most difficult thing you start out by doing the most easy thing you start out by running 30 seconds at aerobic capacity with a minute and a half recovery and over the course of several weeks you build up to doing this five times three minutes that five times three minutes be very good when you finally do it but if you start out doing it it’s never going to improve it’s gonna be a piece of crap it’s gonna be worthless wait a waste of your time it’s the same thing in the pool if all you do is do intervals all day

the entire workout and you get done and you’re breathless and you think that was good I would say for the most part most triathletes, most age group triathletes did not accomplish anything in the pool all they did was made themselves tired they didn’t get any better they’re not gonna show me faster because of this workout today so let’s get to what’s holding you back what’s holding you back is your technique you’re not being held back by your aerobic capacity your stamina, your economy, your economy yes that’s because that’s a skill you’re not being held back these physiological things you typically think if you’re being held back just because you don’t have good technique

if I work you with a golfer I don’t have the golfer go out and play 18 holes every day and try to see if they can shoot below par what I have the golfer do is go to the driving range and work on hitting a ball let’s see if you can hit the ball squarely in the middle of the club face with your driver that’s a good starting place if we can get to that point then we can build on that and there’s other things we’re gonna do along the line to just try to get the ball to the middle of your club face there’s all kinds of things we can do to improve your strength, your swing it’s the same thing with swimming it’s a very, very technical sport it’s not the sort of thing you can do just off the top of your head even if you’ve done it a thousand times you may never get figured it out I know lots of golfers who’ve never figured out how to swing a golf club but they’ve been doing it for 20 years they haven’t figured it out yet because they’ve never really gotten down

to what is the basic element of the movement I have to make what is that movement and then practice that movement they wanna go right to the end in five times three minutes through the capacity everybody’s the same until you get out of that mindset until you get to the idea that I am gonna work on the most basic thing that helps me become a faster swimmer or a golfer I’m gonna do that one thing until I get it right then I go to the next thing nobody wants to do that but that’s what a coach should make you do yeah, I think becoming a good swimmer is just repeatedly doing a list of boring things it’s like, it’s very simple but it’s not easy but it’s just day in, day out repeating these things and allowing it to become habit and if I think back to all the swimmers that I’ve coached and when I see them later on the ones that have improved they’re the ones that have had the patience they’re just like, I’m not too concerned

with my times today I am just, I’m gonna focus on my stroke I’ll do these sets well but the times and so on I’m not too concerned because I know that six months, 12 months two years down the track that this is all going to pay off and I spoke about this concept that I heard from Simon Sinek I spoke about this a few weeks ago on the podcast where he’s got finite games and infinite games and finite games is like, all right you’re training for a particular race because there’s winners and losers and there’s a certain date that it happens but with infinite games it’s like marriage, you don’t win at marriage you know, it’s like the aim is to stay married so if you look at swimming as an infinite game where it’s like, there’s no end in sight it’s just something that I wanna continue to do and you’ve got that approach of just I wanna be the best swimmer that I can but there’s no end in sight I think that’s a really healthy way to approach it

where you’re not looking to rush things you’re just happy to be there and just keep working at it and I’ve found myself leaning a lot more towards that now I mean, I’m in my mid 30s but compared to when I was 18, 19, 20 I was very competitive and cared a lot about my results these days, not so much I just wanna be able to swim until I die and I just wanna keep improving as best as I can so I see it more as that infinite game now not to say you shouldn’t have those finite games where you’re training for a race and you wanna do well you’ve gotta have that obviously especially if you’re putting in all this time but I think it’s the approach that really can make the difference there That’s a very good point, I like that that’s finite and infinite I’ll keep that in mind because it kinda helps to explain this whole thing because you’re right, patience is the key especially in endurance sports if you’re not patient if you don’t really, if you’re unwilling

to work at it until you get it figured out and do it the right way then you’re really just wasting your time you’re just going out there and splashing a lot of water around and getting out of breath and getting out of the pool thinking you accomplished something but tomorrow you’re gonna be just as slow as you were the day before and six months from now you’ll be just as slow as you were before so you’ve gotta think this is a long range it’s something I’m gonna work on for a long time and in order to do that I need to know what it means I need to do right and that’s where having a coach is so important because a coach can see you if you don’t, you can’t see yourself all that well even with an underwater camera you can see it but most athletes, most swimmers most triathletes anyway are not sharp enough to be able to define what they’re exactly and they’re doing wrong it’s just they need to go faster is all they think

somehow they gotta go faster in the water just work harder is all they gotta do and that’s not the way you get there and if they can recognize some things that they’re doing wrong in the stroke sometimes it’s the things that won’t make much of a difference as well I’ve often seen because when we run clinics we’ve got six people there and I’ll sit down at each of them and I’ll go through their stroke with them and before I go through their stroke we’ll play through the video and I’ll ask them was there anything you could notice there sometimes people get like all the things and they have a really good sense of it because I think they’ve studied it and they’ve watched it a lot but then some other swimmers are looking at things that I’m not even really sort of noticing things that they could do better but it’s something that’s not gonna move the needle when it comes to their speed and their time so it does help to have someone

who knows what they’re doing speaking of coaches what’s the hardest set that you’ve ever prescribed hardest swim workout if prescribed someone? Oh gosh I’ll go way back on that probably I coached a couple of guys who were turning for the Olympics in Sydney by the way you’re I tend to guys, yeah but when there’s a spectator they’re amazing Yeah I had a couple of athletes in the U.S.

He was a great cyclist Idioka runner and so he had a couple of strikes against him already and I used to put him in the pool and try to work on things that would get him to the point that he could handle a higher intensities especially I tried to put him in the pool with somebody faster than him and the idea that he was just swimming in the other guys on his feet because that’s what he’s gonna have to do with the race because I was never gonna give him the point where he was gonna come out of the water first he was always gonna come out of the water mid-pack and if it wasn’t for having other swimmers around him he’s gonna come out of the water back of the pack he just wasn’t that good in the water so we had to spend a lot of time just working on stamina in this case stamina in the slipstream of a really good swimmer and so I would find somebody who like the other guy I coached you were they both lived in the same town

I put them together in the pool and after the warm up we’d do these long, long sets thousands where he had to hold the guy’s feet and I had the other guy try and told him to go as hard as he could every time so I knew he could do it try to drop him and so he would try to drop my less effective swimmer and he had to improve his stamina he had to be improved his ability to hang on even when it doesn’t feel good you know when you’re working hard and you’re taking yourself to your limit especially swimming in thousands with relatively short recoveries I don’t recall if the recoveries were now listed back in the 1998-99 period but that was the sort of thing that we had to work on for him was he just had to be able to hang with the fast swimmers and he did eventually improve he got better but he never got to be what I would call a good swimmer he was a better swimmer but he was not a good swimmer so that was the thing that he had to focus on the race

also he had to hold somebody’s feet in the water to make sure he was going he was keeping up with the race I love it there’s a surf Ironman swimmer that I or competitor that I know he’s sometimes strange with our group and he lives up in Queensland and occasionally they’ve had some of the British triathlon team training with him and he said when they were there there was this one swimmer in the group who wasn’t very strong in the open water and just didn’t have great skills out there and so what the coach had this surf Ironman competitor do was he said I just want you to be on top of this guy like for the next six weeks whenever you’re in the open water I want you to be right next to him make it uncomfortable for him when you’re going around the turns when you’re exiting the water when you’re when you’re starting just be on him and he didn’t go easy on him and he was just all over him and then after six weeks after that practice

he just got more comfortable with having other people around and really improved his swim and his open water racing so just practicing those things getting comfortable doing that makes such a big, big difference especially for people who are already a bit nervous in the water and a bit uncomfortable just training in those situations and it’s like if you’re afraid of something or you’re not comfortable with it we’ll just start small work your way up if you’re scared of the open water go at knee depth be two meters off the shore then you can start to increase it from there so there’s a strategy to improving in everything and often it just means start small like you’re talking about with a technique it’s like you don’t need to just pick one thing and start at the first thing maybe it’s posture and body position start there then build your way up it doesn’t have to be jumping out of planes straight away I agree that was one of the hardest things to do

and bring on a camp and I would have these triathletes for one week at the end of one week my goal, one of the goals I had for them was always to be a better swimmer even when they came to the camp and that was difficult to do because even though I was only teaching four things to them the challenge was they only had actually six days to absorb these things before they went back home again and so then I always gave them a pep talk at the end of the week you know you’ve been through all these things you now know what these four things are and that’s all I want you to work on don’t work on anything else when you get to the pool if you have a coach on deck and the coach says I don’t want you to have your hand above the water I want you to have your fingers in the water next to your head but they often teach this sort of thing so teach one if a coach says that to you and tells you to change your technique say yes ma’am I’ll do that

and then go right back to doing what I told you do not do that it’s going to make you a worse swimmer the idea was I want to drill into their heads that this was important that they’re going to get lots of feedback from people who they respect probably will tell them not to do this but I guarantee them that they did it they would get better but so they you know if I had them for six months I could make them all really good swimmers if I’ve got them for one week there’s no chance all I can do is just teach them something that they can do on their own then they can go back home for the next six months they can work on that thing and become better swimmers if they’re patient enough that which is the next big issue as we’ve already talked about if you think back to well basically since triathlon began if you could see a head-to-head race from anyone parent or past who would those two athletes be if they were to race at the Pona

Ironman World Championships anyone from past or present? Well that’s just already taken place Mark Allen Dave Scott in 1989 I was there for this as the I knew that’s going to be in it I can just fall and that’s in the heat it’s like 90 degrees and 90% humidity 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 90 humidity 90% and I recall these guys coming out of transition two on the run shoulder to shoulder and I can recall I was standing there in the heat and sweat was just pouring out of me just watching and they were running at the time probably at that point they were running about six to 630 pace per mile and translate that into kilometers but at fast pace for an Ironman they were pushing themselves pretty good and they were only like in the second mile when I saw them off the run and then I watched them throughout the race I kept driving at the various points on the course to get down to be able to watch them if they were doing in those days you could actually get closer

to the race than you can now and so I watched them all the way until they finally came to the last mile when finding Mark Allen dropped Dave Scott they’d been shoulder to shoulder for 25 miles 40 kilometers and here they are now they’re finally getting some gap between them and that to me that was the best race I’d ever been to in triathlon it wasn’t the fastest times ever but compared to today they’re running faster times today but the best race was those two guys and then the book came out several years later called Iron War and I read the book it’s an excellent book and it really tells that story extremely well about these guys were going through preparation for the race and on race day and so forth and it’s just a great story in fact that was 1989 and the other best race that ever occurred in endurance sports also happened in 1989 although it was a Tour de France and that was the race that came down to eight seconds between first and second

Greg LeMond and Peter LeRan Fignon and so I got to see the two best races that I’ve ever seen, never heard of had to see them both first hand it was just an amazing experience to be there for those races No wonder you got hooked on triathlon and endurance racing when you see that sort of stuff back then that’s awesome it is to wrap up Joe so outside of triathlon what’s something that you really enjoy doing a hobby or something that you take a lot of time thinking about or doing outside of triathlon

Yeah, most people don’t know this but I’ve been playing golf since about 1997 or 98 something like that and I’ve never gotten very good at it but there’s something about golf that kind of makes you come back to it every day you want to, but you think you can get better at it and yet somehow you’re just as miserable a day as you were the day before I’ve used this as a learning experience for myself so back in, even when I first started in the late 90s I hired a teacher to work with me at my golf club to work on my technique and over the years I’ve changed teachers I’ve had, I don’t know, eight, nine, ten teachers over the years and one thing I learned is two things what not to do I’m trying to teach a skill like golf or like swimming what not to do which is overwhelm the person there’s just too much information, too much data too much stuff filled their head with too many things they got to do and then all of a sudden they got to do it

like in golf your swing lasts about a second and a half and yet the instructors told you five things you got to do in a second and a half but you’re standing there trying to get all the stuff into your head get it all right and then you start your swing and immediately all those five things are gone and you just hit the ball again that was, I had one instructor like that the other instructors have all been much more deleterious about making sure we get the right thing worked on just as I do with swimmers so they take one thing which you see as the most basic thing and they would have me work on that thing over and over and over and over until I get it right then we move on to the second thing that’s the good instructors that’s good coaches is also good coaches don’t move on to the more advanced things until they get the most basic things taking care of it to the athlete really can make those moves correctly then we move on to the more advanced things

it’s not just movement and skills this also has to do with types of workouts you do five times three minutes for example as opposed to doing five times 30 seconds when you first start that sort of thing we start with the most basic thing we look our way up over time and you become a better athlete as you mentioned before before you’ve got to be patient to do that and so many athletes are not patient and unfortunately there are coaches and golf instructors out there who are not patient either they want the athlete to learn something immediately and know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing so that’s even though whenever I take another activity even ping pong wherever maybe somehow this always comes back to my head how can I get better at this and how can I take what I learn here back to my coaching with my athletes or maybe there’s always this crossover going on in my head that’s always kind of like been my engineering way of seeing

working with athletes we can engineers see it as fixing the problem that’s the same thing I say always see it as fixing the problem what is the problem you find the problem fix the problem that’s what I’ve always seen this and that’s how I’ve come up with my coaching methodology over the all the years is what’s the problem how do we fix it okay let’s do that yeah but you got to think that way if you don’t think that way you just start doing things randomly and nothing happens if there’s any good at all like the guy the golf instructor has you working on and you know five things on one swing yeah yeah exactly right I’ve found a very similar thing with with surfing which is probably the thing I do most outside of swimming and all the coaches and the videos and stuff that I’ve seen there’s only been one coach that’s really resonated with me and I was thinking about why is it why do I really get the concept when this guy talks about surfing

and number one he uses really good cues and analogies and so I’ve tried to integrate those more and more into the into my coaching because it helps me relate that some of the things like an example there is like when you get up on the the surfboard you want to be like a sprinter starting a race like you’re sort of in like this position sort of half crouched knees slightly bent and so I was like that’s easy to picture so when you get up you get into that position then another one he uses is this coffee cup analogy so your hand at the back is he says imagine you got a cup of coffee and you don’t want to spill that cup of coffee so you’re sort of holding that hand up and this is what provides it gives you the balance so when you’re when you’re turning when you’re sort of coming back like don’t spill that cup of coffee so and and again just really simple cue that within the three seconds or the four seconds you might be riding away

that’s like well all right coffee cup done I can do that so I think I’m similar I’d love to relate things back to how can I be a better coach how can I get my swimming concepts across to for the people that I’m coaching you just can’t turn off that brain it’s you just can’t turn off it’s it’s going to be like that for yeah for the for the rest of your life I think it’s but that’s a part of the fun right you bet I enjoyed it it’s fun Joel thanks so much for being on the podcast again I’ve really enjoyed this and I can’t wait to share this with our with our listeners so for those that are listening you’ve just released the fifth edition of the triathletes training Bible we’ll link to that in the show notes anything you’d like to say to finish up here oh well thank you very much first of all just for having me on board and I always enjoy talking to the people about sport I don’t care what the sport is if I know anything at all about it

which is on pretty limited golf is not my strength when it comes to talking but triathletes more in that area and and I enjoy talking about that so thanks for having me on I had a good time thank you very much thanks Jack

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 Proven Strategies For Fast And ‘Effortless’ Swimming with Joe Friel appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Matthew McElroy is a professional triathlete with 9 World Cup podiums and 1 World Triathlon podium. He was selected as an alternate for the Tokyo Olympics. With a background in cross country and track and field, Matthew had to work hard to develop his swim to get it to an elite level to compete with the best on the world stage. In this podcast, we’ll dive into how he radically transformed his swimming stroke over the last 10 years.

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And that’s when I started noticing I started to get a lot more speed. And I went from probably like 10 to 15 to last out of the water. And I started like making jumps to like the middle of the pack. And I’m still working on it. Like I’m still like, if I have a bad swim, I might be that in the back. And if I have a better swim, I’m in the middle. So it’s a constant learning experience.

And the reason I asked this question is that one of the things that people seem to find difficult is to put in more effort and go fast at the same time. They feel like there’s that diminishing return of I’m going harder, but I’m actually getting slower and saying, OK, what’s happening here? 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 today’s episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I’m really excited to bring you this episode with professional triathlete Matthew McElroy. He has had nine World Cup podiums, one World Triathlon podium, and he was selected as an alternate for the Tokyo Olympics. And currently he’s in the process of qualifying for the Paris Olympics this year. Now, one of the reasons I really wanted to bring him on the podcast was he posted a video of his swimming progress from 2014 to 2023, a video that I saw fairly recently. And we’d been in contact the last couple of years. He’d sent me some of his videos to take a look and see what I thought. And to see his progression from 2014 to today, it is night and day. So I wanted to ask him, what did he do, particularly in the beginning of his career, to get to the point where he started off as a runner to then actually becoming someone who can mix it with some of the best

triathletes in the world when it comes to his swimming. So he talked about a couple of interesting strategies that his coaches had him do in the early days to help him develop better control and balance and catch as well. So I think you’ll really enjoy that, particularly if you’re in the early stages of your swimming journey. There’s some really good strategies here that some were new to me, some I’d heard before, and I think you’re really going to enjoy this one because it’s all well and good to see what the best athletes in the world are doing right now, but what did they do in the early days? What helped make them the swimmer that they are today will help make the triathlete they are today. So we look into that on this episode with Matthew McCallaroy. Let’s jump into it. All right, Matthew, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. So you posted a video a couple of weeks back where you posted a

video of 2014, you had video of your swimming and to 2023. So in the course of nine years, your swimming dramatically changed and it wasn’t just by sheer luck and by thinking just about your technique, it came with a lot of hard work and a lot of swimming. So I want to dig into that today because we’ve been in contact over the last couple of years just about your swimming. And just watching that before and after, it’s such a huge improvement. And I think for anyone listening to this, to show them that you don’t need to have a swimming background necessarily to improve your swimming, but it does take a lot of hard work and a lot of focus to really get to a high level with your swimming where you can compete with the best in the world in triathlon. So that’s what I want to dig into today. So just to kick it off, what was your background in swimming? And I know you were a runner as a kid, but what kind of background

did you have in swimming? Yeah. So thanks for the introduction. Yeah. So my background was actually surfing. I searched competitively for about, I think I surfed competitively about like six years. So I started when I was like, I started surfing when I was six. I was always in the water, um, served in the NSSA, which is like, uh, for those that don’t know, it’s basically just young kids that surf competitions every weekend, you get in a bunch of heats and you try to make to the final and then win the final. And then I did junior life guard. So I’ve, I’ve always been in the water, but never like proper swimming technique or coaching. I was just swimming with my head up, you know, body surfing, not in a pool and not doing flip turns, just, just being in the water as a kid. But yeah, that’s, I guess that’s where I started. And, and then being a runner, that was it.

Did it feel like it was a foreign thing to go from having that running background to having to join a squad and, and start swimming laps in the pool and doing proper, proper sessions? Like was it, was that quite unusual and maybe a bit uncomfortable compared to, compared to the running trend that you were doing? Yeah. I mean, it’s completely different systems, right? Like, I guess the difference between running and swimming, right? It’s like running, you have as much air as you want by breathing. And then all of a sudden you’re in the pool and you’re hypoxic and you’re trying to hold your breath. So it’s a very different system. And also like the fact that it’s like full body, right? Versus running is very, I mean, you want to keep your, your upper body very relaxed. So, yeah, starting out as a runner, I basically went to Northern Arizona, a university where I ran in college and I got recruited by a bunch of different colleges at a high school in high school.

I was like second at Foot Locker Nationals, which is like the cross country national champs of, of high school. So I was recruited kind of anywhere I wanted to go. And then I was plagued with injuries during my college career. So I decided to pick up triathlon just as like a form of like cross training, starting to bike like three times a week, starting to swim a little bit, but I didn’t really have any guidance. I didn’t have any coaching to start. I was just getting in the pool, trying to do, I don’t know, anywhere from like 1,000 to 1,500. And that was like all out. Like I would just swim for 20 minutes straight, maybe, maybe do like, you know, 800 and just be gassed. So I started looking for help and, and I think the first swim test I did before I had any help, I did like a hundred and probably somewhere around like 140, like three yards. So what is that? Let’s just say like 130 for meters, long course meters.

That was like an all out hundred time trial. So I was extremely slow. What was your thought then when you went to 130? Did you feel like, man, I don’t know what I need to do to get faster? Or was it like, all right, I know I’m new to this. I know I can get a lot quicker and I know how. Like where, where was your head at when you started, started out? Yeah, I think, well, what attracted me like to triathlon? First of all, it was like USA triathlon at the time had like a development program, but they were kind of like promoting this idea that if you hit certain standards on the run and so on the bike that you could start getting paid full time and then race around the world. And so it kind of sounds like pretty interesting to me. I was like, okay, I could go like the pro running path and be a marathoner. But I’m kind of plagued with injuries at the moment, or I can go down this path where, you know, I’m probably the best guy in terms of running.

That’s, that’s signing up for this. So I heard about this reached out to like an international coach. And that’s when I got thrown in with like some of the best triplets in the world down in San Diego. But just even backtracking, like he said, like that 130, like I showed up to San Diego and got the doors blown off me. I didn’t even know how to flip turn. Like I didn’t know how to properly flip turn. And I just didn’t like, it was pretty eye opening when I jumped in the pool with a bunch of pro athletes and realized right then that. You had to be the minimum, I would say on this group, you had to be like a varsity high school swimmer was like the bare minimum. And were they welcoming in that group? Were they like, all right, we can see new, new to this. We’ll, yeah, we’ll help you lift that level and that standard of where you’re at. Or was it, did they sort of, you know, exclude you a bit from the, from the group and go, this guy’s no good.

Oh, not at all. I mean, like those are some of the best times of my life, man. Like just working super hard with those guys. Like I’ll, I’ll have the name drop, but had like Joe Malloy, Greg Billington, Eric Wagerstrom, Eric’s a big, you know, big name in the triathlon world right now, Manny Huerta. He was like a mentor of mine and all those guys have been to the Rio Olympics, except for Eric and they took me under their wing. And I think the biggest thing that helped me is like, I had a great coach at time, Paul Sousa, who took a very unique approach to someone at my ability. But what I did was I asked a lot of questions. I think that’s the one thing that you have to do with like better swimmers is like, ask them questions about like, what are you feeling in the water? Like, what are you doing differently? What drills are you working on? What are you thinking about? Right. Like how are you moving your body through the water?

What, what cues are you using to, to set your stroke up? So I asked questions every day, you know, what, whether it was swimming or just racing in general, those guys gave me all their little pro tips. And some of those guys are still my best friends and I talk to them all the time. And most of them are retired now, but I learned pretty quick. I would say, you know, after a year of swimming with this group, I remember pretty vividly, like being able to do an hour of swimming, like four to five thousand yards on the 115 base. So doing 100s, sending off 100, 200, 300s, being able to make the 115 send off, that was like a huge accomplishment for me. And yeah, I like, I sucked a lot up from those guys. Um, that, yeah, that first couple of years. You said the coach took a unique approach with you. What was that approach and what was different about it? Yeah. So I went from just kind of swimming on my own a couple of days a week.

You know, like I said, a thousand to 1500, I actually brought like a buoy. We started out basically swimming 40,000 yards a week, six days a week. We did double swims on Tuesday, Thursday. And then we use the Vossa trainer. Yeah. We had the Vossa trainer for 20 minutes on the second just before we did the double swim in the afternoon. And basically the concept was I’m a runner, right? Like I’m extremely skinny and I don’t have any lats. I don’t have that core stabilization that swimmers have. So we had to build that through what we call the, we would call a brute force, right, just getting the yardage in and using the Vossa, but also using the double pool buoy. So what we would do is we’d have two buoys, we put it together. You’d have a swim band like this, which is a flat tire from a bicycle, or you can use one of the fancy ones. And what we would do is we would tie it around and then put another buoy through there through the middle.

So you had two buoys together and then you had another fan that actually went up on this side that you could put your feet through. So you’d actually put your feet through the middle here. And so when you’re coming from a runner, right, with terrible position and your legs are like basically going towards the bottom of the pool and sinking, this sort of lifted your legs up and you’re swimming with your head like submerged into the water. And so it kind of gave me the awareness that like, I need to swim with my head submerged really deep. And so we did, he basically, after our first camp, I was still in college. He sent me back to NAU with a double pool buoy and I swam 5,000 yards every night, six days a week. And I still finished six and the 10k at NCAAs on the track. So I got three all Americans, still swimming five k a night, which for a runner is a lot at altitude. And a lot of that came from like, you could see kind of body

transformation, like I started to get the swimmers V, right? And my lats started to get really strong. So the double pool buoy was like the first thing that we implemented into that swim progression.

What did you notice aside from the obviously better body position? What did you notice in how you felt when you swam? And did you feel a difference through like that, that, that core control and that your balance in the water, did that start to become evident pretty quickly or was that something that just kind of developed without really noticing the difference? It was kind of like once I took the buoy out and almost put me in the right position, if that makes sense, because I did so many yards. I did like, you know, a year and a half with the double pool buoy and most my swims, as soon as I took it out, it’s almost like that was where I was stuck. And it was very, the stroke was very flat. There wasn’t a lot of rotation. It was very pull, pull focus. We, we started implementing like the two beat kick. You know, we’d like, I obsessed over Ledecky’s two beat kick. And the next thing you know, like I could swim in a chase pack

at the short course distance draft legal racing. So after, after a year, I want to say a year and a half, maybe two years.

So you, yeah. So you developed the strength first of all, and I think coming from that running background, like it just, it requires, you need that upper, upper body strength just to be able to maintain speed for those, those distances, like you just, there’s no shortcut to that. And even if you like don’t have a running background and maybe it’s in a, in a different sport, like swimming is just a different sort of strength really. Cause it’s just, it’s all overhead. And most people haven’t lifted their arms up above their head unless they’ve, you know, done pull ups or something recently, like we just, we’re not used to that position. So it takes time to, to develop that. It’s good to hear that the pool boy helped as well with the body position once you took it out. Cause I think the fear that a lot of people have is they can become too reliant from their pool boy, but you’re talking about obviously the double one down near the feet as well.

So like having it down, not between the legs yet. Yeah. And so that, that I think helps really develop that, that core control and stability, whereas if you do a lot of it with just one pool boy up, up high, then sometimes I think you can get a little bit lazy with the, with the core. So yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with using it, using a pool boy, but for those that aren’t watching this, but are listening to this, yeah, the double pool boys down, down near the feet and where the ankles are. So that’s interesting. So what was the next, the next step from there? So you built up that upper body strength, you started to get some, some fitness and some strength and you started with that, the two beat kick. Did you then progress on to other types of kick, a four beat or a six beat? How did that progress? Yeah. So in 2018, I left that group in San Diego with Paul Sousa and I started working with Ian O’Brien. And then we kind of like, I felt like I, I started

making steps and progressing to the point where I was like, felt pretty flat in the first 300 of their race, which in, in triathlon and the short course, like the first booty is everything. It’s a difference between, you know, you’re getting on the podium sometimes and you finishing 30th. And so get out speed, super critical. And I felt like as soon as I jumped in the water, I didn’t have, I didn’t have any speed. It was just one, one speed the whole time. So as soon as I went to that, my coach, you know, Ryan, he’s, he’s coached multiple Olympians, Taylor Knibb right now. He’s coaching Summer Cook, me. He’s got a pretty good pedigree of athletes. He started to say, Hey, we got to, we got to start kicking and you got to start driving from the hip. And some of the cues that he likes to use is like, you know, fast arm entry, good, good hinge of like the elbow, you know, to, to catch. And that’s when I started noticing I started to get a

lot more speed. And I went from probably like 10 to 15 to last out of a walk out of the water. And I started noticing like making jumps to like the middle of the pack. And I’m still working on it. Like I’m still like, if I have a bad swim, I might be that in the back. And if I have a better swim, I’m in the middle. So it’s a constant learning experience. But the next step was six-beat kick and really focusing on speed work. Six-beat kick, focusing on speed work. Yeah, gotcha. And is it like, I often have, I work with a lot of triathletes and quite often for the people that I’m coaching, sort of one-on-one with their technique, quite often I’ll get them to do fast 25s in their warm up of kick, just to start to develop the, the strength and that movement. And often I get a bit of pushback because it’s like, well, I’m not, I don’t need to use my legs when I’m, when I’m swimming, if I’ve got a wetsuit on and so on.

But the thing is like it with a, with an effective kick, if you can be effective with that downward kick, you’ll get a bit of propulsion from it, but it’s really just about helping drive the, the top end of the, of the body. And for you, especially doing the, the short course racing that you’re doing, you need that, that front end speed to get out with a pack. Cause those guys are quick, like they are, they are going hammer and tong that first couple hundred meters to, to make the pack. And like Ironman racing is obviously a little bit different, right? But you just need that, that front end speed and it’s very hard to do that with a, a two-beat kick. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to work on it and, and have that six-beat kick for when you, when you need it. And it might settle down a little bit through the race, but you know, I’ve got a friend who I’ve mentioned on this podcast before, but he like always sort of struggled with

his swim, but he just, he just worked on that first 200 meters, 200 meters of his, of his race. And he found that as long as he got out with those, that front group, he was always swimming the same pace for the rest of the race, but he wasn’t making that, that front pack at the start. And so he was always left behind. So he just worked on that front end speed. And he’s been right up there with the best guys in the world for half Ironman and full distance Ironman events now. So what sort of things did you do to develop your speed aside from the kicking, obviously? Yeah, like a lot of parachute work, just a lot of like dive starts, you know, working on, you know, good underwater because those, those sort of things matter. Like when you’re on a start line on pontoon versus like Ironman, you know, Ironman 70.3, I’ve done a couple, you’re, you’re sort of like, you know, there’s no pontoon. Sometimes there’s a beach running, but

most of the time you’re just kind of in open water treading. So, you know, underwaters and doing a good dolphin kick doesn’t matter. But when you’re on a pontoon and, and you’re doing a super sprint like we had in Hamburg, I mean, you want to get two really good dolphin kicks and get half a body length away from the guys who are left and right of you because you’re in these little boxes, right? You’re, you’re almost shoulder to shoulder, and you’re going to come up, you know, on top of them. So doing a lot of explosive like 50s, 25s, hundreds at the start of a threshold set. So we might add like two, we might do multiple rounds, like, like two fifties from a dive on two minutes, full gas, and then straight into eight by 100 threshold, right? Now getting into like a pace that, you know, we can hold for an hour or a 1500. But I do agree with you. Like you said, like, you know, working on that kick is going to be super important because you’re going

to need it in the beginning of a race. And then when you, when you slot in and you get on the right feet, then you turn it off, then you can turn it off, wait for the bike. But even an Ironman, like a, like I did Indian Wells, 7.3, then Canute, some of these really good swimmers, the Norwegians were there. And we had to get out really hard. I had to use that kick and then I turned it off as soon as I got into, you know, that fourth position. Yeah. And that’s what we had Kat Matthews on the podcast. And she said that after her bike accident, that the one upside from it was that she could only kick for quite a while. And that actually developed her kick to a point where it allowed her to swim faster. So she just ended up doing fast 25, sometimes within, sometimes without, as part of a warmup pretty much every session. And that just developed a kick to the point where it improved the rest of her, her swim. So it’s, I’ve heard it from quite

a few, quite a few athletes at that, at that level. So I think it’s worth doing. And I think it’s good to change the way you’re doing the kick. Like sometimes snorkel, kickboard, face down, OK, that’s great. But also kick on your back, kick on your side, work the kick in those different directions. Even vertical kicks are great one for that as well. And that can that can also just help develop the kick a bit better rather than just doing face down with a kickboard because you’ve got more more pressure down and then on the up kick there’s less water on top. So you’ve got less kind of resistance there. So you typically only end up working to kick in that one direction, not much in the upward direction. So that’s why I think the side kick or the vertical kick can be can be good to do as well. And you mentioned the parachute there, so that that resistance work can add a lot of add a lot of power to your stroke. And he’s saying that

with some of the best swimming sprinters in the world, like Cam McAvoy is really big on that resistance work in the water and it’s paying dividends for him. So he’s the fastest guy of a 50. Do you know, have you heard of Cam McAvoy? Or is it? You have yet. Yeah. So there’s a big, big push on that at the moment, which is which is really interesting to watch. So in terms of your swimming, what about technically, what about things to do with your stroke that have been a theme for the last couple of years? Yeah, we’ve also done like a lot of I am work. We tend to do that in a lot of our aerobic swims. So normally we set up the week with like two speed threshold swims that are normally on like Tuesday and then like change in speed, like a lot of negative split work. We’re sort of going from like an aerobic pace and then maybe you get down to threshold or even faster sometimes. And then just maybe some pulls and another thing we do is like

a 400 where we do a little more breath control where we do a breathe every three, breathe every four, breathe every five, breathe every six. And that gets extremely hard when you’re at altitude at 7000 feet, doing especially in short force like long course. You don’t have to flip, but I just go extremely lactic when you’re when you’re not breathing as much and you have to flip turn constantly every like 16 seconds. So and then there’s like the strength aspect, like getting with my coach, working on range of motion, doing a lot of dry land, you know, band work, making sure I warm up properly. I think that’s super underrated, right? Like getting on the pool that I can do in like five, 10 minutes every day of just like getting the body warmed up, you know, shoulder shoulder blades, you know, pecs, you name it, core just just waking the body up for the swim. The same goes for the run. Like he did the same for track sessions, doing drills.

So just a mixed bag of things. And I think I’ve noticed the most in just like really hitting quality. Like. I do that. I have the best swims when I focus less on doing a bunch of gray. I was just called the gray area like a paste that’s just sloppy. It’s junk yardage. And you’re you’re kind of having to work, but you’re not working super hard because you’re fatigued from the workout the day before. Like I just I just don’t I don’t think that’s useful because you end up just like getting tired for the next session. I’d rather do something with a little more purpose, more technique, changing speeds, you know, going maybe from really slow to really fast, working both ends of the spectrum. I just don’t find it useful to be in this middle ground. And I still want to continue to go like right now, I’m focused on kicking a lot and getting my kick strong because I’m a huge VO2 max type of guy. So I have like a VO2 max of 9192 that’s been tested.

And so for me to do a lot of anaerobic work, it’s extremely hard. That first 300 is going to be more challenging for someone like me versus someone who has that quit twitch, you know, I’m 31, someone who’s, you know, 24 that can swim to 240s for 300 yards, not meters. 300 yards is going to, you know, is going to be able to tap into that system a lot easier than I am. So I hope that helps your question. Now, that’s great. And what about feeling like you had more than one speed? How long do you feel like it took you to develop different days? I think it’s a it’s a mindset like it’s a it’s like a neuromuscular thing, like being able to tell your your mind and body connection, being able to be like, OK, I’m going to swim slow and just relax and finding these gears, right? And I guess, yeah, it is a technical aspect. There’s a side of like, you’re going to have different strokes for different speeds. You should, in my opinion, you

should have like six or seven different speeds, right? Maybe you would agree with that or not. You can have your slow pace where you’re just like totally dogging it. You just got in the pool and to like your max 25s where you’re not even you’re not even breathing, you know, head down and you’re wind milling. I think you should have that whole spectrum of speeds. And so you should train those and understand with the clock, right? Like your clock, the clock needs to be your best friend, understanding like, you know, what stroke is equal to what speed? Yeah, it shouldn’t be a surprise what you are touching the wall in when you’re doing that speed development work or a set, let’s say, where it might be three, two hundreds and you’re going easy, medium, fast, like you should have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to hit based on the effort that you you put into it. And look, maybe it’ll change by a second or two, depending on

how you’re feeling that day. But you should you should know what what that returns going to be for the effort that you put out. What do you feel like you do when you do change gears and you do start to go a little bit faster? And the reason I ask this question is that one of the things that people seem to find difficult is to put in more effort and go fast at the same time. There’s often they feel like there’s that diminishing return of I’m going harder, but I’m actually getting slower and think, OK, what’s what’s happening here? So I think it’s it can be helpful. And I like to ask this question of athletes like yourself. What do you feel like you do to when you do increase the effort or the pace? Just put it in your cap. I think those are and you want to hit your pace and you’re getting sloppy. You’re turning off mentally. You’re tired from the session before. For most athletes, you know, we’re all pretty tired most of the time.

So, you know, you lock in that tempo with the pacer and you just start like getting after it. And and the only thing you’re focused on is cadence. You’re not focused on anything else. Before we dive into the rest of today’s podcast episode, this episode is proudly brought to you by Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’ve been a long time sponsor of the podcast and they are my go to goggles when it comes to tracking my training sessions and being able to see what’s happening in real time through the goggles. And we know swimming is a highly technical sport, but without the guidance of a coach on deck, identifying and addressing technique flaws can be a challenge. They’ve recently added a new feature to the goggles. Head coach. And this addresses that problem head on. It gives them as improved access to their technique awareness, focus skill development and in app education and analysis. Head coach provides real time visual coaching via the form

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your form smart swim goggles. Yeah, that makes sense, right? You can hold the same or a very similar distance per stroke. And all you’re doing is increasing your cadence. You’re gonna be swimming faster. Now, inevitably, as you as you start to rate up, your distance per stroke is going to shorten. But the goal is to try and maintain it as best as possible. But one of the things that I like to do is if I use the form goggles when I’m doing a training session, I’ll look back at the at the data. And if we’ve done a set where we’ve progressively gotten faster, if I’ve had a good session, my stroke rate will go from say a 60 if I’m going at a 60 60% effort, and then it will kind of go like 62 64 maybe 66 and then maybe 68 if I’m really starting to go for it over like a 200. But it’s like, there’s not a huge difference. It’s only an increase of about 12 13% in terms of stroke rate overall. But that’s enough to see an increase in the speed. I

think sometimes people have the thought that it’s going to be wildly different. Like it might be a 50 stroke rate all the way up to like a 70 or 75 stroke rate as they as they change speeds. But it’s going to be it’s just small little adjustments as you’re going. So it’s not that much of a change in changing cadence necessarily if you’re if you’re doing it well. Do you have a rough idea of what your your cadence is when you start to change space? Yeah, it’s been a while since since I used to one. I’m just going to say roughly like you said, like 6870. I have I’ve had some pretty good swims were actually raced with the the sensor in the cap. I don’t know if it’s legal, but they never stopped me. And I know I know my competitors are kind of looking around at me like what’s that noise? You know, nothing to say here. Yeah, but I do I do think that like you said, like on the other side of the spectrum, cadence is good. But I also think that like

doing a lot of DPS work and not necessarily like like doing long reps like it’s hard to do a 200 DPS, you know, and and hold good form but doing fifties just really strong DPS. You start to figure out like how you’re pulling water and being efficient. So there’s like the other side of the spectrum right where it’s like you focus on cadence, but you can also focus on like on DPS and and getting the benefits of that. And I think the first video I ever watched of you is like a DPS video where you like we’re doing hundreds with like a really low stroke rate and getting a lot of like pulling a lot of water.

Yeah, it’s it’s incredibly hard to do say even 10 fifties where you’re working on minimum stroke count. Like that’s that’s really tiring physically and I think mentally as well. But like it’s yeah, that’s that’s a different kind of challenge in itself, because just to be able to hold that hold that streamline and to be able to pull as much water as you as you’re trying to pull like it’s it’s hard work doing that. So it’s good to work on both ends of it and you can’t have one without the other. I we did a set this morning that was it was a bunch of fifties. We did one at minimum stroke count. And then the next one how to is power and when when I’m talking power, we just do it at an easy effort, but we’re just trying to hold as much water as possible through the stroke. And then the third one we go 25 fast 25 easy. And generally in that fast 25, like you’re feeling good because you’ve worked on the distance per stroke, you’ve worked on that

maximum power. And then you put it put it all together. And you’re generally swimming pretty well. So I think that those little changes and getting you to think about different parts of the stroke. It’s it’s a good way to just bring that feeling of how you should be swimming and just to try different different things. And it’s I had a coach and a friend of mine Clayton on the podcast recently. And one of the things that he talked about was just getting getting used to swimming without any tech, any equipment like just goggles clock on the wall and just being being able to tune into how you’re feeling. Because I think that can get lost pretty easily. And swimming is just so much about the feel of it. And you said that one of the questions that you asked the the other triathletes when you joined that that squad was what are you feeling when you’re when you’re swimming? Because I think that’s that’s such a good, good question, because

it’s like what what should I be be feeling as I’m swimming? It’s just feeling like hard work right now. But if you talk to the best swimmers like they’re probably feeling like they’re gliding a little bit on on one side and they’re not looking to rush that the catch like it’s it’s very much about how you’re you’re feeling. I’m curious to know what you feel for and like how you would explain your stroke to someone now if if an up and comma was to ask you about what you feel when you swim. I mean, my my stroke has really changed even in the last 24 hours to be honest, like I just swim session last night with a coach here and flag staff because I could tell like it it seems like every time every time I take an off season, I come back to swimming and I lose my stroke completely. I’m never taking off season from the pool ever again. I might take a couple days, but like I need to stay in the pool. And that’s from someone who like didn’t grow

up swimming. How would I explain to them? I would say like right now it’s very it’s very kick focused, very hip driven, less about, you know, less about like really muscling through the water with my arms, even though I’m engaging those lats and I’m getting a really good catch. And I’m trying to get one goggle on the water. I don’t know if that’s like I don’t know if that’s a good description of like what you’re asking, but those are some key things I think about and I would explain my my stroke as being right now. There’s not a there’s not a ton of glide compared to, you know, swimmer swimmers who are not doing triathlon because you don’t necessarily want a ton of glide. There’s maybe a little bit definitely focused on like early breathing, which which helps, you know, a little bit more glide. So that’s that’s kind of what I would tell someone. Hmm. It’s speaking of off seasons I took I was swimming probably the best I was one for years up to

Christmas. I did a hundred hundred set average one one 14, which is the best I’ve ever done by a couple of seconds. And I’m feeling good. It took 10 days off over Christmas and it just hasn’t come back yet. Like I feel like maybe this week I’m starting to get it, but that’s that’s a month. I’m going, oh man, that’s so frustrating because our our race season is now all of our races and stuff are happening now and swimming just it kind of fell apart with with 10 days off. So it’s just one of those things. You’ve got to stay in the water and there’s no there’s no getting around it, unfortunately. Yeah. Do you do you feel like getting video or having someone look at your stroke is kind of like pinpoint what’s going on with it is helpful because I know when I get like I always try to tell someone to take a video of me not too often because I think like you can get paranoid, right? But like once every three weeks, get a video of you

swimming, you know, a certain pace, probably not slow, but like maybe your threshold pace and then kind of break it down, you know, like what do you need to work on? I feel like that’s helpful. Oh, so helpful. I did a YouTube video going, comparing wearing a wetsuit to not wearing a wetsuit. So I had had someone there filming that. And I did a turn to time trial with a wetsuit and and without and then drafting. And that was hugely helpful because for me, I found that I like I was pushing back too far on each stroke. And so I just kind of was throwing at the timing. And so I after that I ended up just short in my stroke a bit at the at the back. And my times were coming down by like a second or two per hundred when I did that well. And then I also saw that my I just wasn’t holding water with my my left arm. It was kind of just rushing and my fingers were actually sort of they weren’t pointing down that pointing forwards a bit. So I just didn’t

have much propulsion with that left arm. And when I swam, when I was drafting next to the or behind the other swimmer, I could just see that he was holding the same amount of water on his left arm and his right arm. And my right arm was good, but my left arm I was just I was losing distance to him every time. So and to have that comparison and this guy is a really good swimmer to have that comparison. It’s like, man, there’s so many things I can do here. So it was it was hugely helpful and I don’t get video of myself enough. I’m too busy doing it for other people. But it’s yeah, as you said, it’s just so so helpful. And then I did a four hundred freestyle in a race a week back and they like sort of broadcast the event and they film it and broadcast it. I look back at my footage. I’m just like, yeah, OK, it’s I kind of lost all those things that I’d practiced, but I can see it there and I know what I need to to work on. So yeah, I think it’s

there’s nothing better than just seeing actually what you what you’re doing. Do you feel like you’ve gotten pretty good at analyzing your own stroke and seeing where you might be falling short? I think I think yes. But I also think I think it’s always good to have a second opinion, especially from someone who like you’re always going to get. Different answers from different people. I feel like, you know, everyone wants to break down everyone’s stroke and, you know, give them, you know, certain drills and some drills are better than than others. But I do think like having a coach is I mean, it’s like the most important thing in swimming. You have like having a good coach goes a long way. Yeah. But I was thinking about this in terms of like, I feel like my story is pretty

is pretty challenging to do for most people who are working nine to five, right? Like if the double fool going and start swimming 40k a week, I wanted to ask this to you. What what do you do with most people in my situation? Like most people can’t just swim, you know, eight times in six days and just dedicate their their life to swimming like me. And I almost think that maybe there’s an easier approach to getting how how good I am. But maybe not. Maybe I did take the right approach in the last nine years to get to the point where I am made hopefully front pack this this season. Yeah, I mean, everyone’s everyone’s different with their with their progression and where they’re they’re starting from. And I’m trying to think of examples of people at your level in triathlon who have had a similar sort of background who have who have done it shorter. And off the top of my head, well, you’re done in a short period of time. And off the top of my head,

I can’t think of anyone, not to say there isn’t anyone there. But like, I think especially as you like, you get to this certain point, right, where if you’re working towards the top of the pyramid, you get to this point and those little one percent improvements start to start to take just as much work as that 10 percent or that 15 percent improvement that you got five years ago. So I think it just takes time with it for someone who who doesn’t have the amount of time to dedicate to it like like you do. I mean, a couple of things that I’d have them do is trying to at least three sessions a week, if you can, two, two is going to take longer to to get there. And I think three is kind of the minimum that you’d want to do. Don’t fluff about at the pool, just like get in and and get the work done because you probably only have an hour. So if you’re taking too much rest and, you know, you’re only getting two K done in that in that hour,

it’s just it’s not going to be enough. So just make the most of the time that you have there and like and just make sure your sessions are at the right effort and intensity. So I think some people go too hard. Most people probably just go too easy with their with their training. And like like you said, like there’s no change in speed and it’s just like all at the one pace and just just too easy. So they’re not they’re not really developing their swimming as well as they could. So there’s some some things that come to mind. But yeah, I mean, each person’s journey is different. But yeah, I I know quite a few professional triathletes and just get into that sort of that very top of the pyramid. It can take several several years of just just refinement. There’s no silver bullet. I don’t think is there anyone that comes to mind for you that you’ve seen them sort of get to that that top like like ahead of me from like where I was.

Yeah, yeah. No, not at all. I don’t think there’s anyone that came to that started at my level of swimming that’s even been able to race at a WTS World Triathlon Series like level off the top of my head. Don’t I mean like even Alan Webb, I don’t know if you know that name. He was like a American mile record. I think he still has it outdoors. Ran for Nike. He went to the Olympics. Phenomenal athlete. He retired from running and then tried to pick up triathlon. I mean, he grew up swimming. He went sub three in the 300. When he was like 14. So I don’t he only did triathlon for a year. But yeah, just I’m always curious how like, you know, swimmers maybe got from like a level where I started to like getting either up to my level or past. And I always try to work on like mindset in terms of like how I view myself as a, you know, saying I’m a non swimmer. I like to think of myself as a good swimmer because I do think that plays into how you approach

a race. If you just have the confidence of like, oh, you know, I’m not a good swimmer. We’ll see how it goes. That’s no, that’s like you’ve already lost. So if I if I tell myself like I’m a good swimmer now, I’ll execute it. And I think I think it was promising like I only came out like 20, 20 something seconds down from the leader in our grand final in Spain last year. And I was pretty happy. I think that was like one of my best swims I’ve had in 1500 is like coming out 20 something seconds over 1500.

The mental side of it is is so big because I had a similar thing from my friend who was I was talking about before. He was doing some training with with Josh Anberger, who’s one of the best swimmers in Iron Man. And he’s like, man, I’m like, I’m keeping up with him in training, but I’m just getting smoked by him in the races. And then he started doing some training with him, started training in a similar way, developing his front end speed. And that gave him the confidence to go, look, you know what, I’m actually good enough to compete with these top boys in the swim. And I think that was a huge factor for him being able to get out there and compete with him. So it can’t be ignored, especially at the professional level, like it’s just very much about mindset because the fitness is pretty similar amongst amongst all the guys there. So yeah, it’s a huge part of it. Has there been a, you know, in a race where you have noticed that little voice

in your head, maybe saying, oh, I know, maybe maybe this race isn’t yours, or maybe it’s just time to take it easy here. And you’ve gone, OK, no, I’m not listening to that. And I’m going to I’m going to turn that around. Yeah, I mean, that happens every race, every race I get on the I get warmed up. I’m days out. I’ve traveled across the world. You know, Europe, Japan, sometimes in Australia. And there’s all this build up, right? All this hype. And there’s doubt all the time. But I think it’s how you like you take those negative thoughts and like refocus on on either positive thoughts or being present. And that’s what I always try to do. And I think the more you can be present, especially in the swim and those beginning stages in my in my sort of racing, the more important because you really need to be dialed in on your stroke. And then as soon as you get in your position, you can’t really move much. So yeah, just channeling

negative thoughts. I like to do a lot of like I try to do meditation every day. So like I only do like five minutes because I have like really bad ADHD. I’m kind of a tripper. So I like I like to sit down and do five minutes. And it’s really challenging for me, but it does pay off when I’m on the start line. And and I can stay very present for at least five minutes of that swim. But yeah, I think mine said super important. Like I look at someone like Lionel who I’m a huge fan of Lionel Sanders, right? He’s a big name in the sport. He’s constantly like trying to improve his swim. And that guy actually started as a better swimmer than I did. I’m not going to lie like if you look at a stroke from when he started, it blows the doors off my video on Instagram. And I think he’s built up this idea that like he needs to hit these times in the pool, which I do think he he needs to improve like pool swimming. But I can tell you right now

my open water to my pool swimming does not equate because my flip turns are terrible because I’m always tired and I just don’t care about them. I’m not very streamlined. I don’t do the dolphin kick most of the time. Like little technical things in a yard school that just like I don’t I don’t spend a lot of focus on and and he probably he probably would benefit from, you know, not focusing on like those technical aspects and getting too caught up in the times either. I know when I’m in like a world triathlon series shape to be able to come out in the middle of the pack. I know what times I got to hit up at altitude. They’re not impressive. I can I can drop some knowledge. But most people I know that are pro triathlete could hit these times. It’s about it’s about just being a savage on race day and getting the most out of yourself and not letting the hype and negative thoughts really get into your head so that your energy is wasted

by the time you jump in the water. And I do think swimming without energy is worse than any other sport. You know, swimming out like running without energy. You can kind of I don’t know. I feel like I can get away more with it and biking. You can definitely get away with a lot more of it. With a lot more fatigue like in the legs. You can kind of fake it. You can’t fake swimming when you’re tired. Yeah, it gets ugly quickly when you when you take. Yeah, we’ve all had those sessions before those those races. One of the things that try to do when I’m when I’m racing, especially open water or if you get the start line and triathlon, it’s just standing tall. Like think about Superhero posture and as silly as it sounds like there’s been proven that that can that that can actually have a positive effect on your your mentality and just standing there like you belong to like you belong there and you deserve to be there and you can compete

with these other guys or girls like it makes a huge difference. And I was chatting with within another pro triathlete and she was saying that like she has a tendency just to be a bit timid and a bit small on the line thinking like I don’t I don’t deserve to kind of match up with these other girls in the in the swim. But it’s like I’ve like I’ve seen your swim. I know how well you can swim like you’re just as just as good as them and can compete with them. It’s like you just need to have that that’s the leafing yourself that you can do it and that attitude of like no stuff you I’m going to be the assertive one. I’m going to be the aggressive one here and not aggressors when you’re going to be throwing punches or anything but like you you need to have that mentality of no this is mine and I’m going to I’m not going to be the victim here today. Like it’s I see that with a lot of a lot of people in the water in their races because they they don’t feel

that confident. But you just have to fake it a little bit and stand tall and just you know had that kind of mentality on the line. Absolutely. And and coming from a running background where the like my biggest event was like cross country that was like my bread and butter is like you had at cross country nationals you have 300 guys and you similar to triathlon you bottle neck 300 guys into a you know like 10 meter not even eight meter like course so you have to get out extremely hard and so like you’re kind of aware of what’s going around with you a lot more and running right. It’s it’s like OK you see this guy you left to your right you can look around in the open water you’re kind of most of time you’re in the dark like you most of time you can’t even see your hand past like two feet and so you have no idea really what’s going on so situational awareness and we could chat about that too is like situational awareness and understanding what’s going

on around you without losing technique and form by looking around is really important which you do not get you don’t have that sensation in cycling and running and it’s so bizarre coming from running where you’re so much more in control

because you don’t have anyone hitting you and then you go to swimming and triathlon all of a sudden you’re getting smacked around for the first three minutes until you hit the first movie and you train months you start getting smacked around you get pulled to the back negative thoughts start going it’s so easy to go down a dark hole that like that would not happen in running in my opinion because I always would get out hard it’s a very yeah I feel like it’s it’s important to practice if you can obviously in a group but you start I tend to get like very like when I first started to get hypoxic and I start to panic so it’s just what the experience and staying calm and meditation has helped a bunch yeah it’s it can make a huge difference and it makes me think of the race we did couple of weeks ago there’s the main open water swim here in where I live it’s called the Peer to Pub it’s 1.2 K swim we’re all in the start line and first one to 200 meters

everyone’s going for it swimming over the top of each other and there was this one guy that’s my right hand side who I didn’t know who it was at the time but I realized who it was at the end he’s about six foot four hundred plus kilos massive unit excellent ex Australian swimmer and I and like he’s he’s he’s got speed but doesn’t have the the endurance and so going the first 50 first hundred and then like after 100 meters I sort of see that he’s ahead on the right so I kind of make my way over jumping his feet and I’m like I reckon he’s starting to slow so I came up on his his inside under his hip and then I had another guy come in and they started to sort of sandwich me out and I’ve just got nothing over over this big unit next to me and he’s just sort of making his way across and I’m gonna like would you just get off me so I’m trying to like you know do I like throw an elbow do I like try and kick him off me like I felt like stopping

and just trying to get him off me because I had nowhere to go I was like hang on a second like just keep it cool keep going and just try and make your way out of it so I sort of just swam off to the right tried to move the other guy over a bit so I wasn’t getting sandwiched out and then within a 20 meters I sort of got away from him but it’s like you have to you kind of have to have that plan in place going on if I’m going to be swum over the top of or someone’s going to be hitting my legs it’s like alright I know I’m going to get annoyed I know it’s going to be hard but alright I’ve got a strategy to to get out of it and and just know that it’s going to happen and expect it and then choose your course of action yeah so but Matt this is this has been a great great episode what I really like to hear from you is you’ve thought a lot about each of these things with your swimming arc to me that kind of shows it’s like well it’s no surprise that you’ve

come from where you’re with your swimming to the point where you are now because you’ve you’ve put in the work you’ve you’ve thought a lot about your stroke and your tactics and what it’s going to require to to get to that top level so it’s it’s been great for you to share those things with with our listeners so thank you very much for that now I know next up for you number one goal is to qualify for the Paris Olympics can you talk a little bit about what’s required and what you’re looking to do there

yeah so what’s required is we I mean we have like I think about five months until Paris Olympics so it’s coming up we only have a couple more races left in our our circuit the first race is in March 8th Abu Dhabi so that’s a it’s a sprint so 750 20K and then a 5K run followed with the next day we’re going to do a relay then to qualify for the Olympics is going to be the auto qualification is in May in Japan and we have to finish top three to get an automatic selection and then if it doesn’t basically if you don’t auto qualify it comes down to the discretionary board and they have a discretionary list of like key markers you have to hit so then it kind of it comes down to like the NGB and it gets a little more political so my yeah my I wouldn’t say I’m like hyper focused on this because I’ve this has been my focus for the last two years the Olympic point system for short courses started you know a year and a half ago so I’ve been all in for

you know a long time and trying to chase this goal I just need to execute I need to be healthy last year was kind of not a great year I’m currently 16th in the Olympic ranking last year I was top 10 I think I was eighth when I finished the year so I just I was dealing with some back injuries from a bike fit issue we got that all cleared up last week and I’m looking forward to you know getting top three at Yokohama and then in Abu Dhabi being competitive at the front of the race I want to get to the front of the race and use my weapon use the run and feel good

yeah we’re looking forward to to following you over the next couple of months and wish you all the best for those races and I’m sure that listeners as well will be pretty keen to see you qualify so good luck for it all and thanks so much for being on the podcast it’s been great to have you on and I’m going to post that repost that video that you shared a couple of weeks back of your progression because I know people would be wanting to wanting to see it so I’ll repost that on our Instagram and yeah amazing to see it’s just it’s really nice to to watch you swimming how you’re swimming now so it’s a really nice stroke and I can see a channel Cade Ledecki there and in some of your strokes so good to good to see thanks so much Matt it’s yeah it’s been great yeah thanks for having me and I’m such a fan of the YouTube and the podcast this is an honor so I appreciate you yeah picking me for this this podcast ah thank 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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We have an extraordinary guest, Gerrard Gosens, who is a three-time Paralympian and has an impressive list of accomplishments. From competing in running to representing Australia in triathlon at the Commonwealth Games, Gerrard has proven himself as an exceptional athlete. But his achievements don’t stop there. He has climbed Mount Everest, completed a 2000km run from Cairns to Brisbane multiple times, and even appeared on Dancing with the Stars.

However, what makes Gerrard’s story truly remarkable is his current endeavor to become the first blind person to swim across the English Channel. In this episode, Gerrard shares his journey, the training involved, and the importance of teamwork in achieving such a groundbreaking goal. Tune in now!

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.

you’re trained to be the first person totally blind person to cross the English channel. So that’s what I want to talk about today, because for me, that brought up a lot of questions like, all right, how does that work? How does the training work? Where comes the swimming technique? Obviously, I can’t watch a person do a stroke and you can’t feel a person do a stroke as they’re doing it and obviously can’t look back at video footage. So, you know, for me, I’ve always sort of had the quandaries of how deep do I go with my stroke? 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 today’s episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I’ve got to say the guest I have on today has probably got the longest list of accomplishments of anyone who’s been on this podcast, and that is saying a lot. We’ve had many gold medalists, Olympic medalists. We’ve had Andy Donson, who’s done the Ocean’s Sevens win in 12 months. We’ve had many, many accomplished athletes on this podcast, but I think Jared probably takes the cake. Now, Jared, he’s a three-time Paralympian and he has competed in running twice and once in goalball, which is kind of like soccer where you use your hands and there’s like bells in the, in the ball. And he’s been on the Australian team for triathlon at the Commonwealth Games. He’s not, he’s also climbed Mount Everest. He’s run from Kansas to Brisbane five times, which is 2,000 kilometers. And that’s just some of the things that he’s accomplished over his lifetime.

Now, the reason I’ve got Jared on the podcast is recently we had some people attend a clinic in Sydney and those people were their guide for Jared’s upcoming swim. So Jared is looking to be the first totally blind athlete to swim across the English Channel in August this year. And when it comes to swimming in the channel, it’s absolutely a team thing where there’s so many people involved in from the pilot to the support to the training buddies, all that sort of stuff. But I think even more so when it comes to being the totally the first totally blind person to cross English Channel. So he’s going to do it with several guides where they’ll have an attachment to the to the thigh and I’ll leave the rest for the podcast. But this was a really interesting episode and I learn a lot from Jared. He’s an incredible person, incredible athlete. So I know you’re going to enjoy this episode with Jared Gossin. So let’s get in the episode.

My guest today is Jared Gossin’s Jared. Welcome to the podcast. Good morning. Thank you. Well, I got to introduce you a couple of months ago now. And the friend of yours, Chris was saying that he attended one of our freestyle clinics and was saying that he’s training for the English Channel, but not in the in the typical sense. He’s training for the English Channel to go along as a as a guide for your crossing and you’re trained to be the first person, totally blind person to cross the English Channel. So that’s what I want to talk about today because for me, that brought up a lot of questions like, all right, how does that work? How does the training work? And then I sort of dug into your background and looked at all the pastings that you’ve done, some crazy athletic and physical accomplishments. It sounds like you just love to set yourself a challenge, something that’s completely out there and then just and work away at it.

And you’ve had a lot of success with that over the last several years. Is there anything that comes to mind? What’s probably the one that you’re most proud of so far? Look, I think for me, it’s it’s never been a bucket list of things I had to tick off. It’s always been about the actual opportunity and throughout my career, where I’ve been from long distance running when my ultimate goal as a as a young kid and back in the days where there used to be the Sydney to Melbourne Westville run, the days of Cliff Young and the Oscar us. For me, it was about preparing both mentally and physically to try and I run and and be potentially have a chance of replacing or if not winning the actual race. So I embarked upon my first ever journey by running from to then I went on to complete that for further times by running from cans to Brisbane. So after I suppose five years, I felt I was both mentally and physically prepared to to do the Sydney to Melbourne run

and had my team, had the equipment, had the resources. I was all ready to go and that year they actually cancelled the Sydney to Melbourne Westville run. And I was sort of somewhat left stranded. And for me, I had to recognise that.

I have a I suppose a very simple philosophy in that is success is a journey. Never ever a destination. It wasn’t going to sort of finish at those five runs from cans to Brisbane. And then that turns to you know, parallel games and very through athletics and triathlon and whole range of other adventures. But for me now more so the the English Channel was about an opportunity. You know, I had I come back from the 2022 Commonwealth Games representing Australia and triathlon and I had a small brunch for about sort of 60 or 70 people just to thank them for their support over the last two or more decades. And someone mentioned to me at the brunch that there’s never been a totally blind person swim the English Channel. And I thought, well, hey, look, let’s let’s give it a go. So it was through the opportunity and the the teamwork, the support of ocean water swimming and has been incredible because they’ve all come together as swim guides, as Chris and Joe

and Jen and Hayden and Phil have all shown that they are all dedicated towards assisting me across the English Channel. Yeah, watching a video from a couple of years ago where the ABC was interviewing your wife, she said that people will mention something and it’ll put an idea in your head and just implant that scene. It sounds like that happened for the English Channel. Well, why do you think that’s what appealed to you in that moment?

I think obviously what I it’s very hard for a person who started to I suppose appreciate that the fullness of this particular answer. But every part of my life, his teamwork, whether it be going to the movies, whether it be going shopping and all the years of training, for example, in athletics and long distance running and triathlon, all my adventures have been even, for example, when I climbed Everest on two occasions, it was it was about teamwork. And I saw this as an opportunity and particular training in the swimming pool where I have the opportunity to train individually. I have the control of how long I train, how hard I train and when I train, whereas in running or cycling or climbing or whatever they look like, I’m actually then somewhat, I suppose, limited to the availability and the ability of my guide. So, for example, if I have a guide who pulls out because they’re sick or injured or they’re not necessarily having a good day or they’re feeling a bit fatigued

and they actually can’t do the speed session, whereas in the pool, I can actually get in there and place my head on the line in the sense of my responsibility as a swimmer to train myself where it be for just a simple long swim through two hard reps. Yeah, it’s interesting. So what’s that for you? Does that then obviously makes it easier to do the training because you’re not relying on someone else to do the training? Has there been any other differences there in terms of just having the option to, well, to just go whenever you’d like or to do as much or as little as you need to? Has there been any other differences that have stood out to you there? I think it’s a very simplistic way of describing. It’s like when your 16-year-old gets the P-plates or the driver’s licenses when they have to sit with mum and dad for, I think, it’s 100 hours in the car. And then when that comes to that day where they’ve got their own license

and they have the freedom and they go, Whoa, this is great. I get to drive out on my own. I have no worries about who’s in the car beside me watching how a driver went on a drive. And the freedom for me has been, I suppose, fantastic as a person who is totally blind. And secondly, though, the biggest thing that has been quite remarkable, not necessarily related to the pool, but has been to open water swimming and the amazing culture that there is amongst open water swimming in the sense that when you’re tethered to a person who is totally blind, the growth, the understanding, the somewhat courage and resilience of the guys who has been quite remarkable because they’ve had to overcome some amazing perceptions as well because their fear would be, oh, my God, how am I going to guide a person who’s totally blind in the ocean? Well, now I’ve got multiple guys, both Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sunshine Coast. Who are all available and prepared to jump out into the open water

and swim 5, 10, 15 kilometers.

Wow. And into the question that I’m sure a lot of people are wondering, and this is what I wondered initially, how do you do your training in the pool and how do you do it in the open water? And you mentioned that the tether there. Do you talk a bit about where the tether is, how it works and what that experience is like swimming with the tether on? Sure. In the swimming pool, first up, I actually, when I’m swimming in the pool, I actually wear a snorkel. And the reason why I wear a snorkel is because I don’t count my strokes because I may wander a tad to the left or a tad to the right and that’s going to change where it be by one stroke or half a stroke where I am in the pool. The reason why I wear a snorkel is because I can listen to the water so I can tell you whether it’s shallow or deep. And actually, as I’m coming into the wall, I can listen to the depth of the water and know where exactly where I am in the actual pool.

I have a very good callus on two of my fingers on my left arm or left hand. So as I’m going up the lane ropes, I just check every and again so my my finger will rub up against the lane ropes. So it’s well worn by the how brutal some of the lane ropes are and some of the swimming pools. And that’s how I can swim independently. And I suppose with somewhat some freedom in the actual ocean. I have a swim tether. So there’s an elastic out of court. It goes from just above my knee to my fellow swim guide has like a small sort of wrap brand harness which goes around the actual thigh. I suppose I’m saying we invented a bit designed it and so I actually now provide these swim tethers to other Paralympic swimmers who are doing open water swimming, more so triathletes. I designed it through when I was competing for Australia in triathlons because there were a number of other Paralympic athletes or triathletes around the world who are using

where it be a cord from a surfing board or a piece of rope. And I thought there must be a way better design that’s going to be more comfortably be lightweight and more resilient. And so I’ve sort of taken the time out of the years to design it. And it’s very comfortable. It’s lightweight. It doesn’t hold any water. Obviously, it’s it’s simply a piece of the resistance bands you might buy at a rebel sports store. And then that’s obviously sewn into a tether which goes around the actual thigh of the swim guide. And the thing about obviously being a swim guide is there’s no actual talking in the water, obviously. But I can actually feel through the tension of the tether where my guide is going. For example, if you’ve ever ridden a force, you can feel the tension through the reins of force where it’s going, how it’s, I suppose, working. And it’s the same when working in the ocean. You become very sensitive to the tension on the actual tether itself.

It’s a shame they don’t make the the old foam lane ropes like they used to back in the 80s and 90s. You’d have much less of a callus on your hands. But I think it’s only just gotten worse. There was Lane ropes at M Sack, which is the main pool in Melbourne. And they bought in these brand new state of the art lane ropes to stop any sort of waves and splash. But they were brutal. They they had sharp edges and they they’re not good. Now, hopefully I imagine that probably got just your standard the lane ropes there at the Rongo Park. But yeah, it’s it’s it’s amazing. I haven’t tried listening to the depth of the the water. I’ve never tried that. It makes me really curious as to what I want to try. I doubt I’d be able to notice a difference there. Have you heard of anyone else being able to tell the difference in depth from just listening to it? I’ve been trying to train a number of young athletes who are blind or have low vision.

Rowan is the young kid and Patrick is actually based in Melbourne. I’ve been trying to train them to to really use the other senses to have a sensitivity to the depth of the actual water. If you go to places like, for example, Chandler, Quattroxen or Brisbane, that’s where it becomes a challenge because it’s the same depth all the way through. You have to use other senses there where it be through the acoustics of the Chandler Quattroxen. But most people was obviously with a shallow and deep. It becomes, you know, very easy. More so places like, you know, University of Queensland. But your Rongo for me is sensational. And only from obviously it’s set up for a person who’s blind and has low vision. But I had the culture of a swimming pool. The people there is quite remarkable. And they’re very inclusive for a person who was totally blind.

Hey, tell me a bit about the team who will be going over to the UK with you to do the swim. I have six swim guides. I have three girls and three guys, both Joe, Rosie and Jen, the female guides, they all are supposed to have very different abilities as to Phil, Chris and Hayden. I suppose this is going to sound a bit funny. But I describe them in some respects. For example, one of the guides I describe as the old sort of holding the Commodore where it’s quite comfortable and we just keep on going. Where one of the other guys I describe as the human speedboat, they have a lot of speed and I really have to put the whole sort of jets on to swim beside them. So each of them had their own set of skills and I will tailor their set of skills, strengths in the actual channel crossing. So there are four quadrants in the actual channel. And I will make sure that they will be sort of put into the water so that we are an hour on hour off.

So obviously, for example, Hayden will be my first swimmer to get up through some of the choc. He’s a very strong swimmer. I’ll utilize his knowledge and his time with me. So Hayden went to the Commonwealth Games with me when I competed for Australia in triathlon. And then you look at people like Phil, who is a stayer and you probably use him into the meal parts of the actual crossing as well. So I will utilize their strengths and skills for each part of the course or the crossing.

What’s been different for you with swimming training compared to your running background?

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Form Score and Head Coach skills. Form Score is a measurement of overall swim efficiency ranging from zero to 100 defined by your pace and your stroke length. Head Coach skills encompasses five key areas that will help you identify where to focus on improving with your efficiency. Head roll, head pitch, set pacing, interval pacing and breathing time to neutral. And after completing a session, you can check back in on the Form App to track your progress. And Head Coach provides swimmers from beginner to expert with an unprecedented level of data driven guidance and understanding, enabling you to boost your performance and your speed. Get your pair of Form Smart Swim Goggles today. Click the link in our podcast description or use the code Effortless on Checkout to get 15% off. Your Form Smart Swim Goggles. I think for me, obviously, it’s that sense of solitude because I used to run when I was trying to run from Kansas to Brisbane

and I was studying at University of Queensland and I was living there at Emmanuel College and I run past the pool and, you know, I was sort of training at sort of four or five in the morning and you could smell the chlorine coming across the university campus. And you think, what a crazy soul would swim at five in the morning? Why would you do that? Why would you stick your head in a bucket of water basin and do that? And here I am, Brinton. I was at the pool at 3 a.m. this morning. What up at 2.15? I was in the pool in the pool by 3.05. So it’s amazing how things change and I have a very strong quote in my life and that is that change is constant growth is optional. So it’s the solitude of the actual pool because there’s a lot of thoughts that go through your head when you’re doing four, five, six, whatever kilometers. But more so for a person who’s totally blind, not just in the pool, but also in the ocean

because a person who’s sighted actually can see whether it be a boy out there in a marker if you’re going around a course or it could be a building in the distance, for example, when we do our swims along the Gold Coast. You know, the team can look at Q1 or the Jewel Hotel or other landmarks along the way. They can sort of unconsciously and consciously so know how well they’re going, whether it’s for me, it’s we could be swimming into a sweep and I’m thinking, gee, we should be there by now, but I’m not aware that the actual sweep is really strong or thinking, oh, we’re almost there, but in actual fact, right off really quickly because we’re with the sweep. So it’s all the time in your brain, you’re having to think, are we there? Are we there? Are we there yet? So you have to have that mental strength to know and trust your guys implicitly. Not in obviously the direction they’re taking you, but in how you’re swimming as well.

And when you do eventually swim the channel, will you be getting updates on the distance that you’ve swam and the time you’ve been in there? What for you works best mentally? I think for me, I’m just gonna not, I don’t need to know my distances. When I did the 20K swim a few weeks ago at NUSA, I sort of set out to just go through my swim guides. So that, for example, Hayden won, Chris too, and on which I went. So I was just working through that hour sort of clock order of each of the swim guides. And it was only within the last sort of maybe two K that I simply asked, how far are we off to the finish? And that wasn’t through exhaustion or fatigue. It was just because I knew that I’ve been through a number of guides and I knew that would must be getting very close towards the actual in the swim. And I’ll use the same sort of philosophy because I just bought off small pieces. It’s not looking at the big pieces.

I suppose a good analogy is, how do you, how do you get elephants? Well, we are one bird at a time. It’s not looking at the massive, I suppose crossing. And I have no, I suppose time that I’m aiming for because for me, I’m based on endurance and I will get there regardless of the actual time. And in terms of swimming technique, for me, when I’m running clinics, we have a big emphasis on the visual side of it, recording video and showing people and that helps them understand what they’re doing a lot. What has it been like for you in terms of the technical side of it and what kind of coaching or if there’s cues or something like that that you have found to be helpful over the last year or so? I think for me, both when I was sort of training for triathlon and now obviously the distance swimming, it’s really hard. And I give an analogy in that respect, is that I have the opportunity to compete on dancing with the stars.

And when I was asked to do things, for example, like the rumba, tango, I suppose the jive, but when it came to things like, for example, the rumba and they said, hey, listen, we really need a sexy look or what does that look like? I’ve never seen a sexy look or we’re doing the tango. So we want a passionate look. Well, what does that look like? I’ve never seen a passionate look.

So where comes the swimming technique? Obviously I can’t watch a person do a stroke and you can’t feel a person do a stroke as they’re doing it and obviously can’t look back at video footage. So for me, I’ve always sort of had the quandaries of deep, do I go with my stroke? Do I keep it sort of more close as a service so there’s less drag, but more speed on the stroke or does it go deep or there’s all these questions I’ve had over time or am I placing my chest in the right position and making up head position? All that sort of stuff becomes a massive challenge not only for me but also for anybody who’s trying to give me advice. And whilst we’re getting there, I don’t claim to be any much of a swimmer as I did a dancer. Well, I made it to the final dancing with the stars purely through the passion, the story that we told. I was never a great dancer. Now it’s the same, I don’t claim to be a good swimmer. I just pray to be a person who is stubborn, persistent

and determined to do what I can.

I think trying to give off a passionate or whatever it is sort of vibe when you’re dancing. That’s hard enough if you can see what it’s meant to look like, I think. So the fact that you can’t see what it’s like is like, man, that’s hard work. So yeah, that’s amazing. For example, when people used to say to me, oh, they’re giving you the evil eye or they’re giving you the come to bed look. Like to me I go, what the hell does that look like? Why the look you get to you with a confused look? Well, what does that mean? I’ve never seen a confused look. So that’s all like, because facial expressions are learned as you’re a baby and as you’re growing up, you learn your facial expressions from your parents. Now they’re looking at you with an angry look, you learn that look, it’s unconsciously learned. Whereas I never got to experience those sort of things. Do you find the equivalent for you would be in, say, tone with like vocal tone?

Yeah, vocal tone, yeah, sure. But I think obviously when you’re doing something like, for example, dance and they say, hey listen, you’re expressing your face on your face has to be a very passionate look. Or if you look back on one of the commentaries, I’ve actually, they reviewed my quick stare. I did pretty well at dance, but Helen, who was one of the judges said, she said, okay, when you’re doing this, I need you to imagine you’re waiting for a bus. Well, I’ve never waited for a bus. So I don’t know what that looks like. What does it, what does it playing for a bus look like? So now there’s all these sort of visual things that people will try and work through, but from a swimming perspective, as I said, it’s the challenge of underwater. Am I actually going too deep? Or am I going too shallow? Or is the elbow in the right position? Or am I going too high with the elbow? Am I dropping the elbow? It was always sort of technical stuff,

but yeah, I suppose the challenge is about for me, it’s about persistence. And as I said, I’ll just keep on taking that advice. And in terms of fitting all this training into your day, how are you, how are you finding that compared to when you were doing the other sports? Oh, look, I think I’ve lucky enough where I don’t require a lot of sleep. And I think that was sort of built into me through all the years of the major long distances. So I trained twice a day, almost every day, where I’d be going for a run on the side or going for a bike ride, but I’m gonna actually cut back. The bike ride’s now purely from a risk analysis perspective because I can’t control other riders. So I ride a tandem bike and my pilots is, as in my front rider, is very, very good. But it’s the cars and other riders who could have an accident. So I’m cutting that back. Whereas running, the Pilates, all that sort of stuff is pretty, I suppose, entrenched in my life,

but I love training. There’s never a day where I don’t sort of say, oh, gee, I wish I couldn’t have a day off. It’s, for me, it’s about the whole enjoyment of, I’d rather turn up at my graves or I suppose, rugged at more an ounce and all this stuff rather means to refresh as a daisy. Totally agree. It’s like, if I don’t exercise in a day, I feel agitated as a result. Just, especially in the morning, I love getting something done in the morning. And in terms of starting at three o’clock, do they open the pool for you? Or is there a pool? Okay, I’m gonna say, I don’t know, any pools that will open at three o’clock in the morning, anywhere else. We actually, our official squad starts at four, four, 15. So the guys that actually opened the pool get there an hour early at three just to give everything set up and they allow me to go through the back. And that’s been a fantastic support from Shelly and the guys that you’re on a swimming pool

because they are aware, obviously. And for me, it also allows me that hour where I don’t have to worry about swimmers coming towards me. You know, if I wander a slightly bit towards a meal, then so be it for the hour, I have that sort of relaxation that’s, for example, Brenna, I often talk about the what we call emotional carbohydrates. For example, when you walk down a corridor, you would use up, let’s say, 1% of emotional carbohydrates of thinking about where you’re walking, how you’re walking. For a person who’s totally blind and this has never been equated, I hypothetically might use up eight or 10 carbohydrates emotionally. And it’s the same in the pool and it’s the same in open water because every stroke I take, both in the pool and also in the open water, emotional carbohydrates that consume far more vigorously because I’m thinking about where I am in the water, what’s the tension on the tether? What am I feeling through that,

not only from a, I suppose, a communication, how does my balance, is my body sitting straight because a person who’s sighted also knows when to breathe. So if it’s really chompy, and when I first started doing open water, it was a massive struggle because I couldn’t see waves. So I’m sort of gobbled falls because a person inside can then think, okay, well, I won’t breathe now, whereas I would be breathing away if it’s me or if it’d be a chop, it’s me. And in the pool though, obviously keeping myself straight up against the lane road. So because I’m not gonna obviously put another person in danger of swimming towards me. So I’ll be consciously using up emotional carbohydrates, carbohydrates far more viciously than a person who’s sighted. And have you noticed that all the way through your career, just in terms of the emotional carbohydrates? Yeah, my emotional carbohydrates, as in what the brain actually consumes.

And for example, if I go to a very loud, even not through sport, if I go to a loud venue where it’d be for, for example, I go, I’m an Australian ambassador. Tomorrow I travel out West. I’ve got straight awards. I was young Australian back in 95. And I’m going out there to present awards and make people strange. There’s a function on Friday morning for 400 people. And I know that my emotional carbohydrates will be used a lot, not only in my surroundings, the people around me, what objects are around me and where I’m actually working, where it’d be with my partner or where it’d be with my God dog. So just even in a loud environment, you’re using up emotional carbohydrates. And that’s where athletes, even sighted, for example, when they go out on the town or where they go to a function, they don’t realize when they get to their train next day, why they’re feeling that bit fatigue. It may not be physically, it’s just emotionally.

Yeah, it certainly adds up. And I think about that, even if I just travel into the city where it’s just, it’s busy, there’s cars, there’s lots of people. It’s like just being in that environment is tiring and compared to being out on the coast where it’s quieter, not many people around. So that makes a lot of sense. I think there are… So I think another way of actually describing it very easy too is like, for example, when you go out on your first date, we’re gonna be with a girl or guy because, for example, you’re thinking about, okay, where am I gonna wear? What am I gonna talk about? Where are we gonna eat? And it’s the same day, for example, same thing when you go for your first day on a brand new job at the work. You’re thinking about your desk, where you’re sitting, the new people around you, what you’re gonna potentially get for lunch, what the worst gonna be like, what the new boss is gonna be like, and you go home after that first day of work

and you’re exhausted emotionally, not physically, just emotionally. Have you found that that’s impacted, like you’re obviously an endurance athlete, has, do you feel like that impacts your racing? Like when you’ve done the long runs, has that, have you noticed that take a toll or have you noticed that in the pool when you have the lane to yourself and the pool to yourself, that you feel like those, say, I mean, 3K goes a lot quicker than the second 3K? Oh yeah, look, most definitely, because obviously you have one last thing to worry about, but I think my body has learned to adapt over the years, but my body also knows when to shut down. For example, Brenton never traveled with me on a plane and the reason why sad is because I’ll step onto a plane and I’ll sit in the seat and I might go to sleep straight away. My body just goes, okay, we’re in a plane, we can’t go anywhere, not moving, bang, and I’m off to sleep.

And say, there’s no talking to me on a plane and it’s my body can just shut down for that few minutes and it’s gone again. And I think from a long run perspective, you have, I suppose the ability, for example, whether it be a Richmond Road or I hate running a footpath, Richmond Road’s a far more controllable environment for me because if you’re running on a footpath, I’m thinking, well, what branches are hanging out of the fence? Is it going to be even pavement or is it going to be uneven pavement? So I will try and control those factors that will influence hammy, emotional carbohydrates I will consume. But then there’s also how your diet is feeling as well because I can’t see their facials. They can be struggling, whether you’re not physically, but also other things happen in their life as well. So I have to be trying sensitive to their own emotional and physical needs as well. What do you do to pass the time,

whether it be running or swimming? How do you get through those long stretches of not necessarily activity? Like just, I’ve talked to quite a few distance swimmers and one of them said that when he was doing, I think it was like Taupo. He said he, in his mind, he goes from, when he was a kid, his house that he lived in and he just tries to follow along the road to like different locations and go around all the different streets just in his mind. Do you have anything that you do to pass the time? I think for me, I will, whilst I’m also focusing on particularly open water, I’m focused obviously, but it’s really flat. For example, it could be Annogua Dam in Brisbane. Okay, so I don’t have to worry about waves or chop or anything like that. So that’s a very meditative sort of swim to swim. I can think about where being, the words that I do, I’m a, I suppose I’ll run a number of different projects for where it be through the Paralympic Committee,

the Olympic Committee for Triathlon Australia, where it feed through my work as a chocolatier. So I have businesses in the Brisbane CBD. So it would be going through, even for example, designing chocolates, obviously then trying to invent new flavours, designs. So my brain is constantly thinking, but then also checking back into, hey, how’s the tether? How’s the tension? Where’s my swim guide? Are they slightly, in front or they slightly behind? How are they feeling? How do I think they’re feeling in the actual water? So there’s a constant roll over of thoughts. If it’s in the ocean, way different. Because I could be then thinking about the chop, okay, when is a safe to breathe? Is it gonna be good here now? What am I going through? And the other thing is from a blind perspective is bloody jellyfish and particularly the small ones. Like you might run into a particularly on the Gold Coast, you run into these small packs of hundreds and hundreds

of tiny little jellyfishing or globular ones. Anything, shit, don’t swallow one, don’t swallow one, don’t swallow one. Like it’s, you know, how long will these jellyfish last? Are they going, are they gonna sting me? Are they not gonna sting me? And there’s all that sort of swimming into the unknown is at times a bit confronting. Oh yeah.

Nothing worse than jellyfish on a, well, there are worse things, but yeah, jellyfish are just not much fine. I’ve in the Bay in Melbourne, occasionally have these really big ones, about 30 to 35 centimetres across and high as well. And I’ve, many times just put my hand straight into one, some swimming with my head down and creeps me out every single time. We like we don’t have too many stinging ones down here, but it’s not, they have a few stinging ones up on the Gold Coast, don’t they? Yeah, we do, but it’s more that they’re really, like they can change, for example, or be, and more so just last week in a break lift, my team did a 10K swim and a lot of my team got, and I was a little, I don’t know why, but I was lucky enough not to be impacted, but by sea lice. And all my team now come up with, you know, welts and rashes and feeling unwell. So there’s all that sort of things you have to deal with, but it was more so for me, the unknown, okay,

when you’re swimming through a large pack of jellyfish, how long will this last? And even for example, when I swim around the Great Kippel Islands, you know, I had a, I had a dugong brush past me. Now that was a bit of a scary moment because I had no idea what that was at that time. Oh, how long did it stick around for? I’ve never heard of someone swimming along with a dugong. Well, it was, it wasn’t there for that long. I was, I don’t remember where it’d be. It just sort of was falling out of a ball of fish or what have you. The other one that really freaked me out, which was, I suppose I never knew there were a few like that. And that was a stingray. I was swimming through Recliffe probably about two months ago now, and there was some shallow waters there. And my hand came down and brushed across the top of a stingray. And I always assumed that a stingray would be sort of, maybe that’s the hard, fleshy bit, but it’s actually, they’re very velvety,

almost like a tiny bit sort of, wouldn’t say furry, but I was going back against the grain of the actual sort of bird dash, whatever they are on the top of a stingray. So that was something that I never knew they would feel like. It’s like, for example, I never knew, it took me 25 years to know that an elephant was hairy because you’ve walked into a store of a shop and you pick up an elephant, there’s not one ounce of hair on them. One day when I went to the circus and I had the chance to have a ride on an elephant, it’s like mounting a made of scrubbing brush. They’re one of the hairiest things I’ve ever come across. So your perceptions and your mind can be very different to what they realistically are. Yeah, that’s amazing. Is there any lessons that come to mind that you’ve had to learn over the years through sport and the physical challenges you’ve set yourself? Are there any lessons that have really stuck

where you have to remind yourself when you’re maybe going through something that’s challenging or you’re in a heavy block of training? What are those key couple of lessons that you keep coming back to? I think I carry two tools with me. I carry something that I will never ever use in my life and that’s a mirror. And the reason why I carry a mirror with me everywhere I go is that when you walk into the bathroom in the morning and you give it a smile, it gives one back. When you walk into the bathroom and you give it a grimace, it gives one back. What you put in is exactly what you give back. And for me, it’s about that understanding that if I’m gonna put in the hard session, obviously I’ll get the results back in the hard session. If I’m putting anything in all, then nothing’s gonna be received. The other thing I carry with me is a piece of Everest. When I climbed Everest in 2003 and five, I bought back a piece of rock from the top

of the summit in Everest. And for me, it was a continual reminder that we’ll be both mentally and physically along the way there’s gonna be crevasses. There’s gonna be those, the times where things can and will go astray. And I’ve learned, I suppose, very importantly that there are what we call the facts of life where things can and do go astray. As in, there’s gonna be a point where my guide owner does call up and we’ll be half an hour before a session and say, listen, Jeremy, I’m stuck at work, I can’t come and try and jump on the bike or go for a run. I could very easily go, well, oh well, reasonable reasons. And that’s where a lot of people, I suppose, fall into the mistake of reasonable reasons where they go, oh well, it’s like, for example, I might say, oh, I had a glass of water so I can actually have that piece of chocolate cake. Or I had that salad so I can have that apple pie. You know, our brain is amazing

how it can justify anything of life to itself. And for me, as a person who’s totally blind, I had to get past those facts of life where, sure, a guy’s gonna call up and say, well, what’s the alternative? What can I then, obviously, move on to as it’s firing the actual opportunity? For me, I suppose, to look at the obstacles, not necessarily the actual opportunities. For example, when dancing with the stars, it should have never seen dance before. Well, the opportunities were, well, how can we tell the story? How can we take people on this journey? And that’s how we got to the final. It wasn’t about the dancing. It was about the story, we’re told. I love it. It’s particularly the first one. It’s like, however you approach something is probably how you’re going to perceive it. And you can see the exact same situation in a positive or a negative light. And it’s really about your decision to see it, however, which way that’s gonna determine

how you feel about it. Jared, when’s your window for the English Channel? For those that are listening? Yeah, I’m looking to the actual windows from August 10th to August 17th. So just on 198 days, but who’s counting? And for me, it’s about the journey now. So we’re looking at the swing and the down river through to that’s next week and then to right next to Ireland. And then we have some, I suppose, cold water camps, both in Sydney and Melbourne at Half Moon Bay. And then obviously move on to the channel, but it’s a very short time now. It’s only a matter of months away. So it’s all about the teamwork now, I think in that next six or so months. And I think I was taught there very aptly by Sir Edmund Hillary, I’ll have the pleasure of having, do you know what’s Edmund Hillary? And what people don’t recognize is that when Hillary climbed Everest back in 1953, his team wasn’t four people. It wasn’t even a hundred people.

The entire team that trekked to Everest Base Camp with Hillary back in 1953, total 2,000 people. It took 2,000 people to get two people to the top of Everest in 1953. And the same with my team. It isn’t Gerard Gossens crossing the English channel. He’s my entire team and the charity of Great Dreams, which we’re looking to obviously raise funds for, that will be crossing the English channel.

That’s awesome. Well, I’m really looking forward to, well, to following that journey. And I think we’re gonna catch up in March in Brisbane. So looking forward to that. So Gerard, thanks so much for sharing your story on the podcast. I know that the people who listen to it are gonna get a real kick out of it. And we’ll take a lot from it. So I appreciate that. And I wish you all the best in your journey over the next couple of months in the lead-up to the channel. Thank 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.

The post Life at Full Throttle: Why Extreme Challenges Ignite and Satisfy Your Life’s Journey with Gerrard Gosens appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, we have a fascinating story of transformation. Our guest, pro triathlete Will Draper, started his swimming journey with poor technique and average performance. However, through dedication and hard work, he has completely transformed his swimming abilities. From being unrecognizable in his stroke analysis video in 2019 to becoming a pro triathlete in 2021, Will’s progress is truly remarkable. Join us as we dive into Will’s journey, exploring the strategies and mindset that fueled his transformation. Discover how Will bridged the gap from a non-swimming background to now swimming strongly, only seconds away from the front pack. Tune in now!

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.

When you sent through that video of your, your recent swim technique, I was so blown away with just how much of improvement you made in, in the last four or five years. It looks like a, looks like a different person. And I’ve had months and months where I’ve got no better. And then at the, towards the end of it, I’m actually getting worse. And it wasn’t a case of throwing in the towel or changing how I was doing things. I was confident that I was doing things the right way. And then suddenly I could have a down, we can come back in the pool and just have dropped one second off, off all my pieces. 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.

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is pro triathlete Will Draper. In 2019, Will sent me an email with some footage of his swimming and I did a feedback Friday video on YouTube where I analyzed his stroke. And if you look back at that video, you’ll notice that his body position is quite poor, his catch and pull is pretty average. His timing is not that great and you wouldn’t say he looks like a swimmer. Fast forward to today. If you look at video of Will swimming, you would think it’s a completely different person. He sent me an email recently where he included some recent footage and it is night and day. And if you go to our YouTube channel and we’ll include this in the show notes as well, you can see that comparison from 2019 to today. And you can see exactly how Will is swimming now. Back in 2021, Will qualified as a pro triathlete and in 2022, he had several top 20 placings in the PTO ranked events.

And for 2023, he actually had four top 10 results. So he’s become a very good triathlete coming from a non swimming background. So on this episode, I wanted to ask Will, what he’s done to get to that point coming from a non swimming background to becoming a pro triathlete. And now he’s only 75 to 90 seconds off that front pack with those lead swimmers. So he’s swimming very, very strongly. So we ask what he did, what he focused on and what was his mindset and what sort of things did he learn from the elite athletes that he was training with, like the Brownlee brothers and several other high level triathletes and swimmers and what he learned from them. So let’s get stuck into today’s podcast episode with Will Draper. We’re welcome to the podcast. Yeah, please to to be on it. I’ve watched the videos for years, so it feels a bit weird talking about my own swimming now. Well, you’re the you’re the star of today.

It’s when you sent through that video of your your recent swim technique, I was so blown away with just how much of an improvement you made in in the last four or five years. It looks like it looks like a different person. Do you feel like a different person in the water? Yeah, I think with swimming, you just can’t compare it like any other sport, like month on month, you literally have to go back in years. And that’s when you see the differences and they are there. If you’ve kind of stuck at it, I feel like it’s easy to think that you’re not improving. And then you look back and you’re like, wow, it’s made such a difference. Just pursuing like technique and everything like that. And I remember a couple of years ago, you described yourself as a non-simmer. Can you describe your initial feelings towards swimming and how they’ve evolved over time? Yeah, so I knew how to swim and my mom was a swim instructor for kids.

So I was very lucky that I had parents that would take me into the pool because I think that’s part of it. And I was also lucky that my auntie lived where there was a bit of surfing down in the south of England in Cornwall. So I had done some surfing where you kind of get battered by the open water. But my first 750 was over 15 minutes. So it was slower than two minutes per 100 pace. So I never had any speed. And actually, I remember I did that race when I used to just cycle and I went down to a swimming pool to check if I could actually complete 750 meters without having to stop basically. And and I did it in a pool just about. And yeah, now it’s just completely changed. It’s just like almost every day in the pool and and dedicated so much time over the years to it. It’s crazy when you look back on it, but it’s been been worth it. I will say was there a key moment for you that made you decide to pursue triathlon seriously in term pro?

Yeah, I my brother and I both used to cycle and he actually reached a higher level than I ever did. He was seventh at the Junior World Championships. And I think nowadays that would secure you a ride on the World Tour. But four or five, six years ago when he did it, it wasn’t the case they didn’t really take on young riders. But he actually went to the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games and I was on the long list for cycling, but I didn’t get selected. So my mum and dad and brother were down in Gold Coast and I was at home and I wasn’t really enjoying cycling so much. And I kind of wanted some new goals and just decided to take up triathlon and pretty soon thought I actually want to do this quite seriously because I was already trying to turn professional in cycling. And do you feel like so you obviously had a very strong cycling background? What was it for the running? Did you get that up to speed pretty quickly and quicker than you did with the swimming?

Yeah, so a lot of people I do have a background in cycling. And I would say that I have a strong background in cycling, but I only cycled until I was 17. And at that age, a lot of your races are like circuit racing, which is really beneficial to short course and the tactics of short course racing. But just with not having a strong enough swim to compete in short course, I had to go into a long course where the background I had of circuit racing wasn’t exactly perfect for 90 K 70.3 races. So I felt like I knew what I wanted to do and knew I had to improve my swim and my run. But it’s actually more recently I’ve realized how high the standard of cycling is now in triathlon and I don’t actually feel any better off than some of the riders out there. But I did used to run a little bit where I’d represent kind of my school across country, but it’s not like anything you’d see in America or anything like that.

It’s literally just because no one else would do it. They’d be like, you’re pretty fit and healthy, go for a run. And the running came a lot more naturally naturally than the swimming. Can you take me through your training regime and how you approached your swimming to be able to improve the way that you have over the last couple of years? Yeah, so initially I trained with the Aleman squad, which is a squad that’s over here. It’s from anyone from sort of 10, 11, 12 years old up to the older guys are a couple of years older than me, like 24, 25, so I’m 23. And I enjoyed that and I got a lot faster at swimming, but I only got faster. I didn’t really get stronger because they were so anaerobic, sprint based that I couldn’t get what I needed out of those sets. It took me a few years to realise and I actually benefited then from leaving that squad training more on my own because they would do something like 950s off three minutes.

And the guy who leads that squad just went 48 high in the UK champs or England champs or something. So they’re super fast, but it wasn’t the right stuff. So it was actually I see my biggest improvement in my training when I stopped swimming with a squad and actually swam on my own. And then more recently, the past 12 months, I’ve been looking enough to join a full-time squad in Leeds with Alistair and Johnny Brownlee and Beth Potter in their training squad, which has made a difference. But the past eight weeks, I’ve been swimming on my own again. And I think that it’s not the be all and end all to be in a squad because when you do swim on your own, you can tailor everything specifically to what you need to do. Yeah, I would I’d agree with that. I find a combination of both is really good for myself where I tend to push a lot harder with the squad. I’ll commit to doing a longer distance in the squad because I’m not going to get out early.

But then doing some sessions on my own, I can be very specific with what I’m doing. And I can typically work on faster or shorter cycles as well because you can just do what you need to do. So I think both can be great. And I’d say there’s no excuse to not do well if you don’t have a squad or if you can only get to a squad. You know, you can you have people who are successful in the sport who do do either. And you just just got to use whatever you can to your advantage when it comes to to that. Yeah, I’d agree. I think there’s pros and cons to both my biggest asset when I swim on my own is I actually use a tempo trainer but not for turnover. I use it as like a divide 100 into four and then have it so that it’s on each turn. So if I want to swim a fresh old pace of 116 in training, I’ll have it so it beeps every 19 seconds. And if I can get a lane to myself in public in quite public hours, I can get into flow so much easier than a busy squad session say.

But then on the other hand, you sometimes really fade in in a session. And when you see someone next to you swimming slightly faster, that is really helpful. So I think as you say, there’s pros and cons to both. But I just think of anyone’s listen and they only have one option of the two that is possible to still see really good improvement without having both. Yeah. And I think some kind of accountability or even just something outside of yourself to give you that motivation. And whether that’s a tempo trainer beeping every 19 seconds or you’re looking up at the stop clock on the wall or I like using the form goggles for a lot of my sessions where I can see the pace, like just having something there to keep you somewhat accountable and keep you on pace and rather than just wandering aimlessly through the session, I find even just something very small can help.

Yeah. That’s the key thing. And a thing that I used to do that I don’t do anymore is just chasing sessions too hard and trying to be better than your best swim of the past week or the best swim of the past month. And sometimes you just have to be really consistent. And I’ve had months and months where I’ve got no better. And then at the towards the end of it, I’m actually getting worse. And it wasn’t a case of throwing in the towel or changing how I was doing things. I was confident that I was doing things the right way. And then suddenly I could have a down week and come back in the pool and just have dropped one second off all my paces. So I think sometimes you just got to be confident in kind of your structure and yourself and know that it will eventually kind of show improvement. It might just not happen straight away like the rest of the sports. Yeah, the amount of times that people have said to me like I was practicing something

and it felt like nothing was happening and maybe I got a little bit slower but then like one session or one week it just clicked for me. And I saw that in the compound of that work that I’d done that had finally paid off. It just happened so regularly. And I think people just give up too soon with that quite often. And I spoke about this on a podcast recently. It was the concept of infinite games versus finite games, which is a concept I heard the author Simon Sinek talk about. And a finite game is like it where there’s clearly defined rules and an end point and there’s winners. And that might be like a let’s say a triathlon that you’re training for. Like that’s a finite game. But I think if you think of your swimming as an infinite game where the aim isn’t to win at swimming it’s just to keep swimming and have that longevity in it. I think that you can approach things in a way where you’re just happy working at things

and just that continue the frequency and just being able to stick with things and kind of happy working away. And I think the payoff then happens

after several weeks and several months. So I’m not trying to rush things or force things. So I’ve tried to take that approach to swimming and to other things. It’s like what can I continue to do forever? And I’ve found that to be really helpful especially with like gym work and swimming where I don’t need to just smash a session and smash myself. If I can just be consistent with things then I’ll probably be better off long term. Yeah exactly. The rewards comes from the struggle and everyone wants this goal to achieve and reach but the problem is if you get there then you work better if there’s a goal that you’ll never achieve because you just keep working towards it. But I think with triathlon especially I like to think about how fast swimmers are like full distance swimmers. If you look at the Irish lads the brothers in the 1500 I think one just got the world record or European record. And I think of a level of that

as an end goal being unachievable. And then when you look at triathlon swimming you actually think well it must be quite achievable because there’s a lot of people that do actually swim front park or do swim up the front. And from that aspect it actually makes triathlon seem a little bit more approachable if you think how unapproachable professional swimming is. Yeah yeah absolutely. Was there any barriers that you had to overcome mentally when it came to swimming whether it was in the open water whether it was feeling like you could mix it with those better swimmers. Was there anything that that arised over the last couple of years for you? Probably when I started working with my coach who doesn’t exist he still kind of mentors me now but unfortunately I can’t actually afford to pay him when I was living in Leeds so he’s very good to me but he’s a guy called Mark Buckingham and I’ve got a sponsorship of a wetsuit company called Yonder

and the co-founder Angus told me that the other co-founder Mark was an ex-runner and at 24 he turned to triathlon and he had to swim a 400 meter TT I think in under five minutes 20 in order to get on British triathlons development program at the time which I don’t think they do that anymore you need to be quite a bit faster than that but I remember thinking oh well that’s good that it’s achievable and didn’t think much of it then actually raced Mark in a race that was held in the UK just in lockdown and I came out at the back on on my own kind of with two other guys then there was a main pack of kind of strong bikers and guys that aren’t so good at swimming like Joe Skipper was in that main pack then there was a front pack I think maybe Reece Barkley Josh Lewis guys that actually have led out the front of internationals or up there and Mark Buckingham was on the back of the front pack so not only was he not he was a non-swimmer

he then was suddenly coming out with this front pack so I was like who is this guy I need to talk to him and then Angus got me in touch and then he was helping Johnny Brownlee into Tokyo and after that he was going to coach more athletes and he came on board as a coach and what he did for me was he helped me with zones which I never really stuck to I was always a sucker for chasing best average in a lot of swims and he really helped me just be like now stick to the zone it should be achievable on a bad day and it should be achievable on a good day it’s not unrealistic and another thing he helped me with was just how important getting on feet was I know that when I was an age group it was a little bit harder because the race was more dynamic and people settle fast and people don’t settle fast enough and it’s a bit more all over the place but when you’re in a pro race you have to go fast at the start and you have to get on feet

because that the race is going to go away from you and there’s not going to be a second chance and he just drilled into me how important getting on to feet was and establishing that kind of part of open water swimming which I just thought oh it’s beneficial but never thought much more of it and yeah when I started to do that I actually started to sense the fact that I was in the mix in races and obviously you need the strength on top of it but it was a bit of a bit of a thing that just a kind of moment that you look back at and you think you silly to have not felt how important it was but now it does make a world of difference physically and mentally I’ve got two questions there so tell me more about the what you changed in terms of the the zones apart from going best average as fast as you can hold for the whole set and then what did you do to train being able to get on feet so I used to do a lot of mixed sets which is very classic

and you know where you’d go in and you’d do a warm up and then you do some fast stuff and some threshold stuff and a cool down and you kind of do that each time because you felt like you were getting a good mix of improvement everywhere and then when I trained with Mark and he basically trains the same way that Alistair and Johnny do so when I trained with him for a year before I went and joined that squad in Leeds I went there and it was pretty much identical to what I had been doing but I’d have say five zones

and the way that my training works now and it would works on that squad which they’re open about is that Monday is strength for Robic so just building strength Tuesday’s VO2 which would be regarded as your fastest pace but unlike what I was doing which was just out and out as fast as I could VO2 is in their eyes is a little bit more like a controlled speed like a realistic speed compared to what you’d race another thing I used to do with my VO2 was I think the 50s it might be a controversial topic but I think 50s are easy to

misguide yourself into how fast you actually are because I feel like even if you’re unfit or if you’re not very fast you can get away with having a fast session if it’s just built up of 50s so that’s 50 meters that I’m talking about so we started to do more 75s, 100s even up to 150 on the speed work just to give you that more realistic idea and then Wednesday would be long aerobic long aerobic wet reps or in open water in summer Thursday would be threshold and Friday would be kind of your drills and your mix and I think the big part for me was I always was slow in the warm-up and I saved every film from the main sets and I had a clear I knew what my threshold was I sat for so many months I literally think I sat for about 10 months on a 120 threshold off a 135 off time and I was just kept asking Mark to change it to take me off it I was doing 2100s every week every Thursday and occasionally he’d give me 6150s, 4100s, 2 times through

and he didn’t change me off it and it was just the fact that I had these zones which were these set speeds and as I mentioned before I could hit them on a good day but I wouldn’t push past them because I’d know that a bad day would be due and on those bad days I could just about squeeze onto them and I think that was a big game changer and my swimming was just going into the pool and being like right I’m going to go this pace today or that pace today and it is achievable and it’s not like oh last week I kind of went one or two seconds faster maybe I can do it again this week because it’s just not a sustainable way to think because there is going to be days you’re going to get into the pool and feel terrible Yeah that’s really interesting I growth you on the 50s as well and I was chatting to a mate of mine who is a pro triathlete

he realised that he struggled to get out fast enough in his races and one of the things he changed was he started to do

a particular set that was essentially 150 at the breakout race pace like the first 150 metres of a race so 150 at front end race pace and then he’d do 250 just recovery but it’s not really easy it’s like a six out of 10 just get the heart rate back down and settle and he just keep doing those 150s and he they’ve made a huge difference yeah and he was able to lead he was like I think at world champs he was like he was out there in the front with the big guys and he’d never been out there before but he just like to him he realised okay that was the one main thing that he was missing was that breakout speed

Yeah that’s something we actually spoke about off not on this podcast was just that type of train I’ve actually started to incorporate it as I say because I’m trained on my own I can change sets and I’ve done a few things where I think I can recover really quick on the wall but that’s just not what you get in a race even if it’s just 10 seconds or 15 seconds you’re not going to get that in a race so I have actually done the past few weeks a couple of my sprint sets where I broke them up with long recovery rather than say on a Friday we’d do about 300 metres of sprint and I’ll do 75 max into 125 or 175 easy and I think that that is an important important little

trick to getting used to that takeout and that relaxing because there’s a difference between stopping on the wall and letting your heart rate go down 10 beats and actually doing it while kind of moving and turning in the water

Was there a particular race or moment in your triathlon career where your improved swimming ability made a big difference on the overall outcome? There was a particular race I’ll start off with telling you a particular race where my poor swimming ability was highlighted it was when I first started triathlon and I’d done it for about eight months or something over a over a winter and into a season you had to do a qualifier for the British series and it was a 800 metre time trial on a Saturday and then on a Sunday you did the you were set off in the order you would have came out of the water for a bike and a run just because it was cold and the time of year etc and this was to qualify you for a series I remember the cutoff for the 800 was at 11.40 which I think was around 1.28 per 100 so I just focused on that for months and months and months I did the swim my second to last in this swim I don’t know how I even beat someone I think I swam about 11.30

but these are all super fast kids like nine minutes at the front and I did there was about 150 people and anywhere I passed loads of them on the bike and run because I was so outweighed strength there and I ended up qualifying for this British series British super series and in about 35th and there were 40 in it so I qualified and my first race was WTS Leeds and it was the kind of junior version of that and it was a super sprint and I remember saying to my mum and dad like look the people that I’m stood next to on the start line on average there are about 40th in the swim and I was like I was 150th in that swim so I think I’m going to get like some time put into me here and they were like it’s any 400 meters and I remember I lost so much time that the crossing points had opened when I was coming I didn’t have anyone just race leads but when you come up out of the water up to transition the crossing points had actually opened

because they thought that all the swimmers were done I had probably in a space of 400 meters I probably lost about 45 seconds to a minute off the back of all these

fast kids and it kind of hit me then how important swimming was and that was my kind of moment I thought like I need to get better at swimming and it’s not going to be it’s not going to happen quick because I’ve just spent eight months and I’m still getting absolutely blown out the water here and that was kind of when I realized this is going to be a a long project over the next 10 years but I think more recently this year I’ve actually

been able to make decisions in a race I think it’s the first time I’ve ever been able to make decisions like I’m going to slow down or I’m going to try and get on them feet or I’m going to switch across or I can see that’s going over there or whatever which I think I guess makes me feel a little bit more like a stronger swimmer if I’m composed enough at the start of a pro race to kind of pick and choose some make some decisions whereas in the past it was just like all out swing your arms kind of thing Yeah that’s great to hear you say that because I see it as when you get to that level or that point in your swimming where you can almost be a like almost be a third person to your swimming where you’re able to make these judgments and all right do I need to go over to this pack do I need to go a little bit harder do I need to overtake when you can kind of just sit back and analyze and make decisions that’s kind of that that’s that next level

and that next step with your swimming compared to just going out and it’s just survival there’s one pace and you just want to get through it so and there’s no shortcuts to that it comes from race experience it comes from having the fitness and the strength to be able to adjust your pace and know what you can sustain throughout a race but I think when people get to that point that’s when their swimming really becomes a lot more enjoyable because you’re not just not just a victim to your circumstances and and then you can get such better results obviously because you can be a lot smarter about the things that you’re doing inside in a race so yeah and that takes time how long do you feel like it took you to get to that point before we dive into the rest of today’s podcast episode this episode is proudly brought to you by Form Smart Swim Goggles they’ve been a long time sponsored by the podcast they are my go-to goggles when it comes to tracking my training

sessions and being able to see what’s happening in real time through the goggles and we know swimming is a highly technical sport but without the guidance of a coach on deck identifying and addressing technique flaws can be a challenge they’ve recently added a new feature to the goggles head coach and this addresses that problem head on it gives them as improved access to their technique awareness focus skill development and in app education and analysis head coach provides real-time visual coaching via the Form Smart Swim Goggles augmented reality display during and after a swim head coach provides swimmers with technique feedback using two types of metrics form score and head coach skills form score is a measurement of overall swim efficiency ranging from 0 to 100 defined by your pace and your stroke length head coach skills encompasses five key areas that will help you identify where to focus on improving with your efficiency

head roll head pitch set pacing interval pacing and breathing time to neutral and after completing a session you can check back in on the form app to track your progress and head coach provides swimmers from beginner to expert with an unprecedented level of data-driven guidance and understanding enabling you to boost your performance and your speed get your pair of form smart swim goggles today click the link in our podcast description or use the code effortless on check out to get 15% off your form smart swim goggles I remember in that squad

where I trained with the sprinters to start with I was I was so out my death I couldn’t even flip turn on a wall and these were guys that were swimming 50 seconds for 100 but they were so nice to me and they were they were lazy with their distance sets so I kind of could get away with slotting in between but I remember speaking to one of them asking like

first of all I couldn’t flip turn without it being so overwhelming that it was all I thought about for the whole length and I remember saying to him I still remember now the feeling of being like is this ever natural and I teach or help some of my friends now swim and I explained to them that I was at that point where I thought it’s never natural and it never comes I remember one of them said it was about three years of consistent swimming so I say it probably took five years because it took me two years to them first two years in 2018 2019 you just learning about yourself and being able to swim and what it means and stuff and then it was took three good years and I would say at that point I feel I feel like now I can I would describe it as if I go into a public swimming session and I stand out I don’t just look like a public swimmer someone will say to me are you a professional swimmer and I’ll say no I’m not I wish I was as good as that

but I do professional triathlon and I do spend a lot of time in the water but for a long time I could go into public swimming and some guy in his lunch break would probably put me away in some 100s

I’ve had a couple of athletes that I coach tell me that like they’ve been at the pool and and someone’s made a comment like wow you’ve got a you’ve got a great stroke or you look like a you look like a professional swimmer and as a like and their confidence and like they’re just beaming after that and it’s such a such a nice compliment to get from from someone at the pool so the fact that you’ve put in the work to to get there is is awesome because it’s you know you go to the pool and you can those swimmers do do stand out and I think they’re their confidence and their comfort even just walking into the pool that stands out as well so it’s the trunks something that comes get smaller that’s what I’ve noticed you start with you start with the jammers and the full length ones they go down to the end of your quad then you go for the half length then you go for the like buck shape ones and then when you’re real confident you go for the for the budgie smugglers

yeah that’s exactly right and sometimes it even starts with the with the board shorts as well with you right yeah to it yeah and if you are wearing board shorts you’re making it really hard on yourself just at least get some jammers so you’re not creating heat yeah actually I literally have started using drag shorts do you know the ones that are like mesh on my over the top of my short just for my Tuesday sessions because I feel like I can sprint really fast but I actually want to be a bit stronger I actually think that they don’t make that much difference at all and I thought if I really want to make a difference I’d just stick a pair of like as you say board shorts on and I bet they’ll feel lethal like trying to get up to speed off the walls with them on with the pockets full of water yeah that’d that’d do it for sure I haven’t tied myself with board shorts versus with the outboard shorts but I should should do it I was wearing I’ve got this big sponge

that I sometimes wear for strength sets and it’s what I do it slows me down by it’s going to think like 41 so it slows me down by nearly 10 seconds a 50 so it’s really hard no it’s more than that it’s 12 seconds so it’s really hard work with this big sponge yeah I wouldn’t I went the other way recently and did I did a 750 a 1500 and a 100 and just one of the guys lent me he’s been to the Commonwealth Games they had the Commonwealth shorts that they were given from Speedo or whatever you could probably buy them but it was the first time I had them and I felt getting like a cycling skin suit on was hard and these must have been like I don’t know what they were but they were so small and I must have spent 15 minutes in the changing room trying to get them on and yeah I I felt like I felt like Leah Thomas when I had actually managed to finally get them on and I think I shaved a second off for a hundred just from the compression around the legs

yeah and that’s just the short it’s like we used to wear the full body suits and that would be a half hour mission to get the body suit on and that was almost your race done because it was that hard to to get the race suits on but they were so much faster I remember the first time I wore it I dived in and I felt like after I popped up like I felt like I popped up out of the water because of the amount of like just you feel like you get buoyancy from it but you don’t really but it’s just that less friction and it’s amazing just felt completely different so I’m glad they actually got rid of them because it was such a mission to get into those those suits so it’s a good move I do think the girls get the benefit of the full body suit still to some degree they get it over the shoulders but they look lethal I see them sometimes they’ll do as a squad practice where they do it in suits and they pull them off their shoulders while they wait between reps

and if it’s say 10 minutes or 20 minutes because they’re doing a bit more of a race see them or 30 minutes and there’s just all red around their shoulders just with how tight it’s been so hey yeah if anyone’s there not experienced that I don’t think you’re missing out on anything I know absolutely not what advice would you give to non swimmers who might be intimidated by the swimming aspect the triathlon I have a friend actually who is just a swimman and and this is a guy that he’s a close friend of mine we used to cycle and he cycled at a good level to be fair to him at a kind of national UK level and he’s decided to get into triathlon which is great for me I’ve got several friends now that have gotten into it and one of my friends did an Ironman where I couldn’t finish recently and it’s great to see and and he couldn’t swim a length without he keeps getting water up his nose

so it’s been a bit of a kind of thing with him to try and help him and I was down in him in the pool and we were like just we were in a shallow pool and we were walking walking along the bottom of the pool I did it with him because I didn’t want him to feel embarrassed in any way and we were doing the the kind of arm turnover but while walking you know and breathing out your nose and just getting used to that and I think like people expect that you are just going to go to a pool and be able to do something quite well and that and that if you don’t everyone’s going to judge you there but I think if you’re a complete non swimmer just get in there try and find a shallow pool which I mean one that you can stand up in and that’ll help you confidence and he couldn’t do more than when I first went down with him he couldn’t do more than 10 meters but he was

brave enough to stay consistent with it because it’s not easy and especially if you’ve done sport at a high level elsewhere it’s almost embarrassing but he now is telling me he’s doing his first I did his first 100 the other day and and I think it will be more than another couple of weeks before he’ll start getting into like reps where he’ll go and do repeats of hundreds or whatever so I think if you’re new to it you you just have to really embrace the fact you’re gonna have to take yourself out your comfort zone and start because you have to start somewhere and it’s probably not gonna look pretty but I can guarantee everyone who’s in that pool they don’t you they’re not embarrassed or they’re not the kind of judging you they’re just thinking like I remember when I was like that because even myself I remember just that first sort of intro to swimming it’s not natural so don’t expect it to be

yeah you can’t you can’t get better at it well you can’t start swimming by reading a book about it like you just need to get in the water and you just have to be willing to suck at it for for a long time and yeah as you said get out of your comfort zone and yeah I do see people at the pool who are who are new because they’re stopping after 25 or they’re having to stand up and it’s like I think like good on you like it’s it’s a it can be a very intimidating thing to start swimming as an adult but as you said the people at the pool they understand of anyone they’re going to be the people who will understand the most of what you’re going through yeah exactly yeah they’re not going to be be judging so yeah and any other piece of advice I have that I learned which is for it’s from as soon as you start up to at my level at professional it’s just this Alistair Brownlee is big on this it’s just the time on the world is just like just you just shouldn’t spend much

time on the wall and it’s a mistake I’ve made in the past and I see it with my friends and they I look at their Garmin data and their elapsed time is like half an hour longer than their whole swim might be 45 minutes to swim in a half an hour elapsed time but if you think about running or anything like that you if you’re trying to do a half Ironman or a full Ironman or even a sprint distance where you’re trying to run swim consistently for

a decent period of time the races are 15 half an hour over an hour long and people just getting this habit I see them and I think you need to swim to get better at swimming and your warm-up should be nice and easy that it’s pretty much touching go now for me on a warm-up if it’s I do 400 swim 300 pull 200 paddles 100 kick but I’m not I don’t need to recover between them reps I’m just warming up so I’ll literally stop and then put the pull boy in and go again and I think that that is something that has made a big difference for me Alistair instilled it in me just because that’s the way the squad worked and now I do it myself and I tell my mates I’m like you ain’t gonna get any better stood on the wall do your warm-up take a bit of a reset mentally do your prep have a minute have a drink then do your main set but just don’t stand on the wall it’s at the end of the day it’s swimming it’s not it’s not it’s a bad habit to get into stopping because if you did it

while running you’d feel like a feel like a Wally really if you just kept stopping every 200 meters and standing at the side of the road for 10 seconds 20 seconds I think it’s a good point especially for triathletes who are training for three sports and time limited so just spend that time at the pool primarily swimming and I guess the caveat there is depends on what you’re training for you look at those the sprinters that you mentioned at the start they’re doing six or eight fifties or six fifties off three minutes so there’s a lot of time on the wall so it just depends on on what you’re training for and what the purpose of the session is but if you’re doing distance yeah distance swimming yeah the majority of people yeah it’s a an Ironman or half Ironman athlete it’s going to yeah you can kill a lot of time just by mucking around on the wall so I think that’s a that’s a great a great point yeah just yeah as I say yeah the way the the sessions work

as I was talking earlier is yeah the VO2 the speed session would be about 30 seconds of rest I feel like unless you’re an anaerobic athlete you’re not going to benefit from any more than that and then threshold like 10 seconds rest I do threshold now 3k sets with around 7 to 12 seconds rest between reps and it feels like nothing but that is threshold if you’re doing it right it shouldn’t be if you’re needed more than well this is the way I train because I know that different athletes are different but if I need more than 15 seconds to recover and swim in too hard yeah that makes a lot of sense and so when you you got in touch the the other day your your target was so you’re about I think 60 to 90 seconds off there the front pack in your races what are your future triathlon goals over the next couple of years what are you having in your sights yeah so I feel like I’m kind of only just still on the rise and everyone has their own story and you see all these athletes

breaking out and it’s cool to see and the sport when I swap to the sport I feel like the level I’m at now and the training I do back then it would have had me up there as one of the kind of best 70.3 guys on the scene but obviously it’s grown that was five years ago it’s grown now I think that the benefit of swimming is exponential in age group racing it was it was good and it was maybe I don’t want anyone to think that swimming is not important but I think in pro racing it’s so different because these bike trains go and you’ve just got to be on them like I train with other athletes I know what Alastair holds at the front I know what athletes in the group in front of me hold and I know what what’s I have to hold and if I take that 60 to 90 seconds off which if you’re getting on them fast feet that’s not actually 60 to 90 seconds that’s only maybe 45 seconds faster and the other 45 is just the second half of the race where occasionally I’ve led my group

the second half of the race and I want to be kind of near my limit on the feet which would be perfect really but I think that

my PCO bike ranking went up and I biked less what’s the the normal most races and it’s just because that first 20 minutes I’m in a group and I might bridge across to another one and I can actually race it more dynamically so for me my long-term goals are

to be top sort of I’m ranked 160th I think in the minute so if I say next year ranked 100th the year after that 50th and then by 2026 top 15 and I think the way I’m going to get that is from is from swimming well biking easy being a a strong biker and biking easy and running fast off the bike because I have actually ran a 110 high half off the bike but it was off a bike that I crashed on and I actually rode it in at like 270 watts whereas I’d normally ride it say 300 or 310 so I know that if I have an easy bike I can run fast and even work on that even more in the future so I think that’s my have a new to success really yeah yeah sounds like it and I just love the fact that you’re you’re looking a couple years ahead you’re not looking to go right like next year like it’s it’s got to happen for me just and when you look at the best athletes it just does not happen overnight there’s a there’s a long there’s a long long background in in that

training and consistency so well it’s been great having you on the podcast and just to see that transformation in your swimming over the last few years really blew me away so I appreciate you getting back in touch a few weeks ago just to send through your latest video and you said before the call as well that you feel like you’re swimming even better than that last video which would be great to say too yeah I’ll I’ll try and get some more footage I’ve just it’d been a long a long time since I kind of took that footage and it was just after offseason as well and straight away it’s like for anyone just looking at videos of yourself I watch all the heffalos swimming videos so I know what the the things I need to do are and yeah I just picked up one or two things one of the things I noticed I don’t know if you’ll pick it up but there was a video you did on analyzing yourself which is when you’re reaching out in front and you were too close to the surface of the water

and in my head I for some reason just was convinced that that’s what I needed to do just for hydrodynamics or whatever and I actually go a little bit deeper now when I reach out in front and that’s made quite a good difference and I kind of press my chest down point with the back of my head and I feel even higher again in the water and it’s just from get a video of yourself watch it and then if you just cross reference it with the heffalos women youtube channel then you can you can improve overnight really that’s something that you can’t improve your strength but I think that your technique and that I know that you have different courses and stuff I think that is I almost forgot to improve it and I maybe regret not getting video footage sooner because I might have picked up one or two seconds here or there

well I appreciate I appreciate that a lot and I mean looking at your your body position so much better than than where it was and like just yeah it’s like just looking at your getting that footage and making us a few small changes and just trying to keep it simple it’s yeah it makes a huge difference I mean with the data I was using the EO swim better just to look at the forces and I saw that my drag on my left hand which is typically the high one it was something like 6% or 7% which is ridiculous like way too high it should be zero with your hand drag which is palm facing forwards and yeah just creating a heap of drag with with that so there’s there’s all these little things that we can can improve on so well wish you wish you all the best for the for the future and those that are listening while post the comparison video on youtube by the time this episode has gone live so check out our youtube channel for Will’s before video which we did a feedback

Friday on in 2019 I believe and then the comparison one too today so go to the youtube channel and check that out and give will a follow as well on social media what’s your where’s the best place to find you Instagram yeah will underscore try nice and straight to the point love it well we’ll appreciate your time and I know it’s like this so thanks so much for being on the podcast and look forward to seeing what you’re achieving in the future cheers yeah 2027 I’ll come back on in 5th I’ll lead out I’m on wills I’ll be the first person to do it from a non swimming background that’s the dream love it let’s do it awesome thanks Will cheers 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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