Effortless Swimming

In this podcast episode, we have the privilege of sitting down with Leigh Nugent, one of the world’s top technical coaches. With his extensive experience as the National Youth Coach for Swimming Australia and former Head Coach, Lee shares valuable insights on improving freestyle technique. He also discusses the champion mindset and shares stories of swimmers who have overcome injuries and achieved great success. Whether you’re a swimmer, coach, or simply interested in the sport, this episode is packed with tips and stories that will engage and motivate you.

Today’s podcast episode is also sponsored by Skillest. Exclusively for our Effortless Swimming podcast listeners, you can receive a free course, ‘The Art of Triathlon Swimming,’ and an online analysis through the Skillest app.

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.

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

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is one of the very best technical coaches in the world. His name is Lee Nugent. He’s currently National Youth Coach for Swimming Australia, and he’s also been the head coach of Swimming Australia for a number of years. On this episode, we talk about easy ways to understand your freestyle technique and make changes to it. How to avoid burnout as an athlete or a coach. Why combining technique work with the conditioning behind it is the secret to success. He talks about, he tells a story about how Ariane Titmus was able to push through an injury that she obtained on a swimming camp and how there have been other swimmers who weren’t able to do it, even though the injury was much less. And so how having that champion mindset can set you apart from other athletes. And he talks about what he’s learned on being a part of many national teams and why some

groups and teams have great success and why others don’t. I hope you enjoy this episode with Lee Nugent. I certainly did. Let’s get into the episode. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Lee Nugent. Now, my dad, who’s a swim coach, he said, you have got to get Lee Nugent on the podcast. He’s probably the most experienced coach, the most experienced person when it comes to working with swimmers from all levels down to learn to swim all the way up to international level athletes. He’s one of the most experienced people in the world. And you’ve known my dad for a long time. I’ve known you for quite a long time, though, you know, my dad a lot better being a Gip Slam boy. So for those that are listening, just to, I guess, a quick snapshot on how your swimming career came to be, because you’ve been on many national teams, national head coach, you’ve been in the sport for a very long time. You probably don’t know where to start,

right? But how do you sort of summarise it? Yeah, thanks, Brenton. Well, your dad’s very complimentary towards me. That’s nice of him. And you know, I feel privileged to be on your part here. It’s always good to go on and talk to someone about swimming. And hopefully those who watch get some benefit from it. I think everyone who’s been involved in the sport has always got their story to tell. Probably today we’ll talk a little bit about my experiences. But I started really as a, as a swimmer myself, I was, you know, sort of boarding on national standard, made some national, we’re back in my day, it was junior championships at the Australian level, which was 16 and under. And I made finals at that level, swam at one or two open trials type competitions, Australian championships, but certainly never got to the levels of the people I work with, who work compete internationally. But yeah, I swam at none of wanting actually, it was a foundation

member there. There are a lot of swimming pools built around Australia in memory of the Second World War commitment. And they’re all called memorial pools. So I started competing when I was about 10, I guess, and finished competitive swimming. When I was 18, you know, went off to dematertory education and started playing water polo. And then I re entered the sport sort of as a voluntary coach. As it so happens, he gets land and your dad was swimming. Back in those days, he was a very good swimmer. I started coaching it at a little country town called Mafra. And then that I was there in the summer, didn’t have a clue really about what I was doing. I was just drawing on my swimming experiences and consulted with my old coach. And then I quite enjoyed it and took my squad of young swimmers across to sail and joined up with another squad there. And that was really the beginning of my coaching career. After a few years there, I shifted to

Melbourne and started coaching and running a learn to swim sort of program in Eastern Melbourne. And in 1980 became the head coach at none of wanting swimming club. And that was the beginning of a new era for swimming in Australia where Don Talbot had come back to virtually reinvigorate swimming in Australia. And one of his demands was that club swimming becomes a feature of national championships. It was sort of state based back in the earlier days. So clubs had to really build a strong program. And we started competing nationally as clubs. And that was a revolution really in Australia. And it became very competitive. So this massive shift in club performance became a feature in the competitive landscape. There was prize money on offer. The club’s that achieved top 10 status in the pointscore. So it forced you to build a broad based strong team and coach across a lot of events. And we managed to be successful in that area for

extended period of time. And in doing so had international representatives and so on. In 2000, I became national youth coach. After the Sydney Olympics, followed in the footsteps of Bill Sweetman and sort of led that youth program for four years, I guess, or three. I did a dual role. In 2003, I was sort of called up to be head coach of swimming Australia and lead the Athens campaign for the 2004 Olympics. And at the same time, I was sort of covering off the youth coaching role with getting other experienced coaches to come in and do key projects for me. The Athens Olympics was a successful campaign for us. And in 2005, I felt I had unfinished business in the youth area and relinquished my role as head coach and went back to being the youth coach full time and tried to help rebuild our men’s team, which sort of fell off a cliff then with some of our star athletes finishing up in 2005 and six. So that was that was a

challenging project. And we did get some really good outcomes in 2008 in Beijing, where we had an equally good Olympics in Beijing is what we had in Athens. And then I went back to being head coach again in 2009 and led the London campaign. But we were sort of, you know, the circle or the wheel had turned a little bit in swimming like we know with all sporting teams, you can’t stay on top forever. So our wheel was sort of starting to head towards the bottom of the cycle at that stage. And even though our performances were recognised as being not that successful, I think we still won 10 medals at that Olympics and the whole Australian team at that time, cross all sports struggled in that competition. There were changes made over a period of time and there was a rebuild on nationally across all sports for Rio and then obviously for Tokyo and the wheel kept turning. And I was on the Tokyo team as a technical coach

supporting Ryan Taylor and the coaches and the athletes on that team. And we had our best Olympics ever, which was fantastic, winning nine gold medals and coming second to the Americans again in the gold medal tally and sort of got ourselves back on track, so to speak. And then obviously the same if it was applied in the recent world championships in Fukuoka. And we won the gold medal tally there by significant margin and it was just an outstanding event. So we’re off now to the Paris Olympics next year in 2024. And the pressure is on us, isn’t it, to try and repeat those sorts of performances. But it’s been a fantastic involvement in the sport over a long period of time. And yes, you’re correct. I’ve coached it every single level. And when I was coaching on deck, I was always doing something with junior swimmers or developing swimmers along the way and trying to educate my coaching staff how to coach better

with younger athletes and age groupers. What are some of those things that you would teach them about how to coach better? Because something that I’ve had to figure out along the way with coaching and you referred to it earlier is when I first started, I had no idea what I was doing. I would just repeat some things that I was taught as a swimmer. But then you start to realise, well, coaching is a very different thing. You’ve got the technical skills of swimming, but then there’s the coaching side of things which is a different thing in itself. So are there some key things that you try to pass on to those coaches? Yeah, definitely. Being a welcoming personality is really important. So, you know, swimming’s a hard grind. It doesn’t matter what level you’re at. To be reasonable at it, you have to do a lot of work really. To be average at swimming, you have to train like a champion. And it’s a challenging sport to be really successful at. People don’t

do it just to be successful. They do it because they love the involvement in the sport and they love being with a group of people who are trying to achieve similar things. So if you’re grumpy and an unhappy person on a daily basis, it’s unlikely that anyone’s going to want to be with you. So, you know, you’re dealing with young people every day virtually, week in, week out, and it’s got to be a very welcoming situation. So your personality and how you manage that or project yourself is critically important and how you communicate with people. So you’ve got to be the type of person who people want to be with rather than the type of person who people don’t want to be with. So that’s the number one thing. And then you need to know your stuff and how to teach people and have them want to do better. So if your presentation is really captivating, well then your swimmers are going to more than likely learn from you and progress. But in saying

that, it’s not a slap and giggle environment. It’s like there’s an element of seriousness to it, because people are committing a lot of time and a lot of effort to become better at what they do and to be involved. So there is an expectation always that, you know, the bottom line is going to be you’ll have a reasonable performance when you get up and compete. But that’s not a guarantee, is it? So for coaches, I guess the thing is that they’ve got to understand that they have to coach what’s in front of them. Not everyone is going to be at a particular standard that they would like to have be coaching. And it’s your obligation to help everyone try and be better than what they currently are. And we should never forget that. Have there been any swimmers that you can think back to who maybe as a junior, early teens, late teens, where you looked at them and thought they’ve got the potential there, but they just are not able to concentrate enough or

they’re just maybe the attitude isn’t quite there, but they’ve been able to turn that around. Is there any swimmers that come to mind with that? Yeah, I have, but I won’t mention their names. I think we have people come before us have got you see them, you go, wow, this kid’s really got the talent, they’ve got the body, they’ve got the connection with the water and all of that, but don’t have the application. They just can’t apply themselves to the disciplines that are required in the training for this sport. So that’s disappointing, I suppose, but that’s natural selection, I guess. You know, you get the person who is just an outstanding trainer, but don’t have the talent to take themselves to the highest level. And as a coach, I love I loved coaching those people, because I was so committed, and they’re doing everything for the right reasons, but it was disappointing that you couldn’t get more out of them

as far as comparative to the other athletes that might have a lot more talent. So that’s part of coaching. But I think the great ones are highly talented and highly committed and they’re unbelievably competitive of great competitive IQ. So they’re the ones that really make it to the top. But that shouldn’t be everyone’s reason for swimming. Like for being involved in this sport, it teaches you so much about life and it’s such a good lifestyle for people to live. And the involvement with others who have similar ambitions and a similar mindset, I think is part of the attraction for people to be involved in the sport.

It makes me think of you mentioned when you were growing up, you made it to a good level, but you were never at that international level. I was very much the same was made a few national age finals. That was the best that I achieved. But to me, I don’t really, I’m not fast that I didn’t make it to a higher level, because I love swimming. I love the lessons that it teaches you in life. And it’s such a good community and culture to be around. And that’s why I continue to do it. So there’s so much outside the gold medals and all of that that we draw from. Is that why you find yourself coaching doing what you’re doing? Is that a big part of it? Yeah, it is. Like the bottom line for me has been it’s coaching is a great opportunity to influence positively people on their life and their future. And we know the lessons that can be learned from committing to a sport like swimming are massive in someone’s life as they go, go forward. And, you know, there’s

countless people who I’ve been involved with and stories from other coaches who I’ve been associated with about the successes of their athletes in life beyond swimming. And most of them will attribute their achievements to their learnings from swimming, from being involved in swimming. So that’s sort of affirmation for the good this sport can do. And for what a coach can do as long as they manage their influence is the right way.

And in terms of longevity in the sport, Dad mentioned that in 2008 Olympics, you said one of the one of the things that you wish you’d done before that was to take a bit of a break beforehand. So you went in fresh because you went in and you just mentally quite exhausted with all the coaching and stuff that you’d been doing. What sort of lessons did you take away from the 2008 Olympics and how could that translate to other athletes or other coaches just in managing their energy? Yeah, it was 2012 actually. I think for me in 2004 I was able to have between trials and going to the Olympics. My role was better resourced with people supporting me around it than it was to 2012. There was challenges in 2012 at varying levels in our organization and I was probably over committed across a number of areas. So by the time I got to the Olympics, I felt quite fatigued and I think that was a learning I took to others who were in similar

roles and other coaches and coaches who were coaching the coaches in the high performance area are under quite a lot of stress and they do work long hours and they’re away from home a lot. And I think you need to manage yourself, manage your life so that when the pressure really is on that you are fresh enough to maintain objectivity and be able to deal with the overload that occurs in those situations. And I know when I’m working this role supporting our head coach, Rowan Taylor, much of my approach is around making sure he’s not dealing with things that he doesn’t have to deal with when they’re things that I can deal with. I think we’ve learnt a lot from not only my experiences but others and their experiences from the past. And I’d say that’s a contributing factor to us being able to run our team the way we are now. And I guess it is one of the reasons we’re experiencing some of this success we’ve got right now.

That’s not discounting like the unbelievable swimmers and coaches that we’ve got and what they do. It all contributes to those outcomes. I was speaking to Kim Elberton who was on the Tokyo team and she just said the just the culture, the atmosphere just within the team. It sounded like something very, very special. Was there something tangible there that you could feel being over there for those Olympics? Look, the Tokyo Olympics was probably the best Olympics a coach and an athlete could ever go to because it was just about the swimming. It wasn’t about anything else, you know. They were no distracting stories and because there was no one there. Just the competitors, really. Now, that’s disappointing from Olympic’s point of view and the festival it is. But from a performance point of view and the fact that we were in Covid, I think kept everyone’s outlook in perspective like we hadn’t been able to compete for a couple of

years, the world. So there was this gratitude that we could all come together and race. So it sort of went right down to the bottom line why you compete. You compete because you want to compare yourself to the best. You want the best people there at any given time. So we can have a competition that sorts out who is the top dog and so on. But just to be able to compete in something where the best people are all together, trying to achieve the best outcomes for themselves and for their nation. And I think that was vivid and that’s why it was so good. The things that distract people along the way, the little bits and pieces that people might like to use to make an excuse for why they didn’t go well or why they did go well actually weren’t there. And it was just down to, I suppose, the purest reasons that we were there competing. And I think we had a tremendous group of athletes, staff and wonderful coaching staff. And that’s

why it was like it was. And it repeated itself this year at Fukuoka. Yeah, Flynn Southern said that first night of competition, like we had those back to back goals and it just sounded electric, just being at the pool as part of that squad. Fukuoka was unbelievable that first night. Four gold out of five. And then you’re thinking to yourself when we’re looking at how we’ll position the next probably won’t win any gold. So the question was always asked, is it going to look like we had a false start? You know, are we going to be able to back up? Because that happened in Sydney Olympics. And, you know, everyone was like, wow, this is unbelievable. Came in the next day and we had a had a shocker because everyone had collapsed after the high the night before. But then we got back on track later. But we’d learn from that experience. And we knew we weren’t going to win gold the next night. But then after that, they just kept coming and coming and coming

again. So I think our experience and I guess our self belief helped us through that second day and we’re able to continue with that sort of success from one night to the other. In terms of the the mindset that you see the very top swimmers having heard a story about Ariane Timbers breaking her nose at a training camp, I think. And then basically just continuing training. And then there’s been other athletes that have had something much less severe. And they’re going, No, I can’t, I can’t possibly try him because you dive into that story a little bit. If you remember it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the great swimmers, the great athletes, I guess, do exceptional things. So I’m sure Ariane won’t mind me sharing this story. It was at the national event camp this year. We were sort of on the Thursday, I think, sort of the back end of the camp. She’d done a fantastic session the night before. And going to training on Thursday night and she

was in the back seat of the, you know, eight seat of Anne. She lent forward to let the seat back for someone else to get in in the row seats in front of her. And the seat shot back and hit her in the nose and broke her nose at the hotel. So she had to get out. We called the doctor. I wasn’t there at the time. But the story is relate to me called the doctor, you know, his blood everywhere. And the doctor came and straightened her nose up. So she went with one of the managers to the pool after that, where her group were training. She couldn’t get in because of a broken nose at the time, but she hopped on a watt bike and rode for an hour and a half. So she didn’t miss the workout. So, but the next morning she went training. We go over a lane to herself and she swam something like 5K. Now, I don’t think she could go too hard because as your blood pressure builds, it probably would have hemorrhaged again. But she went training again the next

night when her group weren’t training. She went and trained with the individual medley swimmers and they didn’t go far enough. So she did another 1500 and then got up and did everything on the Saturday morning the next day. Here’s someone who’s just totally committed to preparing herself for what’s to come and finding a way to do things when others would find a way not to do it. And having a broken nose is probably a pretty reasonable reason for not doing something. But there you go. So she did that. But, you know, we find others who, you know, they’ll have a minor. The minor thing occurs to them and all of a sudden they can’t do something. And I think that’s mental toughness, isn’t it? Alright. And there’s a fine line between that and doing yourself harm as well. So we’ve got to be careful with how we manage our athletes and and watch the ones who’ve got this really committed mindset that they don’t overdo it with themselves. You know, we get

injuries or illness or whatever else. So the hero stories are good to hear as long as they have a great outcome. And you know, Arnie went on to do what she did at the World Championships, which was incredible. Like a 400 freestyle was just an amazing swim. And a 200, even though Molly touched her out was just an incredible performance. And then her performances in the relays and so on. Has there been any other swimmers that have stood out to you like that where you’ve just gone, this is this summer is is amazing and just and just consistently they just they make sure they’re doing what’s required to be a champion. You know, we tell lots of stories to our athletes, particularly on the teams because they’re inspiring and stimulating for them. The one story I wasn’t on this team, but Daniel Kowalski at the I think it was a 2000, no that 1994 World Championships. I think it was. He was like really ill with vomiting and diarrhea and so on. And he

was advised and he had a temperature. He was advised not to swim the 200, the 1500, but he refused to take the advice of the doctor. And he did swim that 1500, came second to Kiran Perkins and swam the best time of his life ever. So he’s a guy that probably should have been in hospital, but actually did something like that. So it’s a power of the mind, isn’t it? Yeah, but there are lots. There are lots of stories like that. And we won’t use up all that time in this pod to talk about heroics of people. In terms of techniques, so you’ve done a done a lot with all levels of swimmers. What are some of the key elements that you see as being great freestyle technique? Because those that listen to the podcast, we have a lot of triathletes, a lot of swimmers and open water swimmers. So it’s primarily freestyle. So what are some of those key elements of great freestyle technique that you normally teach? 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 for 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 check out to get 15 percent off your form smart swim goggles. This podcast is also brought to you by Skillist, the ultimate digital coaching platform that’s making waves in the swimming world. Imagine having the opportunity to train with Olympic and World champions like

Kyle Chalmers, Ryan Murphy and Brent Hayden. Well, with Skillist, that dream is now a reality. Swimmers, you now have the chance to work with the absolute best in the sport, getting insights and guidance from these elite athletes like never before. And skillist isn’t just your run of the mill coaching platform. It’s a game changer. Here is what sets it apart. You can discuss training programs, receive detailed stroke analysis and even develop race strategies with these incredible athletes and coaches. It’s like having a personal coaching session with an Olympic champion right in your pocket. And excitingly, coaches from around the world can also tap into the power of skillist. Coaches can use skillist’s amazing tools to train their students, analyze videos and incredibly connectives from across the world as well. So whether you are a swimmer or a coach, go to the app store, download the skillist app today. That’s SKI double L EST

download the skillist app today and get started. And only for our effortless swimming podcast listeners, we’re giving away our art of triathlon course free, as well as a technique analysis online through the skillist app from me for free as well. Go to effortless swimming dot com forward slash skillist offer or click the link in this podcast description and you will get the art of triathlon swimming course for free as well as a technique analysis from me through the skillist app. And now back to the podcast. OK, so we’re talking about pool swimming here because when you’re in open water, you can have all sorts of weather conditions and water conditions. So you’re probably going to move away from the purest type way of swimming. But obviously in the four competitive stroke to swim your fastest, you have to be efficient, all right? You’re most efficient. So to be able to achieve that, you’ve got to have like excellent technique

and then you have to be conditioned. So you’ve got to have the engine to drive the technique. So the training is one thing. But if your technique isn’t good, you can’t connect as effectively with the water as you otherwise would. So you need to have your technique as good as you can possibly have it. Some people are better at applying great technique principles than others. Others just can’t get into the positions. They may not have the range of movement or the particular what we call feel for the water that intangible, where people have a better application of pressure on the water to maintain propulsion. But there are some non-negotiable factors. The first thing is your body position in the water, which is largely governed by your head position. So we need to be in a position, a horizontal position in the water that’s analogous to the position of standing to attention or standing tall. So you have this alignment from the back of your neck,

right through to your feet, trying to have this straight line. So when we’re lying in the water like that, we’ve got our head in very low position. So we talk about a long neck at the back and it’s a bit like the iceberg principle. Most of our head is submerged or are being in alignment through our spine. So that keeps our eyes looking directly downward, not forward. So as soon as we look forward, that means we’re lifting our head because our head is hinged at the back. It’s not a ball joint or it doesn’t swivel around our neck. When we look forward, we’re lifting our head up. So we all know the biomechanical principles. If we elevate our head, what happens to the rest of our body? It sinks down a little bit. So our hips will be lower and so on. Now, the slightest angle to the vertical when we’re trying to be horizontal that we don’t require is going to create more drag as we move through the water. So people underestimate

how little change in angle it takes to increase your drag significantly. So we need to maintain our head in a low position, both when we’re not breathing and when we’re breathing. So that’s the key thing. That’s number one. If you most people swim with their head too high and they’re looking forward because when they’ve been taught to swim, they’re worried that they’re going to hit someone or, you know, run into the wall or whatever else. So obviously you look forward and you’ve been told all your life when you were young, running around to watch where you’re going. All right. Your parents are telling you off. Your teachers are telling you off. So you want to see where you’re going for your own safety and preservation. But in a controlled environment like a swimming pool, we have rules and we’ve got, you know, lane lines and so on that we follow. So we don’t worry about someone’s running into us. So so to speak. So we need to get this

horizontal alignment and then we we’ve got to create rotation around that spinal axis. So that in modern modern swimming to create the greatest propulsion, we try to keep our hips as flat as possible and twist through our core so that our shoulders are rotating, but our hips are staying flat. So it’s like having a universal joint at your hips and one end of it can turn but the other end of it doesn’t. So it makes sense. So that’s like when we stand up and we throw a ball, our feet are anchored, for instance, and we rotate our upper body a lot more than our hips and then that sort of cross core connection that torsion that’s created across our body, then we can his mom, you can connect the muscles from your hands right down through your arm across your body and into your opposite foot. All right. And you can use all of that long muscle chain to generate application of force to throwing the ball. Well, we apply that principle in swimming where

your kick actually creates the anchoring for your hips because in swimming, we’re not anchored to anything. The water doesn’t help us anchor. So we’ve got to maintain a constant kick to maintain the stability of our hips. And then we can create this torsion effect out in front. So when our arms are fully extended in front and the recovering arm is also fully extended, that’s the position of maximum rotation of our shoulders. And it’ll also be maximum rotation of our hip, but we want that hip rotation to be much less and their shoulder rotation. Then we can create this torsion effect through our body and then, you know, we’re taking up the pressure gradually in front as we’re getting to recover our arm. So we’ve always got one of their greatest propulsion. This is in the front half of our stroke, not the back half. The back half is propulsive, but it’s less propulsive than the front half. So we want one hand always in the front half

of the stroke or in any given moment in our swimming. So this hand is coming through the other one. We’re going in front again as we’re pushing air or extending on the front hand. So I think you’ve got to have that picture in mind that one of your hands is always in the whether it’s under the water or above the water is always in the front half of the stroke and to maintain balance in your stroke, we need to be like reaching in front, extending while you’re going into those early stages of recovery of the recovering arm. Many people make a mistake is that they’re pressing down too soon in front while they’re back hands in the back half and then they end up with two hands in the back half and lose balance and over rotate with the whole body. You need one hand in front to maintain balance. So in all of that, the breathing action can create problems because people lift their head to breathe, look backwards, look forward to all sorts of things.

So the correct advice is not to change your head position. So your head has to rotate through your neck in synchronization with the rotation of your shoulders and only ever one goggle out of the water. If you’ve got both goggles out, you’ve lifting your head up. So you’ve got to have one goggle under and one goggle out and children need to be taught way back how to do that. And then obviously no crossing over the midline of your body. You’ve got to keep your hands outside of the midline of your body and not too far outside the line of your shoulder at the widest point. So trying to keep the forces confined within sort of the the parallel lines of both shoulders as you’re moving forward.

You need to have them engage wrists, so no flexion. The only flexion that occurs is at the back of the push at the last stages of your underwater phase of your of your propulsion and your hand is always lower than your elbow in freestyle, always unless you’re swimming straight arm freestyle, which really isn’t the recommended way to swim. So that’s probably a nutshell. That’s excellent. I mean, a lot of those points I like to teach because I’ve heard them from heard them from people like like you and it’s sort of been passed down. I think for me, it’s really nice to hear that concisely from someone like yourself. I’ve got a couple of questions as well, just about about that. So with the hip rotation, in terms of distance swimmers, do you see distance swimmers often having a bit more hip rotation than say the sprinters? Yeah, they do. But we’re seeing in distance swimming now a lot more continuous kicking going on. Like there’s only it might be

50 50 sort of two beat kicking compared to six or a bit of a crossover kick. So we’re seeing less hip rotation in distance swimming than we do. And certainly in 400 meter swimming, which is more middle distance, it’s a lot more like I described, but you don’t you don’t want your hips to get out of control because you lose that straight straightness through your body. Once you start rotating too much of your hips, you then lose that connection. So I still think you want your hips to rotate through lesser degree than your shoulders. And in terms of when someone’s getting increased in their stroke rate, one of the challenges for a lot of people is to maintain what I call front quadrant, just keeping something in front of the head. What are there any teaching points that you would give to them to be able to maintain that that front quadrant while they’re increasing their rating? Where do they go faster with the stroke? How should they be feeling

with the timing of it? Velocity of swimming is the product of distance per stroke or stroke length and frequency of stroke. All right. And those two things interact to maintain your velocity. Now if you’re inefficient, both of those things won’t be as effective. So you have a poor velocity. But if you’re if you’re efficient in the water, you can maintain whatever your velocity is you want to swim out. But if you want to go faster, you have to do one of two things or well, maybe two of two things. You’ve got to increase your stroke rate and maintain your length and you’ll go faster or you’ve got to increase your rate a lot and shorten your length a little bit and you might go faster or you increase your length and maintain your rate and you’ll go faster. But if you’re swimming with a good stroke length, it’s hard to increase your length more. I think what you’ve got to do is try and focus on maintaining your length and increase your rate.

Now that requires training. That requires conditioning and the skill of pacing your race. So if you miss pace your race, when you for the first thing, you lose a stroke length. All right. And connection with the water. So you need to try and maintain length and rate to maintain velocity. If you increase your rate, it’s an inefficient way and lose your length. It’s an inefficient way of trying to maintain speed. But as you’re running out of white fibre capacity, so to speak, those fibres that help you apply more force in your muscles, you have to go to increase rate with less force so that the aerobic area starts to take over. So if you’re finding you can’t hold your stroke length together or then you’ve got to go to increasing your rate, which will involve less efficiency.

It’s the certainly the art of it isn’t is that finding that balance between the two and having someone be able to innately know what they what they where they are in that in that spectrum of things. You know, when you’re race sprint and you’re getting to the end and you know you’re shot up and you’ve got you’ve got 10 metres to go. All you do is try and stroke harder, don’t you? I’m just going to put my head down and try and stroke as fast as I can. But that’s because that’s the default way of doing it. Really, you try you should be trying to stroke longer and hold your right. That’s what we should be trying to do. As you said, it is you need that conditioning, you need that that training and

someone listening to this towards the end of your your sessions. If you can to if you can just focus on maintaining that that stroke length and what a try and encourage people to do is just be aware of their stroke count and just see what it does throughout a throughout a session. And more times than not, it’s probably going up by two or three or four or maybe even more towards the end of a session for for people. So just knowing that we want to maintain that stroke length, you know, first of all, that’s really the number one goal with with maintaining good technique and good form. Yeah, so for the great swimmers, they’re trying to maintain length and but to do that, they breathe less and kick harder in freestyle. So yeah, that’s a real challenge when you’re really suffering the fatigue symptoms. Yeah. And just for you, Lee, so have there been any lessons or realizations for you over the last 10, 20 years that have really stuck

with you? And if you’re talking to someone within the sport that you would if you’re to sort of write them down, my lessons from what I’ve learned in swimming, are there any key ones that come to mind? Oh, look, there’s lots of lessons from a swimming point of view, from a swimmer, consistency of training is the number one thing and applications to tasks. So staying in the moment and work on what you’re supposed to be working on. That’s it’s too easy in swimming to drift off. You know, we always as coaches, particularly with younger swimmers and age groupers, always trying to bring our swimmers back to what the training set was about or what the drill was about or, you know, how we want them to swim. You know, if you’re doing stroke counting work, you’ll be asking them what their stroke count is. And invariably they’ll say, Oh, I forgot, but that’s what we’re doing. You know, so I think those two things are critically important, trying to be

in the moment and be consistent with your training. So, you know, it depends how serious you are. But if you want, if you have an expectation on an outcome that you want to get, or then you need to commit to doing certain things to achieve that outcome, if you can’t commit to that, we’ll change the expectation on your outcome. And that’s that’s a mistake so many families make with their children when they’ll have an outcome because they see what other people do. So they’ll go, Oh, you know, I want my kid to swim that but we’re not going to go and train seven times a week, only coming five or they’ll come seven one week and for the next, but think they’re coming seven the next. So that’s inconsistency. So you don’t get that progression from one week to the next. And often it ends up an injury because the coaches will, you know, gradually increase the load from one week to another and then have a release and then the body adapts to that.

And then they’ll go again. If you sort of miss a week and you’re not adapting to the load and then your copper week where the load is at max that you overdo it. And you’ve got to make sure that you that you are actually adhering to the program that’s being set for you. The key things keep yourself healthy. If you’re not, you can’t train effectively and work on injury prevention. So all that prehab stuff you need to do. And with that, maintaining your range of movement, when you get my age, you rust up a little bit and and you can’t achieve the positions that you used to achieve. That’s just that’s life. Whatever it is you’re trying to do, you’re probably going to have more hope of doing it now than you are in five years time. So try and do it now. Get to it. Yeah. And in terms of the next couple of years, what are you most looking forward to? I mean, we’ve got you’ve got Paris coming up. I’m sure that’s firmly in your in your site.

What excites you at the moment that you’re working towards? Well, you stated the obvious. So Paris is definitely the main game for myself and the people I work with. But I have a parallel life in in identifying and developing the next generation of athletes and coaches. So I’m working on the people for 2028 right now. And also we’re scouting around the people for 2032. Now, the 2032 people like you’re probably people you’re around 202 at that point. So what are we now? We’re twenty three. So our people are sort of eleven twelve at the minute for that. So we can’t. We can we know who are good who are good swimmers there. But, you know, we’ve got to let it filter out a little bit. So that’s important for me right now. I’ve got I’ve got a training camp in a couple of days for young men that are twenty eight prospects. And we had one of them for them back in October last year. This is a follow up one. And quite a few of them have progressed.

But some haven’t progressed much. But that’s the nature of the business, isn’t it? You’ve got to remember in our Olympic team. So we have thirty two or three athletes. Half of that team are going to be repeats from the Olympics before. And then there’ll be a few who are triple Olympians to go around the third time. There’s not many spots for people to break in. So not many people swim at that level each time it comes around. So we see people often are better in their second Olympics than their first, but not necessarily. But a lot of people do too, not just one. And when you’re talking about progression for those those up and comers, are you looking at progression in their times or progression in what they’re doing in training? What are you looking for there? Well, our focus for these guys has been swimming efficiency and learning what it takes to swim the races that they’re targeting. How do you do that? And then how do you train effectively for that?

What does your training have to look like? So we have both the athlete and their coaches with us. Now, their coaches might change like some of these guys of 17, 18, that they may change over the time. But right now they need to be understanding of what it takes. So these guys are trying to compete with the rest of the world. What they were doing as a 16 year old, competing against the rest of Australia, isn’t going to cut it. Like it’s the evolution of standards for them. So it’s a very high performance focus transition from, you know, I’ll just try harder and I’ll go faster. Actually try harder, but you’re going to have to do it in a particular way if you want to be successful. Yeah, so attitude, how they’re performing things. Yeah, a very technical, very technical approach. Yeah, it makes it makes sense. Well, Lee, thanks so much for being on the podcast. I know you’re very busy. You’ve got a lot on. So I appreciate you taking the time out of your day for this.

And it’s been been great talking to you and just to have someone with your experience and passion in the sport and working with the up and coming Australian swimmers. I’m glad to be Australian and have you on our side there. And it’s been amazing just watching the Australian swimmers over the last couple of years just doing what they’re doing. And there’s a lot of moving pieces there. But what you’re doing is is a really important piece to that puzzle. So thank you for that and thank you for being on the podcast. Thanks, Brendan. It’s been a pleasure. And, you know, everyone’s a contributor here. So keep doing what you’re doing. It’s a whole nation that really, in a way, contributes to what happens while the whole nation can take some credit when it’s good, I suppose. When it’s not that good, no one wants to be involved in.

Thanks again, Lee. I appreciate it. OK. Thanks a lot. See you. Bye, everyone.

The post Unlocking the Champion Code: 20 Years Of Elite Swim Coaching with Leigh Nugent appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Join us on this podcast episode as we sit down with Brian Johns from Form Goggles. Brian discusses the exciting new features of Form Goggles and how they can help swimmers improve their technique. From measuring efficiency to providing real-time feedback on head and breathing position, these goggles are a game-changer for swimmers of all levels. Tune in now!

Today’s podcast episode is also sponsored by Skillest. Exclusively for our Effortless Swimming podcast listeners, you can receive a free course, ‘The Art of Triathlon Swimming,’ and an online analysis through the Skillest app.

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.

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

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is someone who I had on fairly recently, it’s Brian Johns from Form Goggles. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for having me. The reason I wanted to get you back on is number one, because there’s a whole bunch of new features that are just about to roll out with the Form Goggles, which I want to talk about. And I’m quite excited about and some of the athletes who came on our camp recently in Thailand have been beta testing them and have really enjoyed the features. I want to talk about those. But for the swimmers who don’t have Form Goggles, it’s going to be worthwhile for you as well, talking about some of these technique points that the goggles measure and can help you improve on, but why they’re important and what you can do to swim better using some of these key things around technique, primarily with head position to start with and breathing, but we’ll dig into that in a little bit more

detail. So first of all, I want to start with the form score. So I guess I’ll let you explain what what this is. And then I want to talk about why I think it’s such a such a good feature and a way for people to measure how well they’re swimming. Yeah, so form score is a measure that we’ve come up with to be a true measure of swimming efficiency. I think a lot of people try and find that balance between like increasing their stroke length. So trying to take fewer strokes per length or increase their DPS while maintaining or improving their time. And it’s that kind of a seesaw battle between like lengthening your stroke, but not lengthening it so much that you slow down. And then the other side, speeding up, going faster, but in an efficient way. And so form score is kind of an updated tool to do that we use it very specifically on rather than like swolfe where you might count your strokes and count your seconds, it’s a lot more specific. So taking your

distance per stroke by the centimeter, taking your speed meters per second, but then taking the next step where normalizing it for your height. So making sure that it’s a little bit more unique to you. And then also being able to use it from a speed perspective so that you can actually use in different pools. So rather than having like this is your swolfe in a 25 meter pool and a 50 meter pool, you have a form score that sticks with you across whatever pool you’re swimming in. And so it just ends up being a more universal score for you to measure your efficiency and help to see if your technique is strengthening weakening or where it’s falling apart when you’re swimming. And essentially a score out of 100. And speaking to Scott, who works at form as well, he’s ex Olympian, he said he was able to achieve somewhere in the low 90s, I think for one of the swims he did recently. But he said the average user was like, what’s the score? You know, for

the average user, it’s quite, it’s on the lower end, isn’t it like 40 or 50 somewhere like that? It’s kind of in the middle 45 to 50 is where kind of like the middle of the bell curve would be. And that’s been most of our users are around that area. So that’s like equivalent of like being a two minute per 100 pace. And with a normal stroke count around that. And so as you strengthen, we find that like most of our maybe age group level triathletes might be in like the sixties, maybe the pro levels might be more like seventies eighties. And then to get to like a nineties is like, that’s what I’m at too as a former Olympic summer. And but we do see some like former competitive summers who get up to that range as well. I think it’s good to know roughly where, you know, where people sit. And if someone’s getting a 40 or a 45 out of 100, initially might go, Oh, hang on a minute like that. So I feel like that’s not that good. But the

thing is just compare it to yourself can look to improve on where you’re currently at. And the good thing there is there’s so much room to improve. And if you go from a 40 to a 50 up to a to a 60, that’s a sign that your technique is really improving. So while initially, and I compare it to when people look at themselves swim, they go, Oh, I can’t believe I look like that. And they’re quite maybe a bit embarrassed about it. Or they go, Oh, I thought I looked better. Well, you’ve got a starting point now. And now you can go about improving. And the fact that it’s individualized to the height and it’s not just swolff, I think that’s a much better approach for things. So it’s basically just a score of your efficiency and speed. But you’ve, I guess there’s some secret source there, right, that you’ve had to put in all this data that you’ve got in form, and you’ve had to work out a way to be able to give a score that that really just tells you where you’re

at with your technique. Is that right? Yeah, I think it like what you see there where it’s like a lot of people might see it for the first time and be like, Oh, that’s not what I would have expected. But we are scoring it across like our whole user base, which is like people who are adults learning how to swim right through to former Olympians and stuff like that on the scale of one to 100. And then like wherever you start is like a good starting point for you. If you start at 45, then try and incrementally go up from there. Might just like improving your technique or improving your time. It takes a little bit of time to see the long term sustainable changes. But you can also use in the goggles to see where it’s like, okay, you swim 100, and you’re like really strong, really fast on the first 25, but then you fall apart pretty quickly and then helps you teach like how to manage your effort a little bit better. Remind yourself

that Oh, it’s falling apart. I got to get back on to whatever technique piece you’re working on and just really helps you give them a better tool so that you can really evaluate how your technique is going in the moment. That’s what Scott was saying. He said, oh, that you did 100, I think in a short course pool. And his first lap was 96 or something. And then he dropped off. He was like 92 91. He’s like, hang on a minute. Like I feel like I was pretty much the same. But then when he looked at the metrics behind, he’s like, okay, I was like, I took an extra stroke here or maybe my rating dropped off. So even at that elite level, you know, it’s a bit. No one’s no one’s perfect. And there’s always things to to work on. So that’s how data like that can be quite useful, I think. Yeah, definitely. Like I have a similar experience where I’m trying to build my volume back up. And so I just did a set of like 15 100s, best average the other day. And it’s

like, okay, the first five, I’m in the right spot, but then I start to fall apart. And it’s like, oh, like, you can see how much you’re falling apart remind like giving myself reminders to get back on it so that I can hold my time and my technique. And then on the on the flip side, I find with like, a lot of people who work at form who have been testing this out a lot are more the recreational triathlete level. And they see the same thing where it’s like, oh, I didn’t realize how much harder I was going in that first 50. They learned to dial it back, be able to manage their effort across. And then it’s like, just do a 200 and keep it all the same. How much different that can feel and how much easier it is to just pull back the gear on the first length, be better at the rest of it and just be able to manage things a little bit better. And those are kind of the very quick gains that we see people have using form

score. That’s a good one. It happens so often that it feels easy at the start. Let’s say you’re doing a 200, it feels easy that first 50. But if that’s going to be five seconds faster compared to the rest of your your 50s in that 200, well, you’ve probably gone out too hard, even though it feels feels easy. So it’s yeah, people who are new to the sport, it takes a while to be able to dial in the effort so that you don’t blow up later on in an interval or in the session. And it’s so incremental with how much additional effort you need to put in to go to go faster. Like it’s just it’s so so small and very hard to judge sometimes. And so that that takes time and having something like that, you know, like the form score, for example, it’s about a judge. Okay, I put in way too much effort here. And I dropped off a lot to be able to save that data. I think for a lot of people can be very helpful because it just shows you or it doesn’t lie. It’s not

going to it’s not subjective like perceived effort, I guess. It’s just going to tell you where you’re at with things. Yeah, like the other thing that we find is like finding that effort and being able to manage the training that’s good. And then, well, on that first link, that is your form score on that first length. And so it’s a little bit aspirational as well, where it’s like, okay, my first length, I might have been trying too hard. I was a 65, then I fell off to 50s. But like that 65 is a real number. You went that efficiently on that first 25. So like, you can like, can you dial it back to 62 and hold 62 is the rest of the way, not all the way back to 52. Like there’s a lot of ways to be inspired by like, okay, I can be that good. It’s just a matter of being consistently that good all the time and learning how to build the training out so that you can find a way to do that. Hmm. So that’s the form score, which I think is a great, just easy,

simple way to measure where you’re currently out with your technique efficiency. The next thing that the other features that you’ve added are primarily to do with the head and the breathing. Do you want to talk about maybe the first one which we’ve got is the head roll? Yeah, so we have a selection of like, what we’re calling really the whole thing together is called head coach and form score is like the vital part of measuring your technique day to day with it. Within that, we have the, we have five more skills, one of them being peak head roll. And with the goggles, we can very easily measure like how your head is moving in the water. And we know that how important head position is as a starting point for good technique in the water where it’s like, yeah, your arms might be doing the perfect thing. But if your head’s going back and forth, well, the boat’s going to move where the front of the boat goes. So making sure that your head position and

breathing are a very good technique. So with peak head roll, one of the things that we see for as a big error for summers, especially as they are learning how to swim for longer distances is turning their whole body to breathe and getting their whole face out of the water, having a lot of unnecessary movement in order to take that breath and learning how to minimize that movement in order to keep that you still get a full breath of air, but doing it’s in a way where you are minimizing how much you’re moving around the rest of your body. So you can always be moving forward. So with peak head roll, it’s we’re just measuring from the neutral spot head looking straight down all the way to where you’re looking to take your breath. And we’re trying to minimize that angle so that you can actually see how your head movement bringing back down can actually make you a more streamlined body. Yes, I say it quite quite a bit when people will turn their

head too far and look up to almost the ceiling sometimes. In worst case scenario, they’re looking up, you know, it’s directly upwards. So that’s it. That’d be an interesting one and probably a bit of a surprise for a few people when they see how far they’re turning. And one of the things that quite often happens is that I see people will often have their head too deep in the water. So the head’s fully submerged. And then in order to be able to get a breath, they’ve usually got to just turn their head a long way. So that’s kind of one of the key mistakes that I see made is going from having your head too deep in the water because they’re trying to bring their legs up, but they’re overdoing the depth of the head. And then they are forced to just turn a long way. So that can be a cause of excess head roll. And then sometimes just either being balanced or just being comfortable keeping the bottom part of your face in the water there. So ideally

want to be looking directly to the to the side and have it, I’d say like a 90 degree turn, I guess, rather than a 180 degree roll of the head.

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 format 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. This podcast is also brought to you by Skillist, the ultimate digital coaching platform that’s making waves in the swimming world. Imagine having the opportunity to train with Olympic and

world champions like Kyle Charmers, Ryan Murphy and Brent Hayden. Well, with Skillist, that dream is now a reality. Swimmers, you now have the chance to work with the absolute best in the sport, gaining insights and guidance from these elite athletes like never before. And Skillist isn’t just your run of the mill coaching platform. It’s a game changer. Here is what sets it apart. You can discuss training programs, receive detailed stroke analysis and even develop race strategies with these incredible athletes and coaches. It’s like having a personal coaching session with an Olympic champion right in your pocket. And excitedly, coaches from around the world can also tap into the power of Skillist. Coaches can use Skillist’s amazing tools to train their students, analyze videos and incredibly connect with swimmers from across the world as well. So whether you are a swimmer or a coach, go to the app store, download the Skillist app today.

That’s S-K-I-L-L-E-S-T. Download the Skillist app today and get started. And only for our effortless swimming podcast listeners, we’re giving away our Art of Triathlon course free, as well as a technique analysis online through the Skillist app from me for free as well. Go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash Skillist offer or click the link in this podcast description and you will get the Art of Triathlon swimming course for free as well as a technique analysis from me through the Skillist app. And now back to the podcast. Yeah, with the goggles, we have a real time experience where you can actually see your head position in real time. So in the goggles, in the heads up display, a little dot like a like a pong ball right in the middle to represent your head position with two lines to show how far is too far for you on peak head roll. And being able to see that in real time, you can see swimmers like make an immediate

change where it’s like they take the first breath or two and it’s like their dot is going way beyond the line. It’s like, oh, I really have to like clean up how much I’m moving my head position to make sure that it’s like only moving enough to breathe. And one of the ways that we’ve tried to individualize that experience is like, it’s not just a static experience, no matter how good you are, we kind of have users divided up into five different levels, depending on their skill level at peak head roll. So if you’re somebody who’s like looking all the way up to the ceiling, while those lines might be lined up to like 130, 140 degrees, a bit of a leeway but better than what you were before. For me, I might be at level five, those lines might be set up more like at 100 degrees where it’s like, OK, I got to be like one goggle in one goggle out and if I’m a little bit over, it’s going to set it off for me. And so having that individualized

experience in the goggles that’s accomplishable, no matter what level you are, but then progressive so that as you get better at the skill, the challenge gets a little bit harder so that you can keep on improving your technique. No, I like that. That’s good because it’s not any not necessarily an easy thing to go from looking all the way up to the ceiling to fixing it perfectly. It’s as that progressive, progressive improvement where you just start to get more comfortable and more aware of where your head is when you’re when you’re taking that breath. I want to move on to the the next one, which is pitch. So is this this is we’re talking up and down movement? Yeah, that’s right. So you brought a good point of like you see a lot of people bearing their head down in the water. And then when they have to take a breath, they have so much more to move to take that breath. And there’s a good sort of like symmetry between head

pitch and peak head roll where you want your head on the water minimize how much you have to turn your head in order to breathe. And with head pitch, so similarly, we have an in goggle experience rather than the lines at the sides, we have the lines at the top and the bottom. The interesting thing for head pitch is like having your head down isn’t necessarily better. So if you have your head all the way down, your head’s going to be buried. If your head’s all the way up and you’re looking to the the wall at the other end, that’s not ideal either. So about being able to create this head pitch experience where you’re right in a sweet spot of your head pitch being just right, being on top of the water, looking maybe a meter or two ahead of you rather than like looking straight down. And that might be a little bit of experience where, like you said, a lot of people are burying their head, they might not realize they might have been told their

whole life, keep your head down, keep your head down, keep your head down. And they’re keeping their head down so much that like the water is going over their head, their head, but really having that like sweet spot so that you’re looking at just the right spot at the bottom of the pool to keep your head at a nice neutral relaxed posture position so that you can keep your head pitch in line with your body on the surface of the water. And we find that not only does that improve the technique on head pitch going forward, but then also ends up helping your head be in a better place to have your peak head roll as you take your breath better as well. So there’s a very good connection between those two much. It’s so true. And they’re the concern that people have when they they hear, well, you can look at one to two meters in front, keep just the top of your head above the water. They think that their entire body position is related to

where their head is. But it’s like anything in life. It’s like too much of something is not a not a good thing. Too much of your head down in the water doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll bring your legs up. It’s probably going to change your posture. It’s going to make other things harder in the stroke. So there’s a sweet spot there. And it talked about it before. So those two things have a big correlation to to where you’re going to be breathing and sitting in the water. And I’ve had a couple swimmers who have come to clinics and they didn’t know that you should keep your head still. So I’ve had some of us who are sort of moving their head left to right when they’re not breathing, the heads rolling around, your head stays still, your body rotates around it and your head really just moves when you’re going to to take a breath. And a big mistake that people make is they’ll go from a good head position to then when they take a breath, they’ll look

up and then turn. And you’ll see that with the with the head pitch. So as for the most part, you want to just go from looking down to turning to the side to breathe a little bit of lifts. I don’t mind, especially you look at someone like Kyle Chalmers. He has a little bit of a look forwards and then turn. So some of it is is certainly OK. But a lot of people do it excessively. So it’s about finding that range and what’s right for you depending on the type of events that you’re doing and the style that you’ve got when you when you swing. Yeah, like I completely agree where like oftentimes you see the summer lifting their head up that might set off their their head pitch in this experience and then breathing. Also find the other way around it to where it’s like they’re breathing with the pull of their arm. And so they end up rotating and looking backwards. You can see like that head pitch dropping down as they look backwards through their breath too.

So just finding that like again kind of that sweet spot during the breath to be like looking towards the wall not lifting up not looking down and finding a good balance in their head position in order to keep their breath in time with their summit.

It’s such a fundamental thing yet that you want to get right is that head position. But it’s very easy to for it to slip out of place especially when you start to fatigue. And two weeks ago we had our camp in Thailand and myself and one of the coaches Mitch we were in doing a training session and we had one of the other coaches Sam he was just taking us through this session because and it’s been a long time since I’ve been coached from on deck because normally it’s like you know as you get older you’re not in the squad you’re just kind of doing your thing. But we were doing some sprints and Sam said to me keep your head still you’re moving it’s moving around too much. I’m like oh come on. But it’s like all right well that’s great feedback because I just don’t get that yet no from anyone on deck because it’s I’m just training by myself or in a squad without a coach on deck. So it doesn’t matter what level of swimming you’re at this stuff can still start

to creep into your to your stroke. So that sort of feedback especially from something like the goggles is is super useful. So it doesn’t matter where you’re at with it this stuff still happens. Yeah I completely agree with you. I’m the same where it’s like yeah I know a lot about swimming I’ve been swimming on my own here’s a feedback. It’s like oh wow I guess I’m doing something wrong here. But like with like I’ve coached age groupers and masters and kids kids going to Olympics and stuff like that the what they’re actually doing for technique or like the technical cues that we might be giving like an eight year old to a 20 year old really isn’t that much different where it’s like yeah you’re got to keep your head still you’re moving too much to breathe just a margin for error narrows where it’s like when you’re teaching somebody to swim is like OK they might be like flipping on to their back and they’re learning how to just turn

their head to breathe whereas like that Olympian might be like OK you’re Kyle Chalmers and you’re like OK you’re lifting your head up a little bit to breathe try and do it a little bit less or it’s like the margin for error becomes like centimeters rather than like a whole process of doing it. And so it’s just like that foundational skill and getting sharper and sharper and sharper at it that these experiences in the goggles really help out with that too.

Now the next one is we’ve got set pricing and interval pricing. Let’s talk a bit about those two. Yeah. And so this is where we get a little bit more into like some of the for competitive summers in general summers. This is important. But we really find with the triathlon community being able to consistently pace so that they are effectively training and bringing that pacing into their races is so vitally important. And so we have set pacing and interval pacing. So the interval pacing imagine doing like really long swim maybe a thousand meters in a row. Doesn’t have to be that long but just as an example. And you’re just trying to hold the same pacing the whole way. And when you’re doing your one thousand or you’re doing you’re an open water or you’re in like in the pool trying to do your triathlon. It’s hard to maybe gauge that OK you’re going hard at the start your pace might be a little bit quicker. You slow down in the middle

you’re building up and you’re really doing a lot of things by feel. So being able to have something to tell you in real time. Are you on your pace. Are you under. Are you over to be able to help you gauge your effort especially through the interval. Very challenging where you’re doing it for longer being able to understand like OK you really got to be smooth at the start to hold the same time from start to finish and then taking the same method into a set where rather than doing a straight swim you might be doing as a broken set 10 100s. Same thing though. Are you starting too hard on the first one. Are you starting just right being able to hold each of those 100s consistently so that the way that you’re practicing shows up in the way that you raise and has that displayed inside the the goggles. Let’s say you’re choosing set pacing for example. How does that appear. Yeah. So the way that we have it set up right now is that you’ll swim your your

10 100s. You do the first one and that first one kind of sets your goal time. And so say you’re doing 10 100s your first one’s 130. OK we’re going to try and hold 130 the rest of the way. And then as you go through what you’re going to see in the goggles is the goal time at the top beside your running time. So you’re going to see like 130 is there. You see your running time ticking closer and closer up to 130. And then you might find on that second 100 is like oh the 130 went past when I was five meters away from the wall. OK I got to speed up a little bit manage my effort a little bit in order to match the pacing that I started with. And then at the same time will rather than try to do like the mental math of OK I missed. I went 132.7 I was supposed to be 130. How much far was I off in the goggles I’ll tell you how far you were off your first one. And so you go 132.7 OK I’ll show you the time 2.7 seconds off. Try and do this to be able to get to

your next one and just give you those subtle reminders of how stay on pace as you’re going through it. Yeah that’s that’s really good. It’s kind of like what you could do running for for many years when you’ve got a gun and watch on or something like that where you can just see your pace you can see where you’re at if you’re doing four hundreds on a track. That’s something that’s just been elusive for swimming for such a such a long time. So to be able to just know you’re running time is it’s so helpful and there’s been not that feature exactly but that ability just to kind of see where you’re at within an interval. That’s one of the main things I’ve really loved about the goggles is just having that immediate just that immediate feedback like after you come off a turn and those sorts of things and that’s that has made my longer sessions just so much more enjoyable and being able to be accurate with my pacing as well because otherwise I’m

trying to look up at the sick the stop clock which you can sometimes see but normally my goggles are foggy or I don’t see it on the turn so I just haven’t been able to do that. So with the form goggles you know you can you can do it. So it’s just it’s such a great experience and that’s the feedback I’ve got from a lot of the athletes that I coach who use the goggles. They’re like wow this is a lot of fun now that I know roughly where where I’m at. Yeah. So I mean the goggles already like will tell you your time and be able to show you your pace and stuff like that. These head coach experiences like interval pacing and set pacing really goes like the next step to enhance what you’re doing. So yep. You’re able to get your time before but now let’s put that into the context of are you being consistent. Are you training in a way that’s going to help you towards whatever performance you’re preparing for whether it’s a triathlon or 1500 or

master’s meet whatever it happens to be. We know that like the more consistent that you’re going to be the better that the way that you’re training is going to show up in the race. And so that these interval and set pacing experiences really help enhance what the form goggles are already doing for you and capturing your time and pace. Now the the last one is is time to neutral. So here we’re talking about the breathing. So the time to bring it back to head down basically is that is that right. Can you explain this one a little bit more. Yeah. This one’s a little bit more complex. But I think the premise is pretty simple where we know that we want to have our breath in time with our regular swimming and like unlike running or biking like we have to breathe in when we’re swimming in the water but coordinate that with our stroke in a very rhythmic way. And so the way that we measure time to neutral is essentially from when you

take your breath. How long does it take you to come back to the neutral. And the common errors that we often see is like you take your breath quickly and your breath is hanging there. You take your breath. Now I’ll come back to the water and your your face is out of the water for a long time. A bigger proportion of your breath is keeping your face out of the water. We want to make sure that to keep your breath in time in sync with your swimming that you’re just moving your head enough to breathe. But then as soon as you have that breath you’re coming back down. So we want to see that time to neutral time shorten be of a lesser proportion of your breathing time to bring your head from your breath back to neutral so that your breath is staying in sync with your swimming. Again a really common one that I see when we look at videos when we record people is that they’ll turn their head with their shoulder roll initially. So they’re turning it at the

right time faces out of the water just as that back hand is exiting which is good. And then they just keep their arm out of the water. So their head out of the water for too long. So there’s there’s that lag. There’s a delay for it to come back down. And the downside to that is if your head stays off to the side but your your body and is rotated back and your arms begun to catch already. Then everything’s out of sinking. You’re just not going to get that coordination and sinking up of their head coming back and the body going back and you’re catching with your arm that’s in the water. You can get a lot of power from that if you time it well. But you can’t if that head still off to the side. You’re going to miss out on a big part of that. And we see that when we’ve measured the power during that that part of the stroke when we like use the EO swim better devices. We can see that you do miss out on a lot of power if you don’t time that correctly. So

it’s a it’s a simple one. But it’s one that you probably wouldn’t be aware of. Like I’m guilty of it. I on occasions my head stays out too long and I’ve seen that in some some footage. And it’s just something that I think it happens so quickly that we just don’t know that that it’s happening. So something like this is going to tell you whether or not it’s happening. Yeah, like it’s it’s such an important thing where I mean how many swimmers have we seen where they are either swimming with a snorkel or you ask them to breathe like every five strokes or something like that. And their swimming strokes look so nice. And then as soon as they turn their head to breathe it’s like a completely different stroke. But unfortunately like the case is for swimming is that you’re going to be breathing every two or three strokes like regularly so that breathing stroke has to be ingrained into the coordination and be in sync with your regular

swimming stroke. And what we often find is like exactly what you said where it’s like oh I’ve like this is something that’s even difficult for me where I find that’s the case for me as well but especially when you get tired and you are like you want to take that breath in so you want to take that extra bit of time to inhale the air or you’re moving your arms so fast that you have less time to actually take that breath. And being able to keep in sync becomes a lot more of a challenge when you’re tired when you’re trying your hardest when you’re swimming fast. And so this time to neutral measure helps be able to keep your breath in sync with your swimming even at those higher end efforts so that you can just keep on flowing with your regular stroke. And I did a video recently on on Lucy Charles Barclay who won Kona recently and she’s got a very high stroke rate of around 90 strokes per minute or 45 stroke cycles and it’s very quick and if you

have a look at her breathing she is very quick to turn it very quick to bring it back and that’s what is really needed especially as you get into those higher stroke rates but you can see it’s she’s not hanging hanging around for long with that breath so you have to be able to turn it quickly still get enough air and you can still get enough air even if you are moving the head quite quickly but it’s just something that we’ve got to got to train and I know you put a lot of work into these new features with with the form goggles and there’s a lot on the way I’m guessing you probably can’t talk too much about what you’ve got coming but I know you sort of work there’s other things that are that are in the works what can you tell us about that about what you’re working on. Yeah, sure like the stuff I can kind of mention right now is like we’re first of all this isn’t an end point for us this is the starting point for form to be able to coach

through the goggles on technique. And so as we go forward we’ll continue to try and develop other metrics that could be helpful for something technique but then also just being able to deliver these ones in a way that is it becomes even more seamless for the summer and so right now we have the tools for you to use over time maybe we can integrate those tools in a seamless way so that you can just swim your your practice regularly and we’ll know the goggles will know oh your peak head role is going too high little reminder to bring it back or a drill sets coming up we know that you need to work on your head pitch the most here’s a suggestion for drill to work on it and be able to have that more integrated and seamless in the goggles without having to worry about like oh I know I need to work on this what do I do about it it just becomes a part of your swimming experience with the goggles on. Mmm I love it well Brian thank you so

much for jumping on the podcast again and talking about these new features for those that don’t have the goggles if you’ve listened to this podcast at all you know I’m a big fan forms been a sponsor for probably 18 months two years now probably probably longer than that so I’m really appreciated for that and it’s because I’m a fan of the goggles and and I know a lot of swimmers who use them and they only rave about them too so thanks again for joining me and I’m looking forward to seeing what what comes in the future as well anything that we haven’t covered that you think we should have covered before we wrap up oh gosh like I mean like I said this is really just a starting point I think it’s really exciting that with the goggles with the heads up display and the way that we connect it with the app the potential for us to grow in this area to be able to coach the summer through the goggles is really great but one thing I wanted to highlight

is like a lot of these tools a lot of people who use form will you we have like workouts we have plenty of training plans and stuff like that if you’re training on your own but we know that a lot of people will be part of a masters group and they have the goggles that captures their their data seamlessly but they might be just doing a free swim to record it a lot of these things like form score is a very unique efficiency measure and something like that really enhances the work out that you’re doing whether you’re being coached on deck or whether you’re using some of the form content and those are the pieces that we want to keep on building so that no matter what the user is doing with the goggles whether they’re doing our content or getting coaching on the side or they’re coaching themselves being able to have more tools to help them become a better summer that’s what we’re always working on as we go forward yeah and it’s I mean one of the things

that’s been great for us is like we’ve got our eight week faster freestyle course we go through different aspects of the technique there and the workouts from that course you can just click the link in the in the course it’s going to download it to your goggles you can follow along with it so even just features like that for me have been really helpful to work with our athletes on these sorts of things so I like how it’s all able to tie in whether you’re following the form workouts whether you’re following someone else’s workouts got their training peaks integration as well to be able to add them to your form goggles so lots of cool stuff like that is just making it able to tie in no matter what your situation is with coaching so it’s been really helpful for me as a coach too so yeah, I appreciate appreciate that Brian, thank you so much it’s been great having you back on and I’m sure this will happen again in the next sort of 6 to 12 months

as we find out what else is coming down the pipeline for sure, thanks for having me and I look forward to chatting again soon 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 Discover Your Real Swim Efficiency Score with Brian Johns appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Welcome to the podcast with our special guest, RJ Boergers, the author of ‘Finish Strong: Resistance Training for Endurance Athletes.’ RJ is a certified athletic trainer with a doctorate degree in Movement Science. In this episode, we will discuss the positive impact of strength training on performance and well-being, misconceptions regarding strength training, and the importance of mobility. Tune in now, as this episode offers valuable insights and practical tips for athletes looking to enhance their swimming and triathlon performance.

Get the book here

Today’s podcast episode is also sponsored by Skillest. Exclusively for our Effortless Swimming podcast listeners, you can receive a free course, ‘The Art of Triathlon Swimming,’ and an online analysis through the Skillest app.

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.

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

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is RJ Borges. He is the author of Finnish Strom, Resistance Training for Endurance Athletes. And on today’s episode, I really want to get stuck into some of the topics that you cover in the book, and some things that will really help the listener for this podcast, stay in the sport longer, not get injured and perform better. So firstly, RJ, welcome to the podcast. Brenton, thanks for having me. This is an exciting, it was an exciting invite to get. I’ve learned a lot from any of your swimming YouTube videos. And as you know, us age group triathletes, we’ve got plenty of work on our swimming to continue to do. But if I can help other triathletes out there by sharing a little bit of knowledge, that’s my main goal. And that was one of our main goals of producing the book. Well, we were talking before the podcast, and you are heavily involved in research, you are teaching this stuff at university,

you’re an age group triathlete yourself. So you are really in the thick of things, which I think is is great, that immersive experience that you’re having in triathlon and strength training, I think there’s going to be a lot of lot for us to cover. So to start with, where does all of this originate for you? Where does your passion and interest begin in this topic of resistance training? Yeah, so in terms of resistance training, we pretty much have to start back to being a university student. And so I was I was a major in athletic training and health science. And by profession, I’m a certified athletic trainer. I know that doesn’t really exist in all parts of the world, but pretty similar to a physio. And so we have a lot of same skill set as a physical therapist might have in the United States, or sports physio might have in other parts of the country. So we certainly get plenty of exposure to classes in therapeutic

exercise, and then also strength training for performance. So that was probably where I was first exposed to it, first got interested. And I really started to make it a part of my everyday life is going to the going to the gym, getting in a workout and and really loving the results that I’m getting. So getting a stronger, more healthy body, just overall overall health is pretty much, you know, my main interest at that point, I would say I got into my 20s, got really busy with work after I after I got some some of my first jobs. And then some of that fell by the wayside. And I got to the point where I didn’t like what I was seeing in the mirror. I didn’t like, you know, what I was what it was doing for any of my performance. So then my late 20s was when I really started to get back into strength training, and and really, you know, engage in it on a on a really consistent basis. So at least minimally five days a week. And then shortly

thereafter was once I got into my early 30s is when I started my endurance sports career. So I had this major foundation and had created this strong, healthy body. And it kind of made the some of the endurance training, specifically for triathlons, swim, bike and run, really not so bad. And and part of me was always questioning and thinking, gosh, I wonder what somebody that doesn’t that doesn’t do strength training, I wonder how their body feels after some of these workouts, because, you know, I think after you’re doing regular strength training, your body’s always going to be in some state of recovery. So there’s always going to be a minimal part of delayed onset muscle soreness. And so when you’re used to having some muscle soreness, I guess any of the soreness that you’re going to get from the endurance sport training, it really didn’t it really didn’t make a difference to me. So I liked how when I combined the two, yeah, I really liked

what I was seeing in terms of a my performance and be my overall health. And I think, well, I’ve seen so I’ve got two friends right who they’ve started running their late 30s, yeah, close to 40. And they’ve gone from not doing much running at all. And they’re training for a half marathon and then looking to do a marathon. And they based both of them. They’re a couple. They went too hard too soon. And they haven’t that don’t have don’t have to have surgery. But he was in a brace for a few weeks and basically just ran through the pain and he was doing no strength training whatsoever. And has injured himself and his wife as well has has done the same thing. So she’s just easing back into it now. And I have sort of had this a similar experience my early 20s, you can just you can kind of get through it without the need for as much strength training. But as we get older, it’s that strength training that will just stop

me from from getting injured. And, you know, it just helps your body adapt a lot. And in the last 18 to 24 months of being going fairly consistently three times a week to the gym. And I’ve noticed a massive difference just with not getting injured, feeling better and and holding up better towards the end of a training session or or a race. So I’m a big advocate for it. I wouldn’t say I’m a convert. I already knew the importance of it. But I absolutely love it. It’s quite addictive. Now I really look forward to going to the to the gym and working on this stuff. So what are what are some maybe common mistakes or misconceptions that you see about strength training that the typical triathlete or swimmer might have? Yeah, I mean, I think that sometimes people don’t understand that they’ve got to follow the same rules that they’re following for their endurance training. And so you want to have planned purposeful training

sessions. And so, you know, you you’re always going to be doing, you know, speed work. Sometimes you’re doing sometimes you’re going to be doing an endurance set as a swimmer. Sometimes it’s really more about the speed work. The same thing kind of goes at the gym. There should be a specific purpose of what you’re trying to accomplish. And I’ve heard from a number of folks where they say, I know I’m supposed to go to the gym. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to go and do. And and I said, Well, I said, then you need to just get get my book. We’ve got planned workouts for you. And then you actually can see what you should actually be doing. So, and I guess what I’m saying in terms of planned, you need to plan on hitting all of the correct muscle groups, right? And and so that would be the planned purposeful part behind some of the training, plus all of the order at which you’re going to train. Okay, so that’s all part of being

planned and purposeful. So you really want to always start out with any of your mobility work by starting out with any of the mobility exercises, you’re going to get your muscles set to the correct length tension relationship. And then that’s going to allow for a better workout. So you’ll be able to reach greater ranges of motion throughout some of the lifts. And that’s going to be an important part. So I think I think that’s a major misconception is like, well, all I got to do is go. You do have to go. That’s a definitely frequency is by far frequency and consistency of that frequency is the number one thing. The other thing that I hear sometimes is people think that you’ve got to be there for like these super long sessions. And so the big thing that I always hear is there’s just no time. I can’t do it. And I said, you definitely can do it. I said, you can definitely make time. And I think people don’t realize is we’re we become very good at wasting

time on social media and some other things. And I don’t want to, you know, get sidebar and make this about something else. But if you have a planned purposeful session of 30 to 45 minutes, you can accomplish a lot. You can get a full body workout in that time, and you’ll be fine. So, you know, a lot of people are just like, I don’t have an hour. I said, you don’t need an hour. And and you also don’t need to go every day. If you can give me three days a week, that’s going to be fantastic. For us, one of the things that we did in the book was we periodized around the training schedule. And so we, you know, we’re understanding that, you know, there is a time crunch once you’re in peak training time for your endurance sport. So as a triathlete that’s training for an Ironman event, you are going to be limited on time. I get that. And so at that point in time, maybe you’re only going to be able to get two quality sessions of 30

to 45 minutes in per week. But as long as they’re full body training sessions, it’s going to still have purpose. And so that would be pretty, you know, pretty useful for you. Let’s see, what are some of the other things. I get into it a lot with people about whether or not strength training is actually good for endurance sports athletes. And so maybe you’ve heard some of this, Brenton, but from the cellular level, are your muscles are going to make adaptations based on how you train. So if I’m training it to be aerobic, you know, by doing my endurance sports, then it’s going to take on those characteristics. Or if I’m training it anaerobically, like what I’m doing in the weight room, then now I’m going to stunt some of the some of what’s going on at the cellular level. What are your thoughts on that? Because I often will get into it with other with other professionals about this. Well, I, in terms of all the physiological

stuff, I’d say that is not my strong point. So yeah, for my own personal experience, though, when I have done, when I have done strength training, I’ve found it just my body doesn’t break down in a longer or harder session. It just it holds up. And so then my technique in my form maintains for the rest of the session. And then I’m able to maintain my my speed. So I just, yeah, I find it’s very helpful. And I haven’t seen any signs that it’s working against that aerobic development. Thank you. Thank you, because you and I agree on the set on the same principles. And and I this is, you know, I feel that it’s so important that we’re having that strength to maintain form and proper form is everything for a swimmer, for certain, and then certainly for a runner too. So if somebody’s an age group triathlete and they’re training for Iron Man, and I just did Iron Man Montremblant two months ago. And when you’re out on that run course, you start seeing a lot

of poor run form and people really start breaking down. And it’s because their muscles just aren’t holding them and into that correct posture into that optimal posture anymore. So to me, I will, I will take that any day. The other thing that I sometimes start to think with going back to the cellular level, if that was so true that, you know, I’m doing a disservice to my muscles by strength training, and I want them to only have the adaptations from the aerobic training. Why isn’t it that the person with the biggest VO2 max doesn’t win every race? So there’s something to be said for mechanics falling apart and things like that. So, um, especially in triathlon, where we’re going to be swimming, biking and running, it’s hugely important to be doing, to be doing the strength training. It took a while to, I would say for, for swimmers to kind of come around to get into the strength training, I would say probably, maybe it was

like, not in the like mid 90s or something, that finally it was starting to become a little bit more common for swimmers to start doing weight room training sessions. And then even to this day, there’s still some cross country coaches out there for runners that will just say, I don’t know, I’m really worried about that, that they’ll start to contaminate their muscle with the anaerobic training. And so we really just want them to focus on the aerobics. And I’m always just scratching my head because of the mechanical breakdown. As I mentioned, my by profession, I’m an athletic trainer, but my PhD is in biome mechanics. And so that’s always something that I’m super passionate about is what’s going on with our form and our overall mechanics. And how is that breaking down over over time? Fatigue plays a huge role in this. And the more that we do the strength training, the more we’re going to be able to reduce the effects of the

fatigue, we’ll be able to hold, hold on to hold on to that proper form. Proper form is everything and swimming. I mean, you’re clearly going to be faster that way. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Like it, it seems crazy to me that someone wouldn’t do the strength training because they think it’s going to impact their, their, their aerobic training because form is so important. You look at the end of any, any even 100 meter freestyle, you’ll see swimmers break down in the last five, 10, 15 meters. And it’s the swimmers who slow down the least at the end of a race that are the ones that are going to do the do the best. And it’s that ability to hold their, their technique and, and strength is a huge, huge part of it. And you know that from when you, you’re in your off season, maybe you haven’t swum for four weeks or six weeks and you go back in the pool and maybe for the first three or four hundred you’re feeling good, you feel

fresh, but that last 500 or a thousand meters can get pretty ugly and pretty slow because you just don’t have that, that strength there to be able to, to hold your form. So it’s just such an important piece of the, the puzzle. So it seems crazy that someone would say, no, it’s not, it’s not worth doing. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, form smart swim goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with form smart swim goggles, including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for only 249 US dollars. They have currently changed up their offer where you can now get the goggles and you have one year membership included for free. And if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to the workouts, training plans and custom workout builder, but

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free as well. Go to effortless swimming dot com forward slash skillest offer or click the link in this podcast description and you will get the art of triathlon swimming course for free as well as a technique analysis from me through the skillest app. And now back to the podcast. Yeah, no, I’m glad that we’re in agreement on that because I get into some heated debates on that with with some people. And it’s something that I’m super passionate about because to me, form is is everything when it comes down to it. And as a guy who studies human biomechanics and understands how muscles will and joints will work optimally, I I know that the more strength that we have, we’re going to reduce our risk of injury. And then we’re also going to be, you know, be able to hold our peak, whatever that optimal form is. And then that should allow us to have a peak performance.

Yeah, I think I told this on a recent podcast. I can’t remember, but there’s this machine that I’ve been using. It’s like a back extension machine machine. So you start from like a killed position, and then you sort of press against it and then then go back. I had a lot of issues with my back about two years ago and just kept tweaking it and would sort of put me out for a day or two. And I originally started at 40 pounds on this machine. I’m up to 120 pounds now. And I haven’t had any issues with my with my lower back for the last 18 months or so. And I would often get it from if I was sitting down a lot. So just that fatigue from sitting in an airplane seat or in the car or at the desk for a long time, or just fatigue from if I’m if I was surfing for two, three or four hours, you just continuing to compress a little bit in the lower back and towards the end, it would just start to be very weak and I wouldn’t be able to hold

my myself together very well as I was popping up and just kept kept doing my back. And it was so frustrating. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m such an advocate for this strength training is I’ve seen the results of it. And yeah. And it’s just I just think it’s one of the best things that that people can do. And I mean, you’ve worked probably with a lot of athletes. You’ve probably seen a lot of different people. Do you have any examples or stories of people who you’ve seen having included this or having maybe had a good strength training program that’s helped them get better results or prevent injury? Yeah. So in terms of I would say the vast majority of what I what I could tell you in terms of stories would be injury reduction as a result of of their strength training. However, you know, I’m I’m the strength and mobility training coordinator for a for a triathlon team. And let’s see. So I took a couple of notes just to jot this down.

So in this past year and this is a team of twenty five twenty five athletes. We’ve had seventy nine top five performances. Forty one personal best. So and this is the first year that we’ve included the strength and mobility training in. So this was a triathlon coach that recognized the importance of of what we’re doing. He said, hey, you know, let’s team up, let’s work together. And, you know, it’s some combination of his training and then what I’m providing for our athletes to in terms of the strength and mobility work. So we have had success in terms of having a few less injuries. Again, this is, you know, small anecdotal evidence, but it’s evidence nonetheless. Another good performance story that I would have is a really close friend of mine. Unfortunately, she moved away, but I had I had worked with her while she was here. Really talented triathlete. She was a division one collegiate swimmer. So she’s always one of the first

one of the first females out of the water. And so she just had a top five performance at Ironman, Arizona, 70.3 this past weekend. She’s to always struggle with knee injuries. And her and so her her running was always just very poor because of trying to fight through through knee pain. And, you know, I had this chat with her. I said, look, we’ve got to work on your core and we’ve got and specifically we’ve got to work on on your glutes because you’ve got a glute dysfunction. So we did some we did some basic a movement assessment with her. We decided what what we needed to work on. And, you know, she was one of those people that was super receptive to it and said, I’m making this change because I know I can be really good in in this sport. She’s like, I need I need to do this. And and so, you know, we worked together. This is probably like 10 years ago. And this is the culmination over the years of her sticking with it. And, you know, now I’m

hearing a lot less from her of the knee pains back or things like so she’s just going going and she’s always having some really awesome performances. So hers is one of those ones where I think she was already talented to begin with. I do think that some of the strength training helped with her performance, but clearly being able to make it to the start line to be able to go and compete. I think the strength training is definitely helped with the reducing the injuries for her. Hmm, what’s another one? I can tell you here’s an interesting one. And this is actually one that I talk in my book. So I had an age group triathlete decent, probably like usually like top 10% finisher. But he was starting to have a lot of low back and specifically SI joint dysfunction. And so, you know, did the movement assessment with him also, you know, ask some questions about what he was doing for, you know, for swimming. He ended up being a unilateral breather.

So he really created a major side dominance issue and side dominance is a major problem. So aside from, you know, working with triathletes, I’ve got plenty of experience working with team sports athletes, so specifically like throwing athletes and the throwing athletes always going to have a side dominance. And so what what it does is it takes the the body’s natural kinetic chains and brings them out of balance. So specifically, the ones with this individual, if you’re constantly rotating and only taking a breath from one side, you’re going to have a very strong rotation or spiral spiral kinetic chain to the on one side, but then the other one becomes dysfunctional. So in our book, one of the things that we talk about is the importance of doing anti rotation exercises. And so we just really got him to do the correct core exercises. And then he really kind of turned around really quickly. I think I think within a couple of months, he was not having

the back pain anymore. And so this comes down to again, having a planned purposeful training session. And so here’s a guy that was going to the gym. He actually was doing all the strength training, but he was working only in the sagittal plane. So think about like crunches and lowering the legs and things like that. But you know what he was forgetting? The ever important obliques and one thing in in most of the athletes that I’ve worked with, I’ll find a spiral line dysfunction. And it really comes down to having a weakness in one or both of both sides of the obliques. So it’s a really underworked, underappreciated core muscle. And so usually one of my tricks for people that are having low back pain is to really start, you know, doing some work on on incorporating some of those exercises. What are one or two of those exercises to strengthen the obliques? Yeah, so a couple of my favorites are windshield wiper. So you can be performed

with a dumbbell or whatever, but you’ll lay on your back. You’ll hold a dumbbell up over your head. And that really is only going to be serving as a counterbalance. And then you’re going to be starting with your knees kind of bent up with your feet on the ground. And then you’re going to just be taking them from side to side in that 90 degree hips at hips and knees at the 90 90 position and then slowly bringing them back and forth. I do see people doing these at the gym and they’re going way too fast for it to for it to actually have that anti rotation benefit. So when people do those like a dumbbell win windshield wiper exercise like that, that’s that’s gold. Let’s see. What else do I like? I’m a big fan of the dead bug palloff press. So I think most people know what a dead bug exercise is. And so that usually is going to be, you know, working mostly in the in the sagittal plane, which is usually, you know, flexion and extension of

your your shoulders and your hips. Once you make a so people know what a dead bug is. People also know what a palloff press is, but usually they do a standing palloff press where they’ll have a resistance band while they’re standing in a bilateral stance and they’ll resist it from turning them. The minute that you go on to your back, you have very little stability and so you really don’t need much of a pull from that from that resistance band to be to be kind of fighting. So those are two that I absolutely love. They’re actually included in some of our top 10 exercises for swimmers in the book. I find those really challenging and then also really effective. So yeah, I think, you know, being able to target some of those forgotten or little used muscles, I think is always going to be important for people. Is there any other must do or go to exercises that you would normally prescribe for 90% of swimmers that you were to work with?

Yeah, so it’s all about just knowing what the target areas are, right? So that’s going to target my core. We also want to make sure that we’re going to be targeting our glutes, right? So unless you’re that triathlete that does absolutely no kick out there, which I can’t stand, but I always see somebody that’s out there and they’re just floating in their wetsuit and it’s just pull, pull, pull. Yeah, I mean, you need to have strong glutes if you’re going to be able to have, you know, a nice kick. And so for that, we really like a marching hip press. And so that can be done on a bench and you just place your shoulders on the on the back of a bench and kind of just place your arms across your chest and then make a nice bridge and then start doing a marching motion with with your legs. So because you’re going to basically be going into a single leg stance once you’re going into the march. So rather than just being, you know, working both glutes at one time,

you are, they are going to get that back and forth motion, which is truly what we’re going to be having to do during a kick anyway. So I like that. Other areas or regions that are going to be super important for, for a swimmer is going to be building a nice strong back and scapular stabilizers. So scapula is going to be that back of the shoulder region that really needs to be stable because that’s, that’s an anchor, essentially the way I look at it, that ends up being an anchor for our true shoulder joint. And when, when the scaps aren’t in the correct location, that’s when people start to have a lot of their shoulder pain. So when people start having shoulder impingements, usually the root cause of the problem was something going on with a scapular weakness. So for those, I, I love using cables, a cable column and then doing low to high row and also high to low row for, for cable column. So, you know, you can just kind of,

you know, start with the one where you’ll adjust it so that the handles are low or and then, you know, for the other one, you’ll just start with them adjusted high. I do think that both of those are going to be, you know, really critical for, for developing the strength there. So those are a couple of the, the strength exercises. The one thing that we always talk about is don’t neglect mobility and mobility is probably, sometimes some of the people that I’ve worked with, the problems, you know, after I start chatting with them and I start uncovering what they’ve been doing, they’ve been doing the correct thing by going to the gym and doing the strength training, but they’ve forgotten to do any mobility work. And so, you know, if you’re doing one without the other, you’re going to only create more of an imbalance. And so the key, the key mobility exercises for swimmers really need to make sure that we’re taking into consideration

the mobility of the back of the shoulder. So we like to do a cross body stretch for that. And then the front of the shoulder and I always love a good doorway stretch for that. So anytime people are doing static stretching, they should be held for 30 seconds. That’s the way that in the, in the research literature that’s been shown to be optimal. And then let me go back to that part where I said the scapula ends up being this anchor for the, for the shoulder. Well, the scapula is sitting on your thoracic spine on top of the ribs. And so, one of the things I’ll often see, and sometimes it’s been termed swimmer’s posture, a lot of it comes because people have overdeveloped lats. And so they’ll get that kyphotic middle back. And so it ends up being rounded. And we really want to try to fight that because once that gets rounded, that’s going to change the rib orientation. And then that change in rib orientation is subsequently going to affect

the orientation of the, of the scapula itself. So it’s really critical to do a lot of extension exercises. So I love doing an extension over a foam roller for my middle back. And then I also love exercises that promote rotation in the middle back. So a thread, the needle or a book opener, those end up being really, really good exercises to be doing. So again, I think we chatted already. I think I might have mentioned that always important to do the mobility exercises first prior to your, to your workout session to be planned and purposeful and then get into the, into the strength training sets.

Yeah, we do a bit of mobility testing and then some TheraBand exercises when we go away and run our camps were in Thailand two weeks ago. And we did some tests with the swimmers there and majority of them, I’d say 75% of them in the lower range of those mobility tests like we do a combined lateral raise do thoracic rotation test and you just say people are really, really stiff and this stuff takes, it takes time. It takes many months to be able to improve on it and just that consistency with the mobility work and the strength work but you’re going to be going through that time anyway. And if even five, 10 minutes of some mobility work before each session or before each strength session it makes a big difference, it does add up. And if you’ve got that patience and that willingness to just go, all right, I’m going to stick with this for six months, 12 months, you will see an improvement and you will absolutely feel a difference when you’re swimming.

It is night and day from seeing someone who’s very limited with their range of motion. You can see that I look at technique all the time I analyze from this and you can see when people are exceptionally tight through the upper or lower back, through their hips, you can notice it and it does limit their ability to get into the right position. So it’s a big factor and as much as I’d love to say like just do the technique work well, maybe you can’t do, maybe you can’t get into the right positions yet. So we need to be able to look at some of this other stuff as well. Yeah, and you said a couple of things. I love that you actually do testing on the athletes prior to and then you actually are assigning the corrective exercises to then go ahead and fix that. I think that’s huge. And you’re so right on the fact that you don’t fix this overnight. Strength training, you can’t improve strength in one training session, it doesn’t work like that.

And the same thing happens with mobility exercises because what you’re trying to do is create new lengths within your fascia and within the muscles. And one thing that we should probably talk about is the fact that as people age, so once you start to reach that age, that ever important age of 40, it’s a magic age where the body chemistry really changes. And once your body’s chemistry is gonna change like that, what happens is your tissues become stiffer. So the muscle becomes stiffer. The joint capsules become stiffer. So now you’ve got a lot more to fight through and it’s gonna take a little bit more time to actually get at. Unfortunately, people like in their 20s and 30s, they’re usually getting away with things. It doesn’t really matter. They’re like, I can just, you know, I don’t need the mobility exercise, that’ll be fine. Then all of a sudden it will catch up to people eventually. And so as in the older athlete,

really taking the time to do the mobility exercises is important. I had mentioned, you know, that I’m working with that coaching group. And we have a couple of younger triathletes on the team, but the vast majority of the individuals on the team are over 40. And so one thing that I did with our programming was make sure that it was a little bit heavier of an emphasis on the mobility training compared to the strength training. So I figured, I said, we’ll dial that back, just we’ll dial back the strength training just a bit, really try to get a focus on that so that people are gonna be able to get to the correct muscle lengths and then be able to have better form, better mechanics, certainly improve your swim as you had mentioned.

It takes a little bit of convincing or a little bit of selling, I think, to some athletes to convince them of the importance of it and that, all right, this is maybe 15 minutes or 20 minutes where you’re not training, you’re not getting that aerobic training, but this is actually going to help you just as much because right now you can’t have your arm overhead without having it 20 centimetres in front of your shoulder there. So it’s going to be worthwhile even though it maybe doesn’t feel like it early on. So I think, yeah, it just takes a little bit of explaining the benefit of it to a lot of athletes, especially, I’d say a lot of triathletes and swimmers as well, they just want to get to the pool, they want to get to the track and they just want to have their workout and go home. They just want to get that training done. And so sometimes this can feel like doing something that’s not necessarily working them towards their goal, even though it is.

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, there’s so many people that have to learn things the hard way, right? So you might have already told them and we might have shared with them all these bits of knowledge. And then it’s just like, yeah, no, I’m not buying it. And then they don’t buy in. And then injuries catch up with them and things like that will typically happen. I find that that’s usually what happens then they have that injury. And then they’re like, oh, I guess it was important. Yeah, and sometimes it’s hard to learn from other people’s mistakes, we’ve just got to learn things the hard way. That’s just how it plays out. But whichever way it happens, we know that it is an important thing to be including. Before we sort of finish up here, anything else that you’d like to share with the listener on strength training, on things that you’ve seen work really well for people to leave them with a few words of wisdom and with all the work that you’re doing in this area,

are there a couple of sort of key things that you wish everyone would know? All right, let me think on this a little bit. I mean, it’s not that hard, right? And I think sometimes we’re overthinking it and sometimes we’re getting caught into the minutia of things. So just like in our endurance sports training, there’s different variables that we have to take charge of, right? So there’s the frequency at which you’re gonna train, you then have volume. And volume in the case of strength training is just gonna be manipulating your sets and repetitions. You then have your intensity and that’s really just gonna be your training load. And usually that’s typically talked about as being based off of a one repetition max. I think people will start to get caught in the weeds on rest intervals. And one thing I try to remind everyone is that, we’re not power lifters, we are endurance athletes.

So power lifters and anything that you’re hearing that they’re doing doesn’t really apply to us. And so a lot of times what they’ll do is they’ll have like really long rest intervals because their intensity is extremely at a high level. When it all comes down to all of this and manipulating these variables, the biggest thing that you’ve gotta do is you’ve just gotta overload your body, right? So overload creates, the body is going to create adaptations after it’s been overloaded. So if Brenton is giving you a swim workout and he’s got you swimming however many meters at whatever intensity, it’s going to create a training load. And so as you’re prepping your people for their next race, that’s always ramping up. And so we try to ramp up and create an overload within the strength training. I get crazy questions of, well, when am I supposed to do the really heavy lifting with, but just only a couple of repetitions?

And I tell everybody, I said, you’re in the weeds. I was like, that’s not really that important. I said, it’s all comes down to overload. And to prove this, I pulled out a systematic review the other day that I found. So high-level research on many, many strength training articles. And it really come, and in the end, the author just says, if your goal is to create strength

and hypertrophy, then as long as you’re training with an intensity which is greater than 30% of the one repetition max, obviously you might have to have longer, more repetitions in the set, people are getting and achieving strength and hypertrophy, which is the ultimate goal. So I just, I try to tell everyone, like don’t get caught in the weeds. There’s a lot of right ways to do this. And I think sometimes people are almost getting, I like to say they’re getting too cute with it and playing around with it. And it doesn’t have to be that hard. So consistency, consistency, consistency of training, as you know and I know for being a better endurance athlete is the key. Same thing with getting the benefits from your strength training, consistency is the key. So that really is my, that’s my take home message to everybody all the time is, if you wanna get some benefit out of it, you just gotta be consistent with it, you’ll be fine.

Yeah, when you look for clues of what the most successful athletes do, consistency, that’s always gonna be in there. It’s, there’s no one who’s trained for three months and become a champion. It’s just that consistency. So what a great way to end it. RJ, thank you so much for being on the podcast. People can grab your book from any good bookstore or online bookstore. We’ll put a link in our description as well. Is there anywhere else that you’d like to direct people to, to either get in contact or to follow what you’re doing? Sure, yeah. People can always reach out to me directly. So through my Seton Hall University email, and so that’s just my name, Richard.gorgers. Last name is spelled B-O-E-R-G-E-R-S at S-H-U dot E-D-U. We also do have a Instagram account for our book and that is at finish underscore strong underscore book.

Awesome. And we’ll put those in the show notes as well. Thanks again. And that’s been, this has been a great, great episode. And it’s, it’s something that I’ve really, really enjoyed over the last two years is doing more strength training. And I think sometimes people think that they’re gonna, they’re worried about getting big and bulky. You know, as a triathlete or a swimmer, but that’s really hard to do. You know, if you, if you’re, if you’re doing all this endurance training as well, it’s really just having strong foundations, not getting injured, as you said. And it just sets you up really well for, not only sport, but for, but for life. So I think it’s a really important message that you’ve shared. So RJ, thanks again. Thanks, Brenton. Appreciate you having me. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

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In this episode, I will share the story of a pro triathlete who achieved a remarkable breakthrough in his swimming performance, transitioning from a second pack swimmer in triathlons to consistently making it to the front pack. How did he accomplish this feat? By making an important change in his training routine. 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.

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

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Effortless Swimming podcast. I want to start this episode off by telling you a story about a friend of mine who’s a pro triathlete and he’s always been a second pack swimmer, never able to make the first pack. And if he ever did, he was really working hard to do it. So it would ruin the rest of his race because you’d have to put in too much effort to be in that front pack. But recently, really this year, he’s able to consistently make the front pack. And at times he’s actually led and sometimes won the swim leg, which has been a massive difference for not only his swim, his bike and his run, but just his overall results and confidence in the water as well. And he did one thing. He’s changed one thing in his training that actually made the difference and helped him go from second pack to front pack. So I’m going to tell you what he did and how it came to be. So this past year, he was over in

Europe training and racing for several months. And he started doing some training sessions with another pro triathlete who’s let out the swim at Kona, who’s often the first swimmer out of the water in the races that he does. And he started doing some training sessions with him. And he realized that when they did fast efforts, he was actually the same speed. And he said to me, I thought he was just going to smoke me in the water, being the pretty much the fastest swimmer in all of Ironman. But he was actually the same speed as him in those efforts that they were doing. But the one area that he would actually get smoked in was in the recovery efforts after the hard efforts. So for example, if they did 150 fast, followed by 250 meters of recovery, my friend would be a fair way behind, he’d be two body lengths behind, because he just couldn’t recover from those harder efforts, as well as this other swimmer. And I’m keeping

them anonymous because I haven’t haven’t asked him if I can tell the story yet. So I’m just going to keep an anonymous for now. And so I realized that his ability to get his heart rate down and to swim, swim comfortably after the harder efforts, it just wasn’t there. He couldn’t match it with the best swimmers in Ironman. So what he started to do was doing more sessions where he would go hard, followed by a longer recovery effort, go hard, longer recovery effort, and just get really good at being able to go fast and then settle back down, but hold a decent just aerobic pace and aerobic effort. So to be able to get the lactate levels up, but then just clear it really, really quickly. Because in triathlon, you said that’s that’s what happens in these these pro races, they go out fast, the first couple hundred meters, so you’re having to work hard the heart rates up, but then it just settles. So there’s always that intensity at the start, because

they’re trying to get out there, get clear water and get away from the group. But then it usually just settles and and usually the packs will often sort of form, but they’re not swimming times that are too different. It’s just that initial couple hundred meters where it’s make or break. And so what he realized was that okay, I need to be able to get out fast and I’ve got I’ve got good speed. But then the more important thing is to be able to just bring that heart rate down and settle and not drop off and be trying to hang on to that front pack. And what he started to do was training sessions like that he was able to do more specific training sessions at main sets that allowed him to replicate what he was trying to do in in races. So he gave an example set of he would do 150 fast and we’re thinking like front end race effort. So 150 fast, 10 seconds rest on the wall followed by was it 350 recovery and just easy aerobic but just

looking to hold hold a steady pace there. Then another 150 fast followed by 250 recovery and then 150 fast followed by 150 recovery and you might do that two or three times through. So that’s a really specific set for someone like him to be able to train what he needs to do in in racing. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor form smart swim goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with form smart swim goggles, including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for only 249 US dollars. They’ve currently changed up their offer where you can now get the goggles and you have one year membership included for free and if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to the workouts training plans and custom workout builder but you’ll always have access to the real time data

in the goggles. So you never lose access to that. My favorite thing about the form goggles is having the instant feedback of what times you’re doing what stroke rate you’re doing and also the ability to see what your heart rate is because never before have we been able to have these immediate feedback heads-up display where it’s actually telling you what your intervals are. So when I wear the goggles in training I like that I know my split for the first 50 and the 100 and the 150 so every single lap I’m getting that feedback on what my pace is and I find it’s such an important tool for being able to not only have different gears where you can switch between the different speeds that you want to swim but it helps you develop those gears and it helps you intuitively know how fast you need to go before you’re going to blow up or before you’re going to go a little bit too hard so it helps you just get really good

at judging your pace for when you do go to a race and even if you’re not wearing the goggles in a race it’s that intuition and that ability to develop your pacing that these goggles can really help with. To get your pair of form goggles and say 15% off use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout and that will get you 15% off your pair of goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout and one of the reasons I tell you this story is that quite often there’s things that can cause you to not get the results that you want and it’s not as evident initially why not get the results that you want but when we look at it in a bit of detail and compare it to someone who’s got the results that we want sometimes it’s easier to find where we might be lacking with things and the other thing too is that when you actually see

what elite athletes are doing whether in swimming or triathlon and you see how they train you see how they race you realize they’re just normal people yeah that they’re incredible they can do some incredible things across the different sports but they’re just normal people and if you are able to train in a similar way as them or if you’re able to to be able to match some of the types of main sets that they’re doing or the strength training if you’re able to set yourself up in as much of a similar way as you can to them and often they’ve got a bit more time on their hands but it’s not as surprising the results that they get and you just realize that they’re normal people there’s nothing necessarily extra special about them they are just like you and I and I think that’s something that my friend realized when he was able to then start to to match this pro triathlete in the swims and in the races so if you’re listening to this podcast and thinking yeah that sounds a little

bit like me I’m doing my triathlon swims I’m doing my races I’m just blowing up halfway through the race and I’m not able to sustain it one thing to consider is well maybe you’re going out too fast that’s what I see happen quite often is that people get really excited in the heat of the moment they’re surrounded by dozens or hundreds of other people and they just go out too hard too fast and blow up from there so maybe you just need to settle it a little bit in the first 200 meters but the other thing is in your training maybe you’re not replicating that maybe not doing anything specific enough to be able to replicate what you’re trying to do in in races so if you were to do a set like the one I’ve described 150 fast 350 easy 150 fast 250 easy and then 150 fast and 150 easy if you do that set as an example what I’d encourage you to do for the easy recovery efforts is try and hold your stroke count every single lap in that recovery effort and you’ll find that

the aerobic effort that you’re putting in to maintain your stroke count is very high even though you’re not swimming fast and you’re not swimming hard if you’re holding good stroke length there then it’s going to be physically quite quite challenging so we did a set in Thailand last week because we had our high-week swim camp there and so in between the sessions that we had I just did a session myself and we were doing something that was similar but just shorter interval so I think it was 25 was 25 fast followed by 125 recovery then 50 max effort followed by followed by 100 easy and my my target there was go all out for the 50 and the 25 but then just hold stroke count for the easy recovery efforts and we did that five times and the hardest part of that set was actually the recovery part because as you’re trying to hold your stroke count trying to keep your stroke together the heart rate’s up high robically I’m working very hard there especially after coming down from the

the fast efforts but that is a really good session in itself just to be able to compose yourself after the efforts and sessions like that can be great for help replicating what happens in a race so my question to you if you if you’re listening to this is is there something that you aren’t doing quite as well in your races or that keeps happening consistently in in races where if you were to add one session a week that address that could you get a better result with your swimming and maybe that’s a fitness thing maybe it’s a technical thing yeah maybe you start to get pretty sloppy towards the end of a swim where you’re throwing your head around or you’re crossing over those those are mistakes that we tend to see what can you do in training to help bring that to life and just and start to dial that in because quite often there’s areas there where we aren’t aware that we’re not training them just because we haven’t thought about them so that’s my question to you

if you’re listening to this episode thanks so much for listening now we do have a quite a few camps coming up next year so before I sign off here on this episode I just want to let you know ones that we’ve got organized currently we’ve got the Galapagos trip so this is like a swimming swimming holiday swimming tour of an incredible place out in off the coast of Ecuador there Galapagos islands I’ve got a link on our website and it’s I’m going to go there I’m going to coach you and do some underwater filming and analysis at the start and at the end of the camp and I’ll be there working with you throughout the camp while you’re swimming in these incredible locations so this is our first trip there and I’m really excited to head over there because of this place I’ve always wanted to to go and finally being able to organize a trip there so I’ve got our Galapagos trip in May we’ve got our Maldives swim camp in September

and then we’ve got our whole week swim camp in Thailand which is in October so they’re all up on our our website now or they’re about to be if you if you can’t see in there so go check those out at effortlesswimming.com join me at a camp I’d love to see you there I look forward to these things each year because there’s nothing I love more than getting a group of people together myself and some of the our other coaches and just spending five days or seven days together and working purely on your swimming while basically having a bit of a holiday it’s beautiful in these locations everything’s provided and you can just switch off and only think about your swimming so it’s a great opportunity to not only improve but really just to get around a group of like-minded people make new friends and hang out in some of the most beautiful places in the world so effortlesswimming.com you’ll see the camps there and I look forward to

meeting a lot of you there in the next 12 months thanks for listening see you next week thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com

The post Why You’re One change Away From A Breakthrough appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Join us for a podcast episode with Taryn Richardson, where we explore the world of diet and nutrition for athletes. Discover the key principles to fueling your body for optimal performance and recovery. Get ready for eye-opening insights and practical tips that will revolutionize your training approach. Don’t miss out on unlocking your full potential as an athlete.

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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I’ve got a returning guest on today. I’ve got Taryn Richardson from Dietician Approved. Welcome back to the podcast. Ah, thank you so much for having me. You’re on episode number 260 where we’re talking about fueling for performance and avoiding late night sugar binges. Today we’re going to go through some different things on this episode. So whether you’re a triathlete or a swimmer, this information is going to be relevant to you. It’s going to help you improve your performance still, I would hope. But also just covering some of the misconceptions about diet and nutrition because you talk to 10 different experts and there’s probably 10 different opinions there. So we want to try and get to the fundamentals of what is going to help someone recover well, perform well and make the most of their training.

Because I see so many athletes who are putting the time in with their training. But if they’re not fueling themselves correctly, then they’re not going to be able to recover well for the next session. They’re not going to be able to do their best at those sessions and then really for race day, which is what a lot of the triathletes are working towards. So looking forward to covering a lot of those topics on this episode. So Taryn, the first thing I want to ask about is protein. Now this is a little bit of a selfish question because I’ve started going to the gym more consistently. And I’m more aware of the protein intake that I feel like I need. So to start off with, let’s talk about protein, how much should people be having? What are some good sources and some not so good sources of it? And for someone like me who’s going to the gym three times a week, while also swimming three to four times a week.

How important is the role of protein in a diet like mine? Yeah, great question. I love that you always ask the selfish, selfish questions as well. Like you straight into how do you help me? Just a case study. That’s all it is. So yeah, protein is definitely really important. It’s one of the, like it is the building block of life. And we often associate protein with muscles, but protein is literally the building block for everything in our body. Like all of our hormones, our enzymes, our cells, like everything we are built on is protein. So we need to get enough, but there I guess is a lot of maybe bro science in the gym scene where people are thinking more is better and more is not better with protein. It’s very clearly established in the research that we need like certain amounts for certain things. Strength training being one of the highest and then particularly somebody new to strength training is another kind of spike in your requirements.

If you haven’t done any and then you suddenly start lifting and tearing your muscle fibers, then your needs are going to be higher. But I like to talk about protein like it was a cup. And so you want to fill that cup regularly right throughout the day. So breakfast, lunch, dinner, maybe even drip some in for snacks. But if you’re over feeling that cup, it kind of just spills out and it is excess to what we can use at that time. And it does get wasted. So we will use the calories for energy, but any excess can’t be stored. Like we store carbohydrate in our muscles and our liver and we store fat as fat, unfortunately. But protein doesn’t have a storage facility or a reservoir where we can keep it for later. So we take what we need at the time and then we break it down and we pee it out. So we just make it expensive urine if we are overdoing our protein in an occasion of eating. And then the reverse of that is if we’re under feeling it, we’re not doing the best job we can to maximize all of our recovery and muscle protein synthesis pathways.

So we’re not doing the best job to recover or back up and go again or get those adaptations that we’re looking for out of the training sessions that we’re doing. So it’s about finding your sweet spot and it depends what sort of athlete you are and what type of training that you’re doing. But particularly in that window after exercise is a really key one where our body is just searching for all of those building blocks. And you want to give it the right amount of protein there in the right time frame. But working with triathletes, that’s my area of expertise. They are constantly training, right? We don’t have one to two days to rest and recover before you do your next training session. Most triathletes train once, twice, sometimes three times a day. And it’s rare for them to have a complete off rest day. Like there’s often a lighter, easy recovery session on a day that’s maybe just a 30 minute run or, you know, an easy 3K swim is still exercising, but it’s not really hard and high intensity.

So we don’t have the luxury of time to sit back and watch Netflix and put our feet up and recover. So we need to be really on top of what we do, particularly after exercise. But for the 24 to 48 hours after a session, you need to be focusing on putting protein back in the system to recover properly. So in terms of the amount after session, it’s going to change. But is there a rule of thumb that you’d often go by for someone and then in terms of that window with, I don’t know if this is right. But in terms of refuelling with carbs, you hear about that 30 minute window after exercise. Is there something like that for protein intake? Yeah. So I would say 30 minutes is a good kind of target. It depends with lots of things with nutrition. I always say it depends. I honestly need to get it printed on a t-shirt because there’s no one size fits all with nutrition. But 30 minutes is a good target because we know that all of the hormones and enzymes for recovery peak at about 60 minutes post exercise.

So we want those building blocks of the amino acids from our protein foods that have been broken down and digested in our stomach to be in our bloodstream to meet that peak at 60 minutes so that we’ve got everything that we need to do the best job of our recovery as possible. So if you’re sucking back amino acids, you could do that in 45 minutes like post exercise. But if you’re eating, which is more ideal, having real food there rather than just a pill or a powder, then give it some time to go through that whole digestion process and pull those molecules apart so that they are single units and available for use in the bloodstream. Let’s talk about some sources of protein. What are some sources that you see people using that you guard? You’ve probably got a better option there. And what are some real high quality ones that you would recommend? Yeah, so most people think about protein after exercise and go straight for a protein powder.

But like I said, right in the beginning, your protein needs are like a cup and want to get that amount like that sweet spot right for you. And often supplements and powders will overdo it for people. So you are just kind of making expensive pee in a way. And it’s so easy to get your protein needs from food out of all of the macronutrients and all of the nutrients in our diet protein would have to be the easiest because it is readily available in all of our meats. So red meat, chicken, fish, any sort of animal meat, you can get protein from eggs and they’re actually a great source. You just need enough. Most people eat like one or two eggs and like, yep, protein done, but you need more like three or four if that’s your only source. You also get protein from all of your dairy foods. So milk, yogurt, cheese and go for things like the high protein yogurt. So things like Chobani or Yopro. If you’re in Australia or like Farje and there’s lots of other different brands depending on where you are in the world.

They are more strained. So they’ve like run them through filtration processes more times, kind of like the difference between a whey protein concentrate and a whey protein isolate. It goes through extra filters to get the protein out primarily. How are we going? So we’ve got meats, we’ve got eggs, we’ve got dairy. If you’re a plant-based athlete, you’re getting protein from things like tofu and it’s fermented cousin tempeh and all of your legumes. So chickpeas, lentils, baked beans, those types of legumes as well as nuts and seeds. So it’s really easy to get enough protein even as a vegan athlete. You just need to know like where your sources are coming from, combining a few different types if you are relying on entirely plant-based sources. So you’ve got that full complement of amino acids that we don’t get from plant-based protein sources that you do get from animal. We call that high biological value because our animal sources of protein contain all of those essential amino acids that our body can’t produce

that don’t exist, that complement doesn’t exist in a single plant-based protein. So you just have to combine lots across the day so that you are getting all of those amino acids that you need. Excellent. Excellent. So in terms of daily intake, the general rule of thumb I’ve heard there is almost for kilos, it’s roughly double what you’d weigh in kilos in terms of grams. So if I weigh 80 kilos, 160 grams of… So 2 grams per kilo? Yeah. Is that…? Yeah, so it depends. For a sedentary person in the population, which is not us, it’s like 0.8 to 1 gram per kilo is a general guideline. But then there’s literature in upwards of like 3.6 grams per kilo as well. So again, it’s just depending on who it is. Like, are we talking about, you know, maybe yourself as a case study for this episode who, you know, you’re well trained, right? You’re fit, you’re active, but you’ve newly started strength training. So that would be a time where it might peak to 2 grams per kilo.

Maybe it’s even 2.5, whereas somebody that consistently does strength training all the time, like maybe it is somewhere around 1.5 to 2. But like I said, more is not better. So they have done research around, like, are you getting better strength gains? Are you getting that hypertrophy, which is size, muscle size? You’re not going to do that as an endurance athlete anyway. But, you know, the gym junkies do want that size. Are you growing as well as another thing to consider? Are you an adolescence athlete that has got to manage training load as well as the demands of growth? Are you repairing from some sort of injury or surgery? You need to go up there as well. So I guess it depends who you’re talking to. But, you know, 2 grams per kilo is a good kind of stab at the dark somewhere in the middle that you can’t go too wrong with. Yeah, yeah, that’s really helpful. I’ll tell you what I mean having for breakfast lately.

And our overseas audience might listen to this and think this is almost a sin as an Australian. But like I’ll often, I’ll train in the morning and then I’ll come back. I’ll have a snack in the car and away home. But then I’ll cook kangaroo meat. And now you can get this from your local supermarket here in Australia. But if you’re listening from overseas, you think, well, it sounds pretty mean to be eating kangaroo. But yeah, great, great, great red meat tastes. I think the taste is really good. So I’ve been having that consistently for breakfast with some other things as well. But I’ve found that to be, that keeps me fairly full throughout the day. And just to be a good option for breakfast for me because I’ve got the time to cook it here and quite enjoy it. So I just want to put that out there. Kangaroo meat or mince is actually leaner compared to beef. So less fat and it’s actually higher in protein too compared to beef.

So a good choice. I’ll take that. Probably not available over in the US or UK though. Although maybe Whole Foods probably has it. They’re probably onto it. I wouldn’t do it every day either because we don’t want to have much more than about 500 grams of red meat in a week. It is linked to bowel cancer. And so the World Health Organization maybe 10 years ago now brought out some guidelines around red meat intake. So just make sure you’re not doing that seven days a week and you have got some variety in that. It is, yeah, like I said, good lean sauce. But we do want to be mindful that we’re not just like as Australians as a population, we overeat red meat in a big way. Especially on Grand Final weekend. That’s right. When most people have a barbecue or something along those lines. Yeah. And steaks come from, you know, a steak restaurant and they’re like 450 grams, right? That’s it for the week in a way. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, form smart swim goggles.

They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with form smart swim goggles, including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for only 249 US dollars. They’ve currently changed up their offer where you can now get the goggles and you have one year membership included for free. And if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to the workouts, training plans and custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data in the goggles. So you never lose access to that. My favorite thing about the form goggles is having the instant feedback of what times you’re doing, what stroke rate you’re doing and also the ability to see what your heart rate is. Because never before have we been able to have these immediate feedback heads up display where it’s actually telling you what your intervals are.

So when I wear the goggles in training, I like that I know my split for the first 50 and the 100 and the 150. So every single lap I’m getting that feedback on what my pace is. And I find it’s such an important tool for being able to not only have different gears where you can switch between the different speeds that you want to swim. But it helps you develop those gears and it helps you intuitively know how fast you need to go before you’re going to blow up or before you’re going to go a little bit too hard. So it helps you just get really good at judging your pace for when you do go to a race. And even if you’re not wearing the goggles in a race, it’s that intuition and that ability to develop your pacing that these goggles can really help with. To get your pair of form goggles and say 15% off, use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout. And that will get you 15% off your pair of goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout.

I don’t want to think about that. That’s hitting my quota too early. Let’s talk about meal prep. What can people do to save themselves time cooking? Because many people are very time time poor. So what can they do to get ahead of that each week? And what are some things that you’d recommend there just being able to be ready for dinners each night? Because when I was coaching in my early early twenties, I would train it from four till six. And I’d swim about six K’s was a pretty hard session. And then I would not eat much at all. Maybe I might have an apple or a banana. And then I would go to the pool and coach for an hour and a half to be on deck. And then I’d finally make my way home. And I was ravenous by then. And so they would never, I never ate anything good after that because I just wasn’t, wasn’t prepared. So I think meal prep is a really important thing to have that organized. So what can we do to get ahead of that and make sure that we’re eating good foods and to save time as well?

Yeah, it’s just about setting yourself up for success, not failure, right? And that is very common for athletes to not have food sorted, particularly in the evenings. And that is one of the key times where you want to be making sure you’re ticking all of your recovery boxes within that 30 minute time frame after after your session. So when you get out of the pool, if you smash some food there that hit all of your recovery targets and then maybe even had like a second dinner before you went to bed or another protein hit or a little snack there. That would have set you up for success so much better because you’ve delayed your recovery. And then are you kind of getting up the next morning and jumping in the pool again or doing some sort of training session? Sometimes I would. Other times I was back coaching. I mean, these days I’ll train three mornings a week in the pool. The other mornings I’ll run or go to the gym the next morning.

So I’m not often training at night unless it’s maybe a gym session. Yeah. And most triathletes will do a session like that. They’ll train in the evening and then back up and train again in the morning. So when your window of opportunity to recover is tight like that, it’s, you know, eight hours. Then we need to be really diligent about what we’re doing after that session in the evening. So it’s just about looking after future. Like I’m a total food nerd and I love this whole organisational piece. I’ve actually built a whole menu planning system for people to help them and have a recipe database with now it’s got 200 recipes in there that I’ve developed over the years. You need to think ahead about what your week looks like and you can do that in any way that you like. Like write it down on a piece of paper, check it on the fridge. Like you will know what your training is. You need to go, all right, what are the nights where I need to come home and, you know,

food is on the table or it’s in the microwave and I’m literally reheating it and I’m getting my recovery nutrition in within that 30-minute window. Or, hey, I’ve got to take food with me because I’m not going to get home in time to eat what I need in that time point. So look ahead to those nights and they’re the nights you need to plan leftovers or you’re batch cooking on the weekend and you’re stuffing stuff in the freezer so that all you have to do is microwave it and, you know, job done. So the first thing is to look at ahead at that so that you’re not being really reactive with your nutrition. You’ve got to be proactive and get yourself on the front foot. And what I say, like I call it looking after future you, whatever you can do, instead of, you know, sitting down and binging Netflix for two hours on a Sunday, spend that time getting yourself prepped for the week and that’ll really set you up for success

and help you back up and recover so much faster if you can do that. And the other thing that I think is really key is having a plan for the week, right? So that’s just dinners. What are you eating for the week and shop once so that you’re not running back and forth to the supermarket constantly, like getting home from a session and going, oh man, what’s for dinner? I’ve got to go get something like we want to avoid that full stop. So make a plan for the week ahead. I’ve got a template that people can grab if they want to use that. It’s free at dietitianapproved.com forward slash menu planning. Map out your training map out like the food that you’re going to have, the recipes that you’re going to make shop once a week. It’ll save you so much time if you can do that and do whatever cooking you can on your weekends or your days off to put some stuff away or put some stuff in your freezer. And you don’t have to spend like six hours on your feet doing that.

Nobody wants to do that. But every time you cook something, just double it. So you’ve got a second batch for future you, whether it’s in the fridge or the freezer. And then once you’ve done that for a month or two, you’ll have a few different options ready to go. So you have that variety. Yeah, that’s it’s the way to go. Just be prepared at my kids on a Wednesday night. I’ve got young kids and we’ve now started meal planning that what they’re going to eat on the way home from their swim lessons. Because if we don’t feed them on the car ride home, they have feral and they’re hitting each other and they’re just they’re losing it. And it’s like, well, okay, I can understand on the same if I don’t eat straight away after swimming on. Yeah, I’m not feeling the best either. So put like a chicken wrap thing that we’ve made for them in there. And it’s made a huge, huge difference. So kids and adults are not too dissimilar when it comes to comes to that.

So adults are just a tiny bit better at managing those emotions, but we still feel that rubbish. Yeah, exactly. We absolutely do. Now I want to talk about some of the common things that you’ve seen lately with the triathletes that you’re working with. What are some of the common mistakes that that you see them running into and where they may be spending time where it’s not required? Maybe they’re spending money on things that they don’t need to. Is there anything that’s that’s popped up recently for you? Oh, there’s heaps. Honestly, how long have we got? I think in your intro, like you even said, like a lot of people get their nutrition advice from the wrong place. And I’m really passionate about teaching athletes like the right way to do things from an evidence based perspective. You need to really check your sources when it comes to nutrition because there is so much rubbish on the Internet. I get so frustrated seeing articles in like triathlon 220 and triathlete magazine and you look at the byline and they’ve written by like just an average punter.

Like not even an nutrition expert. So sorry, I’ll calm down. I get really like my blood boils when I talk about it. So make sure you’re getting nutrition advice from somebody that’s qualified to give it would be the first one. But I think triathletes in particular or maybe just endurance athletes, they don’t focus on the big rocks when it comes to nutrition. They love to do the little one percenters and the shiny objects and all those things first before actually focusing on some of the key things that will actually push the needle to make them better athletes. So I always talk about nutrition being the fourth leg of a triathlon. You’ve got a swim bike run and you then have to work on your nutrition like relatively quickly. It is one of the big rocks to your success as a triathlete as well as sleep and recovery. But we don’t do those things very well. We like to burn the candle at both ends and you know, like you like not eat and then expect your body to be a high performing engine.

But it’s just like putting the cheap economy fuel in and hoping for the best. So I think we need to take a step back and do the not so sexy things first and do them really well, like, you know, getting enough protein, making sure you have your carbohydrate intake right for you. And it’s very specific to where you’re at and in your journey, what type of training you’re doing, all those sorts of things. And doing things like eating enough fruits and vegetables. It’s not very sexy, but I don’t know. You were taking a random like greens powder to do that, but really just need to eat some bloody fruits and vegetables. Yeah. Hey, still a sore point. No. Have you stopped taking that yet? No, I don’t I don’t buy it anymore. I don’t and they and they approached me to sponsor the podcast as well. What would town say? No, I will not be sponsored by any supplement company, just like from a moral perspective, because I want you to know that if I recommend something, it’s because it’s good, not because I’m getting picked backs to suggest that you should do that.

And you should definitely not take a vitamin supplement powder thing, because we have no idea what’s in it. Nobody’s batch testing them to go. Are all those nutrients from those fruits and vegetables still there when we’ve manufactured it heavily in a plant in like a factory or not? Because there’s no way to know unless they batch test it. So hopefully you’re not still like throwing 80 bucks a month at this stuff. Come on, Brenton, you’re better than that. I’m not. I’m not. And one of the and when I looked into it and they don’t, they don’t say what’s in it. They say like a few things that’s in it. They don’t say the percentages and that kind of thing. And to me that that was a red flag to me going, OK, well, if you’re not going to say, I understand that if you put how much of. Spirulina’s in it, whatever else they’ve gotten there, that that’s kind of the secret source. And that’s why you’re not saying those percentages.

But to me that was. Spirulina’s not secret. It’s not secret. It’s not a secret source. No, but it’s the it’s not saying the what’s actually in it. That kind of allows them to, you know, get away with it, I guess. Yeah, it’s like a proprietary blend type thing. That’s like a dead giveaway that you should probably avoid it if they’re not being that open and honest about, yeah, what it is. Yeah. So we’ve talked about so getting the fundamentals right. The same thing applies in in swimming. It’s just do do the basics and do them well. The elite swimmers, they’re really good at the basics so we don’t need to be overly fancy there. So if you can hold a good body line, if you can kick well, if you can rotate the right amount just doing doing the basics. Like it’s going to get you along a long way. Same with the with nutrition. What else are you saying that where people are getting sidetracked? Yeah, so I guess like if they’re not doing the fundamentals, it’s the shiny objects that they get definitely way laid and sidetracked by.

There’s quite a few things going on in in the endurance space at the moment like continuous glucose monitoring kind of been going off this year. And that is definitely like a bit of a shiny object to be honest. We don’t really know about its application in sport yet. I’ve got Greg Cox on my podcast coming up in about a month’s time at the start of November to talk about continuous glucose monitoring and what we know so far in its application to sport because it’s been around for a long time. Diabetics have been using it for a very long time and it’s only now that people are starting to get interested in it in terms of the use in sport. It’s being marketed as a fuel gauge, but it’s really hard to translate what’s going on in your interstitial fluid to what’s happening at that muscle level. So I don’t think we have time to dive into that today, but definitely go and listen to that episode on the Triathlon Intuition Academy podcast when it drops.

It’ll be episode 118 coming out in the first week of November. Coxie is a co-author on the latest paper with which summarizes what we know so far. There is only six research studies to date, more coming in the works, but six so far that have given us some information around whether it is useful in sport or not. So that one’s definitely something that I wouldn’t waste any money on at this point, particularly if you’re not eating enough fruits and vegetables. Do those big rocks first because it’s not the marketing messages that are on the main websites for the companies that are trying to promote that. And we saw a lot of athletes wearing them in Kona that don’t wear them now. It was just a marketing strategy for that company. So yeah, keep your wits about you with things like that and other supplements that we know aren’t particularly safe or effective. Spend your money doing some milk prepping and batch cooking rather than wasting it and throwing it down the drain on things that aren’t particularly useful.

Let’s talk about carb phobia. I read a post that Sam Long put out today talking about how many carbs he took in in his last race or was it world champs. I can’t remember exactly which one it was, but it was either 140 or 160 grams an hour, maybe 140 grams an hour. That’s a lot. Yeah, but he required racing and he was talking about that, which is obviously a lot more than what a lot of other people have maybe mentioned in the past. So I found that quite interesting and that’s certainly not being carb phobic. That would be the opposite. Yeah. Let’s talk about where that comes from and the downside to not having enough carbs to use and burn when you’re racing and when you’re training. Yeah. So I think Sam’s an interesting example. Right. And he is a well oiled machine. Like he’s super efficient. He does a race in way shorter duration than your eye could or most people listening. I would suggest also. And so that amount of carbohydrate intake is not something that like everybody should go and try or go and aspire to because you’re not going that fast.

You’re not that good at using carbohydrate in the first place. And, you know, that probably still doesn’t meet his needs. Our rate limiting step is still our guts. But anyway, topic of conversation for another day. Most triathletes, to be honest, I spend the whole first phase of the triathlon nutrition academy program. I spend like 12 weeks trying to beat out the carb phobia mindset from them. It comes from probably from the 80s where carbs were bad. Fat was bad. So people just didn’t eat fat and didn’t eat carbs. But as an endurance athlete, you need to start to switch your thinking into more performance and feeling for performance because your carbohydrate needs are individual to you. And your training volume, they’re not the same as somebody that sits on their butt all day at work at a computer and drives a desk. So we need to just think a bit more strategically around carbs. Like the message is not eat more carbs because that’s also not helpful for people.

But just understanding how much to have and when releases like so much stress and anxiety from people when they have a clear plan around how to do that. Like how much do you need pre-training? How much do you need post-training? How much do you then need across different meals based on your training demand? So I’m really passionate about teaching triathletes how to periodize their carbohydrate. So we’re not doing the same thing all the time. And we’re fueling for lighter recovery days very differently to those like big longer endurance four, five, six hour ride days. And they should look different from a carbohydrate perspective, but it does take a little bit of a mindset shift to get that in your head. And honestly, the only one day of that fueling properly away from going, oh, that’s that’s how it’s meant to feel. Like I’m not meant to be shattered for the entire rest of the day after this ride and rendered useless and risking divorce.

Or I got an email from a client this morning saying, I’ve been trying to force my five year old to have a nap with me. But now I don’t need to do that anymore because I’ve got enough carbohydrate on board for those sessions. So it’s just about thinking differently about carbs. The message is not no carbs or all the carbs. It’s just being a bit more strategic around your fueling and building that up over time as well. So you don’t want to go from not having much to then having a crap load because your body doesn’t know how to deal with it. So we need to sort of slowly build our way up and that should also build with training volume as you head into a race. And then it can drop down again after your race is done. You’re not doing as much training volume too. So periodization is like a really good word to describe that is that we’re not doing the same thing all the time. We’re actually fueling for the work required.

And do you think a large part of that stems from lighter is better? You’ve got to be lighter to go faster on the bike. Is that where it comes from? Like carbs always have been blamed. You know, carbs equal fat, but they don’t really because carbohydrate is four calories per gram and protein is four calories per gram. So cutting out carbohydrate, people tend to increase their protein intake and that doesn’t really change your overall energy intake. So they definitely got blamed. But I guess back in like Sydney 2000 Olympics from then to now, he’s in a huge shift in the body composition of triathletes. Like back then the message was lighter, leaner, faster. And there’s just a whole heap of stress fractures and injuries and people getting sick and like females not having menstrual cycles and things like that. And the dynamics of our body composition for the sport have completely changed and we need to make sure we are strong and robust, particularly on the bike.

And then when you get off and run, you need to not be fatigued for as long as you can over hopefully till like after you’ve crossed the finish line and you need strength for that. So carbs are not going to be what makes you leaner. Cutting them out is not what’s going to make you leaner. You just need to eat properly and eat less crap and probably drink less alcohol, eat more fruits and vegetables. You know, there’s big rocks and scale your carbohydrates up and down. Well, Taryn, I appreciate the coming back on the podcast to talk about this stuff. You’ve answered many of the questions I’ve had for myself and then hopefully someone listening as well. You’re welcome anytime. What have you got coming up that you’re looking forward to looking forward to with the stuff that you’re doing with the nutrition Academy and the athletes that you’re working with? There’s so many things in the pipeline always.

I am a bit of an overachiever. I’m not sure you’re probably the same, right? Just try and do all the things and bite off more than you can chew and then chew really hard. I am opening doors to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program again in January. Around the 15th of Jan, so mid-Jan if anybody is listening and wants some help with their nutrition, go to dietitianapproved.com forward slash academy to learn more about that. But upcoming this month, I’m running a bike fuel masterclass for triathletes just to get them to understand some of the foundations around how to actually fuel properly on the bike. So like talking about those fundamentals and those big rocks, people either under fuel the bike or maybe try and follow Sam and over fuel. But typically people like bonk or hit the wall, spend the whole rest of the day like useless on the couch. And you know, I just want to get people set up with some foundations to know like what sort of targets they should be aiming for to start with.

And then we can build on that. So if you want to check that out, I’m running it live on the 25th of October, 9 30 am Brisbane time. So Australian Eastern Standard Time. If you’re in the US or Canada, that’ll be your Tuesday night, the 24th. But go to bikefuel.co and you can see all the details and convert to whatever time zone you are in the world for that. Sounds good. Well, I’m sure there’s a lot of triathletes listening to this that could benefit from that. So we’ll make sure we include all these links on our podcast notes. I appreciate you being back on the podcast and perhaps early next year I’ll get you back on and see what’s happening in the world of nutrition and food or related to triathlon and related to swimming as well. So thank you very much for being on the podcast. Hi, you’re welcome anytime.

The post Why Carb-Phobia Could Be Ruining Your Performance with Taryn Richardson appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Join me on a wild journey where I accidentally became the subject of a search party while swimming with friends in Melbourne. From helicopters to firetrucks, this rescue operation had it all. But it’s not just a cold-water mishap; it’s a story about finding answers right in front of us. Learn the lessons from this unforgettable experience and how they apply to our everyday struggles.

00:21 Swimming in the Cold Water
02:04 Lost Swimmer in Red Cap
06:39 Miscommunication in the Cold Water
11:40 Improving Back Strength for Better Performance
13:40 EO SwimBETTER
14:30 Swimming Insights: Finding Obvious Solutions

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.

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

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Effortless Swimming podcast. I want to start this episode off by telling you a story about how I accidentally joined a search party looking for myself. It was 10 years ago and a friend of mine and an athlete that I was coaching at the time, Matt, he was training for the English Channel. And I wanted to help him out and also get a bit of experience in the cold water by joining him for some of his open water swims, where he had to get adapted to the cold. So myself, Matt and another friend of ours, Wendy, we went for a swim in the Bay in Melbourne. And we left from this place called the Brighton Bars. Now, if you don’t know what the Brighton Bars are, it’s kind of like a gym, which has got showers, steam room. And they’ve also got this pier that goes out and around. So it’s this sort of closed, closed square pier that you can you can swim in there that’s protected from

any boats or anything like that. So you can kind of do laps in this pier. But in the corner of this pier, you have got this fence that runs around it, this metal wire fence, but there’s a gap in the fence. So if you want to go out and swim further out, go around the poles that are nearby, go a bit longer, you can go out through this little gap in the fence. So we go to the Brighton Bars, we’re all changed, it’s about 10 degrees Celsius in the water, it’s the middle of winter, it’s bloody freezing. And we all go out just in our swimmers in our bathers. So we’re not wearing wetsuits. Now, I’m not great in the cold. And Wendy and Matt knew this, but I’m strong swimmer, I’m comfortable out there. And I kind of know I know my limits. So we head out there, we swim out to the second pole. So this is probably 600 meters to 800 meters away. We get out there and then we stop and we all decide, all right, let’s swim to the pole that’s

closest to the Brighton Bars. So we all stop there and then I’m starting to get a little bit cold. And I said to them, all right, I’m getting a bit cold, I’m going to head in on this one. And so they decided, all right, we’ll head in as well. Because it was windy, it was choppy. There wasn’t very good visuals because there was quite a bit of swell and chop. So you couldn’t really see further than a couple of meters around you, aside from being able to see the Brighton Bars. So with other swimmers, you couldn’t really see where they were. So we start heading in towards the Brighton Bars. So it’s about 200 meters between the pole and the bars. And we start swimming in and then I’m swimming for 60, 70 meters. And I realize I can’t see Matt and Wendy around me. I stop and I look around and I can’t see them. I’ve kind of got ahead in because I’m getting really cold here. So I don’t want to be caught out here in my

behaviors. It’s 10 degrees in the water and I’m just going to get too cold if I stick around. So I just keep swimming in towards where the pier is and I duck in through the gap and make my way back to land. And I grab my towel and I’m looking out and I can see that Matt and Wendy are swimming around near where this pole is about 200 meters from the shore. And I thought that’s weird. I thought we decided to swim in together and call it a day. But they are still out there and I thought maybe they just decided that they want to keep on going. I was really cold at this point. I was really starting to get to my core. So I just headed in towards the showers and I started getting changed, having a shower and warming up and just thought, OK, well, if they want to keep swimming, no worries. I’ll just get changed while they’re doing that. Then I come back out after getting changed in the lifeguard who’s there and the people on the

front desk there. They’ve got this worried look on their face. And this is a bit weird. What’s going on? And I ask them what’s happening. And they said, oh, yeah, some swimmers are out there and they they run into another swimmer out there that had a red cap on. And he was in trouble and now they can’t find him. Oh, geez, OK, that’s that’s weird. I didn’t know there was anyone else out there. I didn’t really see anyone when we were swimming, but OK, so that that makes sense why they’re out there. They’re looking for this swimmer in the red cap. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with Form Smart Swim Goggles, including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for only $249 US dollars. They’ve currently changed up their offer where you can

now get the goggles and you have one year membership included for free. And if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to the workouts, training plans and custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data in the goggles, so you never lose access to that. My favorite thing about the Form Goggles is having the instant feedback of what times you’re doing, what stroke rate you’re doing, and also the ability to see what your heart rate is. Because never before have we been able to have these immediate feedback heads up display where it’s actually telling you what your intervals are. So when I wear the goggles in training, I like that I know my split for the first 50 and the 100 and the 150. So every single lap I’m getting that feedback on what my pace is. And I find it’s such an important tool for being able to not only have different gears where you

can switch between the different speeds that you want to swim, but it helps you develop those gears and it helps you intuitively know how fast you need to go before you’re going to blow up or before you’re going to go a little bit too hard. So it helps you just get really good at judging your pace for when you do go to a race. And even if you’re not wearing the goggles in a race, it’s that intuition and that ability to develop your pacing that these goggles can really help with. To get your pair of Form Goggles and say 15% off, use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout and that will get you 15% off your pair of goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout. And they had come in while I was in the shower, Matt and Wendy had come in to the sort of front desk they’d run down the pier and told them we’ve lost it. We’ve lost a

swimmer out there or there’s a swimmer that we can’t find. They called triple zero, which is our emergency response number and we need to get the ambulance here. We might need to get the police here. So let’s just let them know what’s going on. And so I’m just going, OK, this is really, really strange. So I’m waiting there and I can see Matt and Wendy are out in the water and there’s the swimming round just kind of swimming in circles looking for this swimmer, obviously. And then the police arrive and the people on the front desk relay what’s going on. And I’m just sort of watching this unfold and I can’t get back in the water because I was just getting too, too cold. So I didn’t get a chance to chat to Matt and Wendy. And then the ambulance arrives and then we also see this fire truck arrive and I start and then I start to see these emergency rescue divers arrive as well. And this is pretty, this is pretty serious. This is a big

rescue and seeing everything swing to action here. So then I see Wendy hop out at the end of the pier. She climbs out of the water and she’s running down the pier and then she grabs this kayak that was off to the side and she grabs a kayak and heads out immediately. So I didn’t get a chance to wave her down and go and chat to her to go and ask her what’s going on here? Like who did you see out there that needs rescuing that you couldn’t find? Now I talked about the swimmer in the red cap that was lost out there. I was wearing a maroon cap and it didn’t click that that could possibly be seen as a red cap. So I was kind of standing in the gym area. She was running down the pier. She grabs this kayak and takes it out and is immediately paddling around. And now as she was paddling out there’s this helicopter that comes overhead and it’s starting to look around the water and it’s starting to hover over where we were swimming and

around the pier. Obviously looking for this swimmer that had been lost. And in the meantime I’m chatting to the policemen. I’m just saying yeah I was out there swimming with them. I didn’t see a swimmer but you know I’m guessing that they they did. So the whole time I’m chatting to the to the policemen and letting them that I don’t know any more than than they do really. And then this all all of this from the point that we got that I that I was lost out there to to this point it’s about 45 minutes. And so I walk out to the end of the pier and Wendy is probably 50 meters away and she’s looking up from this kayak and she squints her eyes and she looks up at me and she starts to paddle over and she sees me standing there on the pier. And I see her head drop down and she goes oh no. And I’m like what what are you talking about? And she goes we’re looking for you. I thought oh my god. This is this is bad. How on earth? All right well first

of all I’ve got to go and tell the policemen that I’m the one that they’re looking for the policemen I’ve been chatting to for the last half an hour. And so I go over to him and I say I just spoke to Wendy she said that they were looking for me and he’s like what are you talking about? Are you sure? Are you sure that you’re looking for? And I said yeah like and so Wendy came over and started chatting to the policemen and they realized that it was just a case of miscommunication and missed timing with us not seeing each other when they had come in and I was I was there. So the policemen then wraps it all up and the helicopter goes home the rescue divers pack up the fire trucks go home the ambulance goes home and we go back to the well and then Matt as well comes in and he was going through in his head like oh man what am I going to tell Brent’s parents? What am I what am I going to say to them? Like I feel responsible for

this because I’m the one training for the channel and you know I invited him to this swim and I feel like it’s my fault that this has happened and so he’s been he’s been stressing for the last 45 minutes thinking that that I’ll somehow passed away and he’s got to tell my parents something so he was he was just explaining all this to me and then we just go to the the steam room to to warm up because by this point they are freezing cold and he’s yeah he’s been out there on the kayak in really really cold weather and windy weather just just looking for me but having to put up with the with the cold because you know what else are you going to do so we’re sitting there and then these two these two older guys are kind of having a bit of a a go at us because of everything that’s happened and you know we just what have we got to say you know it’s like yeah that was like I don’t know how that happened that we’re just kind of

looking back on man how do we miss this? So long story short Matt ended up training for the channel made it he was the fastest Australian swimmer that year in 2013 and but that was that was the last open water cold water swim that I did with him at that time and in hindsight I can see where I could have we could have done a lot better just in terms of communication and communication out there and planning things better so that all these emergency services didn’t have to get involved and it was really embarrassing as well to like to be the reason all of this stuff had to get called out but you know thankfully obviously nothing nothing happened but it was still still quite embarrassing for all of that to to go down when it was just a case of miscommunication but the reason I tell this story is because quite often when we’re in the middle of things it’s hard to see the forest from the trees and often there’s a really obvious answer that’s in front

of us for the questions that we’re that we’re wanting to answer and the problems we’re wanting to to solve so I was thinking of that with my swimming at the moment it’s like where where are the obvious things what am I what am I not seeing here that if I just looked at things a little bit differently where where the opportunities there and so for me that was number one strength so I’ve been going to Kaiser gyms for I think about 18 months now and we do some testing there with you know strength testing and there’s quite a few areas where I’m like I’m fairly fairly weak so you do this back strength test and I’m in the I was in the lowest like bottom 10 percent of of back strength and I’ve had a lot of back issues over the last couple of years and it’s only been the last sort of 12 months where I’ve actually started to work on this where my back strength has improved dramatically and it’s been about 12 months since I last

hurt my back essentially so that was a really obvious one where I kept injuring my back but it was because my my back and core strength was no I knew what it should be but it was just kind of staring me in the face and it wasn’t until I addressed it that I was actually able to to improve it and so and the other one that that’s really clear too is with this EO swim better the the devices where you can measure your your force and the direction of that force I’ve got a I’m pretty low with the propulsive forces so those forces that are moving me forwards it’s around 37 percent I think which is just too low really it should be ideally we kind of want it to be above 50 and I’ve seen Roland Scuman he’s he’s pulling numbers like 70 or 77 percent propulsive forces so to me that’s that’s a really obvious answer as to what I should focus on is focusing on a better catch and pull so where more of those forces are going backwards towards my feet

rather than in a downwards direction towards the floor towards the ground so there’s a few things that when I just sort of sat back analyze that looked at it a little differently what are those those things that are just staring me in the face so my question to you is is there something like that in your in your swimming or in your life that is an obvious answer that you just haven’t been able to see because when we’re in the thick of things it can be hard to to realize those so I’ll wrap up the podcast there thanks for listening to it and next time you’re going cold water swimming with someone don’t make the mistake I did and not be clear with your communication because that was not a not a fun experience to go through but we certainly learned a lesson there and often it’s experiences like that where you can really take a lot from and if you but if you can kind of fast track that process by not having to go through it

and learning the lesson from someone else well that’s always a a benefit and a bonus so thanks for listening to this episode I’ll see you next week with another episode if you did enjoy it and you’re listening on Spotify or Apple podcast one thing I’d ask you to do is leave a review and if you know someone who’s looking to improve their swimming pass on this episode share it with them that’s all I ask thanks very much listening to the podcast see you next week

The post Hidden In Plain Sight: Why The Solution To Our Problems Are Right In Front Of Us appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Join us on this podcast episode with Andrew Sheaf, author of “A Constraints-Led Approach to Swim Coaching.” Andrew shares valuable insights and strategies for swim coaches and swimmers. His systematic training and skill development approach helps swimmers achieve tangible results by avoiding the pitfall of abandoning techniques too quickly. This podcast is a must-listen for coaches and swimmers looking to enhance their methods and training.

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.

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

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is the author of the book called A Constraints Late Approach to Swim Coaching. It’s Andrew Schief. He’s joining me on this podcast. I’m really excited to get into some of the topics that you’ve covered in your book because as a coach of how long now, maybe 17 years, some of the stuff that you’re right about in the book is I’ve learned some of this stuff along the way, but there’s a lot of stuff there that you go into really great detail of that I think, well, there’s so much that coaches can learn from this, but also swimmers and how that they can approach their their training, how they can approach skill development in a systematic way. So they actually see the results rather than trying something for a week and then going, okay, this didn’t work and then just just leaving it. So I’m really excited to get into some of the topics today and thank you for joining me for the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So you’ve you’ve coached collegiate swimming for around 15 years. And now you’re focusing on working with coaches and clubs to help them be able to develop their swimmers with better skills. And with the book, you’ve really sort of covered this in a lot of a lot of detail. What inspired you to write the book because it’s a lot of work to write a book, especially of this kind of detail. Yeah, so I had so I’d gotten so pretty early in my career, I started swimming pretty late, and I was a pretty good athlete, but I was a pretty bad swimmer. And so it became pretty obvious to me that like the skill component was really in specific to me holding me back. And then, you know, and I started to see that it was pretty much true of all athletes to varying degrees. And so I became pretty, pretty interested pretty early in how to develop skills. And so that kind of like started the whole process. And that’s

what really kind of got me interested in coaching. And then as I, you know, I learned more, you know, the traditional approach is to just, you know, you identify the skills that need to improve, be improved, you talk to swimmers about it, you provide them feedback to it, provide them feedback about it. And then you’re also, you know, using the drills that that everybody talks about to help develop their strokes. And, you know, there was kind of a lot of problems I kept running into. And to me, you know, if it’s not actually making the better, like I don’t really want to do it, it’s just a waste of time. And so it became about getting as much out of all of the skill work as we could. And some of the problems were, you know, every coach experiences that you tell someone to do something, they do it for a lap, and then they stop doing it. They stop doing it, they just kind of forget about it. You know, that’s one

of the issues, one of the other issues is there’s like 50 kids. And how are you going to, you know, have a conversation? How are you going to teach all of them? You know, that becomes really problematic and you’re not going to be able to do one on one lessons with everybody. And then the other aspect of it is like, you know, a lot of times there’s this disconnect between skill development and training. And if you can’t do the skills in a race, it doesn’t, you know, that doesn’t mean anything. And if their skills are falling apart when they get tired, it doesn’t mean anything. And so, you know, these are kind of things that I’m struggling with as I go through my coaching. And I’m always kind of looking for answers. And then I came across a guy in Keith David’s who’s really involved with kind of some different approaches to skill development. And I got, you know, he wrote a couple books and I read those and I sort of

correspond with him and, you know, kind of develop some of these or apply some of these ideas to swimming. And then, you know, along the way, he basically asked me if I wanted to write a book as part of a series that he was doing. And so that’s kind of how I actually got into writing the book. But the journey about trying to figure out these ideas was basically just how can I find a way that solves all of these problems that I’m facing trying to develop skills, because I was convinced or am convinced that the difference between, you know, fast swimmers are almost always good swimmers. And so we need to develop those skills in everybody and then finding an efficient way to do it that actually creates change, not just in a couple athletes some of the time, but, you know, all the athletes all the time. And so that’s kind of where all of this kind of came from. And that’s, you know, what I’m still interested in. I’d love to dive into what you do when

you’ve got 50 kids in your squad, because that’s what most clubs are. So a whole bunch of kids and one coach. What are some of those things that you would share with a club coach who’s got a whole bunch that they’re trying to work with, but you just can’t give that one-on-one attention? Yeah. So you have to find ways to basically, so you’re not going to be able to like quote-unquote coach all these kids. It’s not possible. You’re not going to be able to teach them. And so what you have to do is try to find activities that basically do teaching do the teaching for you. And so, you know, an example that kind of everyone is familiar with is like, if you have the kids count their strokes, you know, it’s not perfect. They’re, you know, there are ways to cheat it, but nine times out of 10, they tend to lengthen things out. They tend to smooth things out and tends to fix issues. And so that’s a perfect example of, you

know, a simple activity that you can do that starts doing the coaching for you. And so the more times you can find skills that kind of help with that, the more effective, you know, you’re going to be. And so, you know, another example that probably a lot of people are familiar with, you have kids swim with a closed fist. Most times they’re going to do a better job of, you know, using their forearm to pull. And so that’s an example where like you don’t have to tell them to do anything in terms of like, hey, Johnny, make sure you get your elbow up. But you’ve given them an activity where it starts to push them in the direction that you want. And it starts to do a lot of the work for you. And so that’s what I started thinking about is, you know, how can I create activities or drills or sets that almost require swimmers to swim in the way that I want instead of having to actually teach them? And that’s the best place to start. And so, and

the other aspect of it, too, is that when kids have goals, they’re going to perform better as a result. And so, you know, my expectation is always that kids know their times and they know their stroke counts for just about everything. Because then you don’t have to tell them something’s wrong. If all of a sudden they’re swimming two seconds slower or they’re taking three more strokes, they know that and they’re going to change something to do that. And if they’re not aware of those things and you’re not telling them and you’re not providing them feedback, you know, they’re going to be in a lot of land and they’re just going to be sort of there. So having ensure ensuring that they are taking responsibility for the numbers of their swimming can be can be really, really helpful, too. Yeah, I really like that one. Something that we do at clinics and we’ve done for a long time is contrast drills, which I know you talk quite a bit

about, where you get someone to do the right thing and then the wrong thing. It builds up that awareness around then they know whether or not they’re in the right position, they can sense it when they’re starting to slip or fall apart with their stroke. The other thing I’ve used at clinics a couple years ago, pre-COVID, I ran some clinics in New Zealand and we had about 20, 24 or 30 swimmers or something at these clinics. I was really a lot of people compared to what I’m used to with the small groups of six and I got them to pair up and I had them do a certain drill and I had their partner watch them and then give them feedback on how they were doing the drill. It was like a catch drill. So just getting them to give that feedback and then they swap over. And so when they become the coach and they have to understand, they have to learn, all right, well, what’s the right position? They have to be able to identify it. Then they

have to correct someone. They start to, they really can take it on board because I think one of the best ways to learn something is to coach. And I’m sure that’s probably what you’ve seen going from to coach is like, you just don’t know, you just don’t understand how much there is out there when you’re just swimming compared to when you’ve got to become a coach and you’ve got to learn all these things. It’s like, for me, I learned so much just becoming a coach. Whereas as a swimmer, I feel like I knew about 10% of the information. Right. Yeah. And I think, you know, kind of what we’re both saying is like, you have to have you have to really teach them to, you know, basically how to train and how to train part of that is being engaged in what you’re doing and be aware of what you’re doing. And the more, you know, I found that the more like, I don’t like to argue with kids. And so the more quantitative it can be, like you either went this

fast or you didn’t or you either took this many strokes or you didn’t like, then there’s no discussion about that. And I think that can be really helpful because if it’s like, hey, your head’s in the wrong position. And they’re like, well, I thought it was right. Like, you can’t like, I don’t want to get into those discussions where it’s, you know, kind of subjective. Because, you know, as most coaches have experienced, you know, when you’re their coach, they don’t believe you. But if someone else comes and tells them the same thing, then they believe them. And so like, I just like to keep things objective to keep it simple. Yeah, it’s a good way to go about it. And what’s the process that you would often go through, even just if it’s in your mind where if you’re working with this summer, let’s say it’s one on one. And you’re looking at where, where in this chain of chain of technique, where are they falling apart there? How do

you analyze those? Yeah, the summers. Yeah. So again, like with everything, it’s how can I create a way to get long term change? And so a big part of that is like, you got to keep things simple for yourself. And so to me, pretty much every every technical issue is usually one of three things. And that’s their alignment through the water. And so in all the strokes, they’re trying to move through the water as straight as possible. And without any deviations, you know, minimizing deviations up and down left and right. And so if that’s kind of the baseline, if they’re not doing that well, like everything else is going to be, you know, a problem. And so that’s probably the first place I’m looking. And especially with younger swimmers or older, less experienced swimmers, like that can be a big issue where they’re just their, their body positions not good. And that’s making swimming infinitely harder. And usually they’re not really relaxed if they

don’t have that position. So that’s probably the first place I start. And then the second thing that they have to be doing is creating a lot of propulsion. And so I’m just basically looking at are there one, especially with the upper body, are their arms, you know, moving more or less kind of straight backwards? And do they have a big surface area with which they’re doing that? And I’m not too worried about the details. I just kind of want that big picture thing because we can, we can work on that. And then the, the, the last piece is, is kind of the timing of it. And so they can be doing the right things, but doing them at the wrong time. And that’s kind of the final piece that they have to, to, to get set, set together. And, and I skipped over, but, and the breathing is usually pretty important. But to me, that’s usually kind of part of the alignment thing, because a lot of times when people breathe, that’s when they really lose their alignment too.

And, you know, not breathing isn’t a solution. So that needs to be figured out pretty early too. So it’s usually those three things. It’s like, all of their problems are going to be, there are either alignments off, they’re not creating propulsion effectively, or, or the timing of it’s off something. Yeah, I love it. That’s a really simple way to, to approach it. And it’s the, often the simple

solutions are simple, the simple things that will help someone make that, make that change. And I’d like to go to that first one, the, the alignment. Yeah. I work with a lot of adults who didn’t learn to swim as kids. And that, that alignment, that body posture, that the effectiveness of the kick, it’s, it’s not often there initially. And quite often they’re very stiff in their, their ankles and they’re just not, you know, not kicking effectively or can’t hold themselves in a, in a straight body line. They’re bending through the hips or they’ve got too much back arch and it’s, and they’re not holding themselves straight. What are some, what are some

exercises, drills that you would have swimmers do to just work on, work on that? Yeah. So I think a lot of times it comes from a lack of awareness or almost belief that their lungs can actually support them in the water. And so they’re doing everything in anything to like not take advantage of their lungs. And so really helping them understand that they can actually float and do so with like zero effort. And so like doing something where they get a big breath and they grab their knees and they get into a ball and they’re going to float. Some people float a little higher, some people float a little lower but they’re, they’re not going to sink unless they’re literally like, you know, they’ve got the tiniest lungs in their like pure muscle but you know, that’s one percent of the, of the population. So that’s like a foundation. It’s like, oh wow, I can, I can float. And then it’s, it’s kind of, you know, there’s, there’s two aspects of it. So it’s kind of

like a fulcrum and the lungs are holding them up at the surface. Given them activities where they learn how to press the chest a little bit. And so like they could do it, you know, swim a 25 with their head up really high. And then they kind of lower it down like an elevator and now it’s like really low and they can start to feel how that, that change in pressure changes what their hips do and how they can improve their alignment through that. And so like, once you get the, the center or the awareness of the flotation, learning how to push from the front is important and people will need to do different amounts. Like there’s not going to be a right way based upon how people are built. Like if your legs are super long or they’re super short, you’re going to have to do different things but you know, giving them opportunities to explore that is where they figure that out for themselves. And then the other aspect of it is a lot of people that are pretty new to it

just their legs will kind of just like change. And so they have to learn how to like create tension in the back of their legs in the back of their hips to almost like pull them up a little bit. And so what they can do is stuff like they’re in that ball and then they just focus on extending their arms and extending their legs and they have to like keep tension in the back if they don’t they’re not going to be able to do that. And so helping them learn how to just like feel what that’s like and feel how to create that tension and while still using the lungs can be really helpful for helping them try to establish those positions. And then what they do is like you could do a couple reps of that then you do a 50 do a couple reps of that do a 50. So then you’re taking those sensations what you experience and then you’re trying to apply that when you swim. And if you just kind of keep doing that over and over again you know, it might take a week

it might take a month but sooner or later they’re going to figure out something. Yeah, that tension through the through the back in the hips it’s not for someone who’s just started as an adult like it’s not instinctual it’s like it’s it’s just it’s very unusual but well well the problem is is their instinct is to kick but they’re kicking down and so that’s going to create tension on the front of their body because you know they’re kicking down and it’s almost you know kicking can help keep your hips up but it’s almost the opposite of what they need to do and what and when they’re feeling their legs and hips sink like they’re going to panic like maybe not like you know like traditionally panic but like they’re going to know that this is not a good thing and they’re going to try to do something and the first instinct is to just kick when and sometimes that’s the opposite Yeah, that’s so true I have a couple of swimmers who will come to clinics who

they might tire after 50 or 100 meters and the kick is like a nine out of 10 effort Yeah, that’s why it’s no wonder heart rates up and there’s all this this tension but it’s it’s you’ve got to do the opposite you’ve got to relax you’ve got to lighten the kick and you’ve got to and do less of it as well so it’s and that’s one of the tricky things about swimming quite often that you need to do the opposite of what you think you need to do another example of that is like with the with the catch a lot of the guys I initially work with they are trying to rip very hard through that that early movement of the catch and it’s like well no just use that more as the setup and then you can accelerate through and you can apply more power through there because if you’re going for broke straight away it’s not a strong position you’re not set up to be pressing back right so let’s just turn our thinking around to you and just ease off that power in the in the beginning

and there’s quite a few other things there too yeah and I think holding the water is like the most misleading phrase ever because people think it’s going to be a lot of pressure early and they need to like grab on to something when when it’s really just a repositioning and then you apply pressure and and I think that it doesn’t feel like what people think it will feel like because of the terminology and that’s why you get you know that that type of action that you’re describing especially you know because the adults especially if they’re into it like they’re going to read about it and they’re going to try to figure out the problem and then you know unfortunately they misinterpret what what it’s supposed to be and then they end up with these habits that are actually to your point doing the opposite of what what they should be doing yeah that’s right and something we were talking about before the podcast as well is there’s so many so many different things

that you can consider even just let’s say freestyle technique but you it’s going to be different for each person on how right they need to do what they need to do during that part of it there’s so much nuance to it and you know you might take a piece of advice that a coach has given which may be correct for one person but it’s going to be the opposite of what you actually need to do and you know I’ve heard some coaches talk to swimmers and and say you know I just want you to get that hand in and then just rip it straight back and well I wouldn’t really give that advice to you know anyone it’s like well maybe if they’re way too soft and gentle maybe that’s a terminal to need to use yeah exactly yeah so it’s yeah and and and like with like with the head position we were just talking about there are some people that need to you know lower their head and and press into the water with their chest there are some people that need to do the opposite because they’re

totally burying it and and so you know a one size fits all prescription is not going to be effective and and that’s one of the the biggest challenges with with instructing athletes is like sometimes they need the opposite instruction and that can be tough to know what exactly what to tell them because because you don’t even know what they’re you may think you’re telling them what to do but they may be conceptualizing it something like totally different than that what you want them to think about it and like and and and so that can be problematic too I want to dig into some of the the language that you talk about in the book is as a coach there’s yeah a lot of different strategies that you can use to help get a point across and there’s some of those and you’ve got analogies cues got rhetorical questioning can you talk a little bit about that and how you’d use that with swimmers this episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor

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your pair of goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout yeah so if let’s just you know stick with keep it practical we’ll stick with the catch kind of example you know different athletes are going to have different ranges of motion in the shoulder and they’re going to have different range of motions you know in their upper body and their elbow and all of these things and they’re also going to have different levels of strength and so they can you know a good catch position for different athletes is going to be different and so if you’re trying to tell someone to keep your elbow at a 90 degree angle or whatever angle it is that may or may not be appropriate for me and it may or may not be appropriate for you and and so when you’re super specific about how you’re communicating to athletes that can be a challenge because it might not be in alignment with what they need and so instead

you know what’s the basic concept of the catch like you’re kind of just creating a big hook that you’re going to use to move water so you can talk to athletes it’s like I want you to set up your stroke like you’re getting a big hook on the water and and and that’s an analogy that’s going to be it gives them the basic concept but it gives them also it also gives them the freedom to figure out how to make that work for their own body because if you tell someone to do something that they physically can’t do and they’re and you know like Ian Thorpe was always the the poster child for great freestyle technique because he had this ridiculous catch yeah 95% of you know swimmers let alone humans like you can’t get in that position and so like to expect them to try to do that it’s just you know naive but they can use the concept and they can try to figure that out based upon you know the resources that they have yeah it’s it’s such a better way to to approach things

and I think the other benefits that too is they can they can visualize it okay well a hook what’s a hook look like I know what that looks like yeah and then I can just try and create that shape and that and that feel of hooking into something one are like there is thinking of a ladder underneath you where you’re placing your hand on the rung of the ladder as you’re moving along yeah because quite often people try and move their arm through the water rather than right moving their body through the water and anchoring or hooking themselves right right yeah and so and so you know that was you know pretty early on like that was one of the first like big steps I was like all right well I can’t like I’ve got to find ways to like it’s almost like learning a new language so instead of communicating to athletes and you know traditional put your hand here terms it’s like how can I think of like analogies or or you know that type of communication for all

all the things that I want to accomplish and and you know that took some time because it’s like you’re starting to think in a different way and then you know after a while you say it’s just it’s pretty natural yeah and and how about the questioning so I yeah I think when I first started coaching it was it’s like okay I want you I want you to do do this do this so you know that was too slow and it’s like there’s no there’s no back and forth between you and the athlete and you’re just telling them what to do or you’re telling them where they went wrong without actually getting them to take ownership of it but with the right sort of questioning you can really turn that around and give the athlete something that I can I can work with and I can be more aware of what’s happening and you can get much better results that way yeah and and so especially with a new athlete who’s never really thought about that so you you asked them something like how was that one

or like what did that feel like and they literally stare at you like you’re speaking a different language like they have no idea what what to do or say and so you know these are people that are totally unaware of what they’re doing and that’s you know that compromises their performance at some level because you know they’re missing opportunities every time they swim and so you know going back to the to the head position thing so you can have them do that drill when they start off really high and they they go really low and then you just ask them which position did you feel like was most effective versus like you saying I saw your hips come up on you know about halfway through that looked the best you know you just ask them what which one did which where did it feel best and then you know they may say like you know it doesn’t it almost doesn’t matter what they say because they’re going to be talking in terms of their feelings and you just want them

to verbalize that and then you’re like you can just say I do why don’t you do another one so you can get that same feeling again see if it’s in the same place and now you know you’re trying to help them learn how to create awareness of what they’re doing and so whenever they’re exploring that type of like just asking them how things felt and not just like it’s also important to actually like care what they say because sometimes I think people just you know you kind of have to get them to search for for the best thing and that can be really helpful and then another aspect that I like to do with learning in terms of like helping them learn how to train like so you can ask them after say they’re doing 10 100s on the first one you can just say all right well it was good about that and what could be better and so now you’re encouraging them to problem so because you know they’re like well my time was pretty good but I felt like I fell apart in the last 25

it’s like well now they now they’ve verbalized that and now the odds are they’re probably going to try to fix that on the next one and you know if you if you do that enough they start to do that themselves and it’s a way instead of just telling them what to do you’re helping them discover where their opportunities are and because they’ve discovered those and they’ve made the choice to do it they’re a lot more likely to do it it’s just like anyone if you know if you tell me to go I don’t know do some chores like I’m probably not going to do it but if I’m motivated to do if I decide to do it I’ll probably do it and so you know helping them learn how to identify opportunities and engage in what they’re doing you can’t tell them to do that you can only ask yeah I love that it makes me think of when I was coaching a master’s squad and something that I got when I was being coached as a as a swimmer it was always being asked you know let’s say it’s the last

interval of a main set and we need to make this one the fastest one and the question is where can you find an extra half second somewhere okay yeah where can I find it okay maybe the turn you know maybe I can pick up my my stroke rate that’s second 50 right and it’s something that I would do when I was coaching a master’s squad when we’d have a you know good solid workout is asking those questions and then people go through it in their mind and you’re not saying all right work the turn it’s like no they’re thinking about where they can find it and they’re gonna make the choice yeah yeah and then they’re gonna do it because they made the choice to do it yeah it’s yeah it’s one of the real

joys of coaching for me it’s like being able to get people to to do those things and trying to figure out ways to to get them to to make those changes on their own something that we’ll I’ll often do at clinics is after we go through some drills and we’ve worked on a certain aspect of it I’ll get them to chat with the other students in their lane about all right what were you thinking about and how did that feel and then they’re discussing it and they’re having to think about it okay yeah well I was I was trying to go wider with my hands here it felt kind of weird but you know I think it’s going to be be better I think it’s going to be faster so just getting them to verbalize those things as well isn’t is another really good way to be able to get them to kind of think think about it in a different way because swimming is a sport where you’re always in your head and you know you’re thinking so much during it and I think if you can get that out of your head

and just speak with others about it too it’s it’s a good way just about a figure some things out right outside of just being in your head right right your comment about you know how can you find a way to make this last one the best one I read this I don’t remember where but like a lot of times people especially coaches will be like you can do it whereas the better question is can you do it because then then the athlete has to ask themselves can I actually do this and then they have to go through that process that you’re that you were talking about all right well yeah I think I can but how am I going to actually do this and that and that’s going to be you know a lot more powerful than the coach just telling them you can do it because they’re just like no I can’t for you know they’ve got to figure out what to your point like what what solution can I find to make this happen

yeah I love it another thing is a lot of adult swimmers who have maybe been swimmers since they were a kid that want to go to the pool and have a good workout they’re not that interested in yeah swimming slow skill development it’s like no I’m I’ve got my hour I’ve got my 90 minutes I just want to get to the pool and and have a workout what can we do as coaches to or what can those swimmers do to be able to still develop and improve their skills and their technique without doing half an hour of drills each session yeah so so it kind of goes back to to what we’re talking about in the beginning is is fine training tasks that force swimmers to do in this case force yourself to swim well even you know regardless of what it is or how hard it is and so an example is let’s say we’re working on our pool and the you know that you know you just do some drills whatever whatever pulling drills that you’d thought you know that you were told to do like you could just do

those and that would be your basic skill work instead you could do something like 20 25s on you know if you want to go faster like 45 or if you want to go more rubic on 30 you’re going to put a pull buoy in and your goal is to do each and every one of them and you know as few strokes and as fast as possible and so like you know it’s the old swim golf thing where you add up the time then you add up the stroke count but because you’re trying to do that you know the only way to do that that’s a work set that’s 20 25s pretty strong effort pretty fast but you’re having to swim well to do it and so that’s just one example of how you can you know do that with almost any skill if you put stroke counts on it you have times that you’re trying to hit and then you just change the activity slightly so another thing you could do is like if you hold a paddle upside down that’s going to kind of lock your wrist again you’re going to have to use the whole forearm to create propulsion

and so like you could do a set of 4 100s with you know holding your paddles upside down you’re going to descend one to four and you’re going to try to not take any more strokes and like if you can do that successfully that’s going to be hard and you’re probably going to learn how to hold more water when you do that and so it’s just a matter of figuring out how to just get a little bit extra skill work like you can still do the same basic set whatever it is but how can you add another extra challenge to it that forces you or the athletes to swim well when they’re doing yeah and I remember hearing one of your one of the videos that you did as well is why you can use a tempo trainer in say like a set of 12 100s and you can use that to help develop the skills can you talk a bit about you know how you want to use a tempo trainer that’s a and that one’s that’s fun too so like what you can do is to say like it’s 12 100s and so you set the beep so it’s at a certain stroke

rate that’s pretty manageable then you’re going to like you can descend one to three at the same tempo and so the only like you can’t take faster strokes so the only way to go faster is either to be better with your turns or to take longer strokes and so you can’t really cheat it so you have to swim better in order to swim faster and then like to say we’re doing 12 so the next three you can just make the tempo a little bit faster so you should be able to descend down to even faster because your stroke rates a little bit faster and then you just do that for the next three and the next three and you can do that you know with any type of of set you can do that over any type of distance you can do that any type of stroke rate but it’s just this game that’s way more engaging than just swimming and it forces you to swim well because the only way to go faster is you can’t take more strokes you have to be a better swimmer and so that’s a and you can do the same thing

if you don’t have a temperature it’s the same basic idea it’s like you’re gonna take you can only take 15 strokes a lap and you’re gonna descend one to three and then the next set you’re gonna take you can take up to 16 strokes a lap and then you can try to descend one to three and then you should be able to go faster because you got an extra stroke and you know these type of activities are forcing you to work on both your your stroke count your stroke length and you know trying to swim faster as well and so it can be super engaging it’s a lot more you know at least to me anyway it’s a lot more fun than just swimming back and forth and you’re gonna get better at swimming too

yeah that especially for the for adults it’s like that sort of stuff that I have never really done as as kids you know so it’s just it’s brand new and right I would imagine most adult swimmers who’ve learned to adult say they’re gonna be very bad at that to start with but right I’ve got to start somewhere and yeah being able to being able to swim faster while holding the same stroke right it’s like well man okay that’s that’s it’s a pretty tricky thing to do initially but if you can just keep doing stuff like that you’ll be able to have much better awareness around what your your technique is like and that that feel that hold of the water you you’re going to improve that greatly because I think a lot of the people that I coach and come on board with me it’s like initially that’s just they’re just swimming up and down there’s not too much thought about stroke length or stroke count or anything it’s just going back and forth and if we can bring that

attention or they can bring that attention to how well they are swimming technically and put some numbers behind it with either rating or right stroke count it’s they’re really starting to do the things that at least some is are doing and a very good at yeah right right and another one I like too it’s like they can do say you can do five two hundreds and this is short course like you can go either like on the I’ve laps you go 16 strokes and even laps you go 18 strokes and the goal is and you can make the numbers whatever you want and the goal is to like be able to actually do that on command like you have the control over your stroke to actually switch years and change it like and not just kind of be like I hope I get the road stroke count and like so that that develops you know some control over that and a lot of people as you were saying they start out they have no idea how to do that but that’s something that you should be able to do and like and then you can

you can still descend that one to five and so you’re playing with the same you know variation in stroke count and then you’re also trying to get faster with it too and so like there’s all these games that you can play that will actually you know help you learn how to control your swimming and how to actually create change and in some ways that’s a lot more powerful than just thinking about things because you can be thinking about things but not actually changing any and you know sometimes the numbers can be really helpful because it forces people to change and if if they try to do something and it doesn’t work then they need they know they have to do something different and I think that’s what’s super powerful about that is that it forces change and the feedback is immediate and it’s not arguable what would be some of the things that you say happening for someone who is having trouble increasing their speed while keeping the same strike right

where would you say them going wrong yeah so I think a lot of times it’s it can come down so none of this stuff is going to work if they’re if they don’t have some of those alignment and balance issues sorted out because everything they do is basically just a a reaction to not like not drowning kind of almost and and so like their their their heads all over the place and their arms are just basically compensating for for their loss of alignment and and like you said with the kicking like they’re just trying to keep their hips up and they’re just doing everything they can’t so they don’t really have the ability to control anything and so a lot of times with that it’s that they feel out of control and they just keep things moving so that they can kind of stay in control and so I think helping athletes learn to relax and the water could be the first step because you know a lot of with the stroke out stuff is you have to be a little bit more patient

in the front of your stroke and if you are using your arms and your legs to maintain your balance like you can’t afford to do that and so that can be a huge thing and I think a lot of athletes just don’t yeah they just don’t realize that they can be a little bit more patient and sometimes they just have to like force it and and if you know something I do is like if they’re like I just can’t take 20 strokes a lap or whatever it is while you’ve kicked across the pool once probably in less than 20 strokes you probably took zero strokes so just do under 20 I don’t care how terrible it feels or how much it isn’t even swimming it’s just kind of like this kicking with occasional arm movements but just do it and then you can work yourself back into it and then you can start to figure it at least do something different and create a change and then you can work on creating a better change

yeah I really try and encourage the swimmers at the at the our clinics to say this is this is a chance to experiment this is a chance to try something different and if it feels exactly the same it’s going to look exactly the same so I want you to push yourself out of that comfort zone of what you think you should do with your technique and like this is a chance to just try something new and it’s okay if it feels awkward unusual that’s a sign that you’ve at least changed something and like as much as I’d love it to be the case where any change in the right direction feels better it’s not always the case it does yeah sometimes it is but quite often it is not and it’s just your body going hang on this is I’m not used to this and you know so they go okay let’s go back to what we used to because that feels good and so you’ve got to be able to just know that it’s okay to to feel a bit out of balance a bit awkward out of time right things when you’re making

those changes right and and and that’s you know and that’s one thing I love the the numbers aspect of it too is because it’s comforting because athletes I’m like this feels so terrible I’m like well you took two less strokes you went three seconds faster it’s like if you want to keep some in the other way you can I don’t really care and I’m like they’re like all right I’ll do it and and and the other thing that could be helpful too is you know especially with iPhones everywhere it’s like you can just video it and and like like you said if it feels exactly the same it’s going or it’s going to be exactly the same you know I’d almost say that it can feel totally different and it’s still probably going to be exactly the same like people don’t understand how different it’s going to feel for it to actually be different and like you know you have someone it’s like you know say they’re crossing over with their arm it’s like I want you to literally put your arm

like as if you were entering like at two o’clock like way out here and they’re like all right I’ll do it and you film it and they’re entering straight in front of their head or they’re entering straight in front of their shoulders and they’re going to be like well that was a waste of time and then you show them the video and they’re just like oh and so again like they don’t they tend not to

especially when you’re asking for a a big change and so that you know that’s another strategy that can be really helpful too artists from during the week who would normally breathe to the one side and they tried breathing to the to their right hand side which was the side they wouldn’t normally breathe to and they were three seconds faster per hundred and they’re like but it just doesn’t feel good and we’re looking at the footage and it’s like it looks way better than your other side yeah so it’s just so you’re faster yeah exactly it’s just so funny how that can be such a disconnect there feeling and what’s actually happening but as you said the numbers don’t lie and you need some of those numbers to be able to prove a point and and know right not it’s working yeah and especially athletes that are kind of training on their own it’s it’s so helpful to guide what’s happening because you’re not going to have someone providing you feedback but as long as

you know those numbers are doing more or less with what they should be and they’re moving in the right direction like you’re doing the right things regardless of what it feels like or regardless of how sure you are of of what you’re doing let’s say you’re coaching someone remotely what yeah would you have them do as a sign of progress like what sort of testing would you go okay 100 freestyle just to easy I want you I want your time I want your stroke count or would you have them do like a depending on what they’re training for like a 400 time time what are some of those tests that you think would be important and I know it’s going to change depending on what they’re training for but just interested in your perspective yeah and and and I think so it can be helpful one it can be helpful you just ask them what what they know they you know whatever baseline they have so that they can see progress because if you give them a new test you know that can be helpful too

and then you compare it for a lot of times they they have a sense of where they’re at so you know you know a lot of athletes are like well I like 1050s on 45 and I always hold whatever 36 and then you give them something or it’s like I will we’ll do that in a month or something like that and then and the other aspects but too is like I just you know a lot of training is going to be pretty similar and so they should be seeing progress you know not necessarily each and every day but you don’t always you know to me every practice is a test at some point like you’re going to have an awareness of how hard it was you’re going to have an awareness of your performances and so if your performances are getting better then obviously you’re improving and if your performances are similar but all of a sudden it feels way easier like that’s in progress too and so trying to educate leads to you know to be aware of these things can be really helpful because sometimes

like you know you do the first test and for whatever reason they’re just having the best day of their life and they just they do a really good job and then you test them again and you know that was the worst night of their life and it’s just terrible and like you just can run into these situations where you know it looks like there was no progress made just because of outside factors and so I try to place an emphasis on what’s changing you know day to day and any time you repeat a set of similar type like you’re kind of always comparing it and then that way you know you see the trend as opposed to like waiting for this test and I think regardless of you know whatever I’m coaching someone online or in person like that those are the things that I’m looking for is you know on the on the stuff that we’re kind of pretty feed in on is that stuff making progress in some way over time yeah yeah I like it that’s that’s a good one because yeah quite often people have a set

that they go to set they know the pace they’ve got the same right every time yeah yeah good way to really good way to do it Andrew for those that are listening what’s the best way to either grab a copy of your book or get in touch with you you know perhaps they’re a club or a squad or a coach and you know that they’d like to to work with someone like you to help with the skill development of their athletes how can they best get in touch sure my website is coachandrushief.com that’s probably the best way my well my email address is coachandrushief.gmail.com you can just use that and then you know on the website there’s a quick like

50 something minute course that you can do that’s it’s all how to make this stuff really practical you can get the book there and so that’s probably the best way to get in touch with me or you know to learn more about some of this stuff for sure awesome well thanks so much for being on the the podcast I really love talking about this stuff especially from someone who’s who’s started it as deeply as you have and and put the time into such a such a detailed book and I’ve it’s I haven’t read it from cover to cover I’ve looked at different parts where I’m like okay this is this is something I’d like to work on so you know going through the different different sections of it is is how I’ve I’ve gone through the book and I think it’s I think it’s such a valuable skill for coaches to develop because you know before the podcast we’re talking about how it can be it’s just easier to kind of write a good workout that’s easy you know everyone can write a workout

but it’s how can you apply the skills how can you think about that skill development or how can you have your athletes focusing on certain parts of their stroke so it’s not just you telling them what to do and I think if you can develop that as a coach or as an athlete because most the athletes listen to this like how can you be aware of where your stroke is at by using some of these numbers you know how can you use that to get better so it’s something that I really love to talk about so thanks for being on the podcast and down the track I’d love to get you back on we’ll dive deeply into one or two other topics and go about it from there sounds good thanks for having me appreciate it 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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Join us today with Tom Barton, fresh from the US with Australia’s A team! Tom is the founder of the Q Swim app and works as a physiotherapist at The Health Collab. He’s your go-to expert for keeping swimmers and triathletes moving smoothly and injury-free. Today, we’re focusing on how triathletes can step up their range of motion and overall movement. Don’t miss out!

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

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Tom Barton. And Tom, you’ve just come back from the US with the Australia A team. They were over there racing at the US Open. And you’ve also, you’ve been on the podcast before because you, you do a number of things you’ve found over the Q Swim app, which we’ll talk a little bit about. You’re a physiotherapist at the Health Colab and you do some work with the Queensland Academy of Sport as well. And you’ve got a lot of experience working with high level swimmers and also just general population as well as a physiotherapist. But you’ve really honed in on what swimmers, what swimmers and triathletes need to do in order to move well and to avoid injury. So I really want to dig into some of those topics today, because our audience are primarily triathletes and open water swimmers who are adults. Some of them don’t, most of them I’d say don’t have great range of motion and could

really benefit from moving better. So that’s what I’d like to dig into today. So first of all, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Brenton. Yeah, happy to be here and look forward to chatting. Tell me a little bit about your trip to the US. What was your role there? How did the team go? And was there anything that you learned while you’re over there, whether it’s from other coaches, seeing what other teams are doing, that kind of thing? Yeah, so we had two weeks over in sunny California, which was nice to, even though we’re escaping Brisbane winter, it’s a nice place to be this time of year. We took about 20 kids over the guys that just missed out basically on going to Japan for Worlds. So the guys that maybe were coming second or third or fourth, or just missing qual times. So they got an opportunity to travel to California and race against the Americans. Obviously, the top Americans were over in Japan. So there’s still some

really good competition. A lot of the colleges were represented there. So the big, big guys like Texas and Cal and Indiana are there. So there’s a lot of good tumors. And yeah, we did really well. I went on the same trip last year. And I think only about 20% of the guys managed to swim PBs from trials to the US. And then this year, I think it was 53% swim PBs. And a bunch of them, you know, swimming times that would have made the Australian team to go to Japan and also times that would have, you know, finaled at Japan, which was pretty exciting for them. And, you know, sort of validates the idea of going over because those are the guys that hopefully going to put pressure on the guys that went to Japan for Paris next year. Is there something that stood out to you and the coaches there as to why that that was the case? Such a big increase in PBs compared to last time? Yeah, last year was tough because COVID was still a

thing. So we had half of our team get knocked over by COVID sort of the week before, which was a bit rough. I think we made some adjustments through to Australia. So they took everyone over a day earlier, which was a really good thing. And they also we sort of had a bit more of a relaxed two or three days post-travel, which I think was a learning from last time. Last time we sort of got there, not that we swam hard in those first few days, but probably didn’t give the athletes enough time to acclimatize. So this time we got there, took it really easy, went for a swim, went down to the beach, had a little paddle in the ocean, which is always a nice way to recover from a 15 hour flight. Yeah, absolutely. And any any sort of stand out performances there or swims that you saw? Yeah, the one that comes to mind, well, the swims that come to mind from the same athlete, Max Giuliani, who’s just moved up from Tassie

to Miami. I was swimming with Richard’s guests in Miami. He swam lights out. I think he PBed his 100 and his 200 and probably PBed in the heats and the finals both with both of those as well. So I think his times would have qualified for finals or probably would have won our 200 freestyle trials. So yeah, right. I’ve met him before. He’s a lovely guy and he’s really focused on making that Paris team. Yeah, yeah, that’s exciting. It’s been such an exciting month of month of swimming with the world’s happening, the Australian team doing so well. And then just so many good consumers from different countries that are all building towards Paris. It’s probably the most excited since Sydney 2000 Olympics that I’ve been for Olympics coming up. There’s a lot of people to look out for. Yeah, absolutely. It was, you know, we were saying we were getting up at four o’clock in the morning to watch the finals before we would train or before we’d go off to

compete. So the coaches and the support staff and myself were living on coffees because we wanted to watch all the great racing. But it was really impressive to watch the guys in Japan and the guys that went to the States are going to be putting pressure on those guys. But it’s a good situation for swimming Australia or Australian swimming to be in at the moment. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now I’d love to dig into the first thing is the mobility testing that you do with the elite guys. You were saying before we jumped on this call that you think that the average person, the average swimmer triathlete can get a lot more out of the mobility testing than the elite swimmers because they might have one percent improvements, one percent changes to make. Whereas for general public, it’s like it could be 20 percent, could be 30 percent in terms of if you can improve your range of motion, you can move better, you can get into positions easier, and then you can

swim with better techniques. So I’d love to hear your side of what’s what are some of those tests, what are you looking at, and then perhaps what would be two or three of those key ones that you think for the general person, they could really see some good improvements with their swimming if they improved on them. Yeah, I think the key thing for the triathlete population is they have to run, swim and cycle, whereas our swimmers just have to swim, so they just, our swimmers get the chance to practice being in those long positions all the time. And I think if you were going to try to design a couple of adjunct sports that would make swimming hard, cycling and running would be those two, like you’re adding a lot of flexion, a lot of dorsiflexion through the ankles, thoracic flexion, you know, a lot of positional stuff that is the exact opposite of what you want to do with swimming. So triathletes are in a position where they actually have to

unwind that stuff in order to get into positions, in order to swim fast, and in order to sort of mitigate any of those resistance forces that you’re going to experience in the water. And it’s not just, it’s not just recreational triathletes. I had recently a elite triathlete who was struggling with her swimming. Her coach David Lush is out at Morton Bay, sent me some video and referred her across to me. And yeah, we found some really simple things that enable her now to get into better positions. So her recovery is easier. She can get into a high catch position a whole lot easier. And within the clinic, we sort of have an emphasis on trying to show people how to do that themselves. So in that hour session that I have with people initially, I try to do as little hands-on as possible to see if they can create the change themselves. So whether it’s through exercise or self-mobilization and then we retest. And I think it’s

really empowering if you can come and see me, we do a test. It looks terrible. And then within 20 minutes if you’re doing your own stuff, you can make that look amazing, right? And then I can add the hands-on stuff and make it look a little bit easier and make it get to a slightly better position. But if you can do those big changes yourself, then every time you get to the pool before you jump in the water, you can make those changes and swim faster and swim more technically proficient. And what was that test that you were referring to there? So the big two in terms of that overhead position, we look at just a combined elevation test. So lying on your belly, nose touching the floor, thumbs locked together, elbows straight and you’re lifting your arms up like a stream line. So looking at how high the hands get above the horizontal. For a pool swimmer that’s more important because you’re streamlining a whole lot more. For a

open water swimmer that’s not as important. It’s still important because it does contribute to your efficiency through the water. But I think probably the more important one is in our swim screen it used to be called abduction in internal rotation. So we’d now just called a high elbow test. So we’d pop our thumbs at the front of our shoulder joint and we’d look to elevate our elbows or float our elbows up as high as they go. And with that we’d measure the angle of the the humerus, the arm bone relative to the vertical. And yeah that’s an indicator of how easily they can get into a nice high elbow big armpit catch position to swim fast. And so those that are listening to their the podcast and not watching on YouTube. So you got your thumb touching your shoulder and kind of making a chicken wing I guess with it and then lifting up as high as you can with the with the elbow with the arm. The few common mistakes that we see with that

testing is people sort of poke their chin out as they do that and they also try to keep their elbows too much in this sagittal plane. So too much in a just a perfectly lateral plane. Whereas more functionally for swimming the shoulders on the shoulder blades particularly need to move along the ribcage. So they need to slide a little bit forward as the elbows come up which is what you would see in the water. And it’s just a bit of a hangover both from the physio profession but just generally like in moving in these particular like sagittal frontal planes that don’t actually exist. When we swim we move in spiral sort of movements rather than moving in boxy sort of parallel perpendicular lines. So it’s okay to let that shoulder come off that that plane basically. It’s the elbow. Yeah it’s hugely important you know when I first graduated physio a hundred years ago it was like you’ve got a shoulders have to be kept it back and down all the time

thankfully like that research has been debunked it’s based off pretty poor evidence which some of our some of our bigger moves around like keeping your back straight when you’re deadlift and that sort of stuff is also a bit questionable when it comes to digging into that research. But functionally you can’t be strong and powerful in an overhead position if you don’t allow your shoulder blade to contribute to that movement. So rather than your shoulder blade staying back and down all the time it’s actually the opposite you really want to allow your shoulder blade to slide and we talk about slide and glide or float your shoulder blade as high as you can to allow your hand to be in that easy position as quickly as possible. Yeah that’s good because I I quite often get the question from some of these you know when they’re they’re reaching forwards they ask you do I need to keep my shoulder down and back as I’m reaching it’s like yeah no

you’re going to be 10 15 centimetres shorter with it and you’re just not going to be able to probably can’t rotate very well with it either and you’re not going to get any sort of you know power like you’re not going to have strength through there because you just need to let that shoulder come forward so I like the description of letting it float you say float or float up or float forwards there. Yeah so I think I stole that one what is so Dave like I’ve been really lucky over the my sort of 10 15 years in high performance sport to to work with some amazing coaches here in Australia but also spent some time on deck overseas so I know like David Marsh great coach over in the US he talks about creating a big armpit as one of the big cues for his swimmers and Stefan Widmar who sort of worked within Singapore and also in Queensland he talks about like sliding the scapula that sort of sensation and to me it just makes

perfect sense it positions the the scapula and the the humerus in a really a nice strong position rather than sort of allowing those two pieces to relatively slide away from one another so we want to allow that and it’s a natural movement shoulders backing down as a physio construct from you know the 80s or the 90s that needs to be updated.

Yeah that’s a really good ways to describe it and even just when I think of my own swimming if I’m thinking of like yeah I think like open underarm or open armpit and even similarly over the top in your recovery if you’re closed with it and you’re really sort of jammed up yeah you don’t get much momentum over the top of the water and it’s harder to carry carry the arm over the top so that’s a great way to describe it so you mentioned those two tests you had the combined elevation test and the high elbow test yeah what are some ways that someone can go about improving on those this episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor form smart swim goggles they’re more than a pair of goggles meet the world’s most powerful swim platform see yourself improve with form smart swim goggles including a free one-year membership when you purchase your goggles for only 249 us dollars they’ve currently changed up their offer

where you can now get the goggles and you have one year membership included for free and if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards it’s only 15 us dollars a month where you get access to their workouts training plans and custom workout builder but you’ll always have access to the real-time data in the goggles so you never lose access to that my favorite thing about the form goggles is having the instant feedback of what times you’re doing what stroke rate you’re doing and also the ability to see what your heart rate is because never before have we been able to have these immediate feedback heads up display where it’s actually telling you what your intervals are so when I wear the goggles in training I like that I know my split for the first 50 and the 100 and the 150 so every single lap I’m getting that feedback on what my pace is and I find it’s such an important tool for being able to not only have different gears where you

can switch between the different speeds that you want to swim but it helps you develop those gears and it helps you intuitively know how fast you need to go before you’re going to blow up or before you’re going to go a little bit too hard so it helps you just get really good at judging your pace for when you do go to a race and even if you’re not wearing the goggles in a race it’s that intuition and that ability to develop your pacing that these goggles can really help with to get your pair of form goggles and save 15% off use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout and that will get you 15% off your pair of goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout there’s a couple of different ways so previously we’d say hey maybe you need to in order to improve those you look at the muscles around there so things like pecs and lats that might

feel like they’re tight and restricting that movement so if i look back at my career if i look back 10 years ago i would have said pec stretch in the doorway and a lat stretch like a kneeling lat stretch which i think are fine like they will work but the things that the thing that’s going to give you more bang for buck is actually doing some active strength work working in the other direction so if the things that are restricting your combined elevation or your high elbow test are tight pecs and tight lats we want to actually and it sounds very counter but you want to strengthen your upper traps and your serratus in order to allow that slide movement and every time you do do that slide movement the pecs and lats naturally stretch with that so you’re getting more bang for buck that you’re getting strength of the the antagonist muscle the opposite muscle which enables the other muscle to stretch out and unless you always think now like

unless you go ahead and strengthen that muscle group you’ll be stuck on the hamster wheel of stretching and triggering and stretching and triggering for the rest of your life whereas if you strengthen to actively be able to control your ability to get into that position you start to create a bit more balance in your in your programming and if if you look at swimming swimming is a pulling dominated sport you pull against resistance against the water and you recovery against fresh air so if you if you don’t do stuff to balance that out you get very strong in pulling and very relatively weak in the pressing or the the positioning movement to that overhead catch

yeah I had probably 12 months ago was having a lot of issues with my lower back and it just turned out was so a lot of it was from just sitting and that sort of thing but I was very weak through my lower back and over the last 12 months and I’ve done a lot of strengthening work and I looked at my I go to a sort of local gym here that has some really good exercises to help strengthen your your back and these other sort of supporting muscles and I’ve done I think 130 gym sessions in the last 12 months or so and my back and I look at the weight that I can now move in this exercise and it’s come up probably double to what it was 12 months ago and I’ve had very very few issues with my lower back now and it’s before that I was I was stretching I was trying to stretch at night and that can certainly help but I think the strengthening side of it is just so much more effective and is that something that you’ve changed over the last couple of

years or when is that way of approaching things sort of come in yeah it’s I think the framework I look at it it’s like you’re creating a more robust body so stretching is great but I would I now look at stretching particularly like that passive stretching and again this is coming from someone who’s a a yoga teacher so I love that movement space but stretching is is really nice to feel good it’s a nice sensation it down regulates your nervous system so it’s good for recovery but if you want to change things you want to always come back to how the nervous system is interpreting what’s going on for the body and creating more flexibility doesn’t create safety for our nervous system I think one of the things our nervous system really wants as a primary goal is to know that you’re safe in a position you’re safe in a position you can relax in a position if you can move safely move in and out of the position then your body is more likely

to stay soft and relaxed and easy with movement whereas conversely if you’re pushing into positions that you know right at the outside of your capability or right at the limit of your capability that starts to become a threat to your nervous system and you know anytime you’re in a threatening space to your nervous system you know you get tight you get tense you start to hold your breath all these things that we definitely don’t want to do with swimming so I try to reframe things now and this for me I was exposed to a lot of like neurology sports neurology stuff five or six years ago now which was a really big reframing for me and it’s basically like if I can strengthen and progressively strengthen from a neutral position into those bigger and more open positions and then strengthen in those positions under fatigue and then ideally add rhythm and tempo and timing to that that’s really my framework for making sure both just general plot

but swimmers and athletes feel strong and safe in the environment that they’re trying to execute a race in

yeah that’s it makes so much sense doesn’t it where you get yourself into a position and you don’t have the strength to probably hold it and the nervous system kind of or the body can kind of freak out and just tighten up and and not want you to go through that that movement again so what do you normally prescribe for people like when should they be doing these types of exercises how often that kind of thing how can people best work it into their their normal routine yeah there’s I guess we can break that down into two different areas so prior to swimming so your pre swim routine and then general strengthening away from the water so you want to do something before you swim to improve your position so you swim faster right and you can technically execute better so but at the same time you don’t want to fatigue yourself so the things that we’d like to see for our athletic population or whoever’s going to the pool is if you know that

things like your combined elevation or your high elbow position or hips or ankles whatever is tight what we try to encourage is you want to get to the pool even if you’ve got two minutes you just quickly test to see how that position is feeling because if it’s feeling terrible out of the water it’s not going to magically change in the water and you’re going to create conversations in the water to try to make that feel better so if we can test it out of the water particularly if you’re thinking say that high elbow test then I would jump straight into if you do have a little weight I try to get people to have a two or three kilo weight with them these days or on pull deck ideally you’ve got some resistance but just doing some single arm overhead press work where you’re really encouraging that really big armpit so almost like your deltoid it’s going to brush next to your ear really good example if you want to watch someone swim perfectly

like underwaters of Cameron McAvoy right he and everyone’s talking about what he’s doing now but here’s a technician like back in 2016 he did it perfectly he’s back doing it perfectly now and part of that is he’s getting the position spot on every time and he’s built endurance and capacity to create power in those positions so we want to think about if I can get into that position and I can reach I’m actively strengthening that position and at the same time I’m creating a little bit of length through pecs and lats I would probably only do 10 or 15 reps of that pre swim obviously time is precious but also you don’t want to get fatigued and then when you get to the gym don’t just go in and do chin-ups or bench press you need to do some overhead pressing people are scared of overhead pressing but again if you’re scared of overhead pressing and you want to be an overhead athlete there’s an incongruence there that needs to be addressed and from a coaching

perspective from if you’re doing video analysis of someone stroking you and you see that they can’t get into those positions one of the things that we want to do is actually take them out of the water and demonstrate that they can get into the position and then create a bit of strength and robustness in that range yeah and the overhead pressing so obviously there’s a number of different ways to do it would you often start with say light dumbbells to begin with or the overhead press machine do you have a preference? yeah big preference for dumbbells to allow a little bit more freedom of movement but also if you are particularly stiff you don’t want to go into a double-handed like a barbell movement because that this allows the option for your thoracic spine to get a bit of lateral flexion a bit of rotation a bit of extension so definitely I generally would go yeah two or three kilos pressing as high as you can really reaching for the ceiling

or the sky when you’re pressing and the thought process with that is you know you want to make sure that you’re creating as much length or more than enough length for out of the water so when you go into the water it feels better and it should feel noticeably better to jump in and swim straight away that’s the idea so we want that immediacy of oh yeah actually I feel better getting into those positions and the beauty of that position and reaching overhead and creating more length through your chest and through your lats is that that also helps your thoracic rotation so your recovery becomes easier it takes pressure off your neck and you know they’re the they’re the problems we see day in day out in the clinic of like when I work primarily with swimmers is neck and shoulder problems and are you are thinking alternating arms or both arms at the same time alternating arms yeah alternating arms and when you’re are they starting with the I don’t know the

the technical term here but your hands this way your hands away from you where do you want to finish is it having that the hands sort of turned in like what’s what’s your preference I like to take away as many rules around that as possible so a lot of people in the clinic when they pick up the dumbbells and I’m asking them to do it overhead press they’ll they’ll sort of naturally come out into this abducted position like a little bit of a bodybuilder sort of position and they’ll press and they’ll naturally if I didn’t give give them any instruction they’ll press out in that that plane and they won’t press very high right that is just the leftover from bodybuilding like if you that’s that’s not how we’re designed to move out of we’re designed to move you know you think about our life we exist in front of us a little bit out to the side but we’re not existing out in this 90 degree to the side plane and that position isn’t very functional for swimming either

right so we want to come into a position that feels comfortable so generally I’d just say dumbbells resting on the shoulders hands in like a relatively neutral grip or whatever feels comfy and then as you press I like to again bring my awareness back to my shoulder weight and suggest that the hand is going along for the ride the shoulder is the driver and the hand is going along for the ride to get into that overhead position and when I did that years ago I was like oh that feels easier and my ability to overhead press 10 kilos started to feel like I was pressing six kilos so my ability that force that power generation it feels easier and it takes the pressure off I think cognitively it’s a nice nice little change up for our brain as well

and would you normally have them sitting down or standing standing yeah standing

again I think seated pressing just doesn’t make much sense to me like it’s okay to do it like I’m not saying you should never do it but if we look at how our bodies are designed to move sitting and pressing overhead doesn’t make sense whereas standing and pressing if I’m trying to reach to put something in the cupboard I want to stand and reach it doesn’t make sense to to sit down and try to reach yeah yeah it’s similar to a lot of the drills that we do in our clinics and when I’m coaching I want them to replicate the stroke as much as as possible so yeah making sure they’re in similar positions in terms of their their rotation on the side the depth of the arm it’s like we want to try and make it as close as we can to swimming so yeah that makes makes a lot of sense and another one that I see quite a bit of is that triathletes are typically very tight through their hip flexors and sometimes struggled to get this horizontal position in the

water because they’ve got a lot of you know bend through their waist some of that’s just through that that tightness and I think some of it’s also just not not knowing how to hold their body in the water to have that little bit of activation through their their glutes and their hamstrings to stay to stay straight they just kind of let that go and so they’ve got this disconnect from the top half to the the bottom half is there anything around that that you could suggest for them yeah a really simple thing to

impact that is doing some like some active lunges so I think most people know like a standard kneeling hip flexor stretch or a couch stretch like they’re they’re nice sort of passive stretches that feel good and will will create that change but again if you’re looking to create some strength in that range of motion then I’d suggest in standing take a big step back so really like maximize the size of the step backwards stand tall so you got your head rib cage and pelvis sort of stacked on top of one another and then just think of if you’re stuck between two panes of glass and you’re just lowering that knee down towards the floor you should feel like pretty strong stretch through that back quadricep hip flexor area and then you come back up reset do the same on the other side literally even like five or six of those is enough on each side to feel like those hips are opening up and again like clinically we do what’s called a Thomas test

which is a hip flexor test sitting on the edge of the bed and having a look at that shape and then if I get people to do half a dozen of those exercises and retest quite often it’s made five or 10 degrees worth of change in you know literally 35 40 seconds so again if you’re looking for bang for buck and you’re looking for looking at an athlete that’s spending time on a bike and particularly spending on time on a bike immediately prior to swimming then doing something like that is yeah it’s really crucial to help improve that that hip range if that allows that that tightness through the front of the hips to be sorted out then then just doing a little supine bridge so lying on your back maybe even hugging one knee to your chest so you’ve got just a single leg glute bridge and then just backing that up by trying to create that hip extension from you know you’re probably working from 30 degrees of hip flexion up towards neutral

or ideally a little bit past neutral so you’re just like waking up those glutes in that position can be really nice as well yeah so you’re saying just before something you can really have some significant improvements in your range of motion by doing these activation exercises and then obviously long term we want to be doing some sort of strengthening outside of that but that pre-activation you can really change the way that you swim by doing just a little bit a couple minutes really of some of the key exercises yeah and it’s it’s hard because people’s time is precious and particularly I know a lot of tricequats get in the water at five o’clock which is just wild but early in the belly I’m sure there’s some people getting it for 30 but yeah but the two to three minutes that you spend addressing those positional faults right so we call them swim-specific shapes if you can address those shapes that will pay dividend for every single stroke

that you take in that session right so it’s improving your efficiency and remembering like it’s it’s very different to running or cycling now you’re moving through a really dense medium so your resistance or your relative positioning in the water is magnified so if you’re off a little bit if your hip flex is a tight or your ankles are tight it’s just creating drag which puts more pressure on your neck put more puts more pressure on your shoulders so we need to look at improving minimizing your resistance to drag and like it like we said from the outset it’s the the triathletes and the recreational swimmers that probably stand to benefit more than the elite guys it’s taken us a while to get through to the elite guys but the biggest thing that I’ve found is if they test some of those positions if they exercise to do something about it before they swim they retest and they feel like it’s a little bit better and then they jump in the water

and they feel like dialed in straight away they’re connected they’re floating through the water nicely then they’ve clicked to the fact that what they did on land is helping them in the water and then I don’t have to you know beg and plead for them to to do the exercises before they swim now yeah it makes a lot of sense it gives them that ownership of it but just a really clear way of saying this is actually making a difference for you what you’re doing here is not going to to waste so yeah get the buy-in to increase a lot which yeah which makes a big difference so that’s yeah that’s some simple really simple things that people can do pre-training and you don’t need much equipment that will make a big big difference going forwards for if you if anyone wants to either get in contact with you you’re based up in in Queensland what’s the best way for them to to do that and how do you work with people I guess in in physiotherapist capacity

but you’ve also got the Q swim map can you talk a bit about that for those that aren’t in Queensland or have access to face to face yeah sure I guess that’s probably the the reason that I’ve made the Q swim map a few years ago was it was originally because of the education stuff I was doing with swimming Queensland going out to you know Cairns and McLean and chatting to athletes and coaches there but I wanted to leave them with something rather than just a sheet of paper with a few exercises on it so we like along with swimming Queensland sort of created the Q swim map to give the information that we’ve talked about today to give the testing protocols and an interactive testing format that swimmers can use to have a look at their body positions their swim specific shapes and how that ideally should look so we split screen that with Mitch Larkin who can move very well in all those shapes and then we give you some exercise interventions

stage it through different levels and then also give you a bunch of different educational resources in order to help you understand why we’re doing these particular things and some of the things I’ve talked about today it’s literally the idea is we I don’t want to see people in five years time like that are coming into the elite system that have been injured that are doing the wrong things we’re sort of a bit selfish I’d really love to see these elite guys come in and we’re working on these tiny little things or sometimes we’re actually working on dealing with injuries that they’ve had for five or six or seven years that have been probably didn’t need to be there for that long they probably should have been addressed differently and it’s purely because swimming a lot of people don’t get exposed to the level of swimming athletes that I have like I’ve been working with swimmers for 10 or 12 years at the elite level

and 50 to 60 percent of my week is either elite swimmers or recreational swimmers so it’s I’ve been really lucky to to have that amount of exposure and then also to learn from these great coaches and physios that have gone before me and it’s just a matter of trying to sort of democratize that information so everyone has access to it if people are in Brisbane I know you come up and do clinics in Brissio treat a couple of your clients and it’s been awesome to actually like I was going to mention to you like I had this athlete that I wanted to have a look she’s had neck pain for a long time done the screening giving her exercises but the contribution of having a look at the swim video and you being able to pick up or head position in the water that’s then taken her pain away which then makes the things that I’m doing more effective so when I can work with someone like yourself or a coach that can provide some feedback as to how the athlete swims or some video

that’s always hugely effective for me and it’s then closing that loop of what they’re doing in the water what they’re doing in their daily environment and then potentially what they’re doing in the gym and if we can sort of close that loop for all of the athletes I think we can make some good changes Yeah that’s great to hear and it quite often when someone comes to me at a clinic and they said I’ve got this issue with my shoulder or this issue with my neck unless it’s from something outside of swimming like the technique that kind of stands out it’s like yeah it’s pretty obvious why that’s happening if you’re spending an hour and a half like this with your head up, your chin up and it’s like yeah imagine walking around like that for an hour and a half it’s just there’s not comfortable and then having someone like you who can give them some exercises to build that strength and through that range of motion they’re going to set themselves up

for a long career in swimming that hopefully that’ll get injured because they’re doing all the right things so it’s a really good combination and the things I often talk about in terms of getting better with swimming it’s techniques the big one that we like to focus on then you’ve got you’ve got the fitness element as well you’ve got to be doing the work but then you’ve also got to be able to move in the right positions and you can’t get into the right you can’t do the right technique if you can’t get into those positions or if you’re in the outer limits of your range of motion so those couple of things I think it’s at the real core of improving your swimming so I think that’s where this stuff comes in it can make a big difference once people start to do it yeah and I think for our elite guys like one of the things I’m trying to get across to them is it’s and I think everyone agrees with it when they think about it but it’s not how fast your swim

it’s how how slow how quickly you slow down relative to the person next year so you look at someone like Cam or Poppovicci last year like it looks like he’s accelerating from away from everyone else but he’s just slowing down so much slower than everyone else everyone else is increasing their resistance increasing their drag and you know that curve it might not be exponential but it really stacks on really quickly if you can manage your position for longer swimming becomes a whole lot easier and then you get to be faster and you don’t have to come and see physios like me because you won’t be injured yeah which is always a a good thing but it’s nice to have you there just just in case

so if you’d like to grab their cues from out you can find it in the app store we’ll put the links in our show notes as well so I really appreciate you coming on that’s so just really I love that the simple stuff the actionable stuff that people can can do to you know to improve their their swimming and improve their range of motion because this stuff it’s so common with what I see when I’m working with people so that’s given me a lot of a lot of ideas and a lot of things that I can share with with our athletes and yeah I really appreciate you sharing that on the podcast pleasure glad to glad to be on and enjoy the Maldives yeah we’ll do that’s not going to be too hard to do so I appreciate that and I know you’ve got a surf trip coming up as well so enjoy that nice warm weather because I’m sitting here with two blankets on I’m in Melbourne and it is it is cold so warm weather I can’t wait yeah awesome good stuff thanks so much see you man

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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I’m excited to introduce our guest today, the legendary triathlete Craig Alexander. He’s a three-time world Ironman champion and a two-time Ironman 70.3 world champion. Craig shares insights on resilience, perseverance, and the importance of a supportive community. He also talks about how visualization helps in triathlon training and racing, along with a personal mantra that guided him throughout his career. Plus, he provides valuable advice for young triathletes to help them reach their full potential. 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.

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 the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is three-time World Ironman champion and two-time Ironman 70.3 world champion, Craig Agil-Zander. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, Brenton. How are you? Thanks for having me on. Thanks for being on the podcast. I mean, I’ve seen your name. I’ve seen you about for the last decade, plus that I’ve followed triathlon. And you’ve been an athlete for a very long time and also a coach for a long time, too. And you just got back from the U.S. from a training camp over there. And we’re talking, I’ll fair about your somewhat forced or encouraged retirement due to the pandemic. You were 46 years of age in 2019 and you’re still competing and racing at the professional level, which is incredible.

And you’re still looking to keep going, but that was sort of forced to stop due to the pandemic. What do you want to talk a bit about that and how that all came about and where you were physically and racing-wise in 2019? Yeah, well, I mean, I was in my mid-40s. I was still very competitive, racing 70.3 races on half Ironmans and also Olympic Distance. I stepped back from the Ironman racing almost 10 years ago now. So for a number of reasons, I just wanted to be able to spend more time. I had young children, so I thought I could spend more time with them. You know, I’d scratched the Ironman itch, I guess, is one way of putting it. It was my goal and my dream to race in Hawaii and I’d fulfilled that dream. And I was getting to the point in life where other opportunities were coming along. But I still wasn’t yet finished with the racing. You know, I still was a competitive person. I still am, I think to this day.

I loved challenging myself physically and training each day. I loved setting some racing goals each season. So, you know, when I stepped back from the Ironman racing, I didn’t feel there’s any need to stop racing completely. I still had a real passion for racing at the highest level and racing the best athletes. So, you know, in 2019, my season looked like a lot of those previous seasons looked, which was not too much racing. I’d usually picked five or six races each year that fit in with our family schedule. Races that I knew would have a really competitive field and just races that I wanted to do. I guess one of the benefits of being in a sport and being a pro athlete for 27 years is you have such a huge foundation of fitness. Your aerobic base is enormous. So, I was able, you know, just 15 or 20 really targeted training hours per week to still be competitive. And I was just enjoying it more than ever, to be honest.

That’s the reason I was still doing it. I didn’t really feel I had anything else to prove. I wasn’t, you know, the sole purpose that I kept racing deep into my 40s was just the love of it. So, I didn’t see any real reason to stop. But as you mentioned, when the pandemic hit, it sort of forced a reset upon the whole world. And a lot of things shut down, not just endurance sports, but our events shut down overnight. There was no certainty when they were gonna come back. You know, we went into a period of lockdown here in Sydney. Like, I know a lot of places around the world did we were homeschooling the kids. And I kept training each day just for my own mental health, I think. And just because it was part of my routine, it’d been part of my daily routine for nearly three decades. I didn’t see any real reason to change that. I just, you know, a morning session adds a lot to my day. I really loved getting up in the morning

and getting something done before breakfast. So, I tried to keep that going through the pandemic. But yeah, all the racing aspirations sort of took a back seat at that point. And, you know, at some stage, I was going, I was gonna have to evaluate what I was doing year to year anyway on me. I know Cameron Brown still raced into his 50s. It wasn’t like I had set myself any goals along those lines or anything. I just, as I said, it was a year to year proposition with me, I still loved it. The pandemic forced me to sort of evaluate the things I was doing and kept up with the training, but the racing sort of just fell by the by. You mentioned that we’re doing it for the love of it. If you think back to your early career, were there different motivations there compared to later in your career? Not really, you know, I think the real driving force behind all the habits that I developed and the things that I achieved was just a simple desire or a simple commitment

to get the most out of myself as an athlete. That’s how it really started for me. I guess that came off the back of not having been an endurance athlete as a kid. I played other sports, mainly soccer. I played soccer until I was 20. And that was my main sport. My first sporting dream was to be a professional footballer. And I just, for one reason or another, didn’t fulfill that dream. And usually when you don’t fulfill a sporting dream, it’s, there can be a lot of reasons. The main one is that you weren’t good enough on the days that you needed to be. And I think what I took out of my early soccer career and my early sporting life was that you needed to be resilient. You know, I saw a lot of soccer players who went on to great things just because they kept hanging in there when the going got tough. And, you know, I think going into my triathlon career, that was the really the only sort of idea I had in my head was just to be a little more resilient

than I’d been as a soccer player. So the motivation was just to get the most out of myself and hanging there when the going got tough, which it does, as you know, in sport it does. And I think when we’re young, as athletes, when we’re younger, we look to the people who are, you know, at the forefront of our sport and other sports, these great champions, male and female, and we just think that they’ve always been that way, that they’ve always been either naturally gifted or being winning races, being the first picked in every team. And when you get older and a little more perspective and you dig a little deep, you see that every sporting journey, it’s a big part of success is resilience and just hanging in there. So for me, the only motivation coming into triathlon was just get the most out of myself every day as an athlete and just hanging in there and be resilient. I think obviously as we get older and we change,

as people, motivation can change. Certainly later in my career, when I was married and had kids, I was very motivated by what my family had sacrificed for me to be able to do what I love to do every day. So I drew on that pretty much daily, the sacrifices. My wife had put her career on hold so that we could relocate to the Northern Hemisphere for six months of the year. My oldest daughter was being homeschooled at the time, particularly later in my Ironman career when we were based in Boulder, Colorado. And that was tough for her. She was very social. So being out of school, out of that sort of social setting was hard for her. So I saw the sacrifices that my family made for me. So it was easy for me really to push through every day when the training got hard or when things got tough. And on race day as well, I drew on those memories and those thoughts to keep me on task and to push on and to push through. So yeah, I definitely think as I got older as an athlete

and more mature, my motivations became more centered around the family, but throughout my whole career, just a simple driving force I had was just to get the most out of myself. I think that’s one of the greatest drivers of all because that’s very much driven from within and you haven’t got external forces trying to motivate you or encourage you. If it comes from within, you can keep it going for a long time, which you’ve proved. And I think that’s where it really needs to come from. You’re talking about how you’ve got to be resilient, you’ve got to persist with things. And I think that’s what a good coach can see in other people. And when I think of some of the athletes that I’ve coached or when I’ve been or the coaches that I’ve had, they can see one, two, three, five years ahead and they can see the potential that you’ve got. And a lot of times the athlete can’t see that in themselves because maybe they don’t have the experience

where they can go or they haven’t had enough exposure to other people who have been like them who have gone on to great things. And I think that’s what a good coach can do is they can show that pathway and they can show that you might be right where you need to be right now in order to achieve that thing that you wanna do in five years and it’s possible, you know, we’ve seen it and I can see you doing that. You’ve obviously made that transition or that very slow transition from purely athlete to coach and working with others. What’s that transition been like for you to step onto the other side of things and be the one sort of sharing your knowledge and your wisdom and trying to I guess inspire others or show them what potential they have? Yeah, it’s an interesting transition because I think you’re a hundred percent right. Sometimes as an athlete, you can’t see the forest for the trees. You’re so immersed in right now what you’re doing.

This session, this next main set and the things that you have to check off your list. Whereas the coach and the people around you often are mindful of that but also how it works in with the bigger picture. So, and by definition, I think a lot of the great athletes can really immerse themselves in what they’re doing at that moment and get the most out of themselves. You know, I was coaching before the pandemic and now a lot of our coaching business side, I travel to the training camps, we run and yeah, it’s an interesting transition because I think you’re right, you can see different qualities in different athletes. And I think what a really good coach is, is someone who brings a lot to the table. Not only knows the sport well and the things you need to do to improve over time and also right now, what’s the most urgent thing that we need to focus on as an athlete to improve but they’re great communicators, they get to,

they’re also sort of amateur psychologists, they get to know their athletes very well. What lights each person’s fire is a little bit different. How you communicate with different people is a little bit different. It’s a huge learning curve. I think overseeing your own career and I was self-coached for a large part of my own career only because when I started in the sport of triathlon, it was a completely different landscape to now. There’s a lot more coaches around now and it’s an Olympic sport now so there’s different pathway programs and access to coaching. It wasn’t sort of the case when I started. So it was quite hard to get coaching. So I think one of the great evolutions of our sport has been just the influx of knowledge and great coaches into the sport and the development of great coaches because I think that knowledge base obviously infiltrates down into the athletes and the end result is just a higher level

of performance for the athletes. So I think it’s a tough transition. I just think because you’ve won a race or two, it doesn’t automatically call for you to be a great coach. There’s so much more that goes into it. And my role in our coaching business now, I don’t work with too many athletes day to day. I work with a lot of our coaches and I’m at a lot of the camps and training experiences. So when we do those, they’re usually three, five or seven day experiences that we have with athletes in different parts of the world and so you’re with the athletes 24 seven, living with them, training together, sharing knowledge. So it’s an interesting transition. I think part of me wishes that I had have had a coach earlier in my career because you just see the benefits they bring to the table. And I’m not the sort of person who looks back and has regrets about I should have done this or I should have done that. I think one thing I can say about my career

is I was never scared to ask for help. And I got in the help that I could. I knew my areas of strength but also my weak points and I always sought to get help across the board with all performance areas. So yeah, it’s not like I sit around and have regrets about I should have done this or I should have done that. But I do see the benefits of just having great coaches and mentors involved with athletes and particularly young athletes. You know, I think coaches and mentors bring so much to the table. And did you have a particular mantra or piece of advice that you’d gotten from a coach or you’d come across that you kept close to your heart during your career? Is there something that’s been this thread throughout your career that you’ve used as your philosophy or your way of approaching things as you’ve gone through this triathlon journey? Yeah, there’s been a few things. So one piece of advice I got and I got up early in my Ironman career.

Actually, I just stepped up in distance to do Ironman for the first time and it was just a casual conversation. I was having with the lady called Paul and Yubi Fraser who won Hawaii eight times. What was one of the all-time great triathletes and was still working in and around triathlon in media and doing other things. She just said to me, something she used to ask herself in training every day and also multiple times throughout all her races is, what can I do right now? What can I do right now to improve my situation? I think that’s a good mantra because sometimes we get overwhelmed with the gravity of the task at hand or the length of the race for about one to take off where we arrived at the pool and we got a set of 2,400s to do. The enormity of it can be overwhelming. So it’s good to break it down and it’s a little bite-sized pieces. I always found that asking that question, what can I do right now? What’s my immediate focus

in the next 30 seconds, the next 60 seconds, the next five minutes? What are the things I really need to be focusing on? So that’s something that helped me a lot and I had a couple of really old-school swim coaches, both Olympians had a huge impact on my career and my life. And one used to say, there’s no time like the present. If you’re thinking about changing your swim stroke or changing your training or there’s no time like the present, why put off doing things that we can start working on right now? And another one used to say, don’t quit before the magic happens. It’s a long journey. Nobody becomes a world champion overnight and there’s gonna be, I mean, I guess it’s an analogy I like, an endurance spawning career. It’s like investing in the stock market. There’s gonna be peaks and troughs. You’ve gotta be good enough and lucky enough to be able to ride the waves when they come along them. But you’ve also gotta be robust enough,

and durable enough to ride out the storms when they come along. So you’re still around when the next wave comes. So you just have to hang in there. This coach used to always say to me, when things get really, really difficult, that’s usually when you’re on the cusp of something really special. Either a little leveling up in performance or a performance breakthrough. So yeah, you can’t quit before the magic happens. You gotta hang in there. So I think they’re good mentors to have. I just think a lot of the things we do in life, whether it’s education, academics, sport, business, whatever, they’re long journeys. You don’t send to the great heights overnight. I mean, the great proponents in all those arenas will tell us that. So I think by virtue of the fact it’s a long journey, you just understand there’s gonna be a lot of low points. So you gotta be able to ride them out. One great lesson I also learned is to surround yourself with good people.

Have the best people around you. And that starts at home. It starts at home with your family. And your partner’s husbands, wives, parents. You gotta have great people around you. And that extends in sport to your training partners, your coaches. So having people around you to share the journey when it’s great, but also to help you take some of the lumps when it’s not so great, I think is a good lesson. Yeah, one of the things you mentioned there was just about what can I do in this moment? And one thing I got sort of came across a couple of years ago, it’s about being in the moment where nothing in your past exists, nothing in the future exists. It’s just this moment right now that we’ve actually got. And if you can make the most of that, whether that’s through having that presence there, where you’re not distracted by your phone, you’re not thinking about the future, where you’re just really in the present moment,

that’s where you actually have the power because nothing outside of that exists. Now, I think there’s a certain truth to that. Obviously we wanna be planning for the future and making good decisions for our future, but the only thing you can do right now is what’s in the moment. And I think that applies particularly in training or if you’ve gotta make a split decision in a race as well, it’s like, well, don’t worry, what’s gonna happen 10K down the road on the run? It’s like, well, what can you do right now? Have there been any split decision moments in a race that come to mind where you’ve had to make a certain choice that’s played out in a certain way in a race? Is there any sort of moments throughout important races in your career where you’ve had that split decision or anything like that that comes to mind? Yeah, there’s been a few. I mean, races, I guess, every race is different, but there’s always moments and opportunities in each race

where you have to make decisions. And I know in 2010 in Kona on the bike course, I made a decision not to go with a break just because I thought at that moment, tactically, it was the wrong decision, but it would have been the right decision. And actually staying where I was was the wrong decision. So yeah, there’s those, but you know what? You look back on those moments and not with regret, they’re more like learning moments, I guess, because at the time I felt it was the right decision because I’d made decisions both ways previous to that and some work out some day. And as you know, so I think there’s moments in all races where you, especially those longer races, there can be 100 moments in a race where you have to make a decision. And often they’re not split second, particularly the longer races. You know the moments coming and you give a bit of thought to it. And now with experience, you hope that you pull the right reign,

but there’s a lot of dynamics that go on in races. You know, at that race in 2010, I had won Kona the two previous years. So I was a heavily watched athlete in that race and that changes the dynamic a little bit. And that played into, I guess, the way the race ended up panning out. So there’s always different dynamics. Every year’s a different year. And I think that’s why we do so much preparation, not only physical, but mental as athletes because you’re preparing yourself for those moments and making the right decisions. And I think they call it in sport, now mental contrasting or visualization where you envisage certain moments in a race where you’re presented with a few scenarios and you have to make a decision. And I used to practice that in training all the time. I could easily be at home here in Sydney running in the national park and just imagine that I was on the queen K in Hawaii and in the midst of the marathon.

Same, I could be in the local pool, he’s swimming and just could take myself and mentally and place myself in a race somewhere. So a lot of the times those moments you talk about, I felt a sense of, I wanna say deja vu, but felt like I’d been there before. So I was never really stressed or worried in that moment. I just felt like I had to make a decision and then you make it and move on to the next moment. So I think part of that too is moving on when you make a decision and not dwelling on whether it was a good decision or a bad decision. That’ll become obvious soon enough, but obviously there’s more decisions to make. So, and like you say, some of those decisions happen quick. In the ultra endurance events, they play out a little, they can play out over time. Certainly the shorter races that I used to do early in my career, the sprint distance and Olympic distance races, there’s moments where you have to make

a split second decision and the more experience you have and I always felt the more visualisation or mental prep that I’d done, the better prepared I was for those moments. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with Form Smart Swim Goggles, including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for only 249 US dollars. They’ve currently changed up their offer where you can now get the goggles and you have one year membership included for free. And if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts, training plans and custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real-time data in the goggles, so you never lose access to that. My favourite thing about the Form Goggles

is having the instant feedback of what times you’re doing, what stroke rate you’re doing and also the ability to see what your heart rate is. Because never before have we been able to have these immediate feedback heads-up display where it’s actually telling you what your intervals are. So when I wear the goggles in training, I like that I know my split for the first 50 and the 100 and the 150. So every single lap I’m getting that feedback on what my pace is. And I find it’s such an important tool for being able to not only have different gears where you can switch between the different speeds that you wanna swim, but it helps you develop those gears and it helps you intuitively know how fast you need to go to before you’re going to blow up or before you’re going to go a little bit too hard. So it helps you just get really good at judging your pace for when you do go to a race. And even if you’re not wearing the goggles in a race,

it’s that intuition and that ability to develop your pacing that these goggles can really help with. To get your pair of Form Goggles and save 15% off, use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout. And that will get you 15% off your pair of goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout. It’s such a key thing. I think for me personally, as a more as a teenager when I was competing in swimming, we used to do a lot of that. And I think just moving out of that more sort of structured in environment and high performance environment as an athlete perspective, it tends to tend to think a bit less about it, but it’s such an important thing to do. And the very best race I had in my swimming career was one where 12 months out from the race, I visualized the swim I wanted to do, how it would feel was a 400 medley. And just I visualized every moment of the race.

And when I would visualize that race, I could do it without a clock to within a couple of seconds when I’m playing through that race in my mind. So by the time I got to doing that race, as you said, it feels like I’ve been there before. And I think that brings a level of comfort and it just brings a level of, yeah, it’s just like, well, okay, I know what to expect. And yeah, it’s got that experience. It’s like, maybe it’s your first Iron Man World Championships, but if you’ve played that in your head, well, you could have been there 10, 20, 30 times. And I think that brings that level of experience that you can’t get without visualization in a way. And you hear so many of the top athletes talk about it. And did you have a particular way about going about it? The visualization, yeah, I tried to make it as specific as possible. So I know before I ever raced in Hawaii, I went there 12 months before and trained for two, two and a half weeks

just to get to know the course, the conditions, just familiarize myself with the town itself, be out on the course at the time of the day, the race would be at a particular part of the course when you, where the wind would blow from what the temperature humidity felt like. So, I think they talk about experience is important. I think part of that experience is the mental experience. So if I hadn’t been to a venue before I would often try and go there to do some course reconnaissance and it would just help me make those visualizations more specific and real. And I always felt they were more valuable when they were in context. And I often feel it’s why I raced better when I’d go to a race the second or third time because I’ve just been there before. So I had another 12 months to, I guess, just visualize being on the course in that race. And I think I got that from, I remember speaking to a sports psychologist early in my career and she suggested that visualizations,

yeah, the more real the better and the more specific the better. But I also read, I think it was Mark Chukesbury, the great Canadian swimmer, Olympic gold medalist, a friend of mine who was a triathlete, actually an Olympic gold medal winning triathlete, Simon Whitfield, who was a Canadian. He gave me Mark’s book to read. And Mark talked about, I think he won a gold medal at the Barcelona Olympic Games. So, 30 years ago now, early 90s, but one thing Mark did was, I think two years before the Olympic Games in Barcelona or maybe even three years, he took a trip over to Barcelona from Canada from his training base. And they were still building the Olympic venue. But he walked around, he sort of got familiar with where the athlete village was gonna be, where the accommodation was, the walk you’d have to take over to the pool, where the marshalling area was, where the warm-up pool was, and he had a clear picture of that in his mind.

And I just remember in his book reading about how when it came time for the Olympic Games, he just felt a calmness. Like you mentioned, it lessens the anxiety. He actually referenced that specifically. He said, I just felt very calm and very prepared like I’d been there before. I’d walked that walk from the Olympic village to the venue. I knew where the warm-up pool was, where the marshalling area was, it just felt all very familiar. So, I think there’s a lot to be said

for making those visualisations very specific and real and the performance impact that it has. Yeah, I think it’s incredibly important. And like with, there’s sort of the four things if you can get really detailed about the visual, so what’s it gonna look like, the audio, what’s it gonna sound like, kinesthetic, what will things feel like, and then the smell. So, V-A-K-S fax, it’s just a thing that I remind myself if I’m, whether it’s coaching or say, for me, one of the things I’ve sort of visualised for a long time is, what’s my perfect day look like? And touching on each of those things, the visual, audio, kinesthetic, the smells, that really brings it to life. And that’s how you can make it very vivid and basically live it when you’re not there and it’s a huge thing to be able to do. And if you were to give advice to your younger self as a triathlete, are there any things that come to mind that you think would have benefited you

as a younger athlete? I am, what I would suggest is go and train with better athletes, which is something I did anyway. And part of that was like, I think I just, I didn’t have a coach and I was hungry to learn and I thought, what better way? And I lived in Sydney where some of the best triathletes in the world at the time were living. And if that’s some of the best triathletes in history were living. So I would often make the pilgrimage down from where I lived in the Western suburbs or the inner west to train in Southern Sydney with the likes of Greg Welsh and McKeeley Jones. And there were a lot of training groups down here. So not only some world class triathletes, but a lot of national level athletes and a lot of great swim squads down this way as well. Running groups, a lot of professional cyclists live down this way when they were in, back in Sydney, not in Europe. So, you know, one of those suggestions

that I would make to go train with better athletes and also as a triathlete go and train with great athletes in the single disciplines, I did, I actually did, I took my own advice on that one. And I think the other thing is, and again, I think I did, it was just, don’t be scared to get help. Don’t be scared to go and to surround yourself with the best athletes and the best coaches. And I mean, that’s how you improve. For me, it was very, it was very helpful to get a front row seat at how the best athletes at the time in our sport would operate day to day. The things they did, what set them apart. And part of what I saw very early on was, you know, there were good athletes, there were very, very good athletes. There were great athletes and then there were just all-time great athletes. And you know, the ones at the top of the tree were never just coasting or going through the motions. They were the most driven.

And the most determined, the most professional, the hardest working, regardless of how many world titles they already had on the man or piece, they were not ever coasting or going through the motions. And I found that interesting. I thought it would be the other way. I thought that the athletes in the pecking order below them would be chasing and matching their work ethic, matching their consistency and then adding to it. But no, and I guess it was no surprise that’s why they were where they were. They were never professionally content. It wasn’t just about winning for them. It was about their own performance and always improving. And I guess I adopted that. I wanted, what I saw with the great athletes was that they were very consistent and they’re consistent at a very high level. You know, there were a lot of athletes who could win a race and then maybe disappear for a few months or a few races or even a year or two.

And then they pop up again towards the front of a race and then disappear again. But the great ones were always performing at a high level and always, you know, plus or minus one or 2% from there. Yeah, there was always a small performance variance. They were always, you knew what you were gonna get with them. So that’s, that became my sort of blueprint. I wanted to become a consistent high performer as opposed to just a race winner because I thought there was a big difference. So any advice I would give to younger athletes now is when you get the chance to go into camp or to train with world-class athletes who have a lot of experience, go and do it. When you have the opportunity to go and work out and train with great coaches, go and do it. Because you learn a lot just from watching and observing them. The great catch you learn a lot with what they say to you at the start of the workout, during the workout.

You know, the mental and physical cues that they give you to focus in on the way they communicate, what they communicate, particularly with the coaches. It’s invaluable. So that’d be the two things. And, you know, fortunately, I took my own advice. I did that. And I think a big reason was because I didn’t have a coach. So I was trying to fast track my own learning. What I did have was I was partway through a physiotherapy degree. And we were learning about the principles of endurance training, but also the importance of observation when learning to pick up motor skills. And I thought, well, what better way than go to train with people? And I had the opportunity to do it in Sydney because some of the best triathletes in the world live here. So now I just turn up and jump in with the training groups are often quite large. And I just jump in and then start chatting to the athletes. And I was lucky a lot of them became good friends

and took me under their wing. So that would be my advice to younger athletes. I think older experienced accomplished athletes really like it when young athletes come up and chat to them because they’ve been in that place themselves. So, you know, it was always my experience. I was, the athletes I reached out to were as very gracious and generous with their time and wanted to help. So that would be some advice I’d give to my younger self. But as I said, I took that advice. So it would be advice I’d give to any young athlete. Just go and see firsthand what the great ones do. There’s a lot to learn. Yeah. And there’s a few things there. Like that kind of work ethic can rub off on you and you can just take that on when you’re in that kind of environment, that kind of culture. Then you’re often forced to step up. And I look at someone like Dean Boxall up in Brisbane with his training group. He’s got an immense amount of elite level swimmers there.

And they’re all forced to step up because there’s so many of them at that level and often competing against each other as well. So that kind of environment is gonna force you to perform or you’re just not going to make it. And as you mentioned with the older athletes and even with the coaches, like those more successful coaches, athletes, typically they’re very willing to share their knowledge and to give their time and to help others. Cause it’s quite a compliment to be asked of your opinion or what would you do in this situation? What do you think I can do? That’s a real compliment to someone. It’s not the other way where you’re taking from that person. No, it’s more you giving them the gift of being able to share their knowledge, which I think a lot of people enjoy to do. I certainly know from my swim catching experience, if anyone asks me what do you think I can do here to say five seconds or 10 seconds, it’s like to me it’s like I’m really grateful

that they’ve been willing to ask that because they see me as someone that can help. And to me that’s a big compliment. So I’m certainly willing to give my time and share my knowledge there. So it’s people are more willing to help than you quite often think. But as a young athlete, I think of myself like we’re quite afraid to actually do that and sort of put ourselves out there and ask for that kind of advice because we just think, well, who am I to ask that? And I think of that with my coaching career too. It’s like, well, who am I to wanna work with people and help them get better? It’s like, I haven’t earned that right. So it took me a while to sort of get the confidence to be able to do that. So I think we need to put that on its head. Yeah, I’d agree. And I think most coaches, particularly part of their personality and the profile of being a great coach is you wanna help. You can help and you want to help. But you’re right, it can be intimidating

as a young athlete or a new coach to sort of, I guess, reach out. And but yeah, I had great experiences every time I did it though. So yeah, it was always worth putting myself in that uncomfortable position because yeah, it worked out well. Yeah, no, it’s a testament to that advice, isn’t it? With the success of your career there. What motivates you going forward? So you probably compete in some trail runs and mountain bike races you’ve mentioned as well as continuing to grow the coaching and working with other coaches and athletes to continue to grow that. What’s really driving you at the moment? Yeah, a few things. I mean, I’ve stepped back into doing a couple of things that I didn’t do during my career because there wasn’t time or the danger factor.

You can’t injure yourself doing things in the pre-season or off-season or anytime really. So as an athlete, you often wrap yourself in cotton wool. So got back into a little bit of surfing, playing the guitar and whatever level I do something at, I just, again, it’s just to improve and to get better. That’s the motivation. That’s what keeps me coming back. So I’ve enjoyed getting back into those things. Definitely growing the coaching business. I think just, I really enjoy working with other coaches. It’s a real collaborative what we’ve got with Senseigo. I don’t really feel like I’m the principal. I mean, I guess I’m an athlete who has had a good career and won some big races. But a lot of the coaches I’ve been fortunate enough to bring into the business to some of the best endurance coaches in the world. So I feel very lucky that I get to work with them and learn from them. And just being able to deliver a sort of a collective

or a collaborative of excellence and my brain’s trust to the wider triathlon audience has been fun. So I’m motivated to try and improve on that. Of course, we had a two or three year break over the pandemic where there were no events, but it gave us a chance to look at what we were doing previously and how we want to do it moving forward. So, you know, you can look at the glass half, half empty or half full, however you look at it, you know, you just got to move forward. So, yeah, so the business still motivates me as well. And just being a great parent motivates me to be honest, I love to spend a lot of time with my kids. I coached or help coach both. Well, two of my kids, I got three kids, I shouldn’t say both, two of my two younger kids soccer teams this season. I started a run club at my youngest daughter’s school with one of the other dads there. On Monday mornings, just to get kids involved in running,

you know, it’s not like we were rolling out killer track sets on there was more about just a little bit of technique and just having fun with it. Some running games, you know, we play touch football or frisbee and give the kids a few running drills to this. They’re just motivated by little things like that, giving back to the sport and to the community. I mean, I ended up moving to the south of Sydney because I was driving down here to train so much of my wife got a job at one of the big hospitals down here. She’s been working as an emergency nurse at the two major hospitals in southern Sydney for the last 25 years. So we’re firmly entrenched in the community down here and, you know, I got a lot of support throughout my career. I mean, last weekend, I was actually the guest at the local tri-clubs presentation dinner and that local tri-club were a huge supporter of me during my career. So, yeah, I’m sort of motivated to give back

to the community and to the people who helped me throughout my career. You know, I feel very lucky that I was able to race pro-athlete for 27 years. I mean, that’s a long time to do anything. I think part of it was because I was, like you mentioned, internally motivated, you know, it was all about the journey for me. I think I was more obsessed with improving than I was with actually winning. I dreamt of winning, but I was obsessed with improving, which is why that even when I was able to win and lucky enough to win, I didn’t feel like there’s any need to stop. It’s not like I’d fulfill or check the box. Again, it was just more about the journey and trying to improve year on year. So, yeah, I was very fortunate to have a long career and learned so much. So a lot of the motivation is now is just trying to find areas and add value in areas and different things, whether it be businesses or in the community where I could share that knowledge,

share with that experience, share what I’ve learned. Yeah, and it sounds like you’re able to do a lot of that. And I think for me personally, with having young kids as well, my goals have shifted a bit. I’ve started to realize more the value of community, having people around who you like to be around, who are experts in their field. And I think of their swim camps that we run. Quite often we’ll bring two, three or four coaches along with me to our camps, even the Maldives or Thailand. And when we get a good bunch of coaches together and we have 15, 20 athletes come in, it’s such a great experience, it’s such a great week where you can really create some magic with that sort of environment. And I think it took me a couple of years to learn that it’s about the people that you’re working with. Like I really value that and I value having good people who come in as athletes as well. Like that is something really special.

It’s not necessarily about, well, I wanna make sure that I can give the very best knowledge and just really focusing only on the technical side of things. I think a large part of it is that community, that social aspect of it, because when you get that right, the other stuff, the education, the technical stuff can really be played out in a way where people can take that on board a lot better. So if you have the right, I guess culture, the right people, that’s a really great starting foundation for all the other things to happen. And it certainly took me a long time to realize that. And I think some of that comes with experience, some of it comes with age, some of it comes with having kids as well. Yeah, it takes a while to learn these things, at least for me anyway. No, I agree. It’s interesting, you know, growing old, I was reading this quote the other day, growing old is not for sissies. There’s not too many good things about growing old,

but physically, but what you do gain is better perspective on life, what’s important. And I would agree 100% with that. It’s about the people you’re on the journey with, the people, that’s what elevates the whole thing. So, yeah, I mean, you know, they say surround yourself with great people. And I think it’s one of the best pieces of advice you can have in any walk of life, whether it’s at school, university, in sporting teams. And, you know, when you get a group of people together, you’re right, who share values and they’re just good people in the chemistry there. It’s, you get a certain magic. That’s hard to recreate. Yeah, it’s absolutely right. So, Craig, for those that are listening, what’s their best way to either get in touch or find out more about what you’ve got coming up with camps and get in touch with your coaches? Where’s the best place to find you? Yeah, just head to our website. I mean, punchingsensego, or sensego.co.

You’ll see our coaching platform will come up and yeah, we’ve got a few nice training experiences, training camps planned for next year already. We’re gonna be back in Mallorca in March, which is a beautiful, one thing I like about Europe is they have what’s called sports hotels, which I guess just hotels dedicated to train camps. So, you know, they provide the right sort of food, good food and enough food. And that camp, we run in Mallorca, the cycling effort for Ulysses who know cycling. They will know that that’s one of the best places in the world to ride a bike. So, and then we’re gonna be running some camps over in North Carolina and Virginia in April and May of next year as well. So, yeah, just head to sensego.co. That’s our website and you see all the things we’ve got going on there. We’ve got some great partners and we’ve got some good plans afoot. So, yeah, check in and see what we’ve got going on. Fantastic.

Well, I really appreciate your time and for being on the podcast. It’s been great chatting with you and to watch your career for as long as I’ve been sort of involved in triathlon and watching it to where you are now. It’s incredible to have a 27 year career in anything like you mentioned but to be able to do that in sport and to do that in triathlon is a real testament to I think your consistency, the philosophy of your training and just doing this stuff for life. It’s not just going hard for a year or two. It’s just having that long-term plan and long-term thinking which I’m a big fan of. So, thank you so much for being on the podcast and for sharing everything you’ve shared today and love to get you back on some time to see what you’re up to next. Yeah, mate, I appreciate it. You invite to come on and have a chat and I’d love to come back. So yeah, good luck. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast.

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Get ready for an amazing Andy Donaldson episode! He’s done something amazing: finished the Ocean 7 challenge faster than anyone ever has before. In just one year, he completed all seven swims in a total of 63 hours. And the best part? Andy’s doing all of this to bring attention to mental health. We’ll chat about the tough parts of those swims, how he tackled the tricky currents, and what lessons he took away from the whole experience.

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Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I’ve got a very special guest today, someone who was on only a couple of months ago, but for good reason. So, Andy Donaldson, you’ve just completed the Ocean 7 in the quickest time ever and in the shortest amount of time ever, so within a year. And during the entire seven swims in 63 hours total, which was about an hour 35 quicker than the previous record before that. So, firstly, congratulations and well done. Just a massive achievement and I can’t wait to get into some of the details on the last one that you had because it looked so difficult. And yeah, just how are you after such a massive 12 months really? Well, firstly, thank you again, Brenton, for having me on here. It’s a pleasure to chat and yeah, gosh, it’s just been such a whirlwind.

I mean, obviously, I’m absolutely delighted at how all came together and how together as a team, we were able to pull off this, well, impossible mission, but yeah, just delighted, still pretty tired from it all. It was such a big year, but yeah, feeling really glad and glad to still have all my limbs and to be in one piece. Well, I think before last time we spoke, I think you had the three, maybe the three or four swims to go. I can’t remember exactly, but it seemed like so you had Gibraltar and then Catalina with the fifth and six swims. They looked like they were fairly comfortable in the grand scheme of things. Is that right? Yeah, they were, you know, they were still challenging in their own ways. But more or less went to plan, which was good. The other two swims, so I think we spoke just after the Cooke Strait in New Zealand and obviously we’re coming off a real big high there, breaking the world record.

So, you know, we went into the Molokai Channel swim over in Hawaii with, you know, really buoyed by that recent success and with a fair bit of momentum and goodness did nature show up and have different plans for us out there. That was a real big swim. And then obviously, Suguru at the end was just absolutely relentless, too. And so Molokai, would you put that up there as one of the hardest swims you did? Because is that the longest? It’s 43K, isn’t it? So it’s the longest swim and longest time wise as well, 15 and a half hours. Talk me through that swim and what challenges got thrown your way. Well, it was very challenging even before the swim we derived from memory. I think on the Saturday and swim on the Sunday. So it was a very quick turnaround, flying in the morning we arrived. We met with the skipper and he said, you know, my twix, my great guy just said, look, tomorrow’s probably our best day. Let’s go for it.

So very quick turnaround. Usually a lot of swimmers will fly across to Molokai Island and meet up with the crew over there. We didn’t really have time and we thought it might be easier to just take the boat across and really went through too well. And I got pretty seasick on the way over. And that’s before you even started this 43 kilometre swim. So didn’t feel too great or flash going into it. But, you know, we set off the shores at Molokai around 7pm. The sun was going down. You’re on this, you know, tropical island in the middle of the Pacific. And it was it was just quite surreal, you know, doing that. But little did we know what was to come. It turned into probably the toughest swim alongside Tsuiguru out of the ocean seven and in my own life. And was it the conditions that really started to ramp up as you were swimming? Or was it the currents? What was it there? Knights are challenging. The big challenges with that is it’s the swell.

So if you think of where Hawaii is, it’s just, you know, a couple of pin drops in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And you’ve got no real land masses to block these rolling conditions coming in from the Pacific. So you’ve got these huge waves that just, you know, lifts you right up. The swims through the night, which the reason they do that is to try swim when the winds are a bit calmer and the conditions are ideally a bit calmer, too. So that’s, you know, that’s quite a challenge itself. And that’s when the boat sits quite a little bit in front. So, you know, you can’t really see your team and it can feel quite isolating out there. So it’s just you and a kayaker. And yeah, I mean, you know, you can do all the preparation in the world for distance and for swimming at night. But it’s the psychological challenges that are harder to prepare for. And in that one, you know, we were swimming into a pretty head on

head on and powerful current and I was making a lot less ground than I’m used to, you know, usually on on a good day, I can hold sort of four and a half to five k’s an hour out there. We were covering as little, probably a bit closer to three k’s an hour because of the head on currents. But at one stage, you know, it was right down at 1500 meters in the space of an hour, which is, you know, taking four minutes to do 100 meters. And it’s so hard to hear that news. And when you’ve got such a big long swim at hand and knowing that you could potentially be out there for another 10 hours, it’s quite it’s quite brutal. And yet very little can prepare you for for receiving that sort of news. Is the team keeping updated every hour with the distance that you’ve swam, what you’ve got to go, how does that normally work for you? And do you ever have you changed that approach over the last year or so with that more experience under your belt?

Yeah, it’s a great question, Brent. And so usually I get updates on distance every hour. We started off, I think with the English Channel, it was every two hours. But I wanted to be a bit more equipped with that information, even if it was, you know, not as rosy as we’d like with that swim. We were feeding every 15 minutes. The water temperatures were a bit warmer, I think around 25 degrees. So I was going to be sweating a lot more, losing a lot more liquids and fluids. I already take on quite a lot of feeds because I’m burning quite a lot of energy within a pace. But it was also an opportunity to catch up with the team and just to make sure that we were engaging quite frequently so that, again, it provided that mental reassurance that you weren’t out there alone, that you didn’t feel as isolated. The team were there and, you know, we’d be seeing each other quite a lot. So, yeah, to find out we weren’t covering as much distance, it was difficult.

But, you know, the team kept me really encouraged and supported throughout that. I don’t think, like I usually say, you know, these swims aren’t a solo endeavour. They are only made possible by an incredible collective and a team. And they got me through a lot of those toughest times. And swimming in the dark, so it’s a long time to be in the dark, especially only having a kayaker next year. Like, that’s eerie enough, right? Just being out between the Hawaiian Islands, what feels like probably almost by yourself. Is that something that you had practised a bit before, just not swimming or just something you had to get used to along the way? It was something that I’d had experience of swimming at night time. So in the Cook Straight, we swam through the night in the Derwent River Big Swim. Again, it was another night time swim, but I hadn’t experienced that level of isolation before where it was just you and a kayaker.

I mean, if I looked up, I wouldn’t have been able to see the boat. They were completely blacked out. And they do that because they don’t want to attract in the sharks, which are, you know, they are attracted in by the bright lights. So yeah, it was quite tough. And I think they were cycling through paddlers every two hours. And I remember that particularly the second guy that went out, he didn’t bring any lights or sort of reflective gear. So I couldn’t see him.

I couldn’t see him apart from maybe a couple of tiny glow sticks hanging off the side of his kayak. But I just saw the silhouette of a shape and I just remember feeling so lonely out there. And it was it’s amazing how much of an impact that something as small as that can make when you’re out there in these massive channel swims. Yeah, it makes me think of someone who’s like who’s ship is sunk in there, just stranded out in the middle of middle of nowhere, he goes, man, how do you how do you how do you mentally get through that? That’s that’s a real challenge. So so you have the Molokai swim and then the Gibraltar swim and then the Catalina channel. You said they were they pretty much went to went to plan, which is which is great. Because it was all in a pretty short space of time. Those last couple of swims wasn’t it like those last three were almost within a month of each other, something pretty much bang, bang, bang.

So Cook Street was March, Molokai was April. Strait Gibraltar was May. You know, I was still pretty beaten up from from Molokai. I’d got hospitalised after the Molokai swim. We’d had a real rough finish to that, which I can speak to. And then there was a month long break in June before Catalina and Suguru, which were both in July. So yeah, this is, you know, it’s just how it fell. That’s that’s how we’d organised it. We we really we took the slots that we could get. We didn’t, you know, we didn’t want to. I certainly made it my I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t coming in over the top of anyone else. I didn’t want to take other people’s slots. It was always, you know, we’ll take whatever we can get in order to try to do this in a year. And if we can do it great, but if not, you know, we’ve tried our best. And so that that’s something that a lot of the organisers took in the consideration and, you know, fortunately, I have a bit of speed.

I have some flexibility with with the way that I’ve set up life and how I can work remotely. So it worked out very well. And those swims fell in into those places. And, you know, gosh, it was tough coming in, coming into those last two, especially just that accumulated fatigue, not just physically, but mentally as well, certainly made it a challenge.

Did anything surprise you when you look back at the at the last 12 months? Anything like you knew it was obviously going to be a be hard and a lot of travel involved, a lot of organisation. But was it was there anything that really surprised you looking back? I think my mindset certainly shifted a lot. I think coming from a competitive background where there’s a big emphasis on on results and in times, I admittedly think that I came into it, you know, quite focused on that and trying to break records and set these really fast times, which, you know, 12 months ago, that was, yeah, I was like, wow, I might be able to do this and I could do this. And it was a quick lesson, I think, you know, things like the English Channel and certainly Molokai, they were real quick reminders that, you know, there’s a lot that goes on in a channel swim and what really is a success, you know, take straight a Gibraltar. For an example, as an example, I gave that absolutely everything,

probably put together one of one of my best swims and finished about 40 minutes off the record. And, you know, there’s an incredible woman who’s in her 70s that only went five minutes slower. You know, so, you know, it’s a real it’s a real level or swimming out in the open water. And there’s so many factors that are involved in the success of a swim or in terms of a time, you know, obviously you’ve got the you have to have like almost the perfect conditions, the right swells and currents, low winds or the right winds. And so to be able to go into swim and give it your all, you know, I think that’s that’s where the mindset shift came in. And I knew that if I’d done that, and if that was good enough to get across a channel, you know, I couldn’t really ask for more. And that certainly helped coming into Sugary after all the all the things that have been happening there with the unsuccessful attempts and people talking about the cross currents

and that it was an unswimable swim. That was the main set I went and what if I could give give this my best and if we’re good, if that’s good enough to get across. Great. I can’t I can’t really ask for more. Let’s jump into the Sugary swim. So I remember a week or two prior to you doing that swim in some of the Facebook groups, there was a lot of talk and a bit of controversy around around that swim where they hadn’t been a successful swim for quite a long time. And there was a bit of issue with like with boat captains, like not taking people at dark and it was only between certain times. And so there was a bit of bit of controversy around it. And I didn’t know what the situation was was for you. And I didn’t know the full full details of it because I’m not completely in that world. But I’d love to get your take on for those listening, like most people listening to this probably don’t know what that was all about.

So could you explain a little bit about what what was going on? And then what your mindset was going over there with this being your last swim and basically no one had made that swim for for a very long time. The Sugary Strait is a channel in Japan. It’s between the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. And it’s one of the ocean seven swims. So the ocean seven, just to take about the step back, was a list of swims that Steven Manitone has put together. And, you know, swimmers around the world ever since it was conceptualized, have gone and tried to take on these swims and tried to complete the ocean seven. So for me, the way it landed, Sugary was the very last swim that I’d be attempting in the whole of my journey. And in the lead up to, you know, like you mentioned, there had been quite a lot of, well, it was very public about what had been happening there and the lack of successful crossing. So I think it was a total of 13 people

that have tried it this season prior to myself. And I think nine of them were unsuccessful and four of them didn’t get to get, didn’t get to get a start. So historically, there’s really only been two associations there that have organized swims, a group called Ocean Navi and another group that was run by by the skipper ion. The organizer, I ended up going with a Japanese chap called Hariyuki Ishii, the Sugary Straight Swimming Association. So most people had in the past gone with this Ocean Navi group. And for whatever reason, things just seem to be a lot tougher this year. The Japanese Coast Guard had introduced a new rule. So I understand where swimmers could only go during the hours of daylight. So between 4 a.m. and finishing at 7 p.m. And when you think of the Sugary Straight, it’s a very narrow channel. It’s point to point under 20 kilometres. And it’s between the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean.

And there’s a bit of an elevation difference. So it’s almost like a downhouse slope. So usually the currents flowing from west to east and it’s quite powerful reaching up to sort of speeds of 10 kilometres an hour. So, you know, the best swimmers in the world are only really holding five kms an hour. So it’s, you know, it’s to paint a picture. It’s like trying to swim across a raging river. But at times it really dies down to maybe about one or two kms an hour, so it can be done. And I think with this introduction of this rule, a lot of the best times to swim when the currents were at their weakest was at night time, but it wasn’t possible to go. So a lot of people weren’t getting across. There was a lot of upset swimmers, particularly in how the swims were being conducted over there and organised. You know, I haven’t had too much to deal with Ocean Navi. I tried to organise a swim with them. They didn’t really get back to me.

So which forced me to go look at other options and eventually, you know, work with with Mr Ishii. But so I don’t know how they operate. I’ve seen what I’ve seen online. So, you know, I’m not going to comment on it. But I know there was a lot of unhappy swimmers and it got to a stage where there was so much happening that the World Open Water Swimming Association stepped in and started investigating the channel and the conduct of swims that had happened this season. And when that was all kicking off, you know, it was, it was very difficult for me and my team being out there in Japan and seeing this and reading about what had been happening to others. One was obviously, you know, it’s not good for the sport. When when some things, you know, when people are coming away with such bad experiences, you know, and I was just getting bombarded with messages like, have you read this? Have you seen this? People are saying it’s, it can’t be swum.

It’s unswimmable. People are questioning how you organized your swim. How did you get in touch with this person? How did you do this? And it was, it was very difficult. Swimming a channel was one thing and it comes with its challenges. But to see people talking about you and, you know, jumping to these conclusions or assumptions without actually knowing who you are and what you’ve done, I did that. I find that really tough. So probably the, it was, it was probably the toughest thing I’ve ever gone through in terms of, you know, all of that. Obviously, this was the last swim of the, of my Ocean 7 journey and my pursuit to try to do this all within the space of a year. So there was a lot riding on it. And I knew a lot of people would be watching us out there and keen to see how we go facing these challenges. And yeah, I felt, I certainly felt the weight of it before I even started. Yeah, can only imagine. And especially in a lot of sports

and open water swimming is no different. You are going to get opinions on either side. And people who, as you said, don’t know you. People have got no idea what the background is of you organizing your swim. And people are very happy, will very quickly make accusations. And yeah, and say things that there’s just no, no truth to it. And I mean, I had an Olympian Brent Hayden on the podcast just recently. And he, like, he was even just saying just some of the comments on his like videos that he puts out, like he finds it’s hard to deal with because people with no, with no right basically saying, like, oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about. So hang on, he’s an Olympic medalist and he’s earned the right to teach this stuff. So it’s just, when you put yourself out there doing something like you’ve done, you’re going to cop criticism no matter what you do. And you just, you can’t avoid it. And there was, and like, even just listen to your speak,

there’s no ego in this for you, you know? You’re not out there doing this for yourself. It’s a very selfless thing that you’re doing. So yeah, it just comes with the territory when you put yourself out there with the swim. So I was following the Instagram stories that were being updated pretty regularly. And I just thought, man, if anyone’s going to make it, it’s going to be you. But this looks like such a bloody challenge with the currents and what you went through. So could you share just basically what happened through that swim, how hard it was and everything? Because man, it just, I was shocked that you made it really after seeing how tough these currents were. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we knew that we were, we had this mammoth task ahead of us. And, you know, fortunately in the lead up to it, I kind of just went into protective mode. I stayed offline and together with my team, you know, we had people from all around the world,

you know, offering help and trying to do their research on the channel and making suggestions on when we should go, where we should lead from. And, you know, yes, I was the person in the water, but, you know, I just wanted to highlight that, that it wasn’t just me, you know, there was all these people contributing to the success of that swim and putting their hand up to help. And, you know, that was ultimately what made it possible out there. So we swum on, I think the 20th of, I’ve got one, might have my dates wrong, but I think it was the 27th of July. And fortunately for us, they were willing to try different things from the other group. So we were trying to set off from a little bit further up the cape, shortening the distance, but we knew that swimming across this really powerful cross current, we weren’t going to be able to go from A to B, like directly from point to point. We knew at some point we’d have to go with the current

and almost do a big S-ben. So like you see with the English channel, it’s never, it’s very often not a straight line going from one side to the other. So when we set off, we set off the cape, cape tappy, and we were trying to go out wide to give ourselves the best opportunity to, I kind of need a picture to describe this on a map, we were trying to go out wide so that we could get north far enough before getting swept to the east. Because if we got swept east too quickly, we’d just hit the cape again or get sucked back in because there’s all these powerful eddies and localized currents. But that was really brutal off the beginning. The swell was coming back, bouncing back off the mainland and into the current. So it was just creating this tumultuous surface chop. And I was just getting thrown about up and down, side to side. It really felt like being in a washing machine. And within the first minute, 30 minutes,

I was already projectile vomiting quite violently. I was just thinking of myself like, geez, what? Maybe these guys are right. Maybe this is just unswimmable. Like, I don’t think I can survive this that much longer. I was so, I felt so nauseous and dizzy. And it was very difficult to find a rhythm or to maintain your stroke because every time your arm went over, the wave would just smash into you and your timing would go off. And that made it very difficult. And then like I said with Molokai, you can do all the training in the world for the distance and for the cold or swimming at night time. But that is so hard to prepare for. And we had to be incredibly adaptive when we were out there. So we’re swimming along and we’re starting to make about progress. But I think we were covering maybe about two and a half to three kilometers an hour. So again, probably about half of what I’m used to covering. And Jay Prashel, my key supporter on the boats,

he’s been to six of the seven Ocean Seven Swims out of his own back. You know, he was communicating messages to me, just providing updates. They weren’t necessarily rosy or positive. But, you know, I had these guys on the boat with me and, you know, my mother was there, my uncle handy. And, you know, even though it’s really tough going out there, seeing them up there on the boat, it’s funny, it provides a level of comfort and reassurance that you’re going through this challenge and you’re not doing it alone. And that certainly helped. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with Form Smart Swim Goggles, including a free one-year membership when you purchase your goggles for only $249 US dollars. They’ve currently changed up their offer where you can now get the goggles

and you have one year membership included for free. And if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards, it’s only $15 US dollars a month where you get access to the workouts, training plans and custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real-time data in the goggles, so you never lose access to that. My favorite thing about the Form Goggles is having the instant feedback of what times you’re doing, what stroke rate you’re doing and also the ability to see what your heart rate is. Because never before have we been able to have these immediate feedback heads-up display where it’s actually telling you what your intervals are. So when I wear the goggles in training, I like that I know my split for the first 50 and the 100 and the 150. So every single lap, I’m getting that feedback on what my pace is. And I find it’s such an important tool for being able to not only have different gears

where you can switch between the different speeds that you wanna swim, but it helps you develop those gears and it helps you intuitively know how fast you need to go to before you’re going to blow up or before you’re going to go a little bit too hard. So it helps you just get really good at judging your pace for when you do go to a race. And even if you’re not wearing the goggles in a race, it’s that intuition and that ability to develop your pacing that these goggles can really help with. To get your pair of form goggles and say 15% off, use our link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout. And that will get you 15% off your pair of goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or the code effortless at checkout. Were you able to keep anything down after that? Like you said you were vomiting after the first 30 minutes. But yeah, how did you feed throughout that time?

Did you continue to vomit and have that say sickness the whole way through?

So I vomited I think two or three times within the first two hours. And they were quite sizable vomit, but I felt better after each one. So I skipped a couple of feeds, stopped drinking a certain drink that was I think not helping the situation. Jay picked up on it very quickly, which was good and he just made sure not to cycle that one in because we use a bunch of different things. But yeah, I did. I was able to handle it and the more calm it became. So I think it took about six hours really until the water really died down from that really turbulent surface job that it was. And then that’s when we started going with the current and across the channel. And going along with the current over East. So there was a little period of respite there. That was quite good. We were making decent distance, but we knew at some point we’d have to almost break out of the current again to get across to Hokkaido and that again was a really challenging time.

Jay communicated to me that, right, we’re gonna have to really work hard over these next four kilometers to break through another powerful eddy. And so, you know, there’s not much you can do. You just have to sort of mentally prepare and sit in for the long haul. And what made it tougher was that we knew we had this time limit to get across this Japanese coast guard set limit of getting across by 7 p.m. before nightfall goal to try break the world record for the cumulative time of the ocean seven, which was 64 hours and 30 minutes held by an incredible swimmer, Attila Minyoki. And that also worked out to be 14 hours. So everything was just kind of lining up like it was. And you couldn’t make this stuff up. It was just almost meant to be. And we really had to press hard. There were some tough moments in there. Jay, I remember I think we might have been three kilometers off and Jay said, you know, there’s a good chance you might get sucked back out

into the channel here because of what the localized eddies are doing. But everyone stayed so calm in that moment, which I think it really does help. You can just sense it when people are panicking and sense when there’s worry. And it was the exact opposite out there. There was a lot of people on the boat. They were all smiling. They were all relaying messages that people were sending in from around the world, messages from family, from friends, even Attila Minyoki, the guy who held the record sent for such a lovely message of encouragement. And, you know, it makes such a difference. It makes a huge difference out there. And, you know, I am, I’m super grateful for all of that encouragement and support. It really helped in those toughest moments and, you know, seeing Ishii there and Mitsu Shimu. They were so positive through all of the adversity that it just, you know, their hope sort of spread and rubbed off on you.

And, you know, fortunately we did. We got across to the other side and we really needed almost all of that time that we had available to us. We made it across at 6.02 p.m., so less than, you know, less than an hour to spare. It was really, really down to the wire. Like, you could make a movie out of it, you know? You’ve got an hour to spare. You’ve only got an hour and a bit up your sleeve to break the cumulative time. It’s like, it really comes down to that point. And something that’s been such an epic journey for you over the last 12 months for it all to come to a head and for you to be pushed to your absolute limit and to have just the currents working against you. I could say, it’s such a real test. It’s like, how bad do you really want this? How much have you worked for it? What was that feeling like when you hit land? Oh, I mean, it was just this huge sense of relief.

I mean, we finished on this. It was like the sea wall with all these huge, concrete, free-pronged ballhards. So I had to, it probably wasn’t the safest places to finish, but I had to kind of time it and what’s the waves and land on this thing. But when I got on there and, you know, scurried up to the top, it was probably the best rock I’ve ever seen in my life. So absolutely exhausted, you know, physically, mentally.

But, you know, just so proud of the team and how everyone had come together to make this thing possible. Not just in Sugaru, but the whole challenge of this last 12 months. So yeah, bursting with pride. And although I didn’t want to celebrate at the time because I felt like death, I was, you know, absolutely over the moon. Is it a sense of relief or accomplishment, combination of both? What is that feeling? It’s a sense of, I think, definitely, a bit of both, I mean, you know, when you’re quite open with your goals, like you mentioned before, there’s room for people to criticise or to scrutinise and you’re putting yourself out there, really exposing yourself and making yourself quite vulnerable. So, you know, for it to come together like it did, obviously there was relief there, but the reason I had been so open about what I planned to do and what I hoped to try to achieve was to try to bring more attention to, you know,

the Ocean Seven to promote the sport and hopefully create more awareness about the reasons why we’re doing it, which was, you know, one of the big ones was to raise money for mental health and to share, you know, powerful messages around hope, courage, the importance of teamwork. And yeah, I think we, over the last 12 months, we have been able to do that. And one thing I will say about this when you’re being open about your goals is, yes, you might feel quite nervous and people might say that things can’t be done,

but on the flip side, you’ll get people that will stick their hand up and offer their support. And I think, you know, that’s really worthwhile doing it because, you know, these challenges, things like the Ocean Seven, even doing any of these marathon swims, you know, they’re not something that you can do alone. So yeah. Do you feel like that’s having that bigger picture, that bigger reason behind it helped get you through those tough times in the swim? Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think when, when you’re really in your toughest moments, having a good reason why makes all the difference. You know, why are you putting yourself through this pain? Why are you going to push through this? You know, for me, you know, I certainly thought back to the mental health aspect of things and trying to bring awareness to a cause that’s really important from, you know, for everyone and then is close to my heart,

having suffered from depression in the past before and having, you know, my childhood hero, my grandfather being really impacted by it as well. But also, I think, you know, I’m someone that left their swimming career feeling quite unfulfilled with the things that I’d done when I retired in 2016. I didn’t feel like it realized my potential. And for a number of years, I had felt a lot of guilt and shame feeling that I’d let people down that had believed in me and invested time in me through my childhood and through my competitive years, my coaches, you know, my family and friends, people that, you know, my mom and dad, who would drive me to training in the mornings, four in the morning, scraping ice off the car, you know? So in a way, this was also to hopefully try to repay their faith and I wanted to do it for them too. So, you know, I had all these motivators to come into this and, you know, if you’ve given it your best,

that was my view. If I’d given it my best, it didn’t really matter what the outcome was. I knew they’d be proud. How do you feel now looking back at that and you’re a couple of years older now since you stopped your competitive swimming career? How’s your feeling around not achieving what you wanted with your competitive swimming career and now you’ve achieved this? Do you look back and think, well, like those people that put their time and effort into me, do you feel like they were disappointed you didn’t achieve those goals or is just something that you felt because you’d put in so much work and hadn’t quite got there? It’s an interesting one. I mean, I think if I was to ask my parents or my coaches, I don’t think they would have ever felt what’s the word I’m looking for. I don’t think they would have been disappointed, but in my head, I’d built it up that I had let them down. And yeah, I think this last year has been

a real good opportunity for myself to put that to bed and to move on. And maybe if I had had more successes in my pool career, things would be a lot different and I wouldn’t have done what I’ve done now. So we can’t change the past and I’m grateful for everything that’s happened to this point because it’s made me who I am and it led me to do the things that I’ve done. So yeah, I wouldn’t change it. Yeah, absolutely. It’s quite often like that, isn’t it? Where you wear a setback or a failure at just, at the time, it’s really hard to take and you look at it and you go like, I’m really annoyed this has happened, but then you give it 12 months, 24 months, you can see there’s a reason behind it. You can move past it and it can lead you to greater things and looking at what you’ve achieved, that I think is so much more difficult than making a national team and competing for your country. Not that that’s easy, not at all.

And I’ve got a lot of respect for those people that do achieve that, but what you’ve gone through, it’s like, man, that to me is two, three times harder than making a national team and just physically and mentally that sort of challenge. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of people who could push themselves that far. So yeah, I think your record will stand for a very long time. Time will only tell and whether it’s gone next year or in 30 years time, that doesn’t really matter. The fact that you’ve done what you’ve done and I think being able to just persist and achieve it is incredible. And as you said, I think a large part of that, looking from the outside, it’s because you had a very deep drive and motivation that wasn’t just about you. There’s no ego involved. It’s really doing it for a greater cause and for other people. And it’s like swimming in competitive swimming. It’s like people will do PBs all day in relays

because they don’t let other people down. And it seems like there’s a bit of that kind of spirit in your swings. Yeah, 100%, 100%. And I think for me, the biggest takeaways, like each of these swims has almost taught this, it’s own unique lesson, the Hawaii swim has, for example, taught the importance of having incredible support around you and having a good reason why to push through the adversity and the adversity is needed for growth. Your lowest lows can also be your highs-highs. I went into the cook straight with people telling me that we couldn’t swim in a spring tide. And that was a great example of that it’s important to get people’s opinions, but do your homework and come to your own conclusion and don’t let other people set your parameters for you. Or the English channel, first time I’d ever had to wait before a swim. It’s not like traditional swimming when we know it down to the exact minute when we’re gonna be racing.

There we were there for seven days before we could have been swimming with four hours notice. And so to the lesson there, to focus on the things that are within your control and to be ready. Like it’s just incredible, all these sort of messages from marathon swimming and how transferable they are to your own life. Going through something like Suga Roo, yes it was horrendous at the time, but that’s an experience I’ll be able to draw from for the rest of my days. So for me, that’s been an incredible part and the friendships and the connections made through this last year.

If anything, like you say, records and stuff, someone will beat them at some point in the future, but those experiences, they’re things that no one will ever be able to take away. Absolutely. Now, when you get home and you go back to normal life and you don’t have this massive challenge ahead of you and quite often get it with, and when people achieve their dreams of going to the Olympics, there’s often this little bit of a down period. How’s that been for you? And have you set your sights on anything else just to give you something to work towards? Yeah, it’s very true. I mean, I think there’s a huge come down or a crash, people experience it. After working so long and so hard towards a goal, I think it’s very natural for it to happen. And I’ve had a few people reach out to ask about it and to just politely remind me that it’s coming. And I’ve had a bit of time off since Suga Roo. So Suga Roo was just over three and a half weeks ago.

I actually, I feel okay. I feel okay. I mean, I think I was ready to come to the end of that, that chapter and that journey. And, you know, I haven’t really, I mean, it still doesn’t quite feel real. It hasn’t fully sunk in, which is quite funny. I haven’t had too much of a crash to be honest, which, you know, I am ready for it when it does happen. But I think also I’m really excited about what lies ahead

and, you know, opportunities to continue, A, doing swimming to support worthwhile causes, B, the things that we have going on behind the scenes in terms of mental health, we’re speaking with a number of charities about bringing them together to collaborate, to create more, what’s the word I’m looking for? Not holistic, but maybe holistic. Yeah, to work together, create synergies and make sure that the services provided are cover all bases. And that’s something that we’ve been working really hard over the last 12 months on. And I’m excited to continue to help with however I can. I feel there’s a real opportunity there and to continue sharing some of the messages learned from this channel, from this challenge. So, yeah, I’m not crashing because I’m just so excited about what’s still to come. Yeah, that’s fantastic. I mean, it’s, I think if you keep yourself moving and keep yourself busy enough as well, you can avoid a lot of that come down.

You know, it’s like a plane, it needs that, it needs that speed to fly. And as soon as you stop, then it comes down. So I think you just got to keep moving. You can’t just sit on the couch for a month afterwards and just relish in your achievements. Yeah, you need to keep doing things. And I mean, you’ve got your work there and the business. And I saw your return to the pool as well this week. How’s the body feel first session back? Oh, I was, it was a bit brittle. We didn’t even swim that far. And I’m sure it’s pretty horrible. But no, I think it’s been important to take some time off and to have some rest, you know, not just from a physical point of view, but mentally too. You know, we talk about marathon swimming being 20% physical, 80% mental and to have some downtime for the mental to allow yourself to mentally recover and recharge. You know, I don’t think we talk about that enough. So yeah, these last couple of weeks,

my mother’s been over from Scotland, I’ve been spending a bit of time with her. My sister who lives here in Perth as well. And she’s got a young family. So that’s been really nice. And, you know, it’s just allowed me some time to recharge and come back to the pool and come back to these other endeavors with more gusto and energy.

Yeah, yeah. And in terms of the media after you finish, what’s that been like? It’s a bit of a fringe sport, open water swimming. It’s not AFL, it’s not NFL, but it’s still, from what I saw, there was quite a bit of media attention around it. So how much was there interest from overseas? What sort of commitments have you had there in terms of, yeah, right after the event? So it has certainly picked up a lot of traction along the way and you’re right, you know, we’re not AFL, we’re not soccer, we’re open water swimmers, but I think when there are things, there are things that transcend the world of sport and can really connect with people and, you know, whether it’s been my swimmer or other people that go on and push themselves outside their comfort zone in support of something bigger than themselves. You know, I think that will always resonate with people. So, yeah, these last couple of weeks in speaking to the BBC, they put up an article

and it’s a bit wild, like seeing your face beside the light of Gita Fumberg or Vladimir Putin on the BBC homepage, I’m just this kid from the West Coast of Scotland, a sleepy fishing village, you know, so it just doesn’t add up, but that’s been so the old ESPN, you know, a few Australian outlets, so, you know, for me to get the word out there about the sport, but I think to try to share these positive messages and encourage people into swimming, I got back into swimming in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, after a number of years out in the water, I didn’t have any plans to do crazy channel swims. For me, it was about getting into the water, having this incredible sport that could keep me fit and healthy, it was good for my mental well-being and provided me with access to community. And, you know, I’d love to get the word out there or to do my part to share those messages that is a sport for everyone and everyone can access these benefits

and they might have a good positive impact on your life if you do. So, yeah, I’d encourage people to give it a try. Brilliant. Well, Andy, thanks for being on the podcast and, yeah, willing to jump on here a second time after a successful seven swims. It’s been amazing what you do, what you’ve done. And I’m excited to see what lies ahead for you, whether it’s just as crazy as what you’ve done or, you know, just dial down a little bit because I don’t know how much more wild you can go.

I think, you know, I mean, you know, doing the world’s seven toughest channels in the space of the year, might not, might not guess. Might be a scratch in our heads to think of something that can top that. No, I’d love to continue doing swims that can support worthwhile causes. I think for me, an area that captures my interest is the expedition swims and swimming in uncharted waters or something that no one’s ever done before. So, these swims, they might take, you know, be over the course of a number of days. I’m already speaking with a few parties there about some exciting opportunities that I think we’ll try to fill them. And, yeah, really, really focus on some important causes and the benefits of the sport. So, yeah, watch the space. That’s probably what’s next for me. Is this like swimming with a ruck sack and like, you buy yourself or is this going to be supported? These types of swims, do you have a bit more detail with them?

They’d be supported. So, I think they come in different forms. You know, there’s been some, you know, great swimmers out there that have done incredible things. Guys like Loose Pew, he’s currently swimming down the entire length of the Hudson River over in America to raise awareness around, yeah, around the environment. He’s a big advocate for oceans conservation and things like that. So, yeah, that’s something that interests me and they would be supported. They’d be over the course of a number of days. It’s not about swimming it as fast as possible, which, you know, I think for me is nice to give the body a little bit of respite.

But we’ll see what happens. Like, there’s still some channel swims out there and some swims like the Manhattan Island swim and, you know, Loch Ness back in Scotland that I’d love to have a crack at some records for. And so, we’ll see what happens. There’s plenty of, you know, there’s no shortage of swims in the world. So, if anyone listening has some ideas, you know, they’ll show them through. You know, we’re open to everything at the moment. Fantastic. Well, we’ll put all the links to your socials, to donating as well to the Black Dog Institute too. And I see your following is growing massively in the last, like, what, month or so that you’ve completed the swims like. It’s just taken off, which is really cool too, which gives you that bigger platform to create that awareness around these things as well. It was the, I think it was one of the feeds videos kind of went viral, so. Had like two million views or something, didn’t it?

Because you’re using like a dog lead or something? Oh, have you seen, I mean, I had a quick look through the comments. I mean, it’s obviously hard to kind of follow it, there was all these people that were like, this is a really cool video until he threw the bottle back in the ocean.

Like, it’s so reckless. I’m just thinking, do you not see that it’s attached to a dog lead? Like a bright yellow fluorescent dog lead?

That’s why you can’t listen to comments online, right? Like, it just, yeah, you can’t win. Yeah, you can win. I mean, the internet’s the internet. It’s certainly a source of entertainment. And, you know, like you said, I think there’ll be some good outcomes from that. There’s a larger platform and audience out there to share these messages to and, yeah, hopefully continue to promote the sport and the paths that are available to everyone out there.

Love it, mate. Well, congratulations again. And when I do eventually get back to Perth, I’d love to catch up and meet in person, not just online. And, yeah, mate, I appreciate you being on the podcast and it’s a huge thing that you’ve done. So I’m amazed that you’ve been able to get through it. Mate, congratulations. Yeah, again, thank you for having me on here, Brendan, it’s been a pleasure. 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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