Effortless Swimming

My guest today is Andy Donaldson who recently came back from breaking the Cook Strait World Record. In this episode, we will talk about his experience before and during the swim and his goal to complete the Ocean Seven in a year to raise money and awareness for mental health.

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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 episode number 276 of the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is someone who’s just come off the back of breaking the record for crossing the Cook Strait. Andy Donaldson, welcome to the podcast. Oh, hello, Brenton. Thanks for having me on here. I had John Hancock on the podcast a few episodes ago. He had a very respectable time, eight hours and change. And then you come along and you average 110 across the Cook Strait and breaking the record, you did four hours and 33 minutes. And there’s an unbelievable pace to hold for that time and that distance. And just an incredible swim. I actually had a number of people message me saying, get Andy on the podcast. I want to hear his story. What’s he doing? What’s his secret source? How’s he feeling? All that sort of stuff. So I’d love to get into that today and a bit of the backstory on how you came to do the Cook Strait, but it’s only a very small part of what you’re

looking to achieve, which we’ll get into. So let’s just start with the swim itself, because this is probably very fresh in your mind having done this about a week ago. So yeah, let’s go through the swim. Where do you want to start? Oh, good question, Brenton. So yeah, I’d gone across to Wellington at the start of February with, you know, hopes of getting across to the Cook Strait and having a stab at it. And when I arrived, you know, it was an eventful couple of weeks. Cyclone, Gabrielle, you know, obliterated the country, there were a couple of earthquakes in Wellington, severe weather, the inter-islander ferries were breaking down in the Cook Strait. So like all of these things were happening, you know, justice arrived in Wellington. So not exactly, you know, what you need when you’re trying to prepare for one of these big swims across across the channel, but you know, on the flip side, you know, it was an incredible opportunity to meet a lot of the

local swimmers over in Wellington. And just swimming down at Fryburg Beach with a group called the washing machines. It’s just a great opportunity to meet people there and swim with such a wonderful community. So ended up waiting for about three weeks before there was a weather window opened up for the Cook Strait. And it was a fairly daunting prospect. We were sort of proposed an idea to swim at midnight on a Monday during something called a spring tide. And from there, so you had this window of opportunity, you’ve got the spring tide where there’s basically more water movement compared to the neap tide. So what was your what was your headspace going into into this swim? It’s it’s dark. It’s probably a bit cold. And you’re doing something that isn’t really usually done. So what was your headspace like leaning into it? Yeah, it’s a great question. Certainly a lot of nerves, excitement, doubts, all of it was creeping into my head. No, we were trying

something that what we were about to try something that hadn’t really been done before, not many swimmers have attempted the Cook Strait on a spring tide just because of that sheer amount of water that might be passing through a channel with that particular time almost being thought of being unswinnable. So that was one aspect. And you know, the Cook Strait is kind of known for being quite sharky as well. So to be swimming out there at night where you can’t see anything during a spring tide where there was a good chance that you might actually be out there for a long time because of these currents. I mean, I’d been told so many horror stories of people being stuck in the same spot just because of the sheer strength of the tide. So everything was kind of playing on my mind in the run up to the swim. But you know, I think it’s natural to have those doubts creeping in. You know, we’re all human. After all, the

important thing is how you react to them and how you choose to process that information and those thoughts. Luckily for me, I had a lot of good people around me. I’d made some really good friendships with some of the locals who had come across to the South Island to they very kindly offered to come in support on the boat. So, you know, I talked through my my sort of thoughts and what was on my mind with them along with the organisers, Jacqueline McClellan from Infinity and, you know, together as a team, we sat down, addressed those issues together and come up with a real solid plan that, you know, we could focus and, you know, think about the things that were within our control because ultimately that’s all you can do. And whatever we were just of the opinion, whatever happened out there happened, we’d be just giving it our best go. And how long into the swim did you or those on the boat realise things were going reasonably well? Where

maybe some of that doubt had left their mind about waving on this tide? So, yeah, I suppose it would have been maybe about an hour in. So the skipper was a guy called Grant Orchard from Catholic Charters. The plan that he devised, we were just going to leave, I think it was shortly after the load died. And essentially what he had said was in the first hour, we really need to get to work. There might be some really strong localized currents that we have to kind of push through and get past before things kind of flatten down and there is like slack in the water. So minimal tidal movement and we can really get to work and make some progress. So essentially I came flying out the blocks, probably sitting around 110s or under underneath 110 pace per 100 metres. And we got through that first hour, I think, in just over five kilometres. Like I saw that we were communicating using a whiteboard. So I saw the sign come down and I was like, oh, crap, that’s

not too bad. And it felt quite comfortable. So I just thought, well, I’ll just keep going at this pace. And so you see stuff like that. And

obviously if that was in a pool, that’s quite a decent pace. But you’re out in the open water and there’s so many different variables and factors that can contribute to a swim of this length. You might have covered five kays, but it might have been in the wrong direction. So I just I tried not to get too excited. You know, you still got a job to do. So I just focused on the process and, you know, the current moment and tried not to get to, you know, ahead of myself. So I think it would have been about two hours in. We were all around 11 kays. And again, in my head, I’m thinking, right, thoughts of, you know, we might be on here for a really fast time. And possibly even the record where I enter in my head. But again, just, you know, had to stay grounded. Anything can change just like that. You just don’t know. So focus on what you can control. And that was just the pace that I was going at that particular time.

Finally, I think it was maybe at three hours, 45. The sign came down. Tell me what distance we covered. And it was three hours, 45, 2.5 kilometers to go. And, you know, the record was four hours, 37. So I’m thinking, right, I’ve got like 45 minutes to go 2.5 kays. That’s not too bad. I might have stuck my head up and said, holy, holy, holy something. And I could see the land. That was the first time I’d breathed to the right. So it’s all the listeners out there. Don’t do what I do. Breathe to both sides and balance out your stroke. But I only breathe to my left. So I’ve breathed to the right and saw the land and thought, whoa, we’re so close. But again, just had to kind of stay calm. I knew that we probably still had quite a lot of work to do. And the skipper had said the start and the finish is going to be the hardest part. There’s very likely to be localized currents and eddies that will suck you out to see or, you know, won’t work in your

favour. And that was that was the case. We were approaching the North Island and the guys on the boat were telling me to pick up the pace, even though nothing had changed in my stroke. You know, I was maintaining the same stroke rate of 60 strokes per minute. They were telling me to lift the pace. And, you know, that 2.5 k, it took about 45 minutes to in that last stretch because the tides were turning. I could see the guys on the boat getting a bit more animated. We’ve gone through a few feeds and I knew it was going to go down to the wire. As soon as I saw the waving arms and such like that, you know, I knew it was going to be close. I just threw everything I had left at the wall and, you know, very fortunately where we got in just under the previous record. That’s an amazing result. And seeing what you have done with previous swims, you’ve been very close to some other records for long distance swims. So how is that feeling actually getting

the record when you’re being cyclised on a lot of other occasions? I mean, obviously it’s just like a dream come true to go in and set, well, that’s supposed to be the fastest time of all time of a particular crossing. For me, personally, you know, any of these channel swims, it’s just such a huge achievement to complete them. So that’s always the first goal. Completion is key. And then, you know, anything above that, the way I see it, anything above that is a bonus. So, yeah, in a few of the previous swims that I’ve done, I’ve been, you know, just off records, I think, Rotnest. At the time, it was only four minutes off. Same with the North Channel, only four minutes off the record there. So it was quite nice to be four minutes under.

Guys, you’re way forward. That’s fantastic. And one thing I haven’t mentioned so far, but I’m sure people will have read probably in the show notes here, if they’ve listened to the podcast on Spotify or somewhere similar, is your overall goal is to do the Ocean Seven within 365 days within a year. That’s the big overarching goal. And this being your third swim. So you’ve done the English Channel, you’ve done the North Sea, now done Cook Straight, and you’ve got four more to go. Yeah, that’s right. So when I embarked on this, the core purpose was to use swimming and the Ocean Sevens as a vehicle to raise money and awareness for mental health. Mental health was a big and important issue that’s quite close to my heart. And, you know, off the back of the winning the Ross Channel swim in 2021, we’d raised about $15,000. So I knew that it was a great tool and capable of bringing attention to an important cause. And so I’d say goals

quite, quite, quite lofty goals, such as trying to do the Ocean Sevens in a year to try and bring more awareness to what we were doing and the core purpose behind it. So yeah, we’ve done free swims so far at the English Channel in August. So

going off that, the goal is to try and complete the remaining four by the end of July. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form 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 $228 US dollars. Now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the Goggles and you have that one year membership included for free. And then 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 their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the Goggles. So you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your

Goggles, including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your Goggles with Form Goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these Goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort, my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work 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 Form Goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. Is it coming into the windows when you’re able to do those swims with weather and temperature and all those sorts of things? Yeah, that’s a Branson. So, you know, organizing these swims has been quite a logistical challenge. They’re all spread out across

the world. They all have their own unique challenges and particular times of the year where it’s better to attempt them and more sort of consistent and favorable weather. So, frankly, at the Cook Strait, you know, the weather is a real unknown variable. It’s one of the windiest places in the world. The channel basically acts as a wind tunnel. So, there are very few opportunities to swim during a calendar year. So, you know, luckily enough, I’ve been able to organize and book in slots for the remaining four. But, you know, when you get there, it can be quite tough because, you know, unlike traditional swimming where you pretty much know which day, which heat, all almost down to the minute where you’ll be swimming with these Nairphone swims here, such as the Cook Strait, you know, it’s not like that and you could be like I was sitting around for several weeks waiting for your opportunity to swim. What are you doing in that time

where you’re having to wait? Because I imagine it would be a little bit frustrating. You might be a bit of doubt. Am I actually going to get to do this thing? And you’ve probably got the fitness there. You’re trained up. You’re ready to go, but you’ve just got to sit around and wait. So, what are you doing in that time and how are you keeping yourself mentally switched on, ready for the swim? Yeah, that’s the real challenge. And my, I mean, obviously there’s a physical challenge of these swims, but the mental challenge and that uncertainty can really play on your mind.

For me, we had a few false

green lights, I suppose, where the organisers thought that a particular day might be favourable. They’d be saying, all right, well, we’re looking at Tuesday and then come the Sunday evening and it’s an old gore. So, it’s really about managing your emotions. For me, you know, I’d like to be ready. I’d like to be prepared and almost ready to, you know, jump into spring into action when you get the go ahead. But at the same time, you don’t want to be, you know, thinking about it all at every second moment, you know, because it can be quite fatiguing and taxing. So, I was just trying to, you know, create a routine that I could stick to. I was maintaining my swimming and trying to maintain the sort of strength exercises that I’ve been given to do, but also I think it’s just important to enjoy the time that you’re there. I mean, a lot of these swims are in some fantastic places around the world and it’s almost a shame to go there and not really see it.

So, I was trying to get out and around, see some of the sights, meet the locals and really just capitalise and enjoy the opportunity given to. So, most people would have seen waiting around for three weeks as something that was a bad thing. But for me, it was one of the best experiences I think that ever happened to me. So, I was very grateful for my time in Wellington. I got to know some really incredible people and I think that helps when you’ve got good people around and you’re not just getting stuck in your own head thinking about this one. Yeah, and I think Wellington from, I don’t know, all the open water swimming communities, but I know a lot of people from Wellington and they’ve got a great community of swimmers there. Like a very, not a, it’s not a huge population by any means, but very sort of tight knit and passionate swimming community, which is terrific. And I think viewing it that way, being able to just enjoy that time

off-go sightseeing, meet the locals and actually enjoy the place that you’re in is a great way to keep it, keep sane and just take your mind off the swim. And I mean, we’ll probably have quite a few people listening to this podcast in some of the other locations that you’re going to and they might end up reaching out as well and just saying, hey, take your round, show your round if you’re kicking it out for a couple of weeks as well. Hopefully you’re not having to kick around for too long and you can just get the swim done, but I’m sure you’ll have people reach out and some people are probably wondering, what’s your background? How the hell can you hold one 10 pairs for across the cook straight? Just, you obviously haven’t started as an adult and I know your background is in competitive swimming. Do you want to talk a bit about that and what you’re working towards with your competitive swimming career and sort of what have been traded from there?

Yeah, sure. So I grew up in the west of Scotland as a pool swimmer, predominantly sort of 200 metres, 200 freestyle, 200 backstroke, 2 fly, 4 IM, all the fun events and I was very fortunate to get to a stage where I was racing for my country, going around the world and swimming with some of the best swimmers around that ultimately took me across to Western Australia back in 2012 and that’s where I discovered open water swimming. So got into that and I was just absolutely absolutely loved it. There’s just something different about it. It was quite a nice change of scenery not having to be around the pool, poolside all the time over your weekends. You’d be travelling to some of the nicest locations around and swimming in some absolutely pristine waters. So I really loved it. But then about 2016 I’d had a few hopes to try race on the international stage. It wasn’t looking likely with either Great Britain or Australia but I was exploring opportunities

to maybe swim for Indonesia which is where my mother’s from and when those didn’t really seem to appear possible I stepped away from the sport and I was 25 at the time and thought, you know, I’ve dedicated so much of my life to swimming and I think I was neglecting other areas like my career so I’m an accountant and so I wanted to spend a bit more time pursuing that and growing and building a career and thinking about life after swimming and it was a bit of a shame I probably left the sport not having really achieved the things that I wanted to or feeling a bit unfulfilled and perhaps in my own view

as a bit of a failure so I was, I was a bit burnt out from it all so I didn’t actually have any intentions to come back to the sport like not in a competitive capacity at all but it’s funny what happens in life and during the coronavirus I found myself coming back to swimming as a way of managing my mental well-being one of my friends during lockdown invited me to come swim along the coast and through those swims from Trig Beach in WA to Sorrento yeah, just rediscovered this passion for the sport and swimming and that’s just how much I missed it as an incredible thing as part of my life so yeah, I was very fortunate in that regard and you know, blessed that that happened to me during, you know, a worldwide pandemic what is it about the sport that you think drew you back? I think there’s a number of things I mean, obviously there’s the physical benefits of swimming, there’s a full body workout but I think from a mental aspect

you know, you’re in the water you’re with nature, you’re out in the elements

and there’s time for you to be alone with your own thoughts I don’t think there’s many things out there in today’s world in society where that happens you know, you’re always connected you’re always, you know if you go on the train everyone’s looking at their phone or listening to music but when you’re in the water just you and, you know, in nature and I think there’s something very freeing and liberating about, you know, your swimming and it is peaceful there’s a breath work element to it which is I think has, you know, a very calming effect and then once you’ve done your swim you know, there’s the community aspect of it and all these people around you in for the same reasons and, you know, with many of them working towards particular goals so through the process of these swims I got started to get quite fit again and, you know, with a bit of encouragement from that friend that first invited me down a guy called Martin’s Movie

he suggested maybe you should revisit some of your old goals and see what happens and so from there this would have been in mid-2020 I decided to get back into swimming and have a crack trying to win the Rodney’s Channel Swim which is the big open water swim here in Perth, Western Australia and then so you’re working at the time or did you quit your job at that stage? I quit my job at that stage so, yeah, to wind back a bit I spent a number of years I essentially coming out of swimming when you transition out of the sport it isn’t easy, you know you always have this huge void and all this time on your hands like I used to train maybe 20 to 24 hours a week and all of that free time is now at your disposal so I ended up throwing myself into my job and, you know, working in the city long hours doing the chartered accounting studies the financial planning studies I was burning the candle with both ends I’d come home after a long day

and spend another two or three hours reading a book on tax so I did that for a number of years and things in my life weren’t balanced you know, I was neglecting my health I wasn’t swimming that much and, you know, it all came to a head in 2019 so I ended up quitting my job and going overseas to travel for indefinitely which, you know, at the time was something I’d always wanted to do and, you know, fortunately for me Covid brought me back to Perth and got me back in the water during the lockdown so, yeah, it was this big, I suppose roller coaster of a journey which ultimately brought me back to the thing that I’d been doing all my life that was my common ground and in a place of, oh, I don’t know how to word it like just familiar ground, I suppose

and it’s, because going from full-time training to then full-time work would be very, very challenging like I haven’t competed at the level you have however, just when even just going from when I was in high school training like during school holidays you’re training eight, nine times a week and it’s full-on and then you’ve got this transition to, you know, just to something different where there’s other things going on like it’s very, like I tend to go into nose swimming as well that is a huge change in terms of physiologically as well where you just set entry for those 20 to 24 hours a day instead of actually moving and getting those good chemicals going through you and you might look in the mirror and go yeah, this is what’s happened to me as well you know, compared to what you used to and just how you feel so I can imagine how hard it would be and I’ve got this, I’ve got a friend who was playing AFL for I think the last 14, 15 years

and he retired last year and I saw him two weeks ago and he’s now a farmer and he’s gone just full-time into work but it’s a physical work and he was talking about that transition from playing AFL for 15 years to now not playing at all and but he feels like he’s been able to get through that transition fairly well because he’s busy all the time but it’s physical work and his mind’s always running and it’s been all right for him but I think if it was sitting at a desk for those 60 hours a week instead of being out and about on the farm it would be a very different story yeah, absolutely and you know, I look back at it and you know, as challenging as it was I wouldn’t change a thing because I think you have to experience that to ultimately understand and know what you need you have to go through that adversity to kind of have that growth and get some meaning from it and really value what’s important to you so yeah, it was a journey

but it was one that was well worth going through and I’ve heard that from a lot of people where the most challenging times in their life where maybe they weren’t happy with what was happening or they wanted a different situation it’s those things where you actually make that turn and actually realize right what I really want to be doing and you’ve got to go through those hard times to come out and have the good times like it sounds like you’re having now so as difficult as they are to go through and at the time you can’t see where it could take you in the long run looking back in hindsight you go yeah, okay, I’m actually glad I went through that because it’s led to this so yeah, sometimes it’s necessary yeah, 100% now what’s your training like at the moment how many hours a week you’re doing how many k’s a week you’re doing because I know a lot of people listening will be wondering what’s a typical week look like

so at the moment it’s one swim a day so two hour sessions which will cover maybe six or seven k’s in a session I’m swimming with a group called City of Pear Swimming Club and what I’ll tend to do is pass through the year I’ll maybe ramp that up to get a bit more sort of distance into the arms and build that aerobic capacity but for me and my coach, Owen Carroll we really want to work on quality work and just make sure that the whole process is enjoyable obviously there’s going to be tough sessions and you probably won’t be enjoying them at the time but overall it’s something that we want to be able to look back at and think I really valued that journey and the work that we did and I think it’s certainly coming together in the swims like the Cooke Street the swimming work and the gym work so twice a week I’m doing strength conditioning with a guy called Ryan Everendon who is a former swimmer himself and I think has gone through injuries

and realised the importance of the SNC and managing those and getting the best out of yourself even for the longer distances so yeah, our approach has always been to try work smart always hard work will always get you somewhere but smart work will get you further that’s the mantra that we try to apply to everything that we do and do you think the one session a day rather than double swim days is that helps a lot with that like just the recovery mental side of it I think the double sessions are really good so having that fatigue in the body and having to train through that replicates the lots of stages of these marathons and so on so I’ll definitely introduce the afternoon sessions as well once I get back into the swing of things I think growing older, 32 so older than I was I suppose

with 25 years in this sport I’ve started to realise the importance of things like recovery making sure that go for my massages, eat well, hydrate well any injuries or niggles get them seen to as early as possible because we can only get the best out of ourselves I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here but it really is such an important thing and if you do want to get those one percenters these things all contribute to that so yeah it’s certainly been a mindset shift since my younger days in the sport and we’re looking at all aspects of training and recovery instead of just trying to flog ourselves in the pool all the time and you talked about doing quality sessions can you define what qualities to you what are you and your coach thinking of in terms of making sure the sessions are quality well I’ll answer this by rewinding a bit so when I got back into the sport in 2020 and targeted trying to win Rotnest a lot of the guys that I was going to be up against

were you know some of the best marathon swimmers in the country guys that were on the Australian team and so I sat down with my coach Owen and you know one of the things we said was we’re not going to be able to out train these guys like they’ve been training you know non-stop for the last X number of years most you know I’ve been overseas and particularly looking after myself enjoying yourself yeah yeah but maybe we can train more specific and targeted than them towards Rotnest on a 19.7 kilometer event so one of the guys I’ve reached out to a friend of yours Sam Shepherd over in Melbourne he’d won it in 2019 and done something similar he’d come out for time and to take on the challenge and you know we talked for a long time on the phone I remember it about quality sessions and working at those paces that or working even faster than the paces that you wanted to be holding during the swim so for me you know I had this idea of trying to make

train at sort of 108 pace being able to make that new bread and butter over 100 meters and really comfortable so that on the day if I was swimming at 112 so I’d be able to do that with my eyes closed

so that involved you know sessions where we might be doing short rest 100s and a long course pool on 105 and just really challenging the body but making that possible so that you could drop back to 112s and that would be a doral so when it did come to the race day you know I was able to come out of the blocks

go into that comfort zone at 112 and it was probably just a pace that was a bit faster than what everyone else had planned to go out at and ultimately I’ve led to leading from the start and just developing this lead that was unassailable by about the 15k mark and it just meant that when we came up to the finish and in the Proce Rotnest this lead was about six or seven hundred meters and I could really just enjoy the moment not have to stress about having the sprint into the finish and really soak in the whole experience and when you’re saying 105s what are you you coming in on 105 what are you leaving up leaving on leaving on 105 so coming in leaving on 105 right yeah Jesus so I mean you know like that would be the sort of top end of what I can do and I wouldn’t be able to do too many of those like but you know something like 110s we’d be able to do them until the cows came home so yeah it’s just really trying to work in those zones

work in the threshold zones and just you know I think as a as a sort of fundamental having good technique and always trying to look at ways to improve that you know when you do these swims these big swims if you think about how many strokes you’re going to be taking you know if your techniques not up to scratch or you’re doing things that are loading muscles that shouldn’t be loaded it’s going to make it a lot harder so that was something that we wanted to make sure that we get right before we loaded the body and started putting stress on on some smaller muscles that might not be as durable or as strong as ones that you could you could be using was there anything that stood out to you or comes to mind with your technique that you did focus on whoa I was speaking with a technique guru so I’m not too sure

what I can think of you know for me I think getting a good pull and catch has always been an important thing we were doing a lot of single arm work and band work to really focus on on our catch getting early catch and long use and band work with with a band around your ankles or you’re talking like band out of the water oh sorry band around the ankles but yeah single arm that you know that was you know the our go-to drill and just taking time to isolate one arm at a time and really think about your hand entry and making the most of every stroke yeah I had coach brandt best on the podcast recently and he was talking about that drill as well with single arm drill if I think of one arm to think about and you can really dial in some of those changes like I have a lot of swimmers that I see who are over rotating and particularly to one side and if you’re getting to do single arm on the left side and then the right side

you’ll see one side they’re not being pretty good the other side they’re not and so you can work on a drill like single arm to just refine it and find that better balance or improve a catch or whatever it might be so I think but there’s a reason it’s a real go-to drill for swimmers especially at your level and I’ve seen that with with a heap of other elite swimmers such as yourself so it’s um yeah it’s not surprising that that’s a go-to drill in terms of the the training I think I did the rotteness swim in 2018 I think it was one of the mistakes I made in leading up to it was I didn’t do enough threshold work I was just doing things a little bit too easy and distance wise it was fine but I just don’t think I trained myself I didn’t train enough at those slightly faster faster paces and I paid for that towards the the back of the race and yeah in hindsight obviously we get a lot wiser with hindsight and as we get older

you know we become more aware of yeah if we’re this smart at 2021 I think we can generally you could go a lot further absolutely and you know you just you just don’t know what you don’t know like that would have been a steep learning curve no doubt but you know having done it you know what you could be doing for the next time and did you ever go back and do it again or did it lead to any other ones or you managed to resist the slippery slope because once you do it you know it’s hard to stop yeah well I think coming from Melbourne it’s a little bit easier to not do it the the next week if I was in if I lived in Perth I think I’d I’d probably be doing it each year it’s easy to say that you know coming from yeah yeah when I live over here but yeah just a bit yeah in a team that’s right and it’s easy to organize boats and all that sort of stuff but no so I haven’t done any longer swims however the last I’d say six months as I’ve

started to get back into swimming a bit more regularly since COVID I’ve been a lot better with hitting the right zones in training and I’ve noticed a huge benefit to it so I can see if I do take that route that it’s going to be I’m a lot smarter now with long-distance swimming than I was in the past and talking to swimmers like yourself and then I had Solomon Wright and Heidi again on the podcast when they won it that year and just listening to what they were doing in training I’m like okay I know what I’m missing here and this would have been great information to have prior to it but as you said yeah that’s a not both both great swimmers hiding in Solomon so yeah they yeah they know what they’re doing and so it’s pretty awesome and so at the moment what’s your what’s your sort of routine at the moment you obviously doing quite a bit of training are you working as well what’s your routine like I bought a business with a couple of

friends of mine we bought of all things an industrial cleaning business where we have a team of staff that clean for the mining companies so cleaning dump trucks and excavators all the all the equipment that you see being used up at BHP or a real real dental mine and so I’m effectively the bookkeeper or the the financial controller of that and yeah that keeps me busy but the fortunate thing is I get to work from from a laptop wherever wherever in the world so that’s been a real you know game changer for me I don’t have to be in a particular place all the time and you know that allows me to to do what I’m doing here with these ocean seven swims and I can still work and and have an income that’s a great great setup and must be much easier than working for someone else to you wouldn’t be able to get the leave or you have to have a very lenient boss I think to have you do what you’re doing so when did when did you buy that how

long’s it’s been oh that would have been September 2021 so we’ve had a yeah a year year and a half now it’s certainly come with its challenges when when things don’t go wrong it kind of falls on your shoulders there’s no one else to blame but at the same time it’s been hugely rewarding and an incredible learning experience you know we’re we’re sort of in control of our own destinies and building a business that hopefully we can get to a size and maybe consider selling it in a couple of years and you know I think when you’ve got that knowledge and experience of doing something like that it’s it’s very transferable and to other things don’t don’t leave absolutely you know I was just curious as to how yeah how you were managing to do such a big year of swims with working and funding it and all that sort of stuff so that’s that’s fantastic and one thing I want to just go back to is the strength and conditioning so

talked about you’re working with a strength and conditioning coach who was a swimmer in the past what sort of stuff you’re doing at the moment to keep your shoulders strong and and handle the load that you’re doing and the distance that you’re doing so this I suppose the usual things like like single leg squats and all these exercises that aren’t necessarily about building muscle but it’s more about strengthening areas around the muscles and the ligaments if you think about long distance swimming you know you’re really putting things under duress and you tend to get oh well I certainly tend to get sore in those sort of minor muscles that aren’t even really being used so I’ll get it my hip flexors for example and you know I don’t really kick that much but over time that tiny little bit of kick that balances your body does start to add up so you know we’re doing things to try strengthen those or make them more durable many swimmers might get you

know pins and needles during these long swims and that’s you know my understanding of that is just a sort of less blood circulation to your fingertips so fortunately the guys at formidable strengthening conditioning they’re willing to try

new things and and seek new options to address issues like that so for that you know they have these sort of bracelets that you put on each arm and they inflate almost like when you’re getting your blood pressure taken at the doctors and so they’re constricting the blood flow to your arms and we’re doing our pull-ups with those on and almost trying to replicate that feeling out there when you might be at the 15 kilometer mark when you might be at the 20 kilometer mark where you’re starting to lose feeling and dexterity in your fingers and your hands because I think it happens to us all like I certainly had it in the cook straight I developed the claw after about three hours and tried to like flex my fingers and my hand got stuck like this tried to like open up and it was stuck in the claw for the remainder of the swim that again like like Team Sky you know 10 years ago and Dave’s Railsford you know we were all we’re always looking for those one percenters and ways to improve and

over the length of a marathon swim it does make a huge difference and can be the the four minutes that you need for

going either side of the target time yeah that’s exactly right I’ve seen Michael Andrew use those before and I’ve sort of looked into them a little bit but hadn’t uh yeah hadn’t sort of thought about the best behind their use so that’s a really interesting one and so how long would your gym sessions or your strength and conditioning sessions go for? Probably about an hour you know we don’t want to make them too long and you’ve got I think you know there’s that balance between too much training and and having life so trying to try to make sure that it’s I mean obviously I love what we’re doing and I love the training but I think swimming is there to to sort of be of benefit to you not take over your life it’s supposed yeah swimming’s there to complement your life not take over it so getting that balance between training and other areas is really important and that’s what we try to do. What do you love to do outside of swimming?

I well I love the outdoors so I try to get get outside go down the beach or go on hikes as much as I can my older sister lives in Perth and she’s just had a baby boy so I’ll try and go and spend as much time as I can with with her and and our family so yeah it just it’s I suppose quite a normal down to our outside of the pool like for me but yes you know I feel very fortunate to love where we do in Perth the the weather is always really nice blue skies very few clouds but you know every now and again it’s good to get back to Scotland so I’ll you know been a few years since Covid but I think I’m going to try to get back every every year or two. Yeah fantastic yeah there’s something about like it doesn’t need to be out there does I mean I think about what I love to do and it’s just it’s I love being outside whether that’s in the surf on on the mountain bike or just there’s something about being out outside and I had

the Ironman World Champ on from last year Gustaf Eden and he said why have you always got a smile on the face when you’re training I was just see footage and you’re always smiling and he said I just love being outside and I thought that’s the simplest best answer I’ve heard what do you do what you do it’s uh yeah there’s something to it. Oh I 100% agree I think there’s something about being in nature that is just really calming and beneficial so no I 100% agree with that. And what surprised you so far about your quest to do the Ocean Seven in a year is there anything that’s that surprised you that maybe you weren’t expecting? I think and it’s been probably a pleasant surprise just how lovely the swimming community is I’ve just been so fortunate to meet such incredible people that are involved or attached to the sport in in like for all these different reasons and like I’m a people person I love to understand the wide behind things and

you know there’s some incredible stories that these people have of why they swim and for me that’s been the most fascinating thing just meeting the the people that are involved the people that make all of these swims what they are and then just getting to know others through this sport yeah it’s been the best thing about all of this and you know doing these swims swims like the Cook Street or the English Channel you know they really are a privilege not everyone gets to to do them so like I’m just very grateful for for the opportunities and for being able to to to do them and you know I think it’s been such a valuable and such a valuable journey so far so I’m just really excited for for what’s ahead. Well I’d like to wish you the best of luck for the remaining four swims and whatever you choose to do after that for those that are listening what’s the best way to follow you what’s your your Instagram and

we’ll put all these in the show notes as well but what’s the best way to follow that you’re so yeah probably on on the social media so Andy Donaldson on Facebook or andi.swimming on Instagram and you know I’ll try to do my best to to keep everyone informed and updated on there we’ll be heading over to Hawaii in April for the Molokai Channel swim that’s what’s up and yeah just keep taking each each one one by one one step at a time I think focusing on the remaining four is probably too big to think about at the moment so it’s just these small bite-sized manageable chunks and yeah just just enjoy whatever comes in we giving it our best one way or another absolutely and I know you raise money for the Black Dog Institute as well so we’ll put the link to that so if you are listening you’d like to support mental health and in a way I guess support what you’re raising awareness for as well we’ll include those in the show

notes as well so and you I’ve really enjoyed chatting to you and thank you for being on the podcast and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens over the next couple of months it’s going to be really exciting and looking forward to following yeah no thank you thank you so much for having me on Brent and it’s been a great yeah really enjoyed chatting with you too and yeah we’ll be giving it our best for mental health so yeah 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 On A Mission To Complete The Oceans Seven in One Year with Andy Donaldson appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Joining us today is Dr Jim Taylor, who specializes in Sports psychology and is the author of Train Your Mind for Athletic Success. In this episode, we will talk about useful mind hacks that you can implement into your training.

Book Link:

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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 episode number 275 of the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today, Dr. Jim Taylor, you’ve been on many times before and I always get great feedback when you are on the podcast, I think because you provide very valuable and useful advice that people can actually implement in their swimming or their triathlons, all to do with the mind. And on today’s episode, we’re talking about mind hacks for mental marginal gains. And I’m looking forward to this because you said that you’ve developed this in your work with pro triathletes and you’ve come up with a lot of new ideas working with some of these athletes. So I’m looking forward to getting into it. Welcome to the podcast. Great to be back, Brenton. I always find it a talk shop and share a passion for swimming and triathlon, for sure. I mean, you’re in the thick of it yourself. Your training quite a bit, you’re competing and you get to use a lot of

these strategies yourself, but then you also get to use it with the clients that you work with too. So I think that’s a great way to go about it. I see the same thing with my coaching. If I’m not swimming, and myself, I find I get a little bit stale with my coaching. So when I’m in the swimming regularly, training for something, I find I come up with new ideas as well. So I think it’s the best way to develop these things when you’re doing both. So let’s talk about some of these some of these mental, mental marginal gains that people can can have. What’s the what’s the basis for it? How much would someone expect to improve raising some of these things that we’re going to get into? Yeah, well, I totally agree about the fact that I’m competing at a high level as a triathlete and a lot of the stuff that I do, I consider myself my own first guinea pig. So I try stuff out on me. And if it works, then I’ll maybe suggest it to the athletes I work with, but it’s

also helped me in my own competitive life. So you know, I try to practice what I preach for sure. So let’s start with the concept of marginal gains. It’s a term that’s used a lot in triathlon, certainly in bikes with arrow wheels, shaved legs, arrow helmets, a bike, bike position, all those things. It also applies very much in swimming, whether it’s head position, you know, when you keep your head down versus up, it’s not a big difference. But if you take that difference in terms of maybe saving a second or two a lap, and expand that exponentially to a 10k swim or an Ironman distance swim, it adds up for sure. So these marginal gains are basically these small gains that make a big difference. Because the fact is, the things I suggest, I’m not going to, I can’t say that they’re going to help you improve by by 20%. You know, Brent, I’m thinking I’m pretty good at what I do, but I’m not a magician, that’s for sure.

But if it’s one or 2%, and if you do the math on that, again, it turns into big gains. And if you do a lot of the little things, they add up to more than a marginal gain. So I’ve applied this concept of marginal gains to the mind. Because as we all know, mine plays a huge role in our ability to perform our best in training or on race day. And so if we can add, you know, one or 2%, a little bit of percentage here and there in terms of our swimming and other aspects of triathlon, for example, then that’s going to really help not only help us get the most out of our training, but also to help us be as fast as we can on the swim when we’re when racing. So where would you, where do you think a good place to start would be with some of these things? Yeah, well, I came up with this idea about mine hacks. And I’ve always actually not liked the phrase, the word mine, the word hacks, because it’s sort of a sort of a

nouveau techie thing going on. But people seem to relate to it. And so I decided to call my ideas mind hacks. So I guess start with one sort of general sort of attitude as you enter training or race, where it’s, you know, it’s going to be hard. And our natural reaction, when something’s gonna be hard, something’s gonna be painful is to back away. Because on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago, when we first became homo sapiens, if we start to feel pain, discomfort, what was likely to follow was death. So we’ve evolved to not like to feel pain or feel discomfort. And yet in 2023, swimming triathlon, if you’re not feeling discomfort, you’re not improving, you’re not getting better. So the one thing to start and this is sort of what I would call sort of an attitude hack is that this is range of which you can look at a tough training session or tough race, the range is from I love it to I hate it. Now, there are some people who will with a

really hard swim workout will love it. But you can probably you can speak to this better than I, Breton, they’re probably maybe you’re one of these guys or there’s some athletes out there you worked with who they just love suffering. Incredibly. But but most people aren’t gonna love it. So because you hear you hear this, you play, you gotta love the battle, you got to love the work. I’m sorry, when you’re in the pool, and you’re doing 20 by hundreds or something like that at race pace. It’s hard to love it. The other thing to continue is hate. And if you can’t hate it because you hate it, you’re just not going to do it. So the starting place is this middle ground of I’m not going to love it for sure. I can’t hate it. So I’m gonna accept it. Because it’s part of the deal of striving toward my goals. So I’m just gonna accept it. That way you’re not going like, Oh my gosh, plus you’re not you’re not naturally going to be

going like, Oh yeah, I totally love this and you’re not going to believe it. So just going to a hard workout or a tough race with tough conditions. It’s like, you just accept like this is the way it is. I’m preparing for it. This is helping me get to my goals. So that’s number one, sort of your basic attitude or approach toward a tough workout or a tough race. So now let’s get practical. This has been some fascinating research in a couple of areas that that significantly improves your ability to push your limits to to reduce your perceived effort. One is your self talk. And I might have talked about this in the past, but but it’s been very clear that if you can think positively about something like during a hard workout, actually while you’re actually swimming and it’s hard, you will, your perceived exertion will drop, which means you can maintain your effort and you hurt less. So being very aware of your self talking, if you’re

going through the water going like, God, I hate this sucks. This is terrible. You’re losing time. Because the message you’re sending to your body, the mind of the body is, this is really hard. I don’t want to be here. And the body looks up and goes, Okay, well, we’re just going to ease up there. And so much of swimming is about having your mind overcome your body’s messages to you to stop.

And so so be aware of your self talk and having some things you can say to yourself that will keep you going. And it doesn’t have to be. I love this. I’m doing great. It might just be let’s keep going. Let’s keep working at it. Let’s keep pushing. And and this is going to help me get where I want to go. So really preparing some some some some little self talk sentences can be really helpful. Because when you’re doing a swim workout, and it’s really hard in your body screaming at you to stop, it’s it’s hard to just sort of go, Okay, so what do I need to do here? You can’t think that rashly when your body screaming at you. But if you have them already in your pocket, metaphorically speaking, then you can easily pull them out and go in. Oh yeah. And I’ll share one with you toward the end, which for me has been a real game changer for me personally as an athlete. So so that self talk is really important. Another thing related to words is what I call

power words develop power words. There’s words that make you feel strong. So it might be strong. It might be easy speed is one Olympic swimmer and a gold medalist a number of years ago, sort of famous one in swimming, coming up with words that make you feel good, like fast, strong, powerful. Yeah. Before you talk about what’s the one that you’ve used before, which I’m curious as to what that is. It made me think of the other night I was out at the beach with my two young kids. And the waves were picking out, they’re getting pretty big and sort of breaking words reasonably shallow. And I’m out there with my my kids, they’re six and four. And only in the last six months, they’ve really got quite comfortable out in the ocean. And if they got picked up and dumped or held under or they ducked under a wave and then it pulled them back, there was a lot of fear there. But I’ve changed the, tried to change the story for them. We’re like, this is

fun. How good is it when you get picked up and you get drawn back under the water and it’s like a roller coaster ride. It’s good fun. And so now whenever it happens, they come up and they’re like, wow, that was really cool. That was that was so much fun as opposed to this is a dangerous place to be. And yeah, and it’s unsafe and I’m scared. It’s so the stories that we tell ourselves can really change how we experience something. And and those those words that you have in your pocket can can really make a big difference. So what’s that what do you like to use in training? What’s worked well for you? This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form 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 two hundred and twenty eight US dollars.

Now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the Goggles and you have that one year membership included for free. And then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forward, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts training plans and their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the Goggles. So you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your Goggles, including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your Goggles with Form Goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these Goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort and my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work with

to get your pair of Form Goggles and save 15 percent off. Use our link, formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon effortless at checkout. And that will get you 15 percent off your pair of Form Goggles using our special link, formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. Yeah. Well, just I want to build on the story about your kids. And this applies to all of us is that the words impact how we perceive the world. And so if you’re saying, oh, this is going to be really fun, then you start perceiving the world that way. And that generates different emotions and different physiology. And so it generates excitement instead of fear, for example, like with your kids or before a race. And there’s been some really interesting research that shows that that if you experience anxiety before a race, if you can reinterpret that as excitement, it changes your motivation, it changes your confidence, and it

changes your actual performances. Even though the same underlying physiology is there, there’s no difference physiologically between excitement and fear, but you’re reinterpreting it. And that causes you to view the situation differently, which creates different emotions and different different different performance, different behavior. So so that’s a really powerful one. Since we’re on the topic of words, I guess I’ll give my special sauce, my secret sauce away. It was about two months ago, I was on my indoor trainer and having a really, really hard ride and hard intervals. And I was not doing well. And the last five minutes of these 15 minute intervals, I was the first one might my power start to drop. And by the way, I had this experience in the water as well, doing laps, doing intervals in the pool. And then just I just had this idea pop into my head. And I said, you know, I choose to push my limits. I choose to push my limits.

That’s my secret sauce. I choose to push my limits, not for particularly exciting or anything, but all of a sudden my perceived effort decreased, my wattage went back up. And so I started experimenting with this and myself. And any time I was again in the pool on the road running or on my trainer, I would use this. And when things got hard, I would say this. And every time I was able to maintain or increase my pace. And I’m thinking like, whoa, this is powerful stuff, because it’s obviously you’re smirking, because it’s such a simple thing, right? But there are a couple of really important elements to this idea of I choose to push my limits. So first of all, when when we start to hurt our body’s evolutionarily, again, send signals to our mind to slow down or stop to ease the pain. But what happens is as a part of our primitive brain, called the amygdala, and it’s responsible for filtering in the world and determining very quickly

whether any threats. Because then we have the fight or flight reaction and we run away or fight or whatever what have you. So what this does is when I make this statement, I choose to push my limits. What happens is is that I’m rerouting that information away from my amygdala, which is all about like this, and into my prefrontal cortex, which is involved with executive functioning. It’s a very popular thing with kids these days, kids development. And it basically involves the ability to consider options, weigh risk rewards, and most importantly, make choices. And by making that choice, I’m actually removing the stimuli that’s getting into my primitive brain that’s causing me to ease up. Also, my mind is telling my body, we’re not going to die. I’m in control. I’m on top of things here. Because when you make a choice, that means that you do have the control to dictate how the situation situation is going to go. So I really encourage your

listeners to try this out next time they swim or do something else, maybe related to a triathlon that’s hard is just say to yourself, I choose to push my limits or the way I put it is I choose to dot, dot, dot. You might have some other phrase you like to use. I choose to pursue my goals. I choose to to give my best effort, whatever it might be. And simply by saying that, I believe based on my experience, and I’ve tried this out with some of the pro-trafflates I work with, that it makes a big difference. I mean, it’s remarkable how much it works, how effective it is. Yeah. And I was smirking for that exactly. It’s very simple. But a lot of the times I’m thinking of stroke changes, technique changes, like there’s nothing that is going to be brand new. Doesn’t it be flashy? It’s the simple things, the foundational things that often are the biggest drivers forward. So I can I can see why that why that works. And the thing

that I love about any sport really, but particularly swimming or or triathlon, you get that opportunity to push your limits on an almost daily basis and to have that opportunity to be able to do that and have that feeling of being completely spent or sitting there for half an hour, an hour and a half at a relatively high heart rate. That to me is an exciting thing to be able to do on a daily basis and to feel that. And I think a large part of the population don’t do that. And they’re missing out on a on a really big opportunity to not only feel good, but test themselves. And that can make you a better person in terms of family life, business work. Like it’s just it’s such a great personal development way to do it. So that’s what I really love about about sport, and particularly these more aerobic based sports. And we get to try things like that where you know, where else would you get to say I choose to push my my limits

and actually play around with that, actually test it out. Right. Right. Yeah. I did my first open water swim of the year in Aquatic Park in San Francisco Bay and on Friday. And the water is 49 degrees. So that’s really cold. But I went in the same approach as with a group of elite athletes that are speaking at a camp. And I talked to them about this idea about love, love for versus hate versus accept. Because if you accept it and you anticipate it, there’s tons of research that shows that it’s less of a shock. And I don’t mean just cold water, but I mean any new potentially unpleasant experience. And another thing you’re talking about that’s really relevant here is that by doing it every day, you gain experience. So there are three things that human beings don’t like unfamiliarity, unpredictability, and lack of control. And again, for evolutionary reasons, if we experienced that on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago, we’re probably going to die

right away. And so we’ve learned that we want to stay in our comfort zone, which is familiar, predictable and controllable. The nature of pursuing personal greatness in any sport, including swimming and triathlon, is you have to experience those three things, unfamiliarity, unpredictability and lack of control. But with experience, that which is unfamiliar, that which is unpredictable and uncontrollable becomes that. So for example, after the pandemic hit, all the pools were closed out here, of course. And so I swim in Aquatic Park like 30 times over the next couple of months. And I will tell you Bretton, there was not one moment of joy, for sure, because it’s just cold. But what it did was after, I don’t know, 10 or so, it’s just like, okay, it’s gonna be cold. And the fact is you’re going to have those kind of challenges when you get into races. So it’s that everyday experience, which makes things familiar, predictable and

controllable. And also the fact that, oh, yeah, I survive, I’m okay. Then those difficult conditions that you experience, maybe in a race, and it might be cold water, it might be warm water, I’ve raced in 82 degree. And when I was in Abu Dhabi, I was sweating in the water last November at the World Championships. If there’s a wicked headwind, white caps, I’ve experienced that doing escape from Alcatraz, then it’s like, oh yeah, this is just part of the deal. Plus, it actually at the end, as you suggest, it feels really gratifying. It feels great, because you overcame the challenges. But ultimately, Bretton, what you’re overcoming really is yourself and your own perceived limitations. So there’s tons of power in that. And the more you do something, the more you get comfortable with it. And even though, like now, for example, I’ve been doing triathlons for quite a while now, even though I have a hard workout coming up, and

I have one right after our conversation today, it’s like, oh yeah, it’s gonna be pretty hard. But that’s part of the deal. And that’s why we do it. And in an hour, it’ll be over. And I’ll feel better for it. So again, a lot of that is like these little mind hacks about how you approach, approach tough workouts, or tough days in the water. That made me think of the thing called the rip swim here in Melbourne, which I did recently. So a couple of years back, I did a swim where you swim across their heads to the entrance to the Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. And it there’s, they do it on slack type, but there’s a lot of water, a lot of water moving. And it’s, it’s something like 80 meters deep. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s not a, not a safe stretch of water by any, any means. And the first time I did it, I was quite a little bit anxious. And when I was swimming, you know, I was, I was thinking sharks, I was thinking, I just, I was

keeping an eye on what was, what was around me. And I was, I was quite nervous. Even going through the swim, there was a bit of anxiety. And I did it again a couple of weeks ago. And I had, aside from when I first jumped in and we were lining up to start this, this race, there was a little bit of that. But then afterwards, it just felt like a normal race. And I didn’t have that. And it’s just that experience, doing it a second time. And then I could just get into, to race mode and go for it. And there was no other thoughts in my mind apart from, okay, how’s my pace? Am I going in the right direction? Just all those general things you’d have if you’re racing. But because it was the first time a couple of years ago, yeah, there was those other other fears, those other thoughts there. So if you can get more familiar with the situation by putting yourself there on a regular basis, then you can move yourself in a direction where

you can perform a lot better. Right, absolutely. So another mind hack has to a smiling and in two ways. Now, I think I did talk about this a while ago in one of our earlier ones, but I’m going to add a little twist to it. So smiling is a very strange thing. It has a tremendous impact on our physiologies and our emotions. So a lot of people think, well, you’re smiling when you’re happy. But it also goes both the other way, where if you smile, it makes you happier. And there’s been a lot of research that’s found that if you simply force yourself to smile, your mood lifts, and you feel less pain for a couple of reasons. First of all, as we grow up, what do we learn how we’re feeling when we’re smiling? Well, life’s good. I’m happy on so on. Also, smiling releases neurochemicals endorphins, serotonin, dopamine that actually make us happier and our natural bodies, natural painkillers. So this is a little hard to do in swimming,

but I do it every day. And when I’m in the pool is I’ll actually smile during a workout. And obviously, after let’s say I’m doing a set of 100 or 200 or whatever, I’m hanging at the wall, and I’m breathing hard. I’ll smile. And I don’t mean to be like be having a great time because when you’re stuck in wind and I train part of the times of the mountains of Northern California at 7000 feet. That’s really a plus. I can assure you there’s no joy there either. But but but simply going like this, smiling is a motor skill. Simply raising the side of your mouth produces those same feelings. Now it’s not the same as actually genuinely feeling those those emotions, smiling for genuine reasons. But even when you’re hurting, you can often find reasons to smile. Like I’m pushing my limits. I’m challenging myself. I’m getting stronger. I’m pursuing my goals, whatever it might be. So when things get hard, simply forcing yourself to smile. And you should

this is a great just life thing. You know, you’re driving the road and you’re stressed out because the traffic just forcing yourself to smile. Because it’s hard for our bodies to think and our minds to think and feel in ways that are inconsistent with what the messages our bodies sending us. So if I’m going like this, it’s hard to be really angry. Because the message my mind is getting from my face is, Oh, wait a minute. But you’re happy. And so so it goes OK. And then it makes makes the physiological changes. So simply smiling is a great tool to use in the water, on the bike, on the run, when things get hard, force yourself to smile. And all of a sudden it’s like, well, you know, you actually feel better. So that’s part one of the smiling. Part two is this. There’s been some fascinating research done in a human performance lab where they have a cyclist on an indoor trainer with a TV screen, and it might be something like Zwift or

something like that. And and they would flash smiley faces below the level of consciousness. So so the people riding and looking at the screen can’t see the smiley face consciously. But the mind picks it up. It’s called subliminal messaging. And what they found was that when people are exposed to subliminal messaging that is of a smiley face, they actually go faster and have lower perceived effort and can push harder than if they see a frowny face or no face at all. Now here’s the problem with swimming. You can’t put a smiley face maybe in your goggles or something. But you can pick you can picture the smiley face, because that’s just like putting it on that screen in your mind’s eye. And when I do my effort, my training cave, I don’t like to call it pain cave as sort of negative connotations. But I call it in my training cave. I printed out a smiley face and put it up above my TV when I’m doing indoor workouts. And so when I

swim, I’ll also, in addition to smiling periodically when it’s getting hard, I just pop that image of the smiley face in my mind. Now, realistically, is this scientifically proven to be able to just put a picture in your mind? No, but but I think it works. And if anything else, it’s a placebo. And so I’m going to stick with it. So smiling has this really powerful tool that that we can use. And if we use it on a regular basis and we train ourselves to use it during those hard times, we’re able to get more out of ourselves. Seeing I’ll talk to form goggles and get them to have a button that you can push and then every every 10 seconds to have a little flash of a smiley face in the in the lens, that’s the way to go. Well, well, it’s funny you say that because I like you have a relationship with form goggles and I’m talking to them about building in a self talk and a power word component to it. So where you can where you can actually program in your

power words or the last length, things you things you don’t want to put up there to so you can remind yourself like finish strong or something like that. So so we’re totally the same wavelength there. Yeah, that sounds good. But yesterday I was out I was out surfing at a break near home. And there was probably eight, nine guys on this on this one break. And everyone was you know, kind of they were just all sort of serious and a few salty dogs there and like just not, you know, not not this happy sort of cheery environment. And so I was when in there and everyone’s serious, no one’s sort of smiling, not many people sort of chatting with each other. And then about half an hour in I’m just like, you know what, I’m just gonna I’m just gonna enjoy this. And I’m gonna like smile each time I get away. I’m just gonna be out there and and just be sort of happy. And then over the next half hour, you know, vibe got pretty good out there. People are

starting to chat. I was talking to a few others and I’ve had that happening at other times I’ve been out surfing where if I’m in a good mood, and like genuinely in a good mood, smiling, you know, chat to people, then I have a much better time. But it seems just overall that other people have a better time as well. I’m not saying that you guys are having a good time surfing because I’m out here smiling like I’m not, I’m not, I think that’s the case. But, you know, the, yeah, the environment there can change when you know, when other people are happy. So I try and carry that into the water when I can. Yeah. And yeah, makes a big difference. Yeah, Brent, it’s a good point. And another smiling is one powerful mental tool. Funny is another one. And I love the way you put it in terms like, yeah, I can see surfers, you know, some of the all salty dogs can be pretty dour and that sort of thing, and especially you’re on their turf and

so on. But, but if you can make yourself have fun in the pool or in the open water and in your friendly with other people, simply smiling at other people, being friendly generates positive emotions, which changes your physiology. So the more the more swim coach can can can create a fun environment. That doesn’t mean fun doesn’t mean unfocused. It means just being able to enjoy the experience and especially since the experience from wall to wall might not be always that fun. When you stop in and you’re recovering, you have the opportunity to make it fun because if you can raise your level of enjoyment, then can express that, then it’s hard for other people not to feel that too. So I think with a swim team, creating a culture of fun is a really powerful mind hack as well. Because invariably, if you’re having fun, you’re in the moment, you’re not worried about the next set, which is going to hurt. You’re not thinking about the last

set, which really hurt. You’re just like, oh, yeah, this is really great fun. And so that can lift everybody up as a group, not just yourself as you as you found out with your surfing.

And so came out and who was on the Olympic team in 2021. She trains under a Dean Boxle, who’s a coach here in Australia. And they did a thing, was it about six months ago now, five months ago, he called it the car wash. So that was like getting back into training start of the season. And it was like a couple weeks of the car wash where they’re just washing off all the dirt, all the rust and, you know, framing it that way as a as a fun way to get rid of all the cobwebs and get fit. And then there’s another coach. There’s a coaching Melbourne, Johnny Vanwis, who a lot of swimmers that I’ve had come to clinics have, they train with him. And he’s got a nickname for everyone at the squad. And when they walk in, it’s like, hi, like fastest doctor in Melbourne or whatever it might be. And as like great vibe, people want to go there. It’s early in the morning, but they want to go, they want to be there and part of that that environment. And that

makes it fun. And people are happy to push themselves when they have them from like that, for sure. And then that’s the collective power of creating a culture in a club, whether it’s a master’s program or kids program or in league program. And if everybody’s having fun, a it hurts less. And times go by fat time goes by faster, and you perform better. And it’s like win, win, win, win, win for sure. So so and a coach can certainly help with that. But also the athletes themselves can take upon themselves like, you know what, this is hard, but let’s make it fun and hard because it’s fun and hard is way better than unfunded hard. Yeah, that’s right, because you’re going to be doing the work anyway. Why not? Why not make some fun of it, right? For sure. For sure. Good. A couple more. One is one of the top PTO athletes I work with. He came from a swing background. And and he he knows that when he’s really pushing it, that he realized that

that he can’t force it. So another this might be a key like a good power word or just a good thing to keep mine, this idea of just he would say, I need to flow, not force. So I need to remind my mind and body to flow through the water. And he also he talks. It’s fascinating. This is the difference between people who grew up swimming and people like me who didn’t grow up swimming where like you guys have a relationship with the water. And this is what he talked about. It’s like like he works with the water. He’s not pushing against the water. He’s not pulling the water. He’s working with it. And when he does that, he’s so much faster. He was telling me about this one really tough workout he had a couple weeks ago where he was getting tired and he didn’t feel very good and he was like fighting the water. And it just wasn’t working at all. And then he finally goes, oh yeah, flow. And so he focused on that and the entire workout changed. He put up good

numbers. He felt much better and it was a totally different experience. So just a small thing and especially for inexperienced or relatively new swimmers, you can feel like you’re fighting the water. And Lionel Sanders is famous for his challenges of fighting the water and yet you watch the top triathlete swimming and whether it’s Brownlee or Ferdaino. And what you see is there is that flow to it. And if you can develop that relationship of the water and think of water as not something you’re fighting against or resisting, we’re trying to pull, but you’re working with it and you’re flowing through it. Then again, that changes your physiology. It changed your mind and it actually changes how you move through the water. That’s interesting. You bring that up. I had the guests I had on last week, Brent Best. He was doing some work with the up and coming sprinters here in Australia. Those that are looking to qualify for the 2028 LA Olympics

and they were doing 25s, I think it was and they were getting them to change their tension. Their perceived tension. So he’d have him go 25 meters. Pull as hard and as fast as you can. All right, let’s get times. And then let’s go to 90 percent, 80. I think they went down to perhaps 60 percent. And he found that at 60 percent perceived tension or force, I guess they were only point to slower for that 25 meters. Now these these guys are training for 100 freestyle. And so what they’re looking to get them to do is in that first 50 they want to be relaxed so that they can come home. And that might be point to slower in that first lap. But you’re going to gain much more than that on the second lap because you’ve you’ve kept some energy in reserve. And it’s right. Just more power, more force does not equal faster in the pool. I mean, I would imagine I’m not great at cycling but I would imagine the same thing if you’re if you’re cycling that you cannot sustain

maximum power very, very long. You’ve got to find that sweet spot. And if you’re thinking flow, not force, I think that’s a great cue, a great mental cue that you could use. Very much so, very much so. So two more that I want to share, I suppose. The first is breathing and breathing, yes, is a physical thing. And for me, it’s probably the most powerful physical slash mental hacks, tools we can use because breathing has not only a huge impact on us physiologically, but also psychologically and emotionally. And of course, there’s the whole, you know, Zen Buddhism and the whole meditation thing with breathing, all really great stuff. But the fact is, is that that we just like with smiling, if we can control our breathing, even when it’s hard, these let’s say you just did a super hard set and you’re just gasping for air, your body is getting the message that your body’s sending the message your mind of like, we’re about to die now,

we need to stop. And so everything is the body’s directive is to back off. And if the mind goes along with that, then sure. But if you can send, if you can take control of your breathing, even when you’re gasping for breath, you can still control your breathing. Not only are you going to recover faster, but you’re also sending a message to your body that, okay, we’re not going to die, we’re in control. And this goes back to that control thing I talked about a while ago. And so simply even when you’re gasping when you’re really hard to breathe, taking control of your breathing instead of like going to go again, it helps you psychologically because we like to be in control and we hate being out of control and breathing, especially in swimming because at least with running a bike and you can breathe whenever you want, but you can’t do that in the pool. You have to only, you can only breathe certain times like when you take your head out of the water.

And so that helps a lot as well as it helps get more oxygen into your system. It settles your physiology down. So you recover more quickly and then you can have a good next set. So that is one of those tools. And the thing about breathing is we don’t think about breathing as a tool because we don’t think about it at all because we just do it without thinking about it. We don’t have to, at all. I mean, imagine if we had to really think to breathe, it’s like you stop and breathe and it’s like, oh, I have to breathe here. Oh yeah, because that wouldn’t work very well. So a really great exercise is maybe when you’re doing your warmups and your cooldowns initially to really focus on your breathing. And then when you, when during the workout, the main sets, when you get to the wall to really focus on, okay, let’s take control of the breathing. And that’s something that I do all the time. And I find it makes a real difference

in my ability to recover. And just, I just feel better because I’m not gasping for anymore. I’m in control.

I’ve found that happened in a hard sets where let’s say I’ve got 20 to 30 seconds rest. It might be doing 200s. And we’re working reasonably hard. If I touch the wall and the person behind me touches the wall and we’re chatting, whatever chatting about the weekend and talking, talking, talking. And I haven’t had that chance to just control my breathing. The next interval is usually that little bit slower. And I haven’t had the chance to get that under control. And from the get go, I’m just kind of having to work on just slowing the breathing down. And so I’ll tell you a bit quicker. So yeah, when you hit the wall, it’s just like, all right, let’s get that breathing under control. And then you’re much better off for the next interval. And it’s the only thing that we can really control physiologically is our breathing. And it’s easy to forget because it happens automatically. And the only time I see people forgetting to breathe

is when I’m running clinics and they’re concentrating so hard on trying to change their catch or their rotation. And they’ll take a few strokes and they’re like, oh crap, hang on. Oh yeah, that’s right. I’ve got to breathe. And so that’s the only time I see them forgetting to breathe but that’s when you’re in the water, not out of the water. That’s where it happens naturally. For sure, for sure. That’s great. So I guess the last thing I, the last mind hack for mental marginal gains I would share is for after the workout. And this is to celebrate the daily victories. So we focused on our training so much in terms of the physical gains, like getting stronger, getting faster. And that’s a key part of the training because if we don’t develop ourselves physically then we’re not gonna be able to actually literally go fast in our swim races or in our triathlons because the reality is in both swimming and triathlon, you can’t fake speed.

You can only go as fast as you’re trained to go. So there’s that emphasis of, okay, well the purpose of training is of course to get physically fitter. But it also is important because every time we train, there’s the ability to get mentally stronger. And so a lot of most people when they finish a workout, they’ll sort of get out of the pool and go change and go off to work or life or whatever it might be. But it’s really important, I believe, and this is something clubs can do really well, is to take 15 seconds, 20 seconds and just stop and celebrate the daily victories. And the way I put it is that, and again, we might have talked about this months ago, but it’s like putting money in your confidence bank. And so the idea is that every time you work out, you are getting fitter and you’re also gaining belief in that fitness because you might be stronger, but if you don’t believe you’re stronger, you’re not gonna go out at that pace you’re capable of.

So it’s not just having the fitness, it’s having the belief that you’re of that fit and that you can hold that pace. And so with that confidence bank, what happens then is with that recognizing, celebrating the daily victory, you go money in the bank, baby, money in the bank. And I encourage, I do this with some programs and they actually do that after workouts. And you have to say, baby, otherwise it doesn’t work, Brent. But the idea is recognizing, oh yeah, I just got stronger. And you’re putting, every time you do that, you’re putting money in that confidence bank. The goal of which is to accumulate a really big sum in your confidence bank and then on race day, what do you wanna do? Make a big withdrawal. And you can’t write checks you can’t cover in swimming or in triathlon. And so just taking a couple of seconds and going like, whether you wanna say money in the bank, baby, money in the bank or Ka-ching or Way2Go

or some of my athletes, Olympians, they will imagine themselves on the top of the podium with the Olympic music, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. And seeing the metal going around their neck. And so they just won the gold medal for that workout today. And that, it does a couple of things. First of all, it rewards the effort. And it also reminds you why you work so hard. Because you need to have a good reason to tell your body why you’re hurting so much. And so simply doing that after a workout, that recognition, that celebration, that money in the bank, baby, what you’re doing is you’re showing that it was worth it. That it hurt, yeah. Last couple of hours of however long you’re in the pool, it hurt, but it was so worth it. So the next time you come around to the pool for another workout, it’s like, oh yeah, let’s go for another Olympic medal here in today’s pool. And of course, the victory is you did the workout.

And you tie that into there why, by the sounds of it, like why are we doing all of this? It’s not just for the sake of it. There’s something deep down that we wanna achieve, that we’re aspiring to. So you’re tying that celebration into their why, I’m guessing as well. Yeah. And what I’m gonna suggest, Brenton, is let’s save the why to another podcast, because that’s a really deep and powerful topic to delve into. And it’ll take more time than we have for today. Is that okay? Let’s do it. Okay. So, Jim, I appreciate you being on the podcast. Again, these episodes are great. And we’ve talked about a couple of things today. We’ve talked about you choose to do the workout. And for you, you say, I choose to push my limits. And you can change the way you perceive hard work. Talked about smiling, and the effects that that can have on your training, and on how, on your perceived effort. We talked about flow, not force. So can’t force your way to get fast.

You’ve really gotta relax in order to perform well. Talked about how you can control your breathing to lower your heart rate and control things. And then celebrating the daily victory, celebrating each session. And next time we’re gonna get into your why, which is for me, that’s one of my favorite topics. I love to delve deeply into why someone choose to do something. So I’m looking forward to getting into that. Jim, where can people find out more about what you do and get in touch if they have any questions about what we’ve covered today? Sure, sure. Before I share that, I wanted to make one final point that in talking about all these mind hacks, all these mental tools, you can’t just save them for the race. Like everything else, you need to build it into your training. Make it a part of your mental training as a part of your overall training program. And so literally every day, if you might have a specific mental focus for the day,

or you might just make it a habit of every day I get out of the pool, I’m celebrating the daily victory. Or I use my power words every time where I’m gonna picture that smiley face on my lens every time. What’s most important, just like the power of swimming is not going to the pool every couple of weeks. It’s going in every day or four or five times a week, depending on your schedule. It’s consistency that’s important. Because when you have consistency, you ingrain all these capabilities inside of you, mentally or physically. And that’s where the power is and that’s where the benefits come. In any case, people learn more about me like everybody else, of course, I have a website and drjimtala.com, drjimtala.com. You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and people have questions or comments. My email is on my website under contact. Feel free to reach out, I love getting queries. And swimmers are obviously a curious bunch

or your swimmers are a curious bunch because I hear from them with a degree of regularity asking me questions and I’m happy to answer questions. So I just appreciate the opportunity to share my passion with you, Brent, because you obviously have a similar passion and I’m always happy to come back and share more ideas. Fantastic. Thanks again. Looking forward to the next episode. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

The post Mental Hack for Marginal Mental Gains with Dr Jim Taylor appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Welcome to the third and final part of this three-part podcast with Brant Best. We worked together on a product called SwimBETTER by EO, which helps athletes swim faster. Tune in now!

02:50 More isn’t BETTER

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Head to EO’s website and use the code Effortless at checkout, to get your first 12 months free on a single gold license with any handset purchased.

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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 third and final part of this three-part series with Brent Best. As you will have heard on the last couple of episodes, we’ve talked a lot about the EO swim better. And before we get into the episode, I want to let you know about an exclusive offer that EO is providing for our podcast listeners. So the EO swim better is like a power meter for your swim, which measures both the force and the path of your hands through every stroke. And it provides a unique insight that can improve your technique and efficiency in the pool. And we know that leads to faster swim times. So if you want to know more, head to eolab.com. That’s E-O-L-A-B dot com. And the first production runs already sold out, but they are taking pre-orders now

for delivery in June. And the exclusive offer for our podcast listeners is when you use the code Effortless at checkout, you get your first 12 months free on a single gold license with any handset purchased. So use the code Effortless at checkout for your first 12 months free on a single gold license with any handset purchase. And that will save you 200 Australian dollars, around 150 US dollars, depending on which currency you’re purchasing in. So you can head to eolab.com and use the code Effortless at checkout. All right, let’s get into the episode. It’s a really common one that I see usually on the breathing stroke as well. The thing that annoys me is that, say, a finger-dragged drill or sometimes you get people just over-rotating trying to look good. Yeah, you see a video on Instagram and it’s like, oh, this looks good. I’m going to copy that. And I had someone email me the other day and they said they’ve had issues

with their shoulders. They said, I’ve been trying to rotate a lot more just to take that pressure off my shoulders. And I’m like, man, this is doing the opposite probably to what you’re thinking because if you are too far on your side and you’re trying to get a good catch, that is going to put a lot of strain on your rotator cuff. That is going to jam you up. So you’re probably better off just backing off some of that rotation from what you’re trying to do. And it’s probably something else in your stroke that’s actually causing issues with your shoulders as long as it’s not something underlying. So I think there can be a lot of advice out there that will actually go do the wrong thing. It will send you in the wrong direction and maybe cause more issues with your shoulders. So that’s one that I’ve seen quite a bit of. Yeah, and look, if you want to try it out, try it out. And then get something on your end, I guess I’m going to have a look at it

and then see how much worse it’s going to swim when you’re doing it. If you don’t believe it, don’t believe me. Believe the video sitting in front of you. That if you want to try some stuff out, try it out. But get there at these devices and get someone to watch you or something and talk to you about how much worse it is. Where I think it’s come from, and I think it’s important to know where it’s come from for me, Brenton, because my history goes back into… So I’m not just talking about pipe hormones. My history goes back into adjuvant swimming, learned to swim, and master swimming, which is where I started, is that we want… And we’ve got a history of having really good high recoveries and we want to be relaxed. But more isn’t better. This is a really nice position right here. We don’t need to be here. More is not better there. We don’t obviously want to be all the way out here, but we don’t also need to be in there.

We need to find the position that’s relaxed and going to be in the best power position for you. So you need to work on it and find that position and where it is and don’t be biased by what feels familiar just because you’ve been doing it for a while because someone taught you a while ago a stroke that’s going to make you look more pretty or sell or learn to swim programming because it does look beautiful and learn to swim and you’ve got a whole bunch of kids swimming high all by a bit. Does it serve you? It might serve you, but if it doesn’t, don’t follow up just because it feels familiar. It’s a good one. More is not better. Quite often at clinics I’m trying to get people to do less of the thing that they’re trying to do, whether that be rotation. Sometimes it’s actually reach. Sometimes people try it. They know that you should swim long, but they’re reaching too long and pushing too far back. So more is certainly not better in that case.

You just want the right amount. So that’s a good thing to remember. I actually had a guy on the weekend at a clinic and he has a better high elbow catch position. Now, if we define it as sort of elbow forwards, like vertical forearm, a better catch position than I’ve seen with many of their elite swimmers and triathletes that I’ve worked with. But because he was overpowering the catch and rushing it a little bit and the shoulders were rotating a bit far, he wasn’t able to translate that into the same sort of speed. So what I was explaining to him and trying to get across and I guess sell the idea is that look, your catch is incredible. You can probably back off that effort that you’re putting into the catch and even how much of that high elbow position that you’re doing and you will actually be faster because you are going to be better balanced. You’re probably going to feel stronger and then things will be moving together

a whole lot better. So, and there’s not many swimmers where I’ve actually had to say that because it’s quite a unique flaw in the stroke, I guess. But yeah, and I said it’s one of the more challenging things to develop is a really good catch and you’ve got that. So now we just need to adjust some of those other things so it can all come together and it’s probably going to feel easier to be going faster. So I see it a lot with a lot of swimmers that I deal with that their elbow is too high or too long in their stroke. It annoys me because it’s a shoulder injury waiting to have there’s an optimal amount there as well. If you haven’t got good range in your shoulders, getting into a good high elbow position is going to destroy your shoulders and take away from your power. So there’s an optimal range there too. You’ve got some people that are very flexible and very well connected that can probably sit up a bit higher.

And there’s some people that are not very flexible and are not well connected and are not more balanced that can’t afford to do it. I’ve had athletes who have been able to really get into a very good position and I’ve had athletes, Jayne is probably the most notable of them that couldn’t. So here’s a high elbow position. I’m going to do the coach thing and stand up here. His elbow sat about there. And that’s as far as he went. Didn’t never get into this position here. Got into this position here. That was as far as he went. That was his high elbow. But that worked fairly well for him. And there was a bit of criticism around me. He’s nothing but his elbow high enough. Worked all right. And when he did try to push his elbow into a high elbow position, that’s when he got any shoulder issues at all. When he tried to get anchor too high or hold onto that position for too long. So I see it a lot. People are passionate and they want to do a really, really good job.

So they find it a high elbow is good. And more high elbow must be better. That’s just that advice. More of a good thing. You’ve got to find the optimal amount. You’ve got to find the optimal angle. And if you are internally rotating your shoulder and you are feeling shoulder pain, you’ve gone too far. Yeah, you can’t last long with that, when that’s happening. This is not, these are not loading muscles. These are loading muscles through your body. And if you hold that too high and you jam that, you’re power down on that too much, then you’re going to end up with all sorts of things. I’m no physio, but we’ve seen significant, like things like a labor tech will happen if you are trying to hold onto that and hold onto it took for too long. And then load a muscle that is meant to rotate the shoulder. It’s just an absolute trap. And I think it’s overtaught a little bit of what we’re also seeing and getting back to the device.

And we’re seeing less power through there because if you’re trying to hold onto that for too long, you can’t engage these muscles through here because they work, this one doesn’t work when this one’s working. So until you get down into here, you can’t add power to your stroke anyway. So you’re trying to hold up your high elbow up for as long as you can. Now as long as you can, isn’t great. Get the optimal amount of time where you’re getting that high elbow position and then you’ve got to really use your body because you can’t use your core if you’re up in this position either as well as you want to. You’re not connecting to your body. You’re actually not dislocating but you’re separating your shoulder from that connection all across your body. And we know that the power comes from your body and your arms are just the paddles. You can’t produce force with your hands. You produce force with attaching yourself to your body

and that’s where we get our travel. And that’s where we get our power. And that will get you 15% off your pair of form goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. And of two things that I’ve found helpful for when I’m coaching swimmers is to let them know that the catch is not the power phase. That is the setup phase, that the catch is not where you’re really working hard because as you said, they’re not the muscles where you’re going to be strongest at all. It’s they’re the rotational muscles that you’re using. And then secondly, when I am showing someone, all right, this is what a good catch looks like. Now, don’t try and get that elbow as far forward as you can in that hand and forearm as vertical as you can because it might not be strong or comfortable for you. Anywhere in that high elbow range with the elbow slightly forwards, if we’re looking side on, that is fine.

There are a lot of swimmers, is speaking to James Magnuson. There are a lot of swimmers who are only just in that range and that’s fine. We just need to be anywhere in that range. Don’t try and overdo it. And I remember watching, so Shane Browner Wendell, this episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form 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 $228 US dollars. Now, they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one year membership included for free. And then 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 their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the goggles

so you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your goggles including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your goggles with Form Goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort and my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work 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. The Dutch open water swimmer, seeing some footage of her a couple of years ago now and this was about a year or two before she had a shoulder injury. And then I saw some fairly recent footage probably 12 months ago that she posted from the side

and a couple of years back, an extreme high elbow catch actually going past, so if we’re looking slide on, past 90 degrees. So it was, how do you think in terms of angle? So it was probably like 80, 85 degrees with her upper arm and her hand and forearm. So just ridiculous. And that’s not, yeah, it was like, no wonder. I just thought, how have you not been injured already when I saw that? But then seeing this more recent footage, still a great catch, but she’s not going to as extreme a position. And I don’t know personally, so I’m not sure of what her injuries are like, but I would imagine with that less extreme catch, she’s probably much better. And especially if you’re doing 100K weeks with such an extreme position, it’s just inevitable, but you’re going to get some shoulder injuries when it’s something like that. Yep, absolutely. It’s injury driven, it’s almost driven because if you can’t load that position,

this position, here’s a setup position and you’re loading from when you’re on your body, the more time you’re on your body, the longer you’re going to travel through your impulse. If you’re delaying that, then you’re delaying your power. And if we’re looking at our health curve we’ve been talking about, you’ve got less, you’re actually producing less power for a less amount of time. So you can get into a position that you think you want to be in. It just doesn’t, well, I can understand how people get there, but it just does not make sense to stay in there. Besides the injury, it’s a performance issue as well.

It is, honestly, it is misunderstanding, encourage everybody again. Not only, don’t believe me, go and try it out. And because it’s going to be, we’re kind of breaking a couple of myths of showing you a high elbow is a must. High elbow is important, but too high an elbow is not, but go and try it out and anchor on it. Probably the, and very, very simply, if there’s any physiognomy listening, I apologize because I’m not, and I don’t understand it as well as you will do, but if I’m trying to, if I’m doing a chin up, I can’t shrug and chin up at the same time. And that’s what people are trying to do by getting into this position. And then, so now all I want to load now, you can’t load, you can’t load from your body. That’s a very simple example. And please shoot me. More people who are professionals in movement, but that’s the way I like to think of it. And that seems to relate with the swimmers and coaches that I talk to about that.

You’ve got to load from your body. One cue that I’ve found has been useful for quite a few of the guys that I’ve coached is thinking of having a ladder underneath you and every time you enter your reach forward, you want to place your hand on a rung to that ladder and that in thinking of your body driving past where the hand forearm isn’t really moving back in an ideal world. So think of just placing your hand on a rung of that ladder as you’re going along. And it’s very hard to get your hand on that rung and move your body past it if you’re rotated too far. And you’re going to lose momentum if you’re spending too long in that catch phase or going for too much of an extreme position. So for someone who’s listening to this, see how you go with that cue of swimming on a ladder. And I’ve used that with quite a few swimmers and the results have been pretty good with it because sometimes I think athletes, they need a cue or something to be able to visualize

that can help them try and put some of these things into place. And I know you’re very good at coming up with a way for swimmers to be able to implement the change that you’re trying to make. And I really like that ladder one. Even for me personally, I’m not a good one to be thinking of. I love it. I think it’s fantastic. I mean, you can’t climb a ladder with your shoulder around your ear either. So my brain went straight away to have someone pulling on the lane rung. And I mean, they’d be dropping their elbow as well, but you haven’t got any power there. And it brings you to a drill I’ve worked with on a kid, who didn’t get the concept of something, a very good swimmer about three months ago to get this distance for a stroke. I did, I actually just roll them on their back with your double lung backstroke to get them the idea that they anchor and they move through the stroke to feel it. So they can then feel themselves travel

and they can roll over and feel that travel and their freestyle. It was unorthodox. It seemed to work. I also did it with an athlete who was a, who could do a good breaststroke start, wasn’t a breaststroke, who could do a good breaststroke start as to how they could feel through that power through their stroke. So if there’s any coaches out there, know where you want to get with your message and just keep on throwing cues that may work that may sell your message to your athlete because they don’t buy your stuff. But there’s plenty of ways around it. And you’ve got an out on deck with coaches around Queensland all the time trying to invent drills to find a way to sell to an athlete. I’ve almost started more recently providing the problem to the athlete and saying you need to travel more. Which drill would you use to get that, to give them responsibility for it, but also to get them investigating. And that seems to work pretty well as well.

So a million ways to skin a cat, but I think if we can get our athletes charge of it as well, I think that’s getting off track a little bit. That’s a really good way to get them to buy in.

Well, Brian, I said to you at the start, we’ll go for about half an hour. And you know, if you’re good for time, you said you’re good for time. And we’ve just rolled on to an hour. So I appreciate you being on the podcast and love chatting to you. And time seems to just fly because I’ve learned a lot from you. And I love to get your experience coaching for so many years, but working with just so many different athletes and different coaches and seeing everything that’s happening at the high performance level and down from that as well. So Brian, it’s been great having you on the podcast. This won’t be the last time. I think we’ll organize another one a few months down the track when you’ve had more experience working with coaches and athletes and the swim-better devices as well. Just to keep up to date because I know a lot of the clients who I’m coaching are using them and they want to learn what’s the best way to use this

to swim better, to swim faster. And we’re really starting to figure that out, which is exciting. Yeah, no problem. We’re just starting to scratch the surface. I mean, really, we just don’t understand how we can use these things. So it’s exciting for coaching, PD, understanding stuff that we’ve never been able to do before. So thank you, Brent, for being always, mate, it’s always good to chat. We could go on for hours and hours if we had enough time of the day, but we just don’t seem to. So thank you for your time too. 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 Swim Softer To Go Faster with Brant Best (Part 3 of 3) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Brant Best will be joining us for a three-part podcast. We worked together on a product called SwimBETTER by EO, which helps athletes swim faster. This episode will discuss how it’s valuable to be able to quantify data and drills that he loves and doesn’t like.

00:33 Do you have a standard process when looking at the data?

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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.

Do you have a standard process or order of things that you’re looking at when you’re reading the data? And before you go into that, I mean, someone listen to this, whether or not you’ve got the AOSwimBetter devices or not, this stuff is still relevant, even if you haven’t got them because these improvements in technique can come whether or not you have the devices. These are the things that becomes very clear when you do use them and actually measure these different things in your stroke. Yeah, yeah, you make a good point there before and before we go into the data, I really like the point that you’ve got to focus on your one or two things. Because there’s a million things on the net. There’s a million articles you can read if you try to change all of them in your stuff. Because most of them, probably all of them have never seen you swim. And if they haven’t swimmed and you swim, then they are solution for someone else’s problem. And what

uses that? They’re great gen fixes. What I like about the device, it actually narrows down into where your stroke is missing. Now, I would have seen probably, there’s probably four or five common patterns within the swimmers that I’ve been working with on the device, you can miss it at the front, you can get it at the back, you can get it at the front and then miss it at the back, you can get it at the front. This is pretty common when you get at the front, miss it completely through the middle and then get it at the back. There’s plenty of them in each of those individuals with the athlete. But if you’re worrying about what everybody else is saying on the internet and what everybody else is solving, how they’re solving their problems and they’re not your problems to solve, then you’re not wasting your time, but you’ve definitely not the most efficient way about it. So I think that’s a really important point to make that whether it be with

these devices or with your coach, most of your problems are solved with the top two issues. Rather than going into everything, find out what’s wrong, get someone who understands swimming or get a pair of these devices and work out what’s wrong. Otherwise, you’re just going around around in circles and trying to change something and that doesn’t work and try something else doesn’t work. It really is a waste of time. So I’d say narrow down to the one or two things. And to that point, I hear coaches. And while I work with a lot of very good coaches, I get some that will stand there and tell the whole squad there’s six things that they want done well in this in this set of 6 100s. And even that, I can’t get six things right at once on it. As I said, pretty simple brain, I can get one or two, one, like you give me to it, I’m probably going to battle. So I’m going to get one. So you need to find the one thing

that’s going to make a difference. And you go searching for the one thing, you don’t go searching for the six. And then once you nailed the one that’s the most important, then find the one that’s next most important. But I’m going to almost guarantee you that the one is most important is probably 80% of your problem. That get down to why that’s happening. Then you can get to what’s next, which is why I love these devices, but also why I love coaches because they can help to get there if you’re that swimmer. And if you’re a coach who doesn’t know, and isn’t sure, get into a coach that does and build your network and get some opinions as to what the number one most important thing is a little bit off track, but that’s super important to say, as far as with my with the devices go, I like to go to the to the overall where we get the all the total force bars at the beginning, we get the stroke rate. And I like to see the

trend and compare our right arm to our left arm and see what’s happening on total force. That’s my first snapshot. And then from there, like, there’s some great stuff in the middle of that, I like to go straight from that into what’s happening within each stroke and then work out where my total forces and then work out how my total force reflects and relates to my my propulsive force. I’ve seen some swimmers, plenty of swimmers with where it looks like we’ve got a right hand that’s really powerful. And they feel, oh, my right hand is really, really strong. My left hand isn’t so strong. And then I go into their propulsive force and I have a look and their propulsive force on that right hand is weak, but their total force is high. If there’s a high percentage of it isn’t actually driving forward, but they feel like they’ve got force on their hand. So and it’s been exactly opposite of what they’ve been trying to fix. So that’s

kind of sort of my go to, because I like to I like to look at graphs and see how the see how it’s represented in the force code in the force versus time graph. So that’s where I go with it. I like to look at the force field. I look more at the numbers on the force field and the graph itself, the visual representation is good for me, but the numbers represent for me something really important when we say, okay, well, you are spending 10% of your force on the right or on 10% right, one was 2% left. You’re pushing pulling up too much. Like I said, and that gives me a good overall snapshot is because I think to be able to open up and get a snapshot and then to be able to compare the snapshot. So go from one event, check it out, test it out, show the athlete and then go again and say, Hey, what you’ve just done has minimized your your when you’re slipping under your body, you’re actually slipping half as much as you were before. And that has

meant that your total proposal force has jumped up by five or 10%. It’s super, super valuable. And I think because of simplicity of it, we don’t need to go into the deeper graphs with the swimmers, because we don’t want to over complicate the process. We just say, look, the numbers are better. We don’t even have to show them. We can just say, if there’s five as an increase, you’re going the right way. What did you do there? How did you find that? Go again and see if you can sitting shift a little bit more. So my processes are a lot more around those graphs. I also like to look when I’ve looked at the force field, I think I go into the hand paths, because we’ve got a hand path, the guess is an idea of what’s happening from side on. If I spot too much lateral force, I’ll look at the hand path from above. So with if you haven’t seen the swim better screen, it shows a swimmer from above and then the path of their hand

through their stroke. If we’ve got too much lateral force, it shows it up without even eating a video. And because we can’t get a video above an athlete, we get a really good idea of the hand path. It shows that almost as if we’re seeing through the athlete. I really like that one. And then we can look at the head on and see from head on how deep they’re going, but then how wide they are sweeping. We’ve got a lot of athletes. I’ve seen a lot of athletes with a sweep across the body. We tend to see quite a few who are moving back from the camera a little bit, but are sweeping out and catching quite wide out here. We catch that really nicely. And then we head back into the into the force field. We can then quantify that. And then if we need to, if we need to go deeper, and if probably more, if I’m in a meeting them rather I’m on pool, they’re going to meet with the coach. I’m going to say, well, this is what your numbers look like. This

is what your path looks like. And here is how it’s affecting your force, because your total force might look like this. When we drill down your repulsive force, you’re actually about half of what you’re doing because your hand is waving around all over the place or collapsing under your body. So that’s my process with it, which differs on each athlete, because some athletes are too much downforce, too much upforce. And then we go back and forth with the data. But that’s how you can, for me, that’s how I talk to my coaches. And I simplify that with my athletes. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form 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 $228 US dollars. Now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the Goggles

and you have that one year membership included for free. And then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forward, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts, training plans and their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the Goggles. So you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your Goggles, including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your Goggles with Form Goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these Goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort and my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work with. To get your pair of Form Goggles and save 15% off, use our link formswim.com

forward slash effortless or use a coupon effortless at checkout. That will get you 15% off your pair of Form Goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout.

That’s good. The thing of how I go through it, I’m similar, particularly the force field. So it tells you the percentage of where the forces are going with the left, right, up, down, backwards, which is just an amazing snapshot to see how effective you are with your arms under the body. And then, yeah, going back and forth to actually seeing the path of the hands. I’ve got one athlete that we saw on all of her breathing strokes when we look at the above bird’s eye view, where is that hand going? We saw so much lateral, so much side to side force compared to the other ones, that we’ve just focused on that. How can we go about making that a smoother path? So it’s like a skinny S shape rather than this big wide S that is just not doing much to move you forwards. And if you’re breathing every two strokes or every three strokes, and that’s happening, well, that’s a large percentage of your total strokes where you can get perhaps another

25 or 30 percent out of that stroke, which is not insignificant in any way.

It’s massive to be able to pick that up, especially as they’re fatigued. And probably there’s a second thing worth talking about there is and why I go to my overall view right at the beginning is the decline in power as they go through the race and we’re wanting to hold on to power through the race. When we see the graph just fall away in power, as we watch the maybe through 100 or through 200 or 400, we watch it fall away or through a set. Looking at one the other day, we did 6100s and the first 100 was great and they kept the power up. But as we as they went through the session, we were we’re at 50 percent of the power, the total force by the end of the session and they were at the beginning, which is a really distribution of force across the race. So if you’re swimming a 400 or an 800 or even a 200 year, half as much power at the end of the race and you do a beginning because you’ve used up too much. That’s significant

for your loss of speed, but it’s also significant in picking a particle. What are we doing at the end of the race? Are we losing power? Are we running out of energy? Are we less efficient to your point? Are we breathing higher? And then are we rolling more and is the increased roll? Meaning we’re off balance and then we’re losing power. So then we can not only say we’re losing force, but why are we losing force? Let’s have a look at that one stroke at the 150 meter mark or 175 meter mark and compare it to the one stroke of the 25 meter mark. And let’s have a look at the comparison where you’ve pulled them away. That data is unbelievably valuable. So I’m starting now to look into not only fixing up a stroke within within 25 or 50 meters, but how the decline starts to happen and what’s happening towards the end of the race. Now what’s happening when your legs are on versus your legs being off? The more we’re understanding about it, the

more I’m evolving probably in my use of the data as well.

Yeah, that’s that’s a really good one to be able to actually show a swimmer how that’s impacting how their fatigue is impacting them across a 200 or 400 time trial. Yep. That’s a great way to use it. The one thing I noticed when I have recorded myself is when I breathe every two, the if I breathe my left, my right arm power is quite a bit more. So typically, if I breathe my left hand side, my left strokes are averaging around two. And my right strokes averaging 2.6 to 2.8, I think it was. So I attribute that to having the perhaps I’m perhaps I’m just rotating a bit more, but having the head come back down and just putting a bit more into that stroke. When I come back with the breath, and the same thing happens when I breathe to my right, the left stroke is more powerful. And then if I’m breathing every three, it’s quite even. It’s about 2.3 to 2.4 per stroke. So that as well had no idea, but was was very interesting. And I’m yet to decide whether

yeah, is that the right thing to be doing? Is it should you have more power on one arm? If you’re just breathing every two, I’d probably need to get a wider data set, I think for that and see what the some of the top guys are doing. But I just found that really interesting. It’s super interesting on a few levels. I like to we did probably 80% of our work, technically on our breathing stroke, because the other strikes looked up and looked up and subject to breathing stroke. So to be able to measure it is one thing. The other thing I remember having an athlete who loved breathing on one side over the other. And she was insistent because it was familiar and what she’d been doing since she learned to swim breathing on one side. And I thought the other side was a more efficient stroke. So it was always an arm wrestle to get her to change sides. But I know that the other side was great. But because I felt unfamiliar, and it didn’t

feel right to her, because it’s unfamiliar, she wouldn’t change it. I had another athlete that loved breathing threes and I’m not a big fan of breathing three. She is a middle distance kind of girl. And I like breathing too. So she wouldn’t get out of her three pattern. So I had to actually physically say, okay, let’s do a bunch of 50s on your right. And a bunch of 50s on your breathing threes. I’m going to see which one’s faster. It was point eight quicker breathing, breathing twos and it was breathing threes because she had one side of the solar inefficient. But it was an arm wrestle. And she always kept wanting to go back to threes because that felt familiar and she just watched both sides of the race. It was like, you can watch both sides of the race. But if you’re watching somebody go past you, that’s no fun. So it was still an arm wrestle because I have to be a salesman. I mean, if I haven’t got all the tools available as a salesman, then

I can’t sell the product as well. So this data would have helped me sell it and say, hey, you can do all you want there. But you’re actually swimming a slow race with less power across across whether it would be a 50 or across a bunch of hundreds or across, you know, 800 meters. So this is where I think it is super, super valuable to be able to quantify what we’re doing, mate. For the core, you mentioned there’s a coach been mentoring for about five years. And there was something that you’re sort of able to, like a point you’re able to get across because of the data you could show. Could you go into? Yeah, we’re starting to play a little bit with these now, now that we’re understanding a bit more about what they’re about and what they can apply. We’re starting to play. So I like to go back to good drills. I hate rubbish drills, but drills done well, super, super important. And I’ve only I’ve got probably two or three to take up 80% of

my of my repertoire with drills, because I want to travel as much as I can from the front to the back of my strikes. I use drills are going to do that. So we were starting to get a drill profile on our right arm and our left arm and have a look of what the impulse looks like on our forces as time graph and then start to swim, swim aerobically, see what it looks like there, swim at around about PD plus five to six and see what it looks like there and then to send down to 100 meter race speed and work out where our sweet spot is what we call the I like our Goldilocks power where they had the most amount of power and they had the most amount of travel before they went too fast and they started to slip to get speed and then compare that back to the drill and see where we were at best. And for one athlete, we had the drill was done really well and then as soon as they started to swim, they fell out of balance because they were rolling around too much

and the drill they were very stable. So we had a completely different stroke pattern. It was like, well, this is fantastic, but there’s no drills of state championships as well as you’re doing it. It doesn’t matter if you can do one arm at a time if you can’t put it into your swimming that it doesn’t count. So that’s an argument I like to put forward before the devices, but again, when we’ve got physical data to say, hey, you can hold water like this, yours is not doing it in the thing that we’re training for. So we started to play with that and that concept was very, very cool. So we started to make up drills and play with drills and which was the drill that would lead most closely to the stroke that we wanted for the athlete. So then they tried the drill, we looked at the data, which one links best into your freestyle. This drill works best. This one you can feel in your freestyle. Here’s where your freestyle data looks closest to your

best drill data. That’s the drill for you. But this drill here, which was the drill that is done very, very badly, which is single arm with your hand by side. Actually, it was promoting slipping through the stroke where there’s athlete did this particularly bad. And then that was the drill that they were using as a go to to get to adding more power to their stroke. They’re actually detraining the stroke. So we learned all of this by being able to show them that this is data on their favorite drill was actually getting in their way. What drills do you go to and what drills we’re using? So single arm with the arm by the side. First of all, are you having them breathe to their opposite side or to the same side that they’re stroking? Yeah, that’s a drill that I like when it’s done well, but the majority of the time I dislike because it’s done so badly because I want to stable body through from the catch to the pull. Basically, I want the body

to be stable and I want that force to be maintained. What we’re seeing with that drill, what I see, and I’ll move the camera back a little bit more, what I see with that drill is the swimmers miss the front of their strike and they slide across their body and they miss the back of their strike. And we’re seeing that in the data as well that they will basically be getting almost no impulse versus what they can do in their swimming. So it’s significantly worse. If they do a well, they anchor on here, they hold their angle and they produce good power through their core. But most of our swimmers aren’t balanced enough to swim well enough. Let alone to do a drill is harder than swimming. So they can do that drill great. It’s fantastic. So most of the swimmers can’t. So I like to start with the drill where their hand is out in front because I like when they’re learning something or any athlete in any sport, when you’re learning, you need to be balanced.

If you are off balance and can’t, the uptake of a skill doesn’t happen as quickly. So I like them to be balanced. So when your hand’s at the other hand in front, then you can pull through and you get your balance and you can actually apply force the way you want. And then your brain can send the right patterns to your muscles and the muscles can send the right patterns back to your brain and say, hey, this is a good effective way to reproduce force. So hand in front is my number one. That’s my number one drill. Also, don’t mind it with a fly kick because it helps engage the core and keep the hips nice and stable and we seem to get stable patterns of those. So those two for me are very, very for establishing how you want to feel through the water and up to now because we’ve had to use that gut. It’s all about feelings, feeling the amount of power you’ve got on your hands in front of your stroke and then hold through the back of your stroke.

Feel how much hand on a single arm butterfly drill feel how much power you’ve got. Is that more or less powerful than your butterfly? That’s sorry, than your freestyle stroking. Generally, it’s more powerful What are you doing? Having more power in the drill than you do in the stroke that you’re actually being timed at. So we make the crossover, we make the connection. So they’re two of my big ones. I like a long dog drill. That’s another one I like to like to use to get them to feel the power without having to deal with a with a rotation. The drill that I absolutely despise has done worse than a single arm drill. Here’s a thumb drag drill because it seems to as soon as you put a thumb drag drill they’ve either got to wait and do catch up or their arms swimming around under their body and producing the force that we’re seeing is detrimental to the stroke. So drills that I love, drills that I hate, hate’s a strong word. But if I were kids in the water

for 12 to 18 hours a week and they’re doing drills that are making their stroke work I just want to just get them out of the water and just, you know, just, just you’ve got a limited amount. Actually, you know what? You haven’t always got a limited amount of time. You’ve got so much time, much time as you want in the water. And then you’re doing drills that are going to make it worse. You’re waking up at 4.30 in the morning to make us remain worse with the drill because you’re not thinking about it. I’m going to get on my soapbox a little bit, but what we’re learning is that these drills actually are detrimental to the stroke. We’ve known it, but now we can tell them don’t do that drill. It’s destroying your stroke. Let’s do a drill that adds to your power. So again, long answer was your question, but they’re the drills that I like and the drills that I hate. But more importantly, probably why for me. That’s great. Look, you and I

I think are on the same page with like a thumb drag drill. I come across quite a few somers that adults that are jamming themselves up in their recovery because they’re trying to swim like they’re doing a thumb drag drill. And it causes that over rotation, causes them to lose balance. So the closest thing that we would often do to that would be just your 616 drill. Your 6kicks one straight changeover. But I make sure when they’re doing their recovery that they’re not coming like really high over the water and hand close to the body. Just keep that hand away around the side a little bit where you’d be if you were swimming well because that way you can keep your balance with your arm out in front. And you’re not going to be going past 90 degrees rotation and losing that balance which we sometimes see with some drills like that. So that’s interesting that you have come to the same conclusion because I don’t think I’ve given that to anyone before

because I just see it as making the stroke worse. And we’ve had to come up with our own drills sometimes just to work on the catch in the pool and get adult on sets from those people who haven’t learnt as kids just to be able to find the position that they need to be in for their catch and pull and just to slow things down and break down that movement. And then you can build it back up. And I love long dog, love, love single arm. And I did a video a couple of months ago where I asked Kea Melvitan who you know up in Queensland I said, what drills are you normally doing? Long dog, single arm and there’s one more I can’t think of off the top of my head but they’re the go-to drills and she is a great, great swimmer great looking stroke and it’s no wonder that she’s doing those drills and she’s got such a good hold of the water. 100%. Getting back to what you said before about the thumb drag I understand that people want to look pretty

and ours look pretty. It looks beautiful but if you’re pretty and swing slower then what’s the point? I changed a swimmer worked with a swimmer a couple of days ago she said feels weird doesn’t feel right it feels messy. I said to her, does it feel messy or does it feel unfamiliar? She said, it feels messy. So I was like, okay, well would you prefer to be messy than first or pretty and last? But she was, she had her elbow directly above her shoulder in a friend’s thigh. And we want to be balanced we want to have our friend the positive phase for most of us we want to have her belly facing the floor facing the bottom of the pool to keep that floor on to keep balanced. If our elbow is above our shoulder we can’t physically be propulsive we can’t be on the belly if we’re on our side.

Which is why to your point right at the beginning if you don’t get your breathing strike right at the right time then you’re trying to be propulsive when you’re on your side you can’t do it. And I challenge everyone to go home go back into the pool and try it get on your side and then try to pull through while you’re physically on your side or while you breathe we know it doesn’t work. Anyone that can do it you’re probably either in surface or lay where you’re or you’re better than you think you are because most of the best in the world some of the really really good kids can can roll a little bit and be propulsive because they can hold their core stable but it’s a rare thing or more often than not you lose control and just what what looks to be like an elbow drop at the back of the stroke really is about you’re losing your balance position and when you’ll see if you are losing your balance position your legs will switch or your arm will go across your body

or slide out of the front and there there your indicators that you’ve lost your balance. 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 Swim Softer To Go Faster with Brant Best (Part 2 of 3) appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Brant Best will be joining us for a three-part podcast. We worked together on a product called SwimBETTER by EO, which helps athletes swim faster. This episode will discuss what he learned from working with elite athletes. Watch out for the next episodes!!

00:58 Canberra Camp

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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 has been on recently on episode number 234. It’s Brent Best. Brent, welcome back to the podcast. Right to be on, Brenton. Last time we spoke about some things that amateur swimmers could take away from elite swimmers because your experience is in working with swimmers at the top end or those that are looking to reach the top end. And so we covered some really good topics on that episode. And on today’s episode, I want to talk about some similar things and just get some learnings that you’ve come across over the last couple of weeks and months with working with some of those elite athletes or those that are looking to make the hopefully the Olympic team in 2028. We’ll talk a bit more about that. But I think there’s a lot that we can learn from you and the athletes you’re working with. So I want to dig deep into some of these topics. So we might kick it off with you

mentioned you’ve been in Canberra recently on a camp there. Do you want to talk a bit about what you were doing, who you were working with, and what were some of the things that you were looking to uncover there? Yeah, absolutely. So I was lucky enough to be asked to lead a camp with Swimming Australia where we basically have worked out that it’s obvious really that the more depth we have, the better we’re going to be performing on an international stage, putting pressure on the guys at the top, but also bringing the next run through and not waiting until 25, 26, 27 to get that happening. So we’re jumping early on that and getting our best young guys are patting for that meet and a little bit before that, hopefully, to give them the skills and the understanding of what it takes us to 100 meters freestyle at an elite level and jumping them from an age understanding to an open understanding. So that was the premise of it and giving them and their

coaches an understanding and education really about what it takes. I think we had most of the coaches there as well, which we’re very, very lucky to have because if you can’t make a change, if you can make a change with an athlete, but you can’t make a change with the coach, then you can’t make a difference. So that was the initiative. And then we basically spent the week telling them how to race their race and technical aspects, when to apply power, when to put your stroke rate on, when to sort of drive with your legs and some skill based relay skill applications as well. Now, someone might hear that and go, we’re teaching them how to swim 100 freestyle, they might hear that and go, it’s just up and back, just go fast. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Do you want to go into some of the details there of how to swim a good 100 freestyle at the elite level? It’s a bit misunderstood, I think, from my point of view, we look at, we call the 100

freestyle a sprint that really isn’t a sprint at all. From my point of view, it’s we spend a long swim in the 100 freestyle than a 400 meter runner does on the track. And you look at a 400 meter on the track and most of the best in the world seem to accelerate sort of into the last bend. I’m no athletics coach, but I watch them and I watch other sports that leads into what it takes to do well in swimming. And they’re definitely not sprinting from the start. And they’re a long way from it. In fact, from a novice’s point of view, it almost looks like they’re they’re doing a high level jog around the first 100 meters. So I relate that back to our swimming and look at the effort that’s put into the first 25 meters. And I see that a lot of swimmers and a lot of men and the up and coming swimmers get after it early and hurt a lot late. And then what we’re really looking for is a fairly even and a level velocity through the race. And we get a

fairly big drop off, especially in their age which is ones who don’t understand to get after it early. So early in the race, you want a lot of control because later in the race, you want to come back fast and not lose your velocity. But that’s as simple as I can put it. The intricacies around that and I put it very simply because I like to put it simply because I’ve got a simple brain. And I need to think about like that. And our athletes need to hear things simply. But there’s a lot more sort of complications around it. But if we can come home faster, then we’re going to produce a faster race. We’re seeing the best in the world. Come back quickly and we’re seeing at 75 meters when the whips are cracking then the last 25 meters is where the best in the world have come through over the last 10 years or so. So there’s a lot of talk about the back end and how important is to train the back end. We’re looking at how the front end affects the

back end specifically on this camp. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor form 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 $228 US dollars. Now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one year membership included for free. And then 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 their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the goggles so you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your goggles including your time distance pace

they are right there in your goggles with form goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and a huge fan of these goggles and use them for majority of my sessions and find them very helpful especially for gauging my time, my effort and my pace and I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of some is that I would normally work 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. That will get you 15% off your pair of form goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. And you see Colchamas being one of the best at that because from the racing that I’ve seen he does it’s he’s a very good in that last 25. Carl’s a beast, yeah, especially in the back end of his race. He’s got good physiology for that. He’s obviously got good speed but also good control early in the race.

So he’s able to focus on the last 25 meters where he where he it looks like he’s accelerating. The truth of it is he’s not accelerating. He’s just decelerating at less of a rate than everybody else is decelerating so it makes it look like he’s taking off his effort is higher than earlier in the race. But he’s got a lot. He still isn’t quite what it was at the beginning, which is also misunderstood about the hundred. So his ability to control a good technique at the beginning of the race. So Mr. Softness is is absolutely what Carl’s all about. Now you mentioned softness there. Do you want to talk about what you mean by by softness? And I want to sort of preface this with how does my email be this morning? He’s sort of struggling to go beyond that hundred meters without feeling totally, totally gassed. And in his email, something he mentioned was the first 25 like I feel good. I feel lots of power in my in my catch in my pool. And I

had to ask him, I’ve asked him another question, which I’m waiting for him to reply. I’m asking you, how much effort are you putting into that that catch and pull? Because if every stroke is like a maximum effort, each one, that is not sustainable, no matter how, how good you are. So when you talk about softness, what are you talking about there? Well, I think that we’re talking about myths and misconceptions. I think the myth is that the maximum amount of power you put on the water and also the maximum tension is going to produce the maximum speed. And that’s, we know that’s not the case. Look, it might be the case of 15 meters, we’re even finding that’s not the case even over shortages like that. But if you have maximum tension, I can’t stand here and hold my fist closed of maximum tension for 47, 48 seconds without getting very, very tired and running out of juice in my shoulders. And in my hands, these guys have got

their physiological range of responses happening. And they’re trying to do that from the start. So for me, the tension needs to be optimal rather than maximal. And then when we’re looking at extend extending that across and you assume I might be going a minute or a minute 10 or even 55 seconds or even if he’s very, very good at going 50 seconds, you can’t hold maximum tension. You can’t probably even hold eight or nine out of 10 tension for that amount of time. So you’ve got to find the right amount of tension in your hands to extend across the race. So obviously we don’t want to have zero out of 10. I did something recently with a team where we dropped their tension to about six or seven. And they were only going to slower over 25 meters because they were setting better body position. They had a better length of stroke because they traveled better because they weren’t gripping and switching off their deeper controlling

muscles. They were able to access better muscles in their core when they’ve got a little bit of control, their strength, their stroke length increases. Their stroke rate holds on as well. So the basics of your technique are maintained and probably enhanced by defining that optimal level of control through the first part of your race. It’s a long answer to a short question, but that’s what I mean by softness. It’s not complete softness, but it’s just finding and testing out what the optimal range is. So with that, when we’re doing this exercise, whether it be on a clinic with swimming Queensland or one of these camps with swimming Australia, we’re finding out what optimal is. For me, if a swimmer is swimming at 12 seconds through the first 25 and they’re at maximum force and then they have a crack at one and they might be seven out of 10 and they’re point two slower, I’m happier with the point two slower because we’re going to gain much more than

that on the back end of the race. We might gain a second on the second 50 and I’m happy to give up point two of a second to gain a set to gain one second on the back of the race. So it’s just about finding where that sweet spot is to be able to come home the speed that you want. And is this them judging their own force, tension, like their perceived tension?

It’s hard to judge and it is a trial and error. I spent some time with one of our very good clubs in Brisbane yesterday working this out, just going through repeats. 30 meters sprints yesterday, caught sprints because we started going, they tried to go very hard at the beginning and we found that they went equally hard at my faster, a little bit lighter. So it is a trial and error thing. We would like to be able to quantify as closely as we can. We’re finding out with our swim better devices that we’re working out that peak forces aren’t exactly what we’re after if we’re going to get peak speeds as well. What we’re also finding is that the peak forces that we’re seeing when there’s maximal application. We get higher peaks but we don’t get the width of impulse. So we’re looking at our force versus time curve, which is my go to which I love looking at. We want to get maximum volume under the curves we can. When I’m looking at the swimmers

that are putting maximum force and we’re getting really high peaks, but we’re also getting gaps in force through the middle of the stroke. Which are easily identified and quantified. And honestly, so far when the athletes look at it, they can’t believe what’s going on. And it’s not a question as to whether they are or they aren’t losing force. They can see where it is and they can fix it a lot more quickly and they buy in a whole lot more quickly, which I think is super important when we’re trying to sell this concept to our athletes. So again, going a little bit deeper than the question asked, mate, but yeah, quantifying that is massively important. That’s I want to dig into that a little bit more. So we’re talking about the EO swim better devices, which are force measuring devices that you can wear on your hand when you swim. And a lot of the clients that I work with in the stroke analysis coaching where they send me their videos. And I give

them an analysis, I give them certain things to focus on with specific drills. Those that have those devices are sending me their data. And it’s very interesting just to see what we’re seeing in the video. How does that come out with these devices? And there’s a number of different things that we can look at as a few different screens. And one that you were talking about there was the force over time where we’re looking at the how much force is applied in a stroke through the different parts of it. And as you said there, if they’re going at maximum force, you get this big peak, and then it drops off. But we’re better off just making that force applied for longer and have less of a peak, just so you can have more area under that, that curve, which is which is really interesting, it really interesting. And before you could never, you’ve never really be able to measure that at all. But this is putting numbers to something as coaches, I think

we have known and we know we want to do it, but we’ve never been able to actually see that properly. Yes. That was a lot of what Cam was all about for us was almost selling the idea that maximum force does not equal maximum speed and you’re going to die badly and you’re just not going to be able to finish 100. And that was a that was a very cool part of it. But we were using just times and stroke rates and perceived exertion, but adding the element of actually having proven front of them, we can use video as much as we want, but some is like the flight, they’re in a race and they’re competitive and they want to rip and tear. And you know, for me, you look at the best swimmers in the world, you stand back and very rarely do you say, gee, they’re making that look hard.

These devices prove that that level of hardness is not the best way to produce swimming speed. And when you get, when you get your head wrapped head around that, then you can go lighter, faster, earlier in the race and continue speed and beat the people who are trying to rip and tear. It’s a massive, massive switch. We’ve known it sort of at a high level. We’ve had a gut for it. I’m trying to convince a big, strong 100 meter body, you know, wants to do is beat his chest and rip and tear and do 150 chin ups and bring pressure a million kilograms and to tell them to soften up to go quicker. But as you said, this device proves what we’ve been saying to the better athletes, we just get some message across so much quicker because we can’t sell it. It doesn’t matter how good our info is or how good our gut is. If they won’t buy it and they won’t buy into it, then when our back is turned, they’re going to rip and tear and they’re going to pick it up

like it’s like they’re picking up their dumbbells and rip in like they do in the gym. It’s also probably not ideal either for the their satellite body. So there’s a parallel there as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you get a bunch of 16, 17, 18 year old guys in one place together all at the top of their game competing for the same spots in the next couple of years as they lean to the these Olympics. And you you will get that sort of energy level where where they are wanting to just go as hard and as fast as they they can. But if you look at someone like David Popovich, who he’s not muscly, he’s not he’s not that big. He’s he’s got a good physique for swimming. But he he I think zoos that that softness on the water when you watch him swim. Just great control, incredible feel for the water and just incredible distance per stroke as well. And you can just see that that is that is what we want. That’s what’s going to make you make you faster.

Absolutely. I one thing that isn’t talked about with David with regards to his swimming is the amount of trust he has in to be able to do that because it would be easy just just to want to get after it. But I haven’t spoken to his coach about it. But he’s absolutely sold that this is the best way to swim a hundred. But only because he’s done the work and he’s had that proven to him time and time again that he trusts that enough. And I think we misunderstand that we don’t do enough of that to sell the athlete. We say this is the way to do it. And we expect them to buy into it. It’s against the instinct. They do want to get after each other was a challenging camera when we got eight good boys up against each other and very similar to the environment that when we get eight good boys up against each other when we get into whether it be a national championship or a state championship or an Olympic Games, they want to beat the chest and get

after it. James Magnus and struggled with that internationally because he’s such a competitor. All he wanted to do was go. And even though we’re training and he’s got set to control, the adrenaline was hard for him to control. He brought into it really, really well. So it’s a challenge for all of our guys. So to have a device that proves it rather than for them to say, I just trust me, mate. It’s just another level that I really wish that I had when I was coaching because I think that potentially might have won a few, even a few more races and maybe a couple of critical ones to have that evidence in front of him. Hey, you don’t need to go that hard to go fast. And let everybody else get up and you can have a little bit more control. Yeah, I’ve been the clients that I’ve been working with who have sent through their data. One comes to mine. So he was when I looked at his average force per stroke, he was he was quite high. Now it

was he was up around was like averaging 2.8 to 2.9 with each each stroke. And when I look at when I look at my own, if I’m assuming it like a two to 400 meter effort, it’s generally anywhere from about two to 2.7. And and yes, I and I’m assuming that I put almost twice as fast as this athlete that I was that I was working with. And so first of all, to me, that just says, all right, you’re probably just putting too much force on the water. So let’s let’s just back that off. Let’s really ease off that. And the other thing we were looking at was the direction of the forces. And there was a lot of upward force. And we see in the back of his stroke, that he was finishing quite deep at the at the back. And so rather than pressing back and exiting past the hip, which would moving forwards really well, he was coming upwards, which would sends the hips down. And it’s just not helping you, you go forward. So there are two things that we’ve we’re

working on now from seeing that that data, which I wouldn’t have known about the force that I could not have told you and said, yeah, he’s just really going hard each stroke that I couldn’t really distinguish compared to someone else. And but the back part, I certainly knew, but to see the percentage of his stroke that was upward forces, which was about 5%. And we really want that to be less than 1%. That was good to have that quantified. And a similar thing, just get a lot more buy in that way. You make you make a good point on the forces because we’re seeing that with it with quite a few that our total force is very high. But then when you get a propulsive force is for some of them, especially the ones that want to grip, it’s a much lower percentage. So they feel like they’re holding a lot of water, which they actually are, but it’s not sending in the right direction. And it’s misunderstood by them that they feel what they got all the power and

pressure on the water, which they have. It’s not sending forward and it’s wasted energy. And it’s energy that you’re never going to get back. You’ve only got a certain bucket of energy in your brain and your muscle system only have a certain amount of energy to put out. And if you waste it early, you’re not going to have it at the end. And having at the end, when you’re more fatigued, you know, you can control more of it at the beginning of your race. And you might lose that point too. But once you’re gone, you’re gone. You got my balance on the water, you can make control on the water, your brain is sending signals that you’ve got to stop and you need to get more air in, lactate is going through the roof. All your systems are failing because you put in too much force at the beginning. And if it’s gone in the wrong direction, you just thrown out the window and your race is gone. So this is the evolution of the 100 freestyle

we’ve seen, probably do it, we’ve seen a few more do it. But we’re reaching into having more athletes going into the 46 and all the way down through the age group is getting into making 49 a common thing. And it’s going to not be because we’re producing greater forces, producing smarter force and then spreading it across the race and understanding it. I’m still trying to understand it because force is only I’ve been able to measure for six months of my coaching career, which has been like 30 years now. So still learning how to use it. But the data we’re seeing is guiding us into some some really good and interesting understandings with our coaches, especially in Queensland. It’s interesting to say I’m finding this the same thing because it’s only the last couple of months I’ve been using it with some of the athletes I’m working with. And I first one’s like I don’t know exactly how to use this and use this in a way where I can come up

with a plan to let’s make changes to your stroke this way. Just off the bat. The first one was was a bit of a challenge, but now I’m starting to do it with more people. We’re starting to see what those results are. We’re getting better ideas of what the what the data means. So it is. It’s all it’s all quite new. But the last couple of months that have been doing it, it’s becoming clearer and clearer of, OK, what’s what’s the important stuff here? What is it that we should be focusing on? Because there’s so much data there that if you try and read into all of it, you’re probably going to be confused and do nothing with it. So let’s how do we keep it simple and choose one or two things. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlessswimming.com.

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What is stopping you from getting any faster? Tune in to this episode now!

1:52 How You Hold Your Body

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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 episode number 271 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. This episode is titled Single Point of Failure because there’s often things in systems that if it breaks, it stops the entire thing from working. And what made me think of this was my wife’s got this blender. It’s one of those things that you’ve got like a smoothie cup and you can put the blender on the outside and then just blend it all in one in the cup and then you can drink from that same cup. Now during the week the component of the blender that’s got this rubber seal around the outside but it has the blade in the middle. That rubber seal came out and it got caught in the blade and it split in half. Now the entire thing doesn’t work. You can’t blend anything unless you want all of your ingredients to be leaking through where that seal was.

So this blender has got this single point of failure that if this rubber seal comes out, you lose it or it gets broken. You can no longer use any of the components because it’s just going to leak. And it got me thinking about that with swimming. And I was running clinics on the weekend in Brisbane and we had a number of swimmers who were doing one particular thing with fair stroke that was stopping them from getting faster. It was that single point of failure in the stroke where nothing else can come together. Even if you’re going to have a great catch, you’ve got perfect breathing. There might be something else there that’s stopping them from getting the stroke to come together. And the way that you can think of this if we’re thinking of what are these actual things and what can we do to make sure that we don’t have them in the stroke. I like to go through it in terms of the order of how we want to improve your stroke.

So we would start with the body and that single point of failure that I see with how you hold your body, it’s typically being too bent through the hips and through the waist, not being straight through there. And we do sometimes see people are sort of sticking their bum out, they’re bent through the waist and their legs are kicking like they’re cycling, like they’re riding a bike or like they’re running. And when you’ve got this bend through the middle half of the body, there is no way you’re going to be swimming any faster even if you improve your catch, even if you stretch out more because the amount of drag that gets created when you’ve got this single point of failure through the hips and through the legs, then it’s that thing that just stops you from really getting the stroke to work at all. So that’s the first thing that I was saying was just too much bend through the hips and waist. If you can hold this tautness through your body, so you’re long through your spine, long through your neck, you keep things straight,

then you have this nice streamlined position all the way through the water and you’re much, much more efficient. And it’s so much easier to sit near the surface of the water too with your head hips and heels at the surface. So that was one of the first things that we had to get them to do was figure out how to hold their body correctly, where they switch their core on, squeeze their butt cheeks together and making sure they’re not kicking like they’re riding a bike. Now secondly, we had to make sure that the head position was in the right position. So they weren’t either looking too far down or putting their chin too far forwards, because if your chin’s too far forwards for most people, it just makes the breathing awkward. It makes the hips and legs drop and that can be the single point of failure for a lot of people where they’re just never going to get their back end up or they’re never going to breathe properly

because they’re looking in the wrong spot. So when they do look down towards 45 degrees or a little bit less, then it can even you out. Now the other single point of failure was with the kick. There’s a couple of things that I see here. One really common one that I don’t see discussed that often is sometimes people will be kicking and their feet will be turning outwards. So you should be pointing your toes, turning your feet slightly inwards while you keep your ankles relaxed as you kick. Now sometimes people I think for balance and stability, rather than turning their feet in, sometimes their feet will turn outwards and we see the toes pointing off to the side and every sort of second stroke they’ll have their foot turning outwards. And it creates a lot of drag, puts the foot right outside the body line and it’s just acting as a breakout behind you. And that small amount of surface area, what looks small, it really adds a lot of drag

and it just limits your speed. So when people can kick in the bucket, like a ballerina pointing their toes, then that can really get rid of that single point of failure with the kick. So that was another really, really common one. And another one is usually just the breathing, how you go about breathing. Now sometimes, and there was a swimmer there on the weekend who was having trouble breathing, like his heart rate was too high. He couldn’t get the breath in the right position because he had to turn his head up to the sky because he was sitting so low. But he was sitting so low because of those first few things. He was kicking like he was riding a bike, he was bent through the hips and waist. So once we got those other things sorted, then he was able to start breathing a bit lower and looking to the side, not looking up to the sky. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form 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 US$228. Now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one-year membership included for free. And then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards, it’s only US$15 a month where you get access to their workouts, training plans and their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real-time data of the goggles, so you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your goggles, including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your goggles with Form Goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions

and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort, and my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work 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 Form Goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. So sometimes you’ve got to get these other things in place first, but we need to make sure that you are breathing to the right position because your head determines what happens with the rest of your body in a lot of cases. So if you’re looking too high or you’re throwing your head around, that can cause everything else to move around. So if we can just look to the side, then bring the eye straight back down, minimize the impact or negative impact that the breathing has on the rest of the stroke,

then that can get rid of that single point of failure with your stroke. So they’re the main ones that sort of impact the foundational parts of your stroke. If we’re thinking of improving your swimming, think about it like building a house. You want a strong foundation. You need that strong base. You need the concrete there. We don’t want to build on the sand. You need to have a good concrete base to build on. Then you can build the rest of the stroke. And if those things aren’t in place, it’s very hard to improve your catch and pull and those other types of things. Now another single point of failure is tension. There was another swimmer there on the Saturday who was very tense through the hands in the recovery and the catch and pull and was kind of cupping the hands as well. And this was just something that they weren’t necessarily aware of until it got pointed out. But then when they made the change to keeping the hands soft and relaxed,

especially over the top of the water, they just said, this is so much easier and their stroke began to flow. They got a really nice rhythm happening. So if we’re carrying excess tension and we’re not relaxed in the water, then that can stop you from getting any quicker. It stops the whole thing from really working and being able to keep the heart rate down. So we need to be able to keep things relaxed to keep that heart rate down. And especially excess tension in the hands and forearms is where a lot of people do tend to carry it as well as I guess having that tension in the kick, trying to keep their hips up and their legs up and kicking really hard and frantically rather than having that nice, fluent, relaxed ballerina in a bucket type of kick. So if we can just relax things, have just enough tension to hold the form and shape, then it’s much easier to progress from there. And something that I want to bring up here

is a single point of failure that can happen in open mortisiming. And it’s if you’re not sighting the right way. The way that I’d recommend most from this site is sight and breathe. Where you look forwards, then on the next stroke you turn your head to breathe. You can keep a really good rhythm in your stroke. You can keep a great body position with your stroke when you sight and breathe, sight and breathe, as opposed to having the head up for three or four strokes and then putting the head back down. And sometimes you do need to do that just to get a look at where you’re going. But generally the sight and breathe method is what most people should be using when they are swimming in the open water. Because I’ve seen people who are just working so hard and their heart rate is up very high because their legs are sitting quite low because they’re trying to keep their head up really high for a couple of strokes and then go back down

for a few strokes and then go back up and the head is way above the water rather than having the sighting as part of your normal stroke rhythm. So if you’re not sighting and breathing make sure you change it and make sure you get that sorted. It takes about 15 minutes to sort of get that dialed in and have a look at one of our videos on YouTube just look up sight and breathe, effortless swimming and you’ll see that video there where I go into detail on how to do that because it’s just something that can stop you from swimming comfortably and sighting easily in the open water and it’s a very common one for newer swimmers and newer triathletes that I do see quite a bit. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and got your thinking about what would be the single point of failure in your stroke. Is there something that’s stopping you from getting any faster that you can feel is happening that you have an idea might be happening?

So let me know what is that thing that might be the single point of failure for you in your stroke. If you’re wanting to go into a bit more detail on these things I’d recommend the five core principles training inside of our membership at effortlesswimming.com that goes through the right order to progress things in and it’s got a bit of a checklist that you can go through so am I holding my body the right way this is how you do it am I rotating the right amount this is how we go about developing it and it’s got the different drills there that you can do as well within your training and you don’t need to do a lot you can just do one or two things at a time but progress in the right order build that house with a strong foundation then everything else becomes a whole lot easier. Thanks very much for listening to this episode if you are listening on Spotify listening on iTunes I’d love it if you could leave a review and that helps us get to the top of the charts

we’ve been sitting pretty consistently at number one or sometimes two and three in a lot of the major countries in the world that do listen to your swimming podcast so we’re right up there in the swimming category and I appreciate you for listening to these episodes if you’ve got any ideas of things you’d like me to cover on these episodes send us an email at support at effortlesswimming.com and I’ll make sure to read those if you do have any topics that you would think would be great to cover thanks for listening I’ll catch 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

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I’ve got John Hancock to join me again on the podcast. He recently returned from having a successful crossing of the Cook Straight and is here today to share his experience and some of the preparations he did for the swim.

00:57 Where did this goal come from?

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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 episode number 270 of the Effortless Swimming podcast. Today we’re talking about taking on the Cook Strait, the North South Island crossing in New Zealand. And I’ve got a repeat guest. I’ve got John Hancock to join me on the podcast. Welcome, John. Kia ora, Brenton. How’s it going? Very well, thank you. Look, you’ve just returned from having a successful crossing of the Cook Strait. And this has been something that’s been a long time in the making. And podcast lists might remember you from, I think it was last year or the year before that, had you on talking about your crossing of Lake Taupo. And that successful crossing at that, which is about a 40 kilometer swim in the lake there in New Zealand. And even though the Cook Strait’s a bit shorter, 22 to 23 K, from point to point, it’s actually a more challenging swim. So we’ll talk a little bit about that on today’s podcast. But I just want to talk about the challenge

that you set yourself, having a successful crossing and what goes into it. Because I know there’s a lot of people listening to this podcast who are into cold water swimming, or they’re looking for their next challenge, maybe they’ve done triathlon for a couple of years, and they’re looking for something else to take on. And I think something like the Cook Strait is certainly a big challenge that you can set yourself. And it takes a lot of preparation, takes a lot of good team members and support to help you do that. So I’d love to dig into that, that today. So first of all, congratulations on the on the crossing. And where did it all originate for you? Where did this, this goal come from? Yeah, no, it’s a good question, Brenton. I think I’m an anyone who’s sad enough to have listened to my last outing on effortless swimming, I told the story about swimming across Lake Taupo. So Lake Taupo is the, it’s the sort of hole in

the doughnut that’s the North Island of New Zealand. So it’s it’s an old volcano crater. And as you say, it’s about a 40 kilometer diameter. And the reason I did that was just lockdown, you know, COVID meant that New Zealand’s borders were closed really firmly for a very long time. And coach, Phil Rush, who you’ve had on the podcast a few times, turned up to squad and he said, right, the borders are closed, so I’m going to have absolutely no international swimmers to work with this year. So if anyone wants to do any big swims, this is the year. So that was a project. And we talked about that before. But I lived in Wellington. So Wellington’s at the very southern tip of the North Island of New Zealand. And the crossing from the North Island to the South Island is the Cook Strait. And that’s one of the, the seven great ocean swims of the world. There’s a series called the Ocean Seven. So that’s the English Channel Cook Strait

Catanelida Island to Long Beach in California between two of the islands in Japan. I can’t remember all the other ones are, but there’s a bit of a movement around this now. So it has quite a bit of international celebrity, if you like. And that’s completely unappealing as a project, frankly. But obviously, for me, swimming Cook Straits quite quite an exciting prospect, because that’s where I live. So and Phil’s sort of a system with people who aren’t super experienced swimmers is particularly, you know, New Zealand swimmers, he gets them to swim like Topor one year. That gives you a sort of use to what it what it takes to get ready for something like that. And also the actual execution. So Lake Topor took me 14 and a bit hours. It’s a very long time to be wrapped up in your own head. But if that goes well, then he’s prepared to sort of try and help you get across Cook Strait. So that was the plan. And then of course, we had a second year

with closed borders. So I thought, well, that’s fine, we’ll do that. So I trained up and did all the stuff. And the weather didn’t behave at all. So we were ready and waiting. And then the tide window came and went and that happened three times. So by the time we couldn’t go on the third tide window, it was it was so late in the season, the sea was really starting to get quite cold. So that was the point where we pulled the pin and thought, okay, well, better have another go. So I had a third season trying to prepare myself for that. So that was this year. And, you know, I think with hindsight, it was probably quite a good thing that I didn’t go last year. I was quite a lot better prepared, both physically and mentally and in terms sort of dealing with the things that are different about doing a big ocean crossing rather than just swimming in a nice warm lake. Let’s talk about some of those things that you did

to get prepared. First of all, the cold adaptation. How much better do you think you were with it this year compared to last year? And what what were some of those things that you did consistently to just become more comfortable in the cold? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, when I swam Lake Topor, it was actually slightly warmer than 20 degrees to most of it. So that’s absolutely fine. You can stop to feed, to tread water for, you know, several minutes, chat to people and you don’t really cool down at all. Whereas Cookstra even in the middle of summer can be sort of 16 odd degrees. So that’s cold enough that as soon as you stop moving, you start cooling down almost straight away. So one of the things we had to work on was feeding. So you want to try to feed as fast as possible, spend as little time as possible stationary. Because obviously when you’re when you’re swimming, you’re keeping yourself warm. You’ve got this sort of

heat pump system that your body’s operating. And so the main change I made there was to just get rid of all solid food and just just rely on liquids for the entire day. And that’s quite a fun thing. So everybody’s got advice for you when you do something like this, you know, so you’ve got to use this sort of electrolyte or that sort of sports drink and one of my friends who’s Irish, she’s really big on leek and potato soup. That’s what you need to use. And I’ve tried all these different things and I said to Phil. So what’s the, you know, what’s the strategy? And he said, well, I don’t know if they still make it, but when I was swimming competitively, this is like mid 1980s. I used this stuff called Complan. And I went, OK, so talking to one of my friends who’s a doctor and she said, Oh, yes, I know about Complan. It’s what I give all of my 85 year old patients who can’t eat. So it’s like a sort of food supplement for

geriatrics. So that’s what I trained with. I took my Complan all around the country on training courses and it’s a sort of complete nutrition system. And yeah, so I’ve had about 100 doses of Complan to take me across the strait. I think I worked out that I had more Complan than a geriatric would eat in over a week in one day.

So that was the first thing. And then the second thing is the is just getting used to being cold. So when we got to the end of last season without having tried it, Phil said, you’ll be fine, but I need you to keep swimming without a wetsuit in the harbor right the way through the winter. And that’s that’s quite ambitious in Wellington, Wellington weather. It’s a lovely city, but the weather is not that great and the harbors like maybe nine degrees. It’s sort of late July, early August, which is the middle of winter for us in the Southern Hemisphere. So, you know, the instructions were, you know, burn your wetsuit, swim in the harbor maybe three times a week, every single week right the way through winter. And, you know, the theory is the, you know, the frog in the the pound of water that’s being boiled. So in theory, you don’t really notice that it’s getting colder and colder and colder. And of course, this is complete rubbish because you really

do because it’s really cold in the middle of winter. But but I think part of the point of this is psychological that, you know, you do get used to the fact that you’re swimming in water that’s far colder than I certainly ever managed before, even even with a wetsuit on. And then you go through the middle of winter. And then, of course, it starts warming up. And at that point, you have a lot more self confidence, you know, it may be a bit uncomfortable and everything, but you know, you’re going to be absolutely fine. And there was one point where Phil said to me, well, you know, the main purpose of this is what we’re trying to do is get you used to what it’s like to be mildly hypothermic and to understand that that’s absolutely fine, which is an extraordinary thing to actually want to do to yourself voluntarily. But I think again, what he’s getting at is, you know, the body is an amazing thing. And if you’ve prepared,

practiced, you know what you’re dealing with and you know that you can you can manage yourself through these situations. Yeah, so it’s quite a quite a funny old winter, really. Just every time we had swim squad leaping in the harbor, swimming around the fountain. Did it did it ever become enjoyable? Did you ever look forward to look forward to the cold water? It’s fun with other people, right? I mean, that’s that’s the bit that I tried to make the whole thing a fun project, you know, because I think you can sort of think yourself into a bit of a black hole when you’re doing something like that, because it is a bit intimidating. And I just thought it’s such a ridiculous proposition that was how we were going to do this. We’re just going to make a bit of a joke of the whole thing. And my mates locally have been brilliant, you know, sort of jumping in and doing stuff like that with me. Yeah, so it’s made it quite fun. I think it makes a huge

difference if you can make swimming by something like that that’s a bit more of a team sport. You’ve got other people involved. It is it can be so much more enjoyable and so that you organise a couple of training camps and you lead up to it as well. We happen to run into each other up at NUSA. I was running some some clinics and yourself and a couple of other swimmers that arrived for a week long training camp, get some caves under the belt to get some sunshine in NUSA, which you couldn’t get much of a better place to do that. And you also did a training camp in in New Zealand. How did they help in the lead up to this? Yeah, no, I mean, I think taking time out to do sort of intensive swim caps is it’s almost essential. It’s I’m sure some people managed to do it, but the amount of swimming you have to do to get ready for something like this is quite extraordinary. So Phil, he was a simple old school swim coach in some ways.

You know, his rule is I want you doing 50 K a week for three weeks and then you’ll be ready. So do the maths. You know, if you swim at three kilometers an hour, including breaks and stuff like that, that’s 17 hours. So 17 hours swimming in one week with a break. I mean, that’s an awful lot of swimming each day, every single day for a week. But of course, if you go away with a bunch of people, obviously, you’re not working and you’re not thinking about domestic things. But just the change of scene just makes it that much easier. One of the things I did this year, which was a bit different from the last two years though, was I had to start much earlier than normal. So the last couple of seasons, I’ve really left my build until the end of the Christmas holidays. So for us in the Southern Hemisphere, the Christmas holidays are the main some holidays. So obviously that’s family and friends and you want to be vaguely present for some of that.

So there I was sort of targeting a March swim. So starting swimming in January, whereas this year, Phil wanted me swimming at the end of January, because that’s when the straight said it’s absolute warmest. So that meant I had to get started at the beginning of November to be ready for that. And Wellington Harbour is still quite chilly early November. So that was one of the reasons we thought we’d go to Noosa in Queensland and Australia is a beautiful place, lovely conditions. And that was a brilliant way of kickstarting my whole program as well, you know, to have a whole week just to focus on swimming. I was quite surprised at how how I cope with that much volume. And I think that’s this thing I was talking about that, you know, because it was my third season, even though I hadn’t swam an enormous amount during the winter, because we were focusing on the cold adaptation. I still had quite good endurance just from the previous two seasons.

And then built off that. Then I did a cold water swim camp in the South Island in one of the one of the lakes in the Southern Alps, which, you know, again, that’s got a slightly different focus. And then we finished the season swimming in Lake Topo, actually, which is where the New Zealand open water swim champs are. So we sort of tacked on four days, just a bunch of us all swimming in the lake together. And again, you know, a mixture of open water, some pool work. But it’s the people that make it, right? But even though it’s the same people somehow going to a different place, it just sort of makes it slightly more interesting. And actually, some of the lakes swimming in New Zealand is great for training, because the visibility is really good. You know, in some parts of the world, lakes are quite murky. A lot of sea swimming in places can be quite sort of quite limited because you can’t see much. Whereas Lake Wanaka in the South Island where

spend my Christmas holidays, that’s got lovely shallow waters and there’s bags to look at. Lake Topo’s got a very, very interesting coastline, which we discovered new bits of. So yeah, you just sort of mix it up to keep the keep the variety.

And I’m sure someone listening, this is probably thinking, oh, how how much is a lot of swimming? So you talked about the three lots of 50 k weeks. But what about the 12 weeks leading into the swim? How many days a week are you doing? I tried to do my classic periodization. So I sort of, you know, building it up, sort of adding 5 k a week in a sort of sawtooth, giving myself every fourth week off. So, you know, I would have started sort of about 30 k a week. So that’s about 10 hours and then building it up sort of by adding an hour and a half every week up to the 17 hours a week to get to 50 k. I don’t think I was quite as good at actually managing 50 k. I think if you look at my records, there might be a might be a bit short, but then the swim’s a bit shorter. So probably dodged my way through it. Now, let’s talk about the day itself. So it can be a very things can change very quickly in terms of weather conditions. Sometimes the water movement

is different than what’s expected. There’s a lot that goes on in that swim and the amount of stories I’ve heard of people getting within 100 meters of the coast and they just can not get there because of the tide. Like those stories are really fresh in my mind because it’s such a huge thing to undertake and then to get so close, but you just can’t physically get there because of the tide. You know, those those are the ones that sort of stand out to me. So take me through the day. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form 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 two hundred and twenty eight US dollars. Now, they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the Goggles and you have that one year membership included for free.

And then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forward, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts, training plans and their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the Goggles, so you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your Goggles, including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your Goggles with Form Goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort and my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work with to get your pair of Form Goggles and save 15 percent off. Use our link form swim dot com forward slash effortless or use a coupon effortless at

checkout. And that will get you 15 percent off your pair of Form Goggles using our special link form swim dot com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. Yeah, I mean, you’re right that

it’s so different from even a lake swim in as much as you you have absolutely no idea when you’re going to be swimming and the best analogy anyone’s ever given me for it’s a bit like you hear about these people who go climbing in the Himalayas and they’ll trek into a base camp and then they just wait for the weather, you know, and they can be there for weeks because there’s only like one or two days a year where the weather’s good enough to try and do whatever they’re trying to do. So the thing with the Cook Strait is it’s a very tidal crossing. So it’s physically impossible to swim it no matter how good you are anything other than within a couple of days of low tide. And that’s because when the tide turns against you, the current would be so strong it would just wash you straight back way beyond where you started. So you’d never make any forward progress. So the years sort of chopped up into these tide windows around low tide sort of four to

six day intervals and Phil gets his calendar out and marks out when the tide windows are and he can take multiple swimmers at the same time with dedicated teams. But at the end of the day, you know, that’s what you’re aiming for. You can build and taper your way into the tide window, but you still got absolutely no idea which day you’re going to be going on if at all. And of course, what happened to me last year is the weather was absolutely rubbish for not one, not two, but three tide windows. And so I was sort of ready to go stood down and this whole cycle repeated itself for six weeks. And then I still didn’t didn’t get to go. So mentally, you have to be quite sort of ready for that whole sort of we’re ready. Oh, no, we’re not. So this year, obviously, we were talking about it the week beforehand. And the first day was a Sunday. Phil said, yeah, we’re looking pretty good. Looks like the weather is going to be quite good on Sunday.

And then we got a tropical cyclone came through. And I think the story is actually got one happening right now outside the window. Our second one of the season, Auckland actually got as much rain in one day as it normally gets in a whole year. Now, we didn’t get all of that, but it messed up all the weather in the straight. And that was at less than a day’s notice on the forecast. So stand the team down, ready and waiting and whatever. Nothing happened on the Monday, but Phil said the Tuesday is looking quite good. So again, you need to get everyone organised or your gear ready. And it was only, I think seven o’clock night before the swim that he said, yeah, forecast is stable. I’ve checked it with a bunch of other sources. I’ll see you seven o’clock in the morning tomorrow. And then you turn up at the marina, hop on the on the boat and you’re good to go. So I mean, the way it works is you have a small village with you. So people often say,

you know, did you do it with other people? I mean, you don’t you don’t have other swimmers swimming with you, but you have a huge team of people supporting you. So there’s a there’s a launch, you know, big boat, which takes you and your support crew and a little inflatable rubber boat to the start point and then you hop out of the launch and get into the rubber boat with Phil, the coach and then a friend who’s in charge of feeding. So you feed every every 30 minutes.

And then the system is the launch sort of stays with you. They may rotate the feeders if the conditions are good. And then when you get to the other side, then everybody hops back on the launch and you go straight back to the marina where you started. So in a way, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re going north to south or south to north, you know, as far as you’re concerned, you start in the marina and you finish in the marina because that’s that’s the loop that you do. Yeah, so there’s quite a lot of build up. So plenty of time to get really nervous, I found, you know, so you turn up cool as a cucumber, but then it’s about an hour in the launch to get to the start point. So the way the tides worked for my swim, it made more sense to swim from the North Island to the South Island. And that’s just because the top of the tide in the morning was on the North Island. So that was the way we decided to go. But some people, the

timing is different. So you do it the other way. And so you make your way out there, you know, you put your final sunblock application on and then this famous process that I’m sure people have read about where you cover yourself in Greece. So back in the day, people used to sort of smother themselves in whale blubber to keep their keep their organs warm. So this is this is English channel rules. So you’re only allowed to wear a pair of togs, pair of gobbles and one swim cap. So having grease around your vital organs is just a way of trying to help yourself stay a little bit warmer. So you look extremely unattractive when you’ve got all this stuff on. But I suppose that’s the last thing in your mind. But it’s quite a big build up. And then when you get to the right point in the tide, then you literally jump in the IRB take the IRB takes you out just offshore. And then Phil goes, OK, good to go. So I need you to jump in the

water, swim to that rock over there, touch the rock and then and then swim. And and the day itself, I think when when we talked last about swimming Lake Topor, I mean, the thing that’s so hard about that is every half hour is almost exactly the same because you’re swimming in a lake and you choose a day when there’s no wind. So, you know, sure, the sun comes up and the sun goes down and everything. But there’s a lot of time where it’s just the same. You can’t see land you’re too far away from it. Whereas I found this swim because its title was it’s much more structured and in a way that was quite interesting. So to start with, you’ve got the you’ve got the tide behind you. So you’re going on an outgoing tide. So you’re moving incredibly quickly. Most people do five kilometers an hour, maybe even more than that. So I think my first hour I did nearly six K in the in the first hour and then even the hour after that, you still got the

tide helping you through. And there was a slight tailwind as well. And it was sort of butting up against the tide. So we had this sort of rolling swell. And that meant I was sort of able to sort of surf over the top. I talked about sort of a fantastic little message of good luck I got from a friend in Wellington, Casey Glover. So Casey is quite famous in the open water swimming world because he’s the record holder for swimming Cook Strait and did this crossing, which is about 22 kilometers point to point in I think it’s about four hours and 40 minutes. So that’s an average speed of over five kilometers an hour for the entire crossing. It was amazing. So and he sent me this note and it was very cryptic and he said the swells on your side then surf across. And I wasn’t quite sure what this meant. So I talked to my mates on the boat and they said, Oh, well, you know, what he means is it’s like surf life saving. You know, you sort

of need to come up out of the water and get on top of it. And of course, when I last saw you Brenton, we were in Noosa and the beaches in Noosa are very surfy. So my mate Sarah had shown me how you because I said, How do you do all this really cool surf swimming? So we’d actually practiced this. That was quite, quite nice. And so the first two hours of my swim on Cook Straight, I was really thinking about, you know, trying to sort of stay up out of the water and trying to use the trying to use the swell to sort of give me a little bit of extra, extra help and get my lift to work with the surf. And then sort of middle section of the swim, you sort of comes a point where actually you’re hardly moving at all because the tide turns against you. You can’t really tell because you can’t see any land. So I don’t know. It’s just water and that section three hours or so. That’s that’s more like lake swimming. And that’s where you’re really looking forward to

each feed you feed every half an hour. And, you know, a lot of the focus is on swimming, swimming correctly. So I was thinking, well, I was being told to think a lot about my technique by Phil, who was sitting in the IRB barking instructions at me every every 30 minutes about engaging my catch and making sure I kept my stroke rate up and stuff. But then Brenton, as you say, the sort of business end of the swim is the last two to three hours. So as you approach the South Island, in my case, people had warned me that there’s a complex network of undersea caverns, caverns, channels at the bottom of Cook Strait. And in some places, the water from the bottom of the strait comes up to the surface. It’s called an upwelling. And so you’ll suddenly hit water that’s maybe three or four degrees colder than it was even 20, 30 meters behind you. And that’s quite a big surprise if you’re not ready for it. And it’s that temperature for the whole of

the rest of the swim. So my friend said to me, he said, I just thought of it as being very refreshing. It’s more than refreshing. It’s really quite a shock. But it was it was great because I’d trained the cold water. I wasn’t spooked by it. I knew I was going to be OK. But the other thing, which you mentioned in your question, is about this offshore current. So you’ve got, you know, it’s not super strong, but it’s a it’s definitely something you’ve got to work against. So and this is the thing that prevents some people from succeeding even when they’re really quite close to shore. As you say, there’s countless examples of people who are maybe even 200 meters from shore. And they spend one or two hours trying to get over the very last bit of offshore current and never quite make it. And with the cold water and increasing fatigue, there comes a point where you just start slipping and then you slip and slip and slip and then you run

out of land and then, you know, the swim’s over. So the the secret weapon I had there was was Phil in the boat telling me when I’d been swimming for five and a half hours that I had to pick my stroke, rake up, engage my catch and swim as though my life was depended on it for two more hours. So that was that was pretty hard. And he told me afterwards that he was obviously a bit worried about my my core temperature. He didn’t want me getting cold given that, you know, I’ve struggled with it and worked with it all season. When I stopped for a feed, he lent me just to touch me at the top of my head. And he said, God, he’s absolutely boiling. I don’t think we’re going to have any problem with him getting too cold because I was working so hard. Apparently I had a face like a beetroot. So yeah, so that works. Yeah, my friend, Sarah, I remember she was looking at the I’ll be and she’s up there doing this, telling me to kick my legs.

That’s like, main, give me a break. This is this is really hard. So you I mean, I think I said in my my ride up, you know, I mean, at one level, it’s quite an easy day because I just had to do what I was told. You know, I had, you know, Phil Rush, Master Marathon swimmer, my training buddy, Sarah, both of them just telling me, eat this, swallow this, do this with your hands, do this with your arms, whatever. But then, you know, you can only really execute if you’ve done the training. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Was there was anything that surprised you about the swim that you weren’t expecting? The thing that surprised me about this one actually is how the time went. I mean, I found the Topol swim, you know, that’s a hell of a long time to be inside your own head. But this one, as I say, because there was so much going on, you know, I was actually, you know, mentally quite busy the whole thing. I didn’t really get too bored at any point at all.

And that was great. I mean, the other thing that quite surprised me is the fact I managed to do it because it’s, you know, it’s a pretty amazing achievement, which isn’t bigging myself up. I mean, it’s picking up my team. But it’s extraordinary that somebody like me and I’m not a great swimmer, as you know, do something like that with, you know, with the right focus, preparation and execution. Yeah. Well, like in your write-up, you said it’s something that’s been really in the pipeline for about 10 years, but more tangibly in the last three years, I guess. But but you said, as a kid, you weren’t that much of a sportsman and but you’ve done a lot of a lot of big things in terms of you’ve done quite a lot of triathlons, Ironman stuff, you’ve done a lot of swim run stuff and then the swimming stuff now as well. So to me, that’s that’s really encouraging for a lot of people who may not have been sporty as a as a kid. And then as they get later

in life, they might take on these new sports, these these new challenges. And I think it’s just that build up of belief that yeah, actually, if I apply myself and I do the right things and I find the right people to support me, then it is possible. And it’s not just reserved for those special few who are talented in whatever sport they’re they’re doing. Yeah, I think I think that’s right. And I mean, the Ironman thing I’ve talked about quite a lot and that’s sort of relevance and applicability to marathon swimming. And there have been a few times both in training and in in doing some of the big swims where, you know, I face situations and I thought, well, I know exactly what to do here because this is exactly the same as what happens at the end of the Ironman run. This is exactly the same. I understand what I need to do with my effort, my pacing, whatever, whatever, whatever. And my old triathlon coach, John Acklin used to say,

and it’s obvious until you realize you’ve never thought of it. But, you know, Ironman is isn’t about how fast you go. It’s about how much you slow down. And that’s all about preparation and execution, but it’s exactly the same in marathon swimming. You know, you don’t need to be Casey Glover. You just need to be able to maintain your pace. And if you can keep three kilometers an hour going as the conditions change, then, you know, you’ll make it. And it’s something that that anyone with the right approach, I think, you know, can be successful out if I can. And there have been some really, really good swimmers who haven’t managed to get across cook straight, you know. But in many cases, that’s because they were brilliant pool swimmers, you know, and they haven’t had much experience of cold water, nutrition, effort, conservation, pacing, all that sort of stuff. But it does speak volumes to the team that you surround yourself with.

And I talk a lot about how I mean, my experience is stuff like this. It’s about support, surrounding yourself with people who want you to be successful. It’s the most important thing. It keeps it fun, which we’ve talked about. But also the, you know, sort of it’s not just the technical expertise. It’s the self-belief, as you say, that comes from the emotional support that you get from people who really believe in you. And then amazing things are possible. Yeah, absolutely right. Before the call, we were talking about what have you done since the swim? What have you, you know, how you’re feeling all of that? And you said you’ve been quite, quite tired. You’re still feeling that fatigue because the swim wasn’t that that long ago really. And you mentioned catching up on work and those kinds of things. But with the achievements that you’ve done over the last couple of years, and I guess over the last 10 years or so as well with triathlon and

swim run, do you feel like that has changed you as a person in everything outside of sport? Has that had a flow and effect to your confidence or the way you go about things? Wow, deep question, Branson. You go deep. Yeah, go deep on it. It’s the Joe Rogan of swimming podcasts. Yeah, definitely. I mean, at one level, I think again, because I wasn’t a super sporty kid, I think one of the things I’ve really got a lot of pleasure from is understanding a lot more about high performance sport. I think through triathlon and New Zealand is a wonderful country for stuff like this because it’s so small. So if you’re into anything, you will meet the New Zealanders who are the best just because it’s tiny. So you meet all these people who are world-class and you get to hang out with them and you get this amazing insight into what it’s like to be the best in the world. And that makes following sports so much more enjoyable, I find. And then, of course,

training super seriously, you get a bit of an insight into what it takes. And I think that, again, it’s given me enormous sort of pleasure following sport far more than I did before. But I think the other thing is the sort of not much obvious, isn’t it? The pleasure that comes in spending time with people who like doing things that you like doing and doing things together is a great way of making great friendships. And, you know, I’ve had loads of wonderful sort of new friendships that have all come through triathlon, swim run and now swimming. It’s been it’s been incredibly enriching. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that it’s changed me at work. I think I’ve managed to take some of the things that I had in my kit bag for work and apply them to sport. I think I’ve always been quite organized, I’ve been quite disciplined, all that sort of stuff, quite sort of hungry to learn about things. And, you know, I’ve used that in the in the swimming

and being a bit surprised at how effective it’s been when I’m not naturally very talented. Yeah. So that’s a message for all the non-sporty kids out there that you can apply other things. One thing I’ve noticed over my time as a swimmer is you often form very deep friendships and deep connections with people who you go through hard things with. Like the channel and obviously you’re not outside of the straight and you’re obviously not swimming together, but they’re part of your support team. But you’re probably doing a lot of training with those people as well. And there’s something about doing those those hard and challenging times where you just form this bond that is often quite different to the connections that you may have with friends outside of the sporting arena. And I think back to some of my friends who I made as teenagers and we’re training eight times a week together, going through these hard sessions where everyone’s sweating.

They want to quit but you keep persisting together. Yeah, it’s a different sort of relationship that I think you can form. Yeah, because you had a friend when you were doing all your prep for Rotnest, who you trained with heaps and you had her on the podcast, didn’t you? Is it Italian or something? Yeah, I mean, say LaSanna. Yeah, yeah, we were doing a lot of our longer swims together. And so I don’t live as close anymore, but we see each other at some different swims. I mean, I actually just did a swim on the weekend called the Rip Swim across the the heads here in Melbourne. And it’s yeah, and it’s just it’s great to catch up. And it’s just I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months and then you catch up. It’s like you’ve caught up yesterday. So I really I really enjoy those those types of friendships. And I think that’s a big appeal of of swimming or swimming with other people in a squad. It’s just like, yeah, you always look forward

to catching up with them. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I mean, I’m sure we’re lucky in this part of the world. You know, there’s some really great open water swimming communities as well. So the diversity of it helps as well. You know, like in Wellington, there’s almost always people to go swimming with. But as you say, I’m and I’ve got some really great friendships out of this, which has been just brilliant, right? You know, it’s just really quite life enhancing. And it helps you get through other stuff as well. You know, like when works a bit slow or something like that, it’s quite nice to have that to look forward to to sort of get you through the week. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, John, I don’t know if I want to ask you what’s what’s next because it’s only been what a week or so since the swim. I’m sure you’ve got something in the back of your mind or are you you just going to let yourself take a break

and then see where the wind takes you? Definitely having a break. No, we start classes from my today I’m Maori this month. So that’s that’s even harder than marathon swimming because I’m absolutely rubbish at languages. So that’s my swimming. Sounds good. You deserve a break. Well, John, I really appreciate you being on the podcast and I’ll provide links to some of the people that you’ve mentioned, like Phil Rush and some other episodes that we’ve had with yourself and some of the other coaches who have helped you on your way. So I really appreciate you being on congratulations once again and just really impressed with what you’ve achieved over the last couple of years since I met you all those years ago. First first ever hell week comfort and you’re poor. That was the work again. Yes, and we were joking before the podcast started to I said you’re the you’re actually the brains behind effortless swimming because you’ve introduced me to Phil Rush

and Gary Haring who come along to most of the camps that I run and said there’s probably there wouldn’t be a Maldives camp there might not be a hell week camp. None of these things would have happened without you, John. So you’re you deserve all the credit and I’m just happy to be the fun. It’s just execution. That’s easy.

No, I appreciate that a lot, John. Thanks again for being on the podcast. Great to see you, Brandon. Cheers. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.

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Carl joins us again on the podcast. He has a background in Exercise Physiology and Pilates but primarily in Functional Movement. In this episode, we will talk about how Carl has helped many swimmers with their pain and injury and understand the root cause of some of the injuries that they’re having.

01:26 What Injuries Do You Usually See Among Swimmers

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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 episode number 269 of the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is a repeat offender. It’s Carl, Carl Rita. Welcome back to the podcast. This is probably the fourth time I’ve had you on here to talk about how the body moves, how we can do things outside of the pool to become better swimmers. So I want to get you on today, talk about a couple of case studies, a couple of people that you’ve been working with and some changes that you’ve helped some swimmers go through outside of the pool to help them swim better, but primarily remove the injury or change the way that they’re moving so that they’re not injured and not in pain because I think that’s really your specialty is helping people understand what the root cause of some of the injuries that they’re having are. So welcome to the podcast. Well, Brenton, good to be here again. And yeah, it’s great to love working with the members. And yeah, it’s always

good to be learning new things. And so yeah, thanks for having you back. Great to have you. And your functional movement courses inside of our membership. And I know a lot of the members end up going through that, maybe not going through the whole course, maybe choosing a couple of different things that is more relevant to what they’re looking to focus on. And then a lot of them end up getting in contact with you if they’ve got particular injuries. What have you seen in the last couple of months since the last chat had you on that’s really stood out to you? What sort of injuries are you seeing? Yeah, it’s good question. I’ve had a lot of members, it’s been wonderful working and just reaching out especially with shoulder problems. And we know that’s quite a common injury and lower back. And just really this thing of struggling to this feeling of having to haul themselves through the water and putting too much pressure on their shoulders

and just really helping them to, you know, understand like how they can get around that and work the right muscles to build that strength. And we can we can get into that, you know, dive deeper into that now, like that just getting in that the body connected that there’s actually a connection issue there at the at the roots, like you talked about getting to the roots. So it’s just been very interesting because it’s a common, I see that, you know, work with someone every day. It’s a common, common problem. I think there’d be a big crossover from the consumers that would describe themselves as hauling themselves through the water. I think it’d be a big crossover from how they would all swim. I think that there’d probably be a lot of similarities there with how they all swim. And then you’d probably see that play out in some of the exercises and the movements that you have people go through. And what comes to mind when I think of someone hauling themselves

through the water is that they’re probably not using the lower half of their body very well, their kick, they might not even have one where the feet are just dragging through the water, their rotation, they’re probably too flat. They’re probably very, very flat with their hips. And it’s just all upper body. And when it’s all upper body, that’s when the upper traps, the neck, shoulders are just doing the majority of the work. But if you can get the whole body to work together with the right amount of rotation, an effective kick, then swimming is so much more enjoyable and it takes the pressure off. It takes the effort out of the upper body. So what do you, how do you go about kind of diagnosing where this might be coming from? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, we’re taking through like a full body movement assessment. But what I’ve picked up now recently, I just also that this years of working with back problems is that there’s a weak core. And, you

know, if you talk to most people, whether they do sport or not, the average person knows that you’ve got to have a strong core. But what I’m finding is that even though people are doing sort of like body space exercises, maybe they’re planking, maybe they’re doing some sort of like, you know, CrossFit, they’re just struggling to actually get the core to engage. So a lot of them will say, I feel my upper core, but not my lower core, or I feel my pecs and my glutes, but not my core, or I feel my left hand core, but not my right hand core. It’s quite interesting as you work with the guys. And, you know, if one thing I’ve also picked up is when the lower core is weak, then the hips and the buttocks and the hip flexors, they really get tight. Like you talked about that stiffness to get the legs. So once we get that core connected, and that’s a lot of work I do online, it makes a huge difference because now they get the power generated from this, from

this sort of, you know, I really want the list of pictures of the muscles as like battery packs. So, you know, you’re as big torches you have, you have to stack the batteries on top of each other. It’s kind of like, that’s kind of like your abs and the core muscles. They’re like a battery pack. And if there’s one of those batteries is not holding a charge or is, you know, not working, then the whole body is just disconnected. And so that’s a big part of what I’m doing is trying to help these swimmers like connect, get connected, basically. And how are you going about assessing that? Well, the thing is to try to find what are the things that they could sort of break up that connection. And so one of those is posture. We talked about poor posture, old injuries, then also just weaknesses in the tightness of the fascia. So, you know, you probably talked about this before, but your fascia is like that connective tissue

around the muscles that this around pretty much every organ. And that’s referred to as a semiconductor. So that means that electrons can actually go down those chains or those lines at the speed of light. So you’ve got this sort of like, so you can imagine that’s tight or damaged or the scar tissue there. There’s emotions as well, which you don’t touch on, but it’s just important to bring people’s mind that strong emotions can also sort of tighten up that connection through there. But my big thing is just to just really working on the posture, like getting them into better alignment. Once we align the pelvis and align the body correctly, then suddenly they feel, oh, I can feel my core muscles are working. Just basically asking them, do you feel the cord? No.

Do you feel the glutes? No. They don’t feel it. And they can be even in a playing position and they say, I just feel my back or I feel my neck. And I’ll say, do you feel anything in the tummy? Nothing. So, which is, you know, you think, OK, hang on a minute, that should be really targeting. So those are sort of the diagnostics, very simple questions. And then once you dig a little bit deeper into what the issues are, what and I remember you sort of sent through a case study that you had recently with someone with a shoulder issue and you didn’t start with the shoulder. You started somewhere else. Can you talk a little bit about what you what you’re looking at there? Yeah, you know, great. I mean, she had her posture was, you know, she had like a very high over extended lower back. We went to straight away into the glutes because, you know, me, the glutes, just trying to get that movement, a functional movement to open up a lower back, do lower back

stretches. Once you got the glutes firing, which she said she had an experience. And that’s also quite common again, like the client saying to me, you know, members saying, I just I never felt my glutes. And so once that started working, then we started doing some core strength and exercises. And that was doing the going back now, going back to like plank type movements and Pilates based up, which is really interesting because members have heard me talk about glutes and core and squatting. It was taking the members back now and just going back to sort of even like Pilates based exercises and the plank now the plank on the elbows, in my opinion, is not so functional. But I get my clients to plank in a sort of a push up plank position and we just modify that a lot because that sort of brings in the pics. The serratus anterior kind of connects the chain through the ground and you can even get them doing on a box or a chair

for those who are really weak, but really just trying to get that core and you know, we’re doing start off with some time that’s holding it for seven seconds. I know around the world you get these like playing competitions, you can hold it for like an hour kind of stuff, you know, but it’s really just like starting up with seven seconds, pulling at that strength, coming back and saying, do you feel it? Yes, I feel the top part, not the bottom part. Then we’ve got to go down and mobilize the lower back and and each level of the spine, each battery pack has got a level of the spine. So when they tell me that they don’t feel a certain part of the core working, we go mobilize that spine, try rotate it, try and unlock it, do stretches, then go back to the planks. It’s a bit of a, it’s a bit of like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to figure it out. But it’s, once you get stuff working, it’s like a puzzle that comes together quite nicely.

What I’ve found personally is that with a lot of injuries, unless it’s something more sinister, I guess, is if you can move through the different parts of your body, you can get blood flow to those injured parts. That’s when it starts to heal, because quite often in the past, I’ve heard physios who aren’t familiar with swimming, take a month out of the pool, take six weeks out of the pool and let it rest. Now, in some cases, that might be what’s required. But more often than not, you’re better off actually to keep it moving and adjusting what you’re doing. And you can’t take six weeks out of the pool without seeing a big drop off in your swim strength, your feel for the water, your kick, all these things. So swimmers need to stay active. They need to stay in the pool. And so that advice, you know, and I hear it from other coaches as well, like they will only send their swimmers to physios who know swimming because there’s

often a big gap for those that aren’t familiar with it. So what sort of with that moving through the different positions and getting blood flow to these injured parts, what role does that have in recovery or this episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improved with Form Smart swim goggles, including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for only two hundred and twenty eight US dollars. Now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one year membership included for free. And then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forward, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts, training plans and their custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the goggles, so

you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your goggles, including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your goggles with form goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort and my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work 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. That will get you 15% off your pair of form goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout. Well, I mean, it’s a good you make a great point that she just said to me in the testimonial that

she said when she rest of the shoulder got worse, you know, so likely and she said he made you on point that it’s a good segue into this thing, which I’ve been following this guy called Dr. Jerry, Jerry tenants, he’s got a thing called voltage is healing. And so what’s interesting, you mentioned blood flow and yes, that brings oxygen and clearing up toxins and healing. But what’s what I’m on this thing is like is the voltage, the energy, the power supply that comes to the shoulder through the chain, through the core muscles is where I feel like that’s been a major breakthrough. So like when you’re doing a shoulder press, this is simple pressure. And most people just get in the deltoids and a little bit of pick, but actually, it’s got a lot of that part comes from the lower core. So like there’s like there’s like energy that comes up through there. And the Chinese talk about the energy meridians, you’ve got the spleen meridian stomach

meridians. And for me, those are like, and those are just sort of battery packs. But so it’s to think of it as current that’s flowing. I mean, your shoulder muscles, the attic, the top muscles are Delta quite strong. But the rotator cuff muscles are quite small. And they’re not really significant. It comes to generating power. The power’s got to come from the pick lat like we talked to we’ll talk about later. And then the core but it’s it’s it’s more than just like this idea of these muscles working, it’s that they generate charge. And that’s the really key point is it’s an electrical, it’s an electricity that’s going as voltage. And so when a client you’ll notice with planks, for example, they start shaking. And that’s because the voltage is dropping. And that’s because the load’s too much. So you’ve got to go back and someone will say after three it starts to fatigue and there’s little pain is that weakness is actually there’s

no charge coming through if you see it in electrical terms. So I’m really trying to relook at how I how I how I’d go through my rehab and just strengthening people you know with this whole you know, can they get in the whole body to work together. I mean, you’re using those that kind of terminology in those phrases with them as a way to get them to say it differently. Absolutely. I mean, she even said in a testimony, I feel like you switched on my muscles. I feel more connected. You know, so you give an example, you take someone does a plank and they go into the plank and the push up position kind of like against technicians now but it’s and they’ll say, oh, I feel so heavy. It feels really challenging. And you stop and you’ll go loosen the hips up, do some posture work and I’ll come back and they’ll do like 30 seconds and I’ll be like, am I doing this correctly? Because it feels really light. Now, I mean, what if you what

did you change? Do you haven’t increased their abdominal muscles? You know, something has changed. It’s gone from really heavy to this feels ridiculously light. And that’s because this connection, you know, and I think that’s what we want to get in the pool from hauling to just feel like they’re just floating through the water and flow flowing through the water. You know, so and that’s the key. Yeah, and the same thing with swimming is when you’re swimming well, you feel light and you feel relaxed and your breathing is easy. It doesn’t feel feel heavy. There was I was watching a video of Gwen Jorgensen who won the Olympic gold in 2016. And she talks about her coach has set a swim program and one of the effort levels that her coach wanted her to go at, he just called it tracing. And she explained it as tracing as though you’ve got a pencil and you’re trying to not make any holes in the paper. You’re just or you’re not trying to break the pencil.

So just just tracing really lightly. And that was part of a preset to the main set where he wanted her to stay relaxed and just feel very comfortable and just just really light, really easy. And I think that’s a great way to think about your swimming or about a lot of the movements that you that you do. And the comparison I would make there would be to to surfing and you see this at top level of competition as well. When the guys try and go too hard, if they try and push a turn too hard, or they try and get more air than is required off a off a ramp, they end up overdoing it and they’ll fall or they’ll slip. It’s when they’re just loose and light things are working together, then naturally they just have this power in the water without trying to to force it where you see that lightness. So I think that’s a really good way of thinking about it. Well, look, I mean, take as effortless swimming. I mean, I love that effortless. It’s

whether you’re looking at golf or surfing, anybody likes ice skating. It’s just when professionals do things that looks effortless.

But you touch on a good point as well like this, what I pick up, you know, we all have different personalities and people who you know, like who are ambitious. We tend to gravitate. I know I’ve been guilty of that as well like we just try to hard sometimes and that, you know, try to hard to get your technique or you just really want to get something down and that trying to hard puts tension in the body. And that tension is in electrical terms is impedance or resistance or blocks the flow or slows down the flow. So it’s just really and I wouldn’t say it’s a new way of looking at the body. It’s just it’s just kind of like putting all the puzzle pieces together now.

One of the things that comes to mind there is how to an athlete that I’m doing some stroke analysis with. And he was saying that he’s not really feeling his lats working a lot when he’s swimming yet he’s got a he’s got a good catch. He’s got the right rotation. He’s doing all the things he needs to to be using his lats the right amount. I think he was of the belief that at the end of a session, my lats should be pretty, pretty cool. They should be feeling like they’ve really been used. But while you do want to use your lats, it’s some of the muscles that you want to be using when you’re actually swimming. Well, it’ll be part lats, but everything’s working together. So you won’t necessarily just feel that fatigue in the lats. You feel a little bit of it, but not necessarily. And so I just had to change the way he thought about it is that we want them to be used if you’re doing the right positions. Yes, it’ll be there. But as you’ve sort of

mentioned on previous conversations, it’s not just the lats working on their own. It’s connected to different parts of the body. Can you go into some of those muscles that that are connected to the lats and how we may actually want to be thinking about that instead. So there’s just two points there. Number one is that the lats, they’re not nothing works in isolation in the body. So as you’re doing that pull, you’ve got a slight rotation. That rotation is driving is your oblique muscles, your core rotational muscles and their abdominals. So when you’re doing that pull, it’s getting power and it goes back to my electrical thing again, like it’s the lats doing the work, but it’s not that the lats have to be the only source of power. And so if you just think about just doing like a pulling a band behind you, for example, eventually after 10, 20, 30 reps, your lats are going to just feel so pumped and fatigued because it’s like you’re just getting power

from that muscle where in swimming, if you’re able to with a kick from the opposite leg, so the right hand leg, as you get in that kick in rotation, there’s electricity that this power coming to the lats the whole time. It’s kind of like your lat muscle has been replenished or recharged by other muscles. And so it’s not going to feel fatigued where if he’s just swimming from the lats, he’s going to he’s going to fatigue and feel pumped. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And that’s and that’s the thing about it is that I think he was doing everything he needed to. To he’s swimming really, really well, basically. And that showed with how his his rotation was coming in. And yeah, and that’s that that’s the thing we’re swimming. It should be from the inside out from the core outwards or else you just cannot deliver that power to to the extremities if it’s not from the inside out, you don’t swim from your hands and feet going inwards because you’ve got

no power source there, nothing central. So we need to get that that right. And sometimes in in terms of drills, how we develop someone stroke, you’ve got to start with some very basic movements like some kicking drills, even with your arms by your side, putting a snorkel on and some fins and just getting them to rotate side to side and keep the body together as they’re going side to side and not having this big twist through the the body. So just learning how to hold your body correctly is really step number one. And that’s if that’s not in place, then it’s going to be hard to change the other elements of it. For you, do you see that as being able to squat? Well, because I know on our previous podcast, we sort of talked about you as the squat man. That’s like your your main move and getting that right is very important. So what is that movement for you? Yeah, and you know, when you when we talk again, why I’m such a passion about squats is when you

when you squat correctly, that opens up the lower back joints that helps to strengthen the muscles to help maintain the normal curves of the spine. It opens up the rotational senses. So we talk about your T 12 L 1 T 11 and 10. That’s kind of where the spine really rotates there. And that’s so that’s a very big problem or common problem with a lot of swimmers and just people in general with low back problems. So there’s a squat is a great way to to free that up and to open up those those movements, such those sort of channels. But it’s it’s just really just getting that getting once the core strong, then the squat becomes easier. And then you can start to progress as you load that. And that’ll that’ll definitely help, you know, especially with lats because lats you make talk about rotational, but that’s a massive one. If it’s rotational restrictions, the lats don’t, you know, because lats is actually a rotational muscle.

We think of lats sort of like a shoulder pull down, but actually lats, if you think about a pullback like we’ve done in my videos, that’s actually what lats lats do. But a good point as well with the rotation is that it’s saying, obviously it’s something coached, but it’s to look for clients who do have poor posture that’s to get them set maybe in the pool. I find like, like people have got too much curve is to first get them in a better position and then go into the squats because they, most people struggle with body awareness. And if you say like, dude, you know, correct the low that they don’t read. And like, what do you kind of mean? Do I have to be here or there? Or, and in the pools and even a different feeling is you’re trying to breathe and not drown. So you kind of like, where my pelvis is, I don’t even know like, I can’t even feel my pelvis in the pool. Like, like, so just to get them set them right in the pool.

And then they, they get that connection quite quickly. But that’s kind of the work we do as well. Cause you don’t really want to have to think about it too much. You don’t want to have to, but a good point as well, you brought up with that core. And it’s such a tricky balance depends on each person, but it’s to not to like over, we talked about that bracing. You don’t want to brace too much in the pool because you lose rotation. You know, you, some clients really want to suck in their tummy and muscles as far as they can. And that, that really restricts movement and it’s acts as a barrier. It’s actually slows down the talk about again, electrical stuff again. So yeah, that’s a, that’s a tricky one, isn’t it? Because you, you need some taughtness and stability through the core and through the hips, but it’s only very light. And the way that I’ve explained that to some of my swimmers is that if you were to pick up a glass of water,

you wouldn’t grab that glass really hard and try and crush it. You’d have just enough tension to hold the glass and not let it slip. That’s, that’s a good amount of tension to sort of hold through there. That’s a good amount of taughtness to hold through your body. And, but it takes a while to learn, especially in a foreign environment like water, if you’re not an experienced swimmer, sometimes you can either go too, too loose and relaxed or too stiff and tense. So it takes a little bit of practice to get there. But I really like your point of learning something, getting something right out of the pool first, because if you can’t get it right out of the pool in a stable environment, it is going to be very hard to get it right in the water. And even just, I used to catch it, one of the main pools in Melbourne and I’d see some of the Australian Olympic team there training, they’d be doing a bit of a warmup. And they’d be on,

one of the things was just on all fours. So they’re on their knees, on their hands, and they’re just doing like alternating left arm. Yeah, so one foot, one leg, just bringing it out and trying to keep the body still. So not letting that lower back arch. And they were very good at it. But when I’ve done that in the past with some athletes, initially it’s, there’s a lot of movement going on. There’s instability through the body, the lower back is arching. They don’t know if their hand is too high or their legs up too high. So even something as simple as that can be quite challenging until you just bring yourself to, to that awareness of where you’re, the different parts of your body are. And again, there’s a list of, they maybe even do that. Cause that’s quite a standard exercise across the board in most backpains, rehabilitation programs, swimming programs. If they can’t get the tummy to work, is to find out again,

why is the tummy or core muscles not getting involved in this process? And that’s kind of what we do on online. And as you said, go through the diagnostics to see, like, cause that’s very frustrating when someone is planking, is doing Superman, is trying to get stronger, but there’s just no connection. It’s like having the wifi and the router and everything, but your ISP, your internet service provider is just not playing game. And so you can do all the settings and go through all the movements. But if you’re not getting that signal from the ISP, it’s just challenging. And so that’s kind of, that’s like, you talk about that root thing. And I think that’s where for people who enjoy exercises out of the pool exercises and really want to get that feeling, I think it makes a huge difference, not only just the injuries, but just general performance, like having a, again, like wifi, it’s nothing worse than having like a bad signal.

You just, you know, you just can’t do anything and it’s frustrating. Well, like South Africa, you have no electricity. It’s just like, you can’t even swim, you know? Yeah, I’ll take no wifi, I have no electricity any day or even just having, yeah, that’s right. No internet, no signal is very frustrating. And to have that comparison, that’s kind of like your core when it’s not working well. It’s a totally, totally get it. The thing with all of this is that once, I’m speaking from my own experience, once you get into it, and once you start to understand where your limitations are, where those blocks are, and you start to get better and you start to move better, what I’ve noticed when I swim, what I’ve noticed when I surf is I’m just, I’m just so much better at those things. I get into flow much easier and I see that progression and I can see that improvement. So it’s quite not addictive, I’d say, but it’s really, it’s this very positive feedback loop

that you get from it. When you start to see how these little changes can impact you down the track. But even like shoulder mobility as well, when you put a stick behind you and you kind of do these shoulder movements, it’s like, my shoulders have, I’ve been doing a lot of core and planking and squatting as well, and I just feel like it’s just so much easier and I don’t spend hours stretching. It’s like the body lets go of that tension and there’s a connection, that connection actually, the connection improves the whole mobility as well because now the other muscles can relax and that’s kind of what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to stretch them out and relax them. So I mean, something it’s, there’s nothing better than feeling loose in the pool. It’s just that freedom and connection, like when you feel like your shoulders is catching and your hip doesn’t want to quite kick. You know, and I mean, I’m not old, I’m only 43,

but like what I find is like, I’m feeling like my best. Like I’ve never been this mobile and this connected and strong. Like it’s such a, you know, you think like, you know, I’m gonna be 21, but like I’m seeing people even in their 80s and this is like my other work that I do that are like, they’re feeling their best at 80, you know? So that’s incredible, you know? Yeah, it’s so promising, isn’t it? And it goes to show that it is possible to still be feeling good as you get into your later years. And I think swimming is one of those activities that you can do for life and mine now is 94 now. And she still goes the pool two or three times a week and does a few laps. And I think, Jesus, if she can do that at 94, then that’s, to me, that’s quite inspiring and that’s something that I wanna be doing as I get into my later years as well. And if you can have a really good routine out of the pool that assists with that,

then you’re gonna be looking good as you get older. So Carl, I really appreciate you being on the podcast. Those that are listening, if you’re a member, you’ll see Carl’s functional movement course inside the membership. You can also purchase it separately, which I’ll put in the show notes. But Carl, anyone who’s listening who might be having some sort of shoulder pain or hip pain or any issues with how they’re moving, what’s the best way for them to get in contact with you and perhaps set up a Zoom call or something along those lines to get that fixed because we know what it’s like being in pain. It’s not much fun when you haven’t got your health, yet you haven’t got much. So what’s the best way to get in contact? Yeah, there’s two ways on my email address, which is callwellnessatgmail.com and Carl will be with us see Carl wellness at Gmail. And then CarlReaderCoaching.com and they can even reach me there or there’s my officer all out there.

But yeah, even on through the membership, they can drop me a message on your portal there and it’s great. A lot of people are reaching out and just even if it’s one session or a couple of sessions or it’s personal training, just to get those whatever you need and just to get you along the way. You don’t have to be stuck in pain. I think that’s what you’re saying. And just there’s a few simple things that can be changed and you’re away. Absolutely, thanks again Carl and looking forward to having you back on sometime in the near future. Thanks Ben and always pleasure, keep well. 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 Stop ‘Hauling’ Yourself Through The Water & Swim With Ease with Carl Reader appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

In today’s episode, I will talk about the equipment and pool toys that I recommend to the athletes that I coach.

00:41 Have A Good Pair Of Fins

DMC Fins HERE

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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 episode 268 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. On today’s episode, I’m going to talk about what equipment, what pool toys I recommend to the athletes that I coach. There’s so many different options out there, but more times than not, a lot of it is not that good and can actually make your stroke worse, can make your technique worse compared to making it better, which is what we want to do. And we don’t want to impact our stroke in any way just by using the wrong equipment. The thing that I would recommend every swimmer get is a pair of fins, a good pair of fins. And the brand that I’ve used for more than a decade now is DMC. I use the DMC Elite Max Finns, which is a short blade fin. They’re not the longer ones that you might see with some younger kids using, but they’re

a shorter blade fin. But the benefit to that is you don’t change your rhythm and timing of your stroke. With a longer blade fin, it makes you kick a little bit funny and differently than what you’d normally do when you’re not wearing fins. So we don’t want that. If that’s all you’ve got, the longer blade, look, it’s fine. But if anyone’s looking to get a new pair of fins, I would say get a pair of the DMC fins. Now if you generally have tighter ankles and you don’t have great ankle flexibility, these are a really good option. And I’d recommend get the DMC Elite 2 Triathlon Finns. It’s a softer material, still gives great propulsion, still very similar to the Elite Max. But because they’re that little bit softer, it will put less pressure on your ankle joint. And that can be something that can cause triathletes to not really like fins is if they’ve got too much pressure on that ankle joint, it can impact your running a little

bit. So the softer version, which is the DMC Elite 2 fins, is a really good option there. Now a similar brand to that, I’m not sure if they ripped off the design or not. But you got I think the Arena Power Finn, which is fairly similar. If you can’t get the DMC Elite Finns, that would be another alternative option. This episode of the podcast is proudly bought to you by our sponsor, Form 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 $228 US dollars. Now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one year membership included for free. And then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forward, it’s only $15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts, training plans and their

custom workout builder. But you’ll always have access to the real time data of the goggles, so you’ll never lose access to that. So if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your goggles, including your time, distance, pace, they are right there in your goggles with form goggles. I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful, especially for gauging my time, my effort and my pace. And I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work 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. That will get you 15% off your pair of form goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout.

Now paddles. So if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you’ll know that for the last couple of years I’ve had this paddling development. It’s been a very, very long process. Still not there yet. We’re still working with the manufacturer to get these done. It was a lot harder than what we expected, but we’re hoping in the next couple of months that this will come to fruition. Now, once it does, I will let you know. But in the meantime, the paddles that I recommend, there’s two styles that I quite like, synergy hand paddles or the stroke master hand paddles. And these are available through Amazon or through a lot of different websites online. Now there’s synergy hand paddles. It comes in three sizes. You’ve got your small, medium and large. Don’t go for a large pair unless you’re fairly tall or you have quite big hands. I see people overdoing the size of their paddles, which can put too much pressure on their shoulders and can lead to injury or it can just

reinforce bad technique. So I personally use the medium sized ones. If you are a little bit shorter or have smaller hands, you might go for a small pair, but I wouldn’t recommend most people go for the large ones. You would probably see some elite triathletes using some bigger dinner plate type paddles, which can be OK, but especially if you’re still learning good catch and pull technique, you’re probably better off going for a small or medium sized there. So the synergy hand paddles are great and so is the stroke master. It’s fairly similar design, but they don’t change your stroke in any negative ways. There’s some paddles that I’ve seen that, for example, you put your thumb through quite a curve to the paddle. And the only way you hold that the paddle on your hand is by putting your thumb through it to me. That really sort of changes your stroke, especially as you exit the water. So there’s quite a few paddles out there that I wouldn’t recommend it.

I’d say don’t wear them because it’s going to make you a worse swimmer, even though they’re marketed as making you better. So I’m just not a fan of quite a few different paddle designs out there. I think simple is usually quite good. So yes, I’d stick with those two brands for now until we get our paddle out, which I hoping to do by the end of the year. Now, Pullboy or Pullbilly, if you’re in the US, the one brand that I love and have used for many, many years now is the EniBilly 2. So designed by my friend, Eni Jones, most of the top triathletes, the pro triathletes that I see, they’re using this Pullboy. It is narrow in the middle, so it means you can keep your legs close together. So they’re not sitting out really wide, which is creating extra drag. You can keep your inner thighs, your knees close together like you would when you swim. And that’s an important thing to having good connection through your core and through your hips.

And it’s got these two plastic, almost like plastic bottle shapes on the end of it, which provides a really good buoyancy because it’s filled with air, more buoyancy than what you’d have with a foam Pullboy. So that’s why I think that’s a really good option. Great buoyancy, keeps your legs in the right spot. And you could also use it as a water bottle if you want to. Now, in terms of kickboards, this is something that I’d say you probably don’t need necessarily. This is one that I wouldn’t normally carry around with me. But in terms of kickboards, I don’t think you necessarily need any fancy designs here, just a basic board would do. Just depends what you use it for. But not something that I would typically carry around in my kickbag, but it does just it does depend on what you’re training for. A lot of elite swimmers will have them because they do quite a bit of kick. So it really just depends on what you’re doing in your training sessions.

For going to snorkel, so I am a big fan of low profile snorkels, meaning ones that aren’t excessively big or wide or cumbersome. I like low profile ones. We stock some in our shop, so I’ll put the link below. So our online shop to where you can get some. Otherwise, the TYR, the Tier Ultra Light Elite is quite a good design. It’s narrow, fits on your face easily. It’s not going to move around too much when you go through a turn. So I think that’s a pretty good option that would be available in most countries in the world. But there are I have used the Aquasphere and Michael Phelps one. That’s pretty good, but it is quite large. And I do find when I push off, especially at speed, if I push off the wall, it moves around quite a bit. So I do prefer the lower profile options of a narrow, thinner snorkel. Most people tend to need a nose clip when they’re wearing a snorkel. So if you’ve tried on in the past, try it with a nose clip.

If you’ve had trouble, if you get water up your nose, a nose clip is just necessary. You’re going to have to wear it when you have a snorkel on because especially if you’re doing any turns, it’s very hard to keep the water from going up your nose if you don’t have a nose clip. So that’s a five or ten dollar investment that can make wearing a snorkel much more enjoyable. Now, if we go to goggles, this is definitely a personal preference. So I wouldn’t recommend the one brand of goggles for every person. It just depends on how your face is shaped and all these different things. So a couple of recommendations I would have for goggles, though, is obviously if you want to track your swimming and not have to stop and start your watch when you’re training and just be able to track your swimming, obviously the form goggles I’m a huge fan of, they’re a sponsor of the podcast. So that’s a really good option for tracking

in terms of just general goggles and perhaps when you’re racing. If I’m swimming in the open water, I usually want to wear goggles that are slightly bigger. So the lenses are slightly bigger than my pool training goggles if I’m not wearing form goggles because with slightly bigger lenses, you can see better visually. It’s a bit better and that might be needed if you are looking for where the buoys are. If you’re looking for trees or landmarks to be able to see. So I find that’s better when swimming in the open water. But otherwise, I’d normally go for a smaller type of goggle in the pool because it’s going to be a little bit faster. Perhaps might feel a little bit better as well in the pool. One thing that is usually required if you are swimming in open water is tinted goggles. Unless you’re swimming early morning, late evening, if you’re swimming through the middle of the day, you’re probably going to need some form of tinted goggles.

So I’d recommend getting a pair of those, especially if you’re racing any time where there’s going to be sunlight or it would be quite bright because that’s going to make it much easier to swim if there’s any sort of sun in your eyes. Otherwise, it’s going to be too hard to to see. In terms of keeping your goggles free from fog,

a lot of people will say baby shampoo. Now, I haven’t personally tried it, so I can’t say for certain whether that’s a good option. But if I’m doing an important race, I’ll usually buy a new pair of goggles for it. And I might have one or two key races each year. So it’s not too bad to wear it for those one or two key races or buy a new pair for those one or two races. So it’s not super expensive, but that way I’m sure that my goggles won’t fill up. But baby shampoo is what a lot of people recommend, but I haven’t really tried it. If you’re looking to track your heart rate, the polar verity sensor, optical heart rate sensor, is a good option. I see a lot of swimming clubs using that where you can actually hook it up to an iPad and the coach can stand on deck. They can see what everyone’s heart rate is at to make sure people aren’t going too easy or too slow. And you can buy that for groups and clubs. Or if it’s just for yourself,

you can hook up your the polar verity sense heart rate sensor to your form goggles. And I think usually to your garment as well, if you wanted to or your your training watch to get more accurate reading of your heart rate. And you can either wear it on your arm. So there’s a band that goes on your arm or there’s like a there’s a goggle attachment. So you can attach it, sits on the side of your head and can track it pretty well that way too. So it just depends on what you prefer. But that would be a good option if you’re looking for a heart rate monitor or sensor for when you’re training. The last one here is a power meter or a way to really dig deep into your technique. And you might have heard me talk about this in the past. The EO swim better, which they have now released. A lot of the athletes that I coach through video analysis have purchased these and are starting to send through their data from what they’re getting with the EO swim better.

So this is a device that you wear on your hands. And it measures the direction and the force as you’re going through your catch and pull. So through all phases of your stroke and measures, where your hand is, how much force you’re applying, where’s that force directed. So it allows you to see a lot of a lot of detail with your stroke, where you’re slipping in the stroke. Are you applying force in the wrong direction? Maybe through your catch, there’s too much downwards force or side to side force. And you can also look at the path of the hands too. And I’ve seen with a lot of the swimmers that I’m coaching. Who have sent through their data that on their breathing strokes, we can see there’s too much side to side, too much lateral force. So we’re working on how do we smooth that path out to keep pressure on the water so that they can have more propulsive forces through those breathing strokes, for example. So you can really dig deep into what’s happening through the stroke.

So that’s the EO swim better. I’m partnering with them. I’m doing quite a bit of work with them because I see it is a really good tool to analyze and break down the technique. And it goes hand in hand with the video analysis. It just gives us more data to see. All right, we can see this on the video, but what’s actually happening with the catch and pull, the hand and forearm. And we can dig deep. So I’m looking forwards to taking all these learnings from there and sharing them with you on the podcast. So they’re the main types of equipment that I would recommend. Now, if you’re thinking of keeping things really simple, I’m a big fan of fins, as I mentioned. A snorkel can be very handy because that way you don’t need to turn your head to breathe and you can focus just on what are my arms doing through the stroke. And it’s a much easier way to develop your catch and pull. So I think fins and snorkel is required.

And then if you are doing triathlon, you’re looking to build up your swim strength. Pull boy and paddles is a good tool as well. So they’re sort of the key things that I would have in a kit bag and and would recommend most people get. 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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My guest today is Tim Reed, an Australian coach, and triathlete, who has had multiple Ironman and IM70.3 wins. I wanted to get Tim’s perspective regarding swimming and coaching and discuss the struggles of transitioning from a professional athlete to a full-time coach.

01:15 Biggest Success In Racing

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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 Tim Reid. Tim, you’re very experienced, very successful triathlete and also very experienced and successful coach as well. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Brenton. Yeah, it’s cool to be on. I owe you first of all a big thanks for making my coaching life easier because whenever I’m trying to explain something to someone, you know, an aspect of their swim stroke or anything, I just go, Brenton, I’ll have a video on this quickly, find it, show them that and then save myself a lot of time. So now it’s cool to finally connect. Yeah, it’s been great to connect. We’ve got a mutual friend in Dudley who introduced us. And I mean, I’ve seen your name around for years just in the in the results of a lot of that half Iron Man, full distance as well. Yeah, I wasn’t as successful over the full distance, but and rates did a lot more sporadically. But yeah, had a few results over

the Iron Man distance and a lot of bad results as well. And I mean, I guess the biggest success for you was probably 2016. I mean, Iron Man, like 70.3 world champs, which is, which is unreal. Would you classify that as your biggest success in racing? I’ve always, I’m pretty objective about things. So like I look at the numbers more than the results. And I actually had better in my mind, I had better results in 2015 and in 2019, actually, when I look objectively at the data, in terms of yeah, winning races, 2016 was, was definitely the best year, but I take more pride in the years where I was like, the numbers were better than any other year sort of thing. So by numbers, you’re talking times or you’re talking, yeah, so looking at looking at in the swim, it’s a bit more subjective, but looking how I was able to stay with the main group. Or if I wasn’t having to stay with the group main group, how I was able to get back into the race, I’m looking at power

numbers and then run, run time is pretty, you know, pretty objective because there’s not a lot changes there. Although now with the new fancy shoes, things are changing pretty quick. But yeah, so just, just looking at times and my power output and things like that. And also even my head space a little bit, how, how I raced and, and was able to keep a cool head was definitely, it’s definitely part of what I consider, you know, contributes into the success of how I value a race. Is that something you feel has improved over time or you’ve had years where it’s been good years where it hasn’t been so good in terms of keeping a cool head and the mental aspect of it? Yeah, so I, I reckon 2015 I was physically probably at my best, but my head was on and off. And, and I think, you know, I went into 70.3 world champs that year, ranked number one, and I just was hopeless because I hadn’t slept for three nights and I was

I put all this pressure on myself and couldn’t get my head under control. I got better at it. And I think it really helped up until about in 2016, when I won world champs over that distance. And then I think my head went again, because suddenly I felt all this pressure being the world champ, you know, so it wasn’t a linear, like it was definitely not linear in terms of gaining control of my mental aspects of racing. It comes and goes. And when I put the work in, I think like most people, and it’s really cliche, but when you do the mindfulness work, when you do the meditation, when you do the visualizations, yeah, it pays off and you can, your head’s in the right space during races, but I was also really good at skipping all that stuff and then wondering why I couldn’t get my head under control. Yeah. But you’ve been up in the top ranks for a very long, long time. What do you attribute that? I think largely, I think

time in the sport and also just time doing lots of different sports. I mean, everyone, you know, sometimes views an athlete that’s suddenly getting results and they’re like, wow, he’s sort of come from nowhere and he’s just kicking ass off seemingly no history in the sport. But I just have never found an athlete in endurance sports who comes from nowhere. Like they’ve either got a, like I had a history in playing team sports, but I was playing four or five hours a day, you know, growing up, even though I didn’t have a history in swimming, biking or running. And then even then it’s still, I spent a lot of the time racing as an amateur before I even turned pro. There was no overnight success, even those people outside looking in my thought, oh, that’s a really fast rise to the top. And you see the same with everyone else. I think it just takes decades really to build up the aerobic pathways to be good at endurance sports. And

a lot of that, I think, comes down to an addictive personality and that’s an inability to sit still and, you know, a lot of mental aspects that drive you out the door to train a lot. And of course, this genetic aspects, too, would be hard, even if you did all the right things, if you don’t have a certain level of talent, I think it’s going to be tough to make it to the top. Because you coach a lot of other pros. What do you think attracts other pros to you as a coach? And where have you learnt some of the lessons that maybe these other pros are just starting to take on board or, you know, just starting to uncover for themselves? That’s a good question. I think there’s a lot to be said for having been through all the experiences or similar experiences to what they’re going through, understanding if that athlete is particularly anxious about racing, saying the right things, leading into a race. The psychology of working

with an athlete is super important that I think a lot of brilliant sports scientists might not understand if they haven’t been through the stress of racing or if, you know, vice versa with an athlete who’s super cruisy, you know, you’ve got to tell them a completely different thing to the really anxious athlete. So I think that potentially my ability to understand people and connect with athletes probably, I think that’s probably a strength of my coaching. You know, I think the science behind endurance sports coaching is not overly complicated, but knowing, working out the psychology of what will really motivate an athlete, what will, what they need to be told or what they need to not be told sometimes is really important. And that’s, I think that’s the really hard part of coaching is understanding that it’s human to human. It’s understanding personalities. It’s saying the right thing at the right time or shutting up when you need to.

That’s because what sort of fascinates me there is you seem very driven by, by the science and you are adept in what you need to be doing to have success in the sport. But it’s only if the person is able to take that on board and have that belief that it’s going to work for them and actually do it that will make the difference whether or not they have success with it. So like you sort of mentioned, it’s great to have the sport science there, but if they can’t relate to the athlete in a way that they’re either going to take it on board or that they can actually have an outcome from it or they have, right, well, this is the next step for me, then it’s useless. And someone who I’ve learned a lot from in terms of coaching is a guy, Wayne Goldsmith, who I’ve had on the podcast a couple of times and what he talks about is the art of coaching. It’s not the workouts. Like anyone can write the same workout, but it’s how you apply it. It’s

how you get your athlete to, to do it. Make sure they stick to the right training zones or, you know, you’re able to, to explain it to them. So there’s so much outside of the scientific aspect of coaching that is often not talked about, but that’s really where I think the, the magic is and someone who I haven’t seen really in person, but from what I can tell someone like Dean Boxle, who coaches Ariane Titmus, see like the having a coach who can build a culture or who can, you know, relate to his athletes, that’s where I think the magic really is. And if you can tie those two together with the sports science and then the art of coaching, that’s a powerful combination. Yeah, I totally agree. I’ve, you know, some of the coaches I had through my career, you know, were some of the best sports scientists. I still think that just impressed me with their level of knowledge and their expertise. And in many ways, I didn’t always do what

they said or I didn’t do enough testing when they wanted it to. I was sort of the problem in the relationship. But because they hadn’t got me on board completely, there was not the trust built up, you know, and then I had other coaches where the sports science knowledge was definitely not as not as at the same level as those coaches. But I was fully on board because they, they I guess connected with me as a person. They explained the importance of what they’re doing. There was good reasoning behind it. In some ways, I had, you know, some of my best racing with, I think, one of the best sports psychologists in the sport, but not necessarily the best sports scientists. So yeah, there’s the strengths and weaknesses to every coach. But I think if you can start to get that balance right between knowing as much as you can in terms of the science, but being able to really get the athlete on board, that’s that’s where the magic

really does happen. And I think a big part of that is also either telling stories or using examples and showing people why and how it can work. And an example of that is, I think of the Norwegians at the moment, right? So everyone sort of, you know, sees those guys having good success and come out of nowhere, so to speak, but they’ve been building for a very long, long time. But it’s really, I think, brought a lot more attention to and awareness around the sport science, but in a way where it’s a bit easier to understand, because you’ve got that example there of like your sort of zone two training and what’s the high volume at the right intensity. And to me as well, like that sort of helped me understand the importance of the right training zones. Whereas before I’ve just looked at it and gone, it’s all too hard. Or yeah, I haven’t quite got that example or way to be able to relate the data. So I think that’s a really helpful way for showing

people what they need to be doing as well, having those examples or stories. And yeah, to me, that’s been quite useful. Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s funny because what the Norwegians are doing is is not revolutionary stuff. It’s just that I think we sort of, in many ways, we moved away from it. The general move was just trying to find quicker, easier, faster solutions. But you know, the reality is the long term approach of the basics that have been around for a long time really pays off. And they, even though they use a lot of tricky devices and things to measure everything, the actual principles behind what they’re doing is very basic and it works. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. But it’s really opened my eyes to, yeah, it’s made me interested in learning more about it as well because I had stuff on the podcast just after his Kona win. And so I sort of, I wanted to research well for the podcast and make sure I had

questions asked and all that sort of stuff. And then I sort of went down the rabbit hole on all that and yeah, and found it quite interesting. For the pros that you’re working with or have worked with. I read that in terms of the swimming, you’ve had them either pull back from squad and do their own training or move down a lane. Do you want to talk a bit about that? Yeah, so it does depend on the athlete to some degree. I think there’s some that, some of my pros who really just, not even at that point where they can throw big volume at their swimming x, their techniques just not good enough. Like they’ve got too much to work on. Sometimes I’m like, if you can get someone to look at you while you’re swimming and just for giving feedback, then that’s what we’re really focusing on now before we even think about really getting a lot fitter. But the more advanced pros who are just, some of them, for triathlon too, it’s really hard if

you jump in with a swim squad and they don’t have any idea around what your other hard sessions are in the week and they’re not working in with that. Like it’s, it becomes, you just can end up spending way too much time at or above anaerobic threshold and the stress, like it can become very stressful on the athlete. And realistically for Ironman, for example, the goal is to get through that swim, not necessarily winning the swim, it’s just to be in the mix and get through it with as lower lactate level as possible. And so, you know, for example, Steve McKenna who just had gotten second at Busselton, Ironman Western Australia, had great anaerobic capacity. Like he could swim so much faster than me over 100 meters, 200 meters. But once he started getting to 400 to 600, our time started to even out and I was after years and years of not liking swimming that hard, I’d actually developed a really good aerobic capacity and could just

hold my 100 meter pace really well without generating tons of lactate, whereas he was very much the opposite in that he could put 10 seconds into me over 200 meters, but it would start to come back. And so, yeah, guys like Steve, I had to really work on pulling back from squad because he would just jump in there and just rip, you know, 105, 100, it’s when really what he needed to be doing was learning to swim 115s at, you know, ideally like well under two millimolar lactate. So we just did, yeah, almost to the real old school methods of just bulk miles, but at quite aerobic intensities. And we still worked quite at range within that zone too. Like it’s very easy for people to just throw out that zone to terminology, but it’s a huge range, especially if it’s really fit. It’s quite a range of pace in the pool for some guys, whether they’re going really easy zone two or almost zone one. And then, you know, going up to that

to that point where they’re starting to generate lactate, but it’s been cleared pretty well as well. So for most age group and elite triathletes, I sort of recommend potentially one to two hard swim squads a week if it’s available to them, especially if they’re at that point with their technique where they can really just push their fitness. And then the rest of you can’t get in, you know, two hard bike sessions or in a hard run session as well as four hard swim sessions. It’s just too much stress on a triathlete. So it’s about matching what you do on the bike and on the run. You do one or two hard sessions and the rest you keep really quite aerobic and easy. And when you were explaining to Steve about this is what we, I think we need to do, was that by and pretty immediate? How did you go about showing him where the gap was? I think by having the data for him to see and having his own lactate monitor and things like

that, I know everyone thinks it’s a bit, you’re Mickey and everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, but I’ve always found if athletes can actually see themselves that it’s not something I’m just, it’s not a hypothesis of mine. It’s there, the numbers are there. You know the same way I’ll say to someone I don’t think you’re an efficient fat burner. I think we need to do a little block working on becoming more metabolically efficient. They don’t really get on board with that unless they go and do a metabolic test and then they’re showing off shivers. I can’t ride 70% of FTP without burning tons of glycogen. You know like when they see the data I find they jump on board a lot quicker. So and Steve’s a bit like me like as an athlete which is why I think I’ve been quite patient with him is he loves to smash himself in training and doesn’t want to necessarily, it’s hard to get him to get on board with some of these ideas but he’s also

pretty intelligent. So when he sees that the sees the data or the numbers on the test he’s like yeah okay I’ve got to listen now and give it a try. So yeah yeah that’s interesting. I find it similar in a way is having the evidence there having the data is when someone gets films they might have had a coach telling them crossing over and they’re like yeah okay okay then you show them and they’re like far out that’s like this is this doesn’t look good. Having that evidence there that you can’t refute actually helps with the with the buying and then and then taking things on board and for a lot of people they haven’t been filmed before and it’s just such an eye-opener for them and it’s I think it’s really the first step for many people to actually start making a change to their technique because you just don’t know what you’re doing otherwise. Like it’s even today when I look at my stroke I’ve been filmed for a little while but

yeah that first time I got filmed I was thinking Jesus Christ I alright I’ve been in work on my own straight before I start telling people how to swim. No I think especially with swimming I literally had this conversation with an athlete this morning who’d sent me a video and he was I thought I was a good swimmer then I saw the video he was all depressed. Your level of proprio perception and awareness of where you are in water is so different to land like I think most people if I give them a technique correction on the run or even on the bike and be like hey I need you to relax and do this they just do it but in the swim they can’t fix it until they can see that they haven’t actually fixed it. Yeah yeah something so weird like that it’s almost like hearing your own voice on the podcast you’re like oh do I really sound like that? You look at your own stroke and you’re like oh that’s not pretty. Yeah so true but the thing about

swimming too is that even some very good swimmers particularly triathletes who are some fast swimmers they don’t look that good necessarily either so it’s not like we need to look good for the sake of you know looking pretty there’s no points to that it’s it’s really about about the speed but obviously there’s so much that we can see in video that yeah we know it’s going to help make someone fast either by reducing drag or or increase in propulsion but it doesn’t need to look pretty so I’m always trying to make that clear for people especially triathletes there’s no points for looking pretty the things that we’re looking at are just to help you get faster and not just look better because sometimes people try they fall into that trap of trying to have this smooth pretty stroke and you know have it look like a stroke that they’ve seen on instagram and go okay that’s how I I need to swim and actually an example of that is

like Dan Smith who I don’t know if you’ve seen that video on our youtube of Dan Smith from the 2016 Olympics week recorded some footage of him and he does a 110 and it looks like he’s swimming two minute pace but a beautiful swimmer but for most people they shouldn’t try and swim like him because he’s just got this incredible innate feel for the water he’s swum since he was a kid done thousands of thousands of hours and he’s got incredible mobility as well so for most people to swim like him it’s just not the stroke that they should be going for and there’s been some swimmers who have tried to adapt their stroke to look like him I’ll just have to go hang on a second no we’ve got to change it you should try and aim to swim like this person instead this episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor form 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 228 US dollars now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one year membership included for free and then 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 their custom workout builder but you’ll always have access to the real-time data of the goggles so you’ll never lose access to that so if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your goggles including your time distance pace they are right there in your goggles with form goggles I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these goggles and use them for a majority of my sessions and find them very helpful especially for gauging my time my effort and my pace

and I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work 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 form goggles using our special link formswim.com forward slash effortless or use the coupon code effortless at checkout yeah I wasn’t sure how much you touched on this before but it was something I thought I should bring up but when I first year or two I was racing pro I was swimming faster in the pool than I ever did later in my career and I could not make the front pack and I was trying to swim like a swimmer and I actually got so frustrated with it I went to LA and started training did a block of training with Jerry Rodriguez over there and the first thing he did when he saw me swimming he’s like you’ve got to stop trying to swim like Ian Thorpe

you’re not flexible enough you don’t have the feel for the water what you have is a high vo2 max so you just need to get your stroke rate from 65 to 75 and I think you start making the pack and that’s literally what we worked on I just rated up it looked a lot more messy but especially when you’re in the bubbles of the people’s feet in front of you I didn’t have that range of motion anyway to get a really nice catch at the front so by getting that faster turnover I was getting an extra 10 strokes per minute and I wasn’t falling off the back of the pack anymore and I left that six week block in LA and every race for the rest of the year instead of getting out two minutes behind the pack I was riding the race from the start and I think yeah it’s you might be able to speak more on this than me but I feel like the open water swimming especially on feet the how pretty it needs to look is secondary to the just the basic

physics of pushing water behind you so yeah so so true and actually I sort of went through a similar thing where my background was was competitive swimming in the pool and then I started when did I start tries I think I started tries in 2015 but I sort of started doing open water swimming from about 2008 and the evolution from say 2008 where I was a pool swimmer over the next eight years or so my strokes started to get scrappier and scrappier and but I was swimming really well in the open water and I had some really good swims in the few triathlons that I did and open water races I was going well but then I’d also do this one pool race every year touring country champs and I had a friend who’s a very good pool swimmer he was on the Olympic team and he coaches a lot of good swimmers and he saw me swim the 400 freestyle and he goes that looks hideous that looks your stroke looks so bad and I’m like I’m thinking like all right that’s a kick in the guts

but you’re right it looks like an open water stroke and it just it wasn’t pretty in it it wasn’t that quick either in the pool but it was so good for open water and I found it hard to sort of have those have those two because I’ve just gotten so used to swimming for the the open water but yeah it did not look good it wasn’t that quick in the pool even if people aren’t on feet I’m interested in your opinion why is it that that scrappier stroke seems to work pretty well like is it because of the chop and the currents or is it the higher buoyancy of salt water or well I think all my races I’d say were with a wetsuit on so yeah you’ve got that buoyancy and then obviously the salt water as well where you just better off having that faster stroke rate because you’re just sitting so high in the water but you can sort of get the stroke rate up and you need to get to come over quickly you can’t do it with this Ian Thorpe like recovery

you just better swing that hand over the top getting it in so I think that’s partly where that scrappiness comes from and it’s intriguing to just even in a wetsuit to to have that neoprene around your elbow to then do that high elbow catch I find it a lot of our athletes we really go go for almost a straight hand recovery or just to relax whatever feels natural recovery in your wetsuit and if you want to go high elbow and pretty in the pool that’s fine without one but it’s just too hard in a wetsuit yeah yeah that’s right and I mean yeah pretty much with the wetsuit on as long as you’re not swinging really low and flat over the water where it’s causing this sort of side to side movement it doesn’t matter too much how you’re coming over as long as yeah as long as you’re not too low low and flat there so it’s now something I either learn as a as a coach originally coaching pool swimmers to then coaching triathletes and open water swimmers

and I think and I see a lot of coaches going through the same thing that I went through coming from a pool background where there’s a lot more emphasis on looking good being smooth all that sort of stuff but yeah you’ve just got to have some other allowances there for the triathletes and that’s such an interesting story about you’re going to see see Jerry there and actually had Dan Atkins on the podcast who coached a lot of the ITU guys guys and girls in Australia and he had Michael Bowle next to him who’s probably the best Australian swim coach at the moment and Bowley said to him that with these athletes like they haven’t got the range of motion the technique is okay but they’re not going to be swimming like swimmers so just get them is get them as fit as you can to swim you know as they need to swim don’t yeah don’t worry about trying to perfect everything with their stroke just get them as fit in the pool as they can and that’s what’s going to help them

be really good ITU swimmers I often wondered too like whether the cycling and the maybe the running to a degree but especially the cycling you start to get really flexible from the swimming but then there’s a limit to how flexible you get and your range of motion because of all that cycling that will limit a triathlete from ever getting that same range as a swimmer because I could you know you’re just locked into this position potentially for 12-15 hours a week on a bike or that position I wonder if that I don’t know but I wonder how much that affects the ability to develop the sort of range of of a swimmer or is it just the fact that a swimmer you know triathletes are never going to be doing you know 40k a week of swimming you know like a swimmer to get that range so that’s good I noticed that when I did so I did one season of I built up and did an Ironman and I found that in that year I my swimming really changed and I just noticed my overhead range

was a fair bit less I can’t remember the exact numbers but you’ve got the combined elevation test where you can lie face down chin on the floor link your thumbs together and you have your arms above your head and you see how how high you can get it I think I went from being at 20 degrees off the ground to like seven or eight degrees like it did change reduced yeah reduced a lot and it was really just from the cycling primarily but also the running like just this movement you know I tend to be a little bit more more hunched there but yeah my range of motion reduced a lot and I also found that my legs were a bit no I don’t know maybe not necessarily heavier but just but use your legs a lot more you got

when you consider the muscle density to cycle and run through like it would have to change the whole body you know the whole weight of you where your body weights distributed so yeah so I noticed that because I went from never doing bitter running but definitely no cycling yeah that was that was one of the biggest changes so I think that yeah it just lends itself to those changes that you that you need to make for the open water swimming rather than the pool swimming and so for you when you’re working with your your athletes are you are they sending you videos regularly giving them one or two things how does that actually work online guys you know we have a local squad too but the online guys I encourage basically whenever they’re with someone just grab a quick video underwater obviously ideal overhead if if not and you can and I always try and work on just one thing at a time maybe because I’m a bit simple but I found it really hard to

correct more than one thing at a time in the in the water and I sort of stuck with that with my athletes so we’ll work on one thing until I see the next video then we’ll work on one other thing if that’s corrected

yeah so that’s that’s basically how we do it and we obviously try and run camps pretty regularly because sometimes nothing replaces face to face coaching in my opinion I mean online’s the reality for most people but when you can spend time with an athlete it’s so useful to pick up I can just make a note within about 10 minutes of watching them okay and these are 10 things we’ll work on in the next three months you know so

yeah so that’s typically how we do it with the the video work there’s sort of no limit to how many our clients can send through if they’re sort of on board with a coach it’s they’re fully on board and we’re fully invested in them yeah I find there’s a difference to when some talk about being at a camp and seeing someone and maybe swim a session someone might can look good for 100 meters but maybe they can’t look good for for a full session and you really get to see what they’re what they’re actually swimming like so what I try and make sure that they do is just unless they’re trying to make a change and we want to see all right how how’s it look when you’re doing that just swim like no one is watching you because that’s the technique that you’ve got in grain so we just want to see what’s actually there not when you’re trying to to look pretty for the camera as well that’s a good point on our last camp in Bright we got everyone to do a

600 meter maybe it was 400 meter just 600 meters at eye man pace and we didn’t necessarily tell them but we filmed everyone’s last 100 meters just so that we could really find what was because you’re right as soon as people know there’s a camera there then suddenly in thought magically appears

or sometimes it’s the opposite too because they’re nervous about getting filmed so they’re like a robot when they swim they lose that rhythm and and fluency to their stroke but yeah it’s good to film them when they’re when they’re not looking is there being like for the say age group athletes that you’re coaching in terms of their swimming is there a couple of things that have come up on on quite a regular basis where you’ve got say three or four main problems they might be having or technique issues and then you’ve got like a prescription for them is there anything that comes to mind when you think of that it’s yeah I guess I find the biggest thing we tend to work on is the difference in technique for people getting into a wetsuit most of our amateur athletes tend to be in wetsuit legal swim especially if they’re a bit nervous about the swim and we find you know like a lot of the things they’ve learned in the pool like for example even the head position

is slightly different so they can keep some of those wetsuits just almost lift their legs out of the water and so like what we talked about with the the different recovery slightly different head position to for some people who like to kick a bit or get some generate still generate some speed out of their kick I think also people can end up really arching their back in open water with the buoyancy the wetsuit and salt water so we try and you know remind people that if you want to get out of the if you don’t want to be like have lower back issues the first 30k of the ride it’s really important to still keep your core slightly activated and or just a more neutral alignment to the spine which you don’t have to think about the same way when you’re in a when you’re in a pool in fresh water maybe it should be but people tend to be not not in such a position and then we work my group work a lot on open water skills so we spend half you know a lot of half of our main set

actually sitting on feet in the pool because the reality is most of us are going to be sucking feet and so it’s important to just learn how to do that I was always a pretty terrible swimmer relative to how I got out in races but I think I developed I was lucky to have lots and lots of group swims open water and in the pool where I could just practice being in the draft of other swimmers and it became so instinctive to me I was never I never had to really look up because if I did I’d normally get dropped but I would just be I could feel when I was in the bubbles of someone I could feel when it if when it’s suddenly they were half a meter in front of me and I just quickly lifted up for four six strokes to get back into the draft so a lot of my our athletes particularly amateurs it’s just learning how to be comfortable in the draft learning the differences in open water technique and learning yeah because you could you know as we know if you can get really good

at just sitting on sitting on people it’s a much easier way to get through the swim unfortunately for the good swimmers

the thing about that too is it’s counter and surety of in a way because when you’re sitting on feet you don’t get much of a catch you feel like you’re swimming worse in a way aside from being pulled along but you feel like you’re swimming worse because there’s just there’s very little pressure on the hands through that first part of the the catch and so I like in training I hate being second I always want to lead the lane because I just like the feel of the water and to me that’s that’s comfortable but I know when it comes to racing obviously I’ve got to got to sit on on feet but it doesn’t it just doesn’t feel good so just knowing that that’s the right thing to be doing first of all and you can save up to about 30% of your energy if you’re drafting well it’s just so worth worth doing and then we had a Peter pub which is probably the biggest race here in Victoria there’s about four or five thousand competitors and I just did the age group swim

and another guy Sam Shepard who is really good swimmers he’s won that event overall seven times but he had a baby six weeks prior to the event so he’s lacking sleep lacking fitness and I’m thinking this is the my one chance to beat him because he hasn’t hasn’t been able to train but long story short he got me by about two seconds but his open water skills are just so good from being competing at at a very high level for a long time and I was sitting on his feet for 300 meters and he’s like I hang in a second I haven’t got the fitness here I’m just so he just quickly darted off to the side about five meters so I went with him for a bit and I’m like I don’t like this line he’s taking so I just sort of went on my own but he knew that that was a bad move for him to make if he was if I was on his feet because I just I was wasn’t working very hard and then he just got me with the open water skills at the end caught away before me and so on so those open water skills

just makes such a difference and it takes I think a couple of years to really get good at them but or you can make your swimming easier if you if you learn them and you can do them well yeah it’s really it’s for athletes who are a bit isolated for group sessions in that regard like it’s very like I think I got good at it because I had the I had Grant Giles running AeroMax up here and we would every week would be bashing each other as we went swimming around and some boys you know so that was just part of the weekly process and not only do you get that instinct for knowing when you’re on feet when to rate up without having to constantly be looking up to find find where everyone is you just get really comfortable with that claustrophobia of

of the chaos of a swim you know I mean now they do wave starts but back in the olden days we was it was always mass starts and and pretty pretty daunting if you’re not really good at it but even with the wave starts now that the amateur athletes do I think there’s so much value in them having continuously being made slightly uncomfortable in the open water and not not wasting energy with stress and anxiety and you know just just over like you know what it’s like in at the start of the swim so many people are just if they’re swimming tense and just really stressed out that first two or 300 meters they’re completely completely full of lactic acid without you know without really getting any benefit out of that much stress and effort so I find that the big part of continually getting people to be surrounded by other swimmers and even in the pool we finish most sessions with that basic you know four across the lane straight arm recovery just 25 meter sprints

just to get used to just people being in in your grill in your space so yeah there’s a lot to be said just for being being comfortable with that that close yeah that feeling of people being really all over you yeah and I think you can get to that point too where that actually becomes fun and enjoyable being in a in a tight group and you know making sure you’re aware of wherever everyone is and thinking about strategy like if you’re in the very very middle that might be okay but you don’t want to be able you don’t want to sort of get get caught behind or not able to sort of make a break if you’re stuck in the very middle like that that strategy being in the thick of things can become quite enjoyable so for anyone who’s a who’s a beginner or learning these skills I think like changing the mindset around it too yeah okay it’s going to be uncomfortable in the beginning there’s it’s going to be challenging but you can actually turn it around where it becomes the

the fun part in a way and and same with you know I guess some of the other aspects of triathlon too where it’s it’s hard work it’s a lot of a lot of training but I think the people who do it more and get really good get really fit that’s the thing that they seek out the most is that that intensity and is that is that hard training and then when you go away from it you you miss it whereas someone who’s a couch potato and is looking at that going off that’s that’s not fine that’s not something I want to want to be doing so I think it can be can be reversed in a way yeah for sure it’s even you know for me now who hated that experience of you know of being the that feeling of you know getting drowned by everyone all I want to do now if it comes to swimming is jump in an open water race because for me that’s love the tactics it’s like a bike racing that you’re in draft you’re in groups you’re getting boxed in you know it’s about surges it’s about hitting a

hitting a boy turn that’s the most fun part of swimming for me now and I you know I even jumped into some open water races recently with very little fitness but it was it was fun I love it and you’re right like that it can turn from being the most scary part of a triathlon to actually being the most fun part yeah and you mentioned so you’re you’re now going through that transition of being a full-time athlete you’ve always always sort of coach but now it’s it’s transitioning to more of a full-time coach but still doing some races here and there whether they’re triathlon or or some other other sports you mentioned that prior to the call that you asked a lot of people you did some research around that transition because like any professional athlete it can be a really big one and a very challenging one so what were some of the concerns that you had making that transition and what was some advice or who were some people who helped you with it

yeah it’s funny it was something I was really interested in for quite a while and I was asking a lot of the recently or long time retired pros about how did they go with the transition and without like nearly everyone struggled with it and I thought oh I’m pretty pretty prepared for this because I never really stopped you know dipping my hand into coaching or you know and even before being a professional triathlete I didn’t come from a high performance program so I was always working and when I was racing prior I was balancing my wife’s work as well and kids and but yet I still really struggled with the the transition from I’m a full-time coach now you know and I guess you get really good as a pro athlete at always putting yourself first and it’s hard to suddenly step back and actually become a bit more selfless learning to I’ll fit my training in if I get all my other work done oh I didn’t get everything done for anything else therefore

I’ll shorten my session by two-thirds or whatever it is so it was that transition was hard and I think the other thing I found hard was I thought when I I was really burnt out at the end of 2021 racing like really racing poorly and just hooked from travel training all the stress of losing sponsors through COVID and and I thought I’m never doing anything with triathlon again and I took like six weeks off thinking I’d be so productive in the rest of my life and what actually found was the opposite you know I found how much my brain and my body just needed to move every day to feel good and then everything else seemed to flow well from that and certainly for me there’s there’s a tipping point you know beyond about you know I find half of what I used to do as a full-time pro athlete a really nice level for me to stay balanced in my life and still enjoy training and also keep like keep relating to athletes remembering what the sessions feel like continually learning

because I still do lots of little experiments with myself now with training and trying to maximize what time I have with training I found that yeah compared to when I thought that I would be able to fully focus on other things and I didn’t do any training it was probably the least productive time of my life because you just yeah it just the ball wasn’t rolling I wasn’t feeling good about things you’re sort of getting unhealthy that I think as pro athletes we have conditioned our brain to just have a certain level of endorphins and you know it’s just part of what our brains are conditioned to now and so I I sort of have realized now it’s going to be a very slow weenoff of training you know cold turkey was definitely not the way to go and and I would say love just lining up still just love standing on a start line ready to just go to war with other people you know in my own mind and so you know I’m realistic now that you know I’m not going to be

chasing world tide was anything like that but if I can jump on a start you know if I can put certain periods of time when my other athletes don’t have aren’t racing or this time opens up I want to stay at a basic level of you know a decent base level of fitness that I could do I’m going to do six weeks solid hopefully get in shape for a top 10 in a race or and then use that fitness to then go oh I might try and do a half marathon well or I might do a bike race well and then just you know be able to jump off that sort of steady base training phase and jump into one individual sport specific event yeah I think you know the other side of it laughs pretty short I don’t want to just keep doing triathlons the rest of my life I think there’s lots of other cool events out there that I want to try and do and the nice part about jumping in to say you know bike racing or a swim race or is I’m never really going to be that competitive in a single sport event

you know potentially ultra running or something like that if I really dedicated to it but even then you know you can’t jump into a swim race and be anywhere near people who’ve just been swimming their whole life and you can’t jump into a bike race and expect to have the skills on descents that you know that cyclists have had you know their whole career from just or being able to ride an appellate on so I like the idea of jumping into those races purely because I can’t get that competitive

yeah that’s sort of where I’m at and definitely yeah the transition was hard but I feel like I’m in a good place now but it took a good year of sort of working out that you know you realise racing was largely your identity and working out who you are and what else you can do and not you know not getting not chasing it like it’s hard to not go oh I can still win that race and you know maybe you could but it comes at a big cost every time you fully focus on something at a pro level it’s a big cost for the family and it’s time for you know it’s time to sort of pull back for sure yeah that’s it sounds like you’ve got it got it worked out pretty well there and I think it’s good to go through that you know go cold turkey and realise oh I feel like crap no I’m not getting anything anything done and that’s saying of if you want something done give it to a a busy person I find that that’s so true if I have no structure to my days and I think about school holidays

right now where one of my kids is in school the other one’s not but without that structure of right but to pick him up drop him off at these times without these activities I’m not getting that much done I’m better if I’ve got this this structure and they say discipline is is freedom where you know if you’ve got these these things in the calendar and you stick to them then you can you’ve got more control over those those times outside of it and yeah that’s the something that I’ve come to realise over the last couple of years as well as I hate being really busy where I’ve just got no no free time in my calendar but I also don’t like the opposite because I just don’t get being done and then I look back at a few weeks and go what was I doing like I was just just wasting so much much time and for me and I wonder when you feel the same you talked about like you’ve got that you feel like you need to get these in Dorf and you’ve got this desire to

you know seek this feeling I find each day I want to be doing at least kind of 30 minutes of aerobic work preferably more if it’s like 60 minutes 90 minutes and I’m I’m pretty happy and I just feel like every day I want to get that and I want to try and get it in the morning it’s it’s just something that each day I’m addicted to in a way and if I don’t get it then I’m just I’m not that happy

yeah I’m a bit the same I’ve sort of found my sweet spot to be around 90 minutes in the morning I’m sure over the years hopefully that’ll get less a little bit less but 90 minutes seems to be the amount that you know I’m just ready to go and cope with the day and feel happy so which sounds like a lot but when you consider what you know you do as a pro triathlete where you it’s literally a small day is three hours though it’s still a big step down and I’m also pretty I’ve been really surprised how well I can maintain fitness off 90 minutes a day you know for you know if you’re eating well not drinking too many beers and getting good sleep it’s actually the decline has not been as fast as I would expect and sort of excites me because I feel like I could still jump into four to six weeks of solid training and you know still have fun in a race not be totally embarrassing yeah

that’s the thing that cites me to it it’s like I and races on these guys even just on the on the weekend where it appeared a pub I didn’t do the the super fish which is like the top 20 or 30 guys there I’ve got no chance against these guys who are training eight times a week doing minimum 40k sometimes probably more up to like 80k a week it’s like I’ve got no chance against that if I’m doing three to four sessions a week of like 3k each yeah but

can I do off three or four sessions a week and and how can I adapt my training so I can get the most out of that time that I’ve got got available and that’s what I’ve found quite enjoyable about diving into this sort of zone zone two stuff and and trying to sit sort of just below that that tipping point I’ve started to do some solo sessions where so like three by one k is the main set or 15 twos and just on short rest but just trying to find that that sweet spot and to me at like the I love sitting in that in that zone in that range for a good period of time and it’s and just the aerobic benefits are huge I’m really enjoying sort of getting getting stuck into into that

yeah it’s funny I think

for you know it’s pretty well known that if that that aerobic training is just so it’s like an NGO and like it’s an anti-anxiety medication in many ways it just lowers your stress and like you know I find it’s just an important part for me to be able to function well in life and certainly I found when I’m doing lots of high intensity as much as I love it I find I’m not you can tell when you’re doing too much of it because it affects everything else you or said you’re grumpy and I just find when you’re getting that zone to work right you can just back it up day in day out and you start to get really fit because you’re not you’re not having those days off you don’t have you don’t have to have those days off sorry you’re not sort of you know once you’re above that range the you know obviously your cortisol production your stress hormones are being produced and then so then let’s say you’re not actually you might feel good for an hour or two after the session

when you’ve done like a real anaerobic set but then three four hours after the session all those nice feelings disappear and you’ve actually got more stress and when you combine it with your life family work so you know if someone’s out there and just wanting to stay fit and healthy I’m not saying don’t do the high intensity work but if the key if the if you’re using exercise primarily primarily is a stress release it’s really good to know where your zones are and make sure that you’re staying below a certain point so that you can actually actually get some stress relief instead of actually contributing to it

and going forward so what have you got coming up that that excites you whether that’s with the coaching racing personal what are you what are you looking forwards to over the next couple of years now that you’ve transitioned to this phase yeah I think I mean for me it’s nice to just be able to look at things with the family and you know in school holidays it’s planning certain things you can do so

just just being like we haven’t been able to go to the snow because I’ve always been overseas racing in June July you know or just I just think my boys are really excited to just have a not have that a dad that’s constantly traveling not constantly tired so the family side of it it’s definitely been really beneficial that I look forward to just doing different things from a big perspective I just look forward to experiencing different races and jumping into different events regardless of how competitive I am so just experiencing more of life I guess is the is from the racing side and family side and then yeah from from a coaching perspective I think you know I was talking to you earlier about like I we obviously do one-on-one coaching but creating some other way people you know it’s quite expensive to be coached by one of our coaches because we keep small numbers it’s very personalized but I want to try and find a way we can open up the coaching to a bigger group

even if it’s not at a person like a fully personalized level just something to make people part of that community we’re at a lot of races you know it just makes it more fun if you can do it as a bit of a team so that’s where my head’s at sort of for the for the business side of things is looking for the next step for RPG

you know most of the coaches there we’re all pretty much at capacity everyone’s doing a great job obviously because we don’t have a high turnover of athletes we focus on you know we really do focus on the quality of coaching so yeah that’s that’s the summary of I guess the goals across most of my life yeah fantastic and and how are your boys so four seven and ten four seven ten yeah right yeah awesome busy awesome yeah

yeah it’s good holidays it’s been it’s been busy yeah I bet and in terms of getting in touch with you where’s the best place to do that so they can go to our website rpgcoaching.com we’re on instagram too rpgcoaching I’m pretty sure and just yeah there’s contact details through there yeah hit me up love to have your chat let have a chat and let you know what options there and also we can keep you in the loop if when other hopefully if we get another program going where it’s more

available to more people at a cheaper cost so yeah reach out sounds good Tim I’ve really enjoyed this and it’s been great to chat with you about a lot of different things and yeah love getting your perspective on swimming because I like to get it from you know I learn a lot from the guests that I have on and someone who coaches ad group triathletes and pros and with the experience that you’ve had competing at the the top level as well great to get your insights on it so thanks so much for being a guest and yeah really appreciate it it’s been a pleasure no good to chat and yeah always I learn a lot from you so thanks again for doing all your work it’s very helpful for us who don’t have the energy to create such good to be yeah and look if there’s any topics that keep coming up and I don’t have a video let me know because I try and do one a week so there’s no shortage of capacity to do it as well yeah thanks Tim thank you thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast

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

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